Author: tonytins

Problem with Copyright

I watch a lot of debunking videos mostly because it’s just entertaining. Edutainment, I should say. I have learned a lot. X)

This ranges everything from flat earth to the creationism. Personally, I seem to see this as homogenizing into a unified narrative that basically attempts refute tones of scientific evidence. But that’s like a whole another can of worms entirely.

So what does this have to do copyright? A lot of this boils down to The Bible. (Really. All this homogenizing leads down the same predictable path.) That meant I needed my own copy to keep track of claims being refuted. Having grown up in a religious household, I obviously I wasn’t going to ask for theirs. That would be insulting. It’d be like highlighting all the plot holes in a book you love. 

Thankfully, I did stumble upon the World English Bible (WEB). What makes this unique it is in the public domain with only name being trademarked. Although fairly modern, the book’s development began before the Creative Commons. And they have an interesting take on copyright that I agree with.

Isn’t it dangerous not to copyright the WEB?

No. Copyright protection is intended to protect the income of the copyright holder’s sales of a work, but we are planning to GIVE AWAY the right to make copies of this version of the Holy Bible to anyone who wants it, so we have nothing to lose that way.

Yeah. Copyright is simply a fraud protection tool. In that regard, it works a little too well sometimes. Aside from that, copyright really isn’t intended to do much else. But one debunker I watch seemed to think it also included legacy or hereditary. Problem is that is a fairly recent interpretation brought on by dozens of legal battles that only got reinforced in the Copyright Extension Act of 1995. (The licensing model we have today is a byproduct of that.) 

But if the author is dead, why does the family have to profit off their work? That makes no sense. Art is a deeply personal thing. And if you dig even a smidge deep down into the internet, you’ll know how true that is. Just because that person is willing to share with it the hoard, doesn’t mean it belongs to their family. The only time something like that should ever be true is if the artist personally makes clear as day in their will. Otherwise, this should not be the default.

In the original copyright model, we gave up that monetary protection after 20 years. There was an option to remove for another 20 but that was it. Like, are we still talking about the MCU as of now? No. In fact, before current national and geopolitical events that torch got passed to Gunn’s Superman. (God only knows now.) Beyond that, such works would continue to live on secondhand in the original model. And that’s okay.

Creativity is being stifled all for the sake exploiting works made by artists who are now long gone all for a simple monetary gain.

Decentralized Package Management

One thing that has always given me a more favourable view of Swift is how Apple choose to go about handling package management from the very beginning. Similar to Go, the majority of packages are referenced using Git repositories. Swift differs in that you usually have to specify a snapshotted version using the tag feature instead of pulling everything from a certain branch. Not that you can’t do that, don’t get me wrong, it’s just not recommended in production.

While this method is not without its drawbacks, it does eliminate a lot of security concerns. Plenty of my toy Rust and .NET applications had relied on dependent bot to frequently update varies dependencies. Swift takes this approach a step further by having a minimum version baseline. You can really fine-tone this by simply updating every minor patch or major release. 

Really the biggest drawback is that you are building a lot of external dependencies all at once. Sure it removes DLL hell but it does increase the build time and processing resources by quite a bit. Trade offs. It’s essentially bad with languages like Rust because it exists in such weird middle ground between bare bones and having a feature complete standard library. Like, I had to write an extension for a time and date library just so I can get basic support for printing ISO weeks that I could use for my little toy program that was inspired by Tom Scott. I just created DLC for DLC just so my silly little program worked. Like, WTF!? Luckily, Swift isn’t that bad since Foundation is built into the language, regardless of the platform you’re on, and you know they’re going to optimize the shit out of it for experience. But I digress. xD

All that being said, this is how it’s always been done. Many C/C++ programs bundle libraries needed to successfully build their project. It’s basically why many of their classic projects have such big and monolithic repositories. When Git came along, plenty of new projects pulled from submodules instead. Even older .NET applications did this before NuGet came along. Modern programming languages, such as Go and Swift, just adopted a form of this submodule practice by baking it into the package manager and having those be referenced from a cache instead.

Really the biggest benefit is decentralization. Even if Apple attempted to were throw a wrench into the ecosystem, they’d likely miss. The majority of that ecosystem is just open source Git repositories that anyone fork. This is also means that you’re not limited to a central repository or host. Like, there is this one library I discovered a few days ago in the Swift Package Index they recently moved from GitHub to their own personal Git and it still functions all the same.

Compare this something like .NET, where everything is centralized on NuGet. While this isn’t necessarily a bad thing and it has certainly help evaluate the platform, Microsoft really has their grip on the wheel. All their recent .NET talks is just about AI this and AI that. Meanwhile, Apple is over here creating new open source libraries and features. Like the recent @c annotation that exports functions as C headers or their new Configuration library. I love the .NET guys. I really do. The two Scotts are my favourite. I just hate the leadership. (Not that Apple is any better.)

From Rust to Swift

As the Rust programming language continues to spread through the open source community, I find myself wanting to leave it. I haven’t touched it since the pandemic. The borrow checker is just so annoying to use. Like, the compiler could hit on you upside the head for the most benign things. It’s so frustrating. xD I’ve yearned for something that was just as safe without sacrificing damn near everything. My first attempt was with Zig and, as much I really liked it, the language still has some teething issues.

Now, I’ve been keeping track of Swift on and off for a long time. Roughly since it’s debut in 2014. Helps that I’m a Mac user. Despite suffering similar teething problems as Zig, it evolved rapidly and matured a lot since 5.0. I decided to give it another shot when I was setting up my Linux laptop. The RAM is very small by today’s standards so putting something like Rust’s complicated build system wasn’t much of an option. So I created a series of command line applications after I discovered that’s what “tool” option meant. My first attempt was creating a simple program that generates a desktop entry for Linux. It was quite simple to make. Like, the whole program is roughly a 100 lines of code. (Although, if you focus on the actual logic portion, it’s probably way tiny.) And although I haven’t properly tested it on a distro yet, the dry runs are working flawlessly.

I have a number of other tools written in not only Rust but C# that could do with a proper rewrite. The most complex are written in C# while the simpler ones are in Rust. My most simplistic is a D&D dice roller. I had planned to add support for modifiers but my issue with the borrowing checker forced me to abandon it. On the C# side, my tool used to used to streamlines building an EPUB using Pandoc is slightly more complex.

I decided to start simple and rewrote that dice roller. While it shares a roughly similar architecture as the original, there are some notable differences that make the two incompatible. Like instead of typing in any number using the --roll option, you can specify “d2” to “d100” as argument and add an additional --modifier option that you can type a number into. This new version functions more like an actual dice roller you’d use in D&D or any other tabletop game and less like random number generator dressed up as a one. Next up is allowing for multiple dice to be rolled so you can create different builds.

All that being said, Swift is turning out to be a joy to develop for and I may use it to create more tools in the future. Regardless of what some people may say, programming shouldn’t be a chore to do. I stuck with C# and tried out Zig preciously because it didn’t punish me for programming the way I was taught.

And don’t get me wrong, Rust is a great programming language. Once you get the hang of it, it is powerful tool to use like anything else. Rust has earned its spot to be adopted into the kernel and other Linux distros. The language was designed to handle loads like this. But it isn’t for me anymore.

Minty Fresh Linux

Recently, I had to help setup a relatively old laptop for my mom. She was having troubles with her current one. Fans were failing, etc. 

The plan was I would install Linux Mint on an old laptop that previously had Ubuntu on it and I would give her that. She didn’t care what OS it was as long as it behaved familiar to what she was using before, and was capable of running her Windows app. That being said, she was fine with open source alternatives. Later, I discovered an old laptop of mine that had Windows 11 already on it. My plan was to Mint on that laptop as a warm up before dealing with the one that went to mom.

Unfortunately, I had trouble getting to the boot menu. It kept going straight Windows no matter what I did. Like, I tried absolutely everything. It got to the point where I was getting sick of hearing the startup sound. This isn’t the first time I’ve run into this issue and is why I stopped using it. So I shared my frustrations to mom and told her the change of plans. She would be getting the one with Windows and I would install Mint on the one with Ubuntu.

Thankfully, she understood and was just happy to start fresh. As for me? Well, I’m happy too. As much as I love macOS on my Mini, I do miss Linux ad I’m glad to have gone through all this effort to get a fresh install of it on this laptop. No bloat or spyware. Just my personal computer.

One Simple Question

I tend to watch debunking of varies “genres” as a bit of guilty pleasure but also as a learning experience. Debunking Flat Earthers (or Flerfs) is no exception to that.

In the wake of Artemis’ successful go around the moon, Flat Earthers have come out of the wood works to cry foul yet again. But it’s already proving a little bit more difficult for them. Instead of coming right out and striking back with their usual talking point, they were left more confused than anything.

One of immediate questions during the launch was why they kept cutting back to the rocket as it flew further away. Or why was the just quality of the live streams? Why fallback visualization of Artemis when they couldn’t pick up any live feeds? And don’t get me started on the delays that caused April 1st, 2026, launch date. All of these are fair questions that I’m sure any laymen would ask. That’s why most of these debunking channels are geared more as edutainment than pure mockery.

Visualizations

I think the fallback visualization was the biggest surprise to them. Because, well, it’s obviously CGI and it makes no attempt to hide it. It literary says, “visualization” on the top left hand corner. Their whole conspiracy hinges on CGI and there it is. Open and honest about what it is. But that’s just a visual representation of the ship based on telemetry data for when they lose connection with the live feed. Hardly the crew in front of green screen. Frankly, it’s amazing they were able to get any live footage at all. Deep Space Network isn’t exactly 4G.

What many don’t know is that local news stations had to do something similar for the Apollo missions preciously because NASA didn’t have the technology to pull off the visualizations we see today. Flerfs argue that NASA hired Stanley Kubrick for Apollo 11 but what’s often overlooked is that 2001: A Space Odyssey came out a full decade after the Moon landings. The technology to pull off what they claim to have happened just wasn’t didn’t exist at that time.

Hell, I didn’t even know this! They didn’t go live until they were on the ground.

Soviet Union

But while one could easily go in circles explaining the technicalities of why it wasn’t the fake, one fairly new revaluation pretty much destroys the whole conspiracy theory. If it was fake, why didn’t the Soviet Union speak up? That’s the simple question. One has to remember the whole reason we had the space race in the first place was because Russia spooked the living shit out of the USA with Sputnik.

So if anyone is going to cry foul about Artemis today, it would be Russia. They have every motivation to do so.

To the Moon and Back

During the first two weeks of April, 2026, we saw the crew of Artemis II make their way around the moon and back in ten days. They actually accomplished that in nine! Which is impressive in it’s own right. Just like that, I think it’s safe to say these people will go down in history as legends. The success of this mission has basically kept it off of Congress’ chopping block even as the current administration seeks to find new ways of further dismantling NASA.

Recently, I’ve spent the last year digitally collecting everything NASA after I discovered First Woman comic and later D&D campaign created under the previous administration. Obviously, both got axed under this regime because heaven forbid we have a little representation and fun. Sure, the latter is at least still there but I doubt we’ll be seeing any updates.

So I didn’t think much of Artemis II. Barely knew it even existed, if I’m being honest. This was even more compounded by later delays that lead up to its eventual April 1st launch. (Which Flat Earthers have been exploiting that fact.) Knowing this administration, I just took the piss out of it. So when it actually happened I was like, “wait, they’re really doing this!?” And my cynicism faded away into optimism and hope. And that’s what we all need right now.

This new regime wants us to live in fear. And they’re very legit reasons to be afraid. But Artemis, just like Apollo before it, shows what happens when we put our differences behind us and work together.

Project Liger Zero

Recently, I just got started working on Project Liger Zero (or TSO LZ), a prototype aimed at recreating The Sims Online using Godot. In order to make this all work I’m using 2dog, a library that uses libgodot in order to reverse the workflow, letting .NET take control of the engine. You can still make use of GDScript or C# for scripting but this brings with it more advanced capabilities of .NET to Godot. Which is useful for both complex games like this or simple ones.

Unlike past projects, I’m taking a slightly different approach to this. Since Godot has a basic multiplayer framework already built-in, I’m going to focus on creating a foundation for testing networking with a simple map view and later lot using Kenny’s game assets as a substitute. That way I won’t be going in completely blind when it comes too finally using TSO’s contents. Not that it doesn’t do that already to a slightly lesser degree.

You see, Godot is rather strict about file I/O. That’s good, don’t get me wrong, but it does make creating a project like this rather tricky. In order to get around that, I figured you can simply place or put a symlink to TSOClient in the game’s user data directory. The first thing I did was to see if this even works is to have it show the TSO version you have on the login screen. Map mode does something similar, if TSO is found it’ll play music from the game. So it is completely possible.

Behind the Name

It’s been a while since I’ve used a code name for a Sims project. Mostly just been reusing the classics cause I couldn’t think of anything better. But this project is certainly different from the rest. While 2dog is just as bleeding edge as my failed attempt with Zig, I at least know C# and Godot.

So when it came to time to come up for name, this needed to be special. Then I remembered Zoids: New Century. It was one of the many animes I grew up with and have been itching to see it again. As a kid, I wanted to be in the mecha the main character had soo bad. So I named this project after it: Liger Zero.

That brief backstory aside, it’s just a cool name to give a game client.

Not Just for TSO

I’ve seen a few recreation projects that eventually grew up to become their own thing. They all reached the point where the game evolved into a versatile engine. Probably the best example is OpenTTD.

So even if all else fails, all this effort doesn’t go to waste. That’s my plan for Liger Zero.