as said in computer science it has accepted by most people (for the sake of having categories) that CPU emulation is emulation, and otherwise its not.

It’s important to keep in mind that things said in computer science for the sake of having categories are usually said within the very narrow implicit context of a particular field of study, like microprocessor design. It makes sense there for the sake of brevity, just as arcane acronyms make sense when everyone in the room understands what they stand for in that context. But the context no longer applies when we’re out in the rest of the world using a word that is not so narrowly defined, as we are now.

I think we mostly agree, because you pointed this out yourself:

It’s a “domain specific” language; which means, you have to specify it before in order to make use.

However, I want to clarify my position in response to this:

nobody has the right to act like having a clear definition and saying anyone else is wrong.

I often encounter people on social media chiding or mocking others for referring to Wine as an emulator, which is disheartening for a number of reasons. Importantly, the people reading such comments are being taught that it’s wrong to call Wine an emulator, when in fact it is not wrong at all. Wine’s very purpose is to emulate. This is plainly visible not just in how it is used, but also in how it is developed (many of its behaviors are reverse engineered Windows behaviors, departing from the API docs) and how it functions (it does a heck of a lot more than translating system calls).

The Wine project’s FAQ acknowledges the misunderstanding, a bit indirectly, by pointing out that it is “more than just an emulator”.

Unfortunately, since most people in the discussions I mentioned have no visibility into Wine’s internals, they don’t know any better than to accept what they were told by multiple people on the internet. They are misled by a smug few who love to tell others they’re wrong by repeating that officially abandoned slogan that was never really true (at least not in the context that framed it) in the first place. And then some of the misled people adopt it themselves, so we end up with more of the “you’re wrong” attitude, perpetuation of a ridiculously narrow understanding of the word, and people who publish about the topic performing awkward linguistic gymnastics to avoid simply saying “emulator” for fear of rebuke.

I think all three of those results make the world a little worse, so I’m here to let everyone reading know that it’s perfectly appropriate to call Wine (or Proton) an emulator. Anyone who claims it’s wrong to do so is perhaps a hardware field specialist who has lost sight of the importance of context in language, or (more likely) either honestly mistaken or an internet troll.

Hardware is not the only thing that can be emulated. Here’s an example. To claim that things emulating software components are not emulators is simply incorrect, like claiming that squares are not rectangles. It’s always disappointing to see someone spreading that falsehood.

It’s true that Wine is not a hardware emulator, nor is Proton. But make no mistake: they are both emulators.

The unfortunate backronym made a kind of sense 20 years ago. At the time, lawsuits were flying hard and fast at projects offering APIs and tools modeled after commercial operating systems (Unix variants), and there was no established case law protecting them. The prospect of Wine contributors getting sued into oblivion by Microsoft was a very plausible threat. Rebranding it as “Wine Is Not an Emulator” helped frame it as something different as it grew and gained attention, and although that phrase is inaccurate, “Wine Is Not a Hardware Emulator” wouldn’t have fit the existing name or distanced it from being seen as a Windows work-alike. Also, most emulators of the time happened to be hardware emulators, so it didn’t seem like a terribly big stretch.

That time is gone, though. The legal standing for software based on reverse engineering is more clear than it was then. Microsoft has not sent its lawyers after our favorite runtime emulator. The backronym was thankfully abandoned by the project some years ago. Weirdly, there are still people on social media spreading false statements about what the word does and doesn’t mean.

Me: You have wasted what little free time I have with a bad design choice that you could easily have avoided. Since I can’t skip your cut scenes, I will instead skip your games.

This is not enshittification.

Enshittification refers to a process with specific phases that ensure services will degrade at the expense of users, and then business customers, so that shareholders can extract as much profit as possible from both of those groups. It was coined by Cory Doctorow, who explains it here:

Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market,” where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In other words, it’s the same effect as when you make separate identities to share with different contacts on any messaging service. SimpleX has adopted that as the normal way to operate.

Okay, Henny Penny. Now that we see your judgment of major threats is worthless (and your motivations entirely profit-driven self-interest) we know that we should ignore you when you scream that the sky is falling.

If you want to sell more anime, improve your service or lower your price.

Worth mentioning just in case you’re not aware: versioning is present not just on the protocol spec, but on individual rooms. That ought to ease any semantics changes that might be needed.

Tux is my copilot, and never tries to be a back-seat driver.

Ah, so they just built the middleware, not a UI. That’s not what launcher typically means in this space, but fair enough. Thanks for clearing it up.

Anyone have screenshots?

Cats have a side designated as “up”?

It’s middleware for game launchers like Lutris, but specifically for Wine games. It uses GloriousEggroll’s custom Proton builds instead of stand-alone Wine/DXVK/etc.

Note that GloriousEggroll more or less discontinued his custom Wine builds, and has been encouraging people to use his Proton builds via this tool instead. It might make things easier or harder, depending on your needs and workflow. I expect it will be easier for casual Linux users when combined with a GUI.

Why not link the original source?

Was this article funded by a would-be surveillance state? If not, I wonder what David Gilbert’s headline will be when he learns that roads, telephones, postal services, and conference halls are also used by neo-nazis.

Wildermyth is somewhere between a tactical combat game and a role-playing game, and quite good.

Solasta: Crown of the Magister has caught my attention, but I haven’t played it yet.

Dragon Age: Origins is good, and although not on sale, is old enough that full price is not bad. (I don’t know if the EULA is tolerable, though; I don’t think it was there when I played it.)

I think this could use some elaboration on what you mean by half dead.

I don’t remember the statement in the bug report verbatim, but it indicated that they intend to fix it, which is about what I had previously seen on other issues that they did subsequently fix. I expect it’s mainly a matter of prioritizing a long to-do list.

I can’t think of a reason why it wouldn’t be possible. The protocol is continually evolving, after all, and they already moved message content to an encrypted channel that didn’t originally exist. Moving other events into it seems like a perfectly sensible next step in that direction.

That’s XCOM, baby.

Oh, wait…

There are a few that do a good job of protecting our messages with end-to-end encryption, but no single one fits all use cases beyond that, so we have to prioritize our needs.

Signal is pretty okayish at meta-data protection (at the application level), but has a single point of failure/monitoring, requires linking a phone number to your account, can’t be self-hosted in any useful way, and is (practically speaking) bound to services run by privacy invaders like Google.

Matrix is decentralized, self-hostable, anonymous, and has good multi-device support, but hasn’t yet moved certain meta-data into the encrypted channel.

SimpleX makes it relatively easy to avoid revealing a single user ID to multiple contacts (queue IDs are user IDs despite the misleading marketing) and plans to implement multi-hop routing to protect meta-data better than Signal can (is this implemented yet?), but lacks multi-device support, lacks group calls, drops messages if they’re not retrieved within 3 weeks, and has an unclear future because it depends on venture capital to operate and to continue development.

I use Matrix because it has the features that I and my contacts expect, and can route around system failures, attacks, and government interference. This means it will still operate even if political and financial landscapes change, so I can count on at least some of my social network remaining intact for a long time to come, rather than having to ask everyone to adopt a new messenger again at some point. For my use case, these things are more important than hiding which accounts are talking to each other, so it’s a tradeoff that makes sense for me. (Also, Matrix has acknowledged the meta-data problem and indicated that they want to fix it eventually.)

Some people have different use cases, though. Notably, whistleblowers and journalists whose safety depends on hiding who they’re talking to should prioritize meta-data protection over things like multi-device support and long-term network resilience, and should avoid linking identifying info like a phone number to their account.

At low levels, a free-to-play isometric fantasy MMO.

At higher levels, a grindy gankfest.

So you are basically saying that root CAs are unreliable or compromised?

Not exactly. They are pointing out that HTTPS assumes all is well if it sees a certificate from any “trusted” certificate authority. Browsers typically trust dozens of CAs (nearly 80 for Firefox) from jurisdictions all over the world. Anyone with sufficient access to any of them can forge a certificate. That access might come from a hack, a rogue employee, government pressure, a bug, improperly handled backups, or various other means. It can happen, has happened, and will happen again.

HTTPS is kind of mostly good enough for general use, since exploits are not so common as to make it useless, but if a government sees it as an obstacle, all bets are off. It is not comparable to a trustworthy VPN hosted outside of the government’s reach.

Also, HTTPS doesn’t cover all traffic like a properly configured VPN does. Even where it is used and not compromised, it’s not difficult for a well positioned snooper (like an internet provider that has to answer to government) to follow your traffic on the net and deduce what you’re doing.