These games are less niche than you think. I for one played way more Snowboard Kids than SM64.

The other factor to consider is OoT and SM64 are Nintendo properties. Nintendo is one of the most litigious companies in the industry. That alone may shift people away from some of those big name titles owned by them.

Both SM64 and OoT have been decompiled and have PC native recompilation ports already.

My personal opinion is that the very concept of IP misses the mark. “Property” requires scarcity. If I use something, it means someone else can’t use that thing. When I use a house for living, others are unable to do so. When I consume food or water, others people can’t do so.

Ideas aren’t scarce. Someone who reads a book, or looks at a picture, or makes use of a copy of software is not preventing other people from doing so. The idea that an idea can be restricted are given exclusive use to one particular party for any amount of time by law, is dystopic.

There’s a few modern TCGs who take this approach, like Riftbound (the League of Legends TCG that launched last year) and Sorcery Contested Realm.

Other attempts to fix the mana problem include games like Lorcana and Flesh and Blood, in which cards have dual modes where they can be played or used for resources.

You might be interested in the relatively new TCG Sorcery: Contested Realm. It’s a a game that plays lands to a grid and creatures on the lands, somewhat like the game you invented. Also has an artistic direction reminiscent of 90s era magic.

Hard to believe that even 10 years later, people who don’t understand probability are still hung up on an event with a 30% chance of happening, happening.

You need a prediction market to know if the Second Coming of Christ is imminent?

I think an on over-fixation on “freedom” is what leads to many of the societal ills we (uniquely) deal with in America.

Freedom itself is itself a nebulous concept. Are my freedoms restricted when I can’t drive 80mph through my neighborhood? Yes. On the flip side I enjoy the “freedom” of living in a more controlled, safer environment. Is a corporation’s freedoms restricted by the laws that prevent them from dumping toxic sludge into the river upstream from me? Yes, but my freedom from living downstream of that pollution is preserved. Are my freedoms preserved when we allow broad access to firearms in this country? Yes, at the cost of my kids freedoms to attend a public school without the risk of being shot by a mentally ill psychopath.

Here we are considering the freedom to destroy your life via gambling vs the freedom from being targeted by corporations with much greater resources than you trying to get you to do so, and the freedoms of your family who may choose to not gamble and still have their lives destroyed as a result.

An “pure” worldview of maximizing personal freedoms over-simplifies the trade-offs and is doomed to fail in the real-world as a result. Realistically maximizing societal well-being requires a more moderate approach.

IP law is a farce, and the open source licenses are built upon that farce. If a single good thing comes out of LLMs, it will be forcing society to recognize “intellectual property” for the dystopic stupidity that it is. I doubt it though.

That is a pipe dream. The current direction is the opposite of that - knowledge becomes even more centralized and only rented out to individuals.

Knowledge being rented out to individuals is the status quo. Already there are court rulings dictating that “training” on data is legal, but model weights also are non-copyrightable, which seems like a step in the direction of sanity.

I don’t think many people are getting daily news from LLMs. Journalism has been dying since long before LLMs burst onto the scene as well.

There really isn’t even a defensible argument as to how this even should be illegal. The idea that someone can read words about a concept, and then rewording an explanation of that concept somehow violating the rights of the original author, is absurd.

The issue here and elsewhere isn’t LLMs. It’s that IP as a concept has always been a dystopic farce. Despite this we have not only kicked the can down the road on addressing this, we’ve doubled and tripled down and built our society around the concept. The advent of AI has simply blown the scale of the problem up to the point where it cannot be ignored any longer.

> I don’t think many people are getting daily news from LLMs.

How many people do you think use LLMs in some fashion at all in their daily lives? Genuine question, I'm sure my personal experience is a biased sample, but so is everyone else's. Stats from AI companies isn't going to be (seen as) objective either. OpenAI and Anthropic are pushing a feature where I get a situation report at 9am like I'm an important official. With both labs pushing that, I think some people are getting their daily news from LLMs, the question is how many would it take for it to be meaningful, and how would we know if/when that bar gets crossed? What are the implications of that?

This is interesting to me given that another factor seemingly correlated with dementia is the bacteria that causes gingivitis. The obvious speculation for a naive layman like myself is if dementia is simply driven by cumulative damage done to the brain by infections pathogens over the course of one’s life.