Hi Sandy, I hope you’re well. I have appreciated the recent discussions. I do not agree with your framing.
Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model. DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world.
By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not ��pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing the free episode exactly as intended.
That doesn’t excuse people pirating the registered game. However, it’s important not to collapse legal shareware distribution, unpaid reach, and actual piracy into one number.
I also don’t think piracy is what “gutted” id - id is still around and still making games. Piracy may have cost money, but it wasn’t the reason Quake was hard or why people eventually went different ways.
So yes: pay developers. Buy the games you love. Support the people who make them.
But history is messier than “pirates killed the companies.” Sometimes the same free distribution that looked like lost sales was also the thing that made the game impossible to ignore.
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⚠️ URGENT: A 10.0-severity bug just hit React Server Components and Next.js.
It lets anyone run code on your server — even without logging in.
🔗 Details → https://t.co/9pG1bxMlCw
⚙️ Fix: update to patched versions now.
Web app users would be shocked to learn that 99% of the time, deleting your data just sets a flag in the database. And then it just lives there forever until it's hacked or subpoenaed.
4:47AM and I have to do a client meeting at 6:30AM and explain why I wasted 2 days of work because the developers they hired to architect their entire business decided to deploy a security update that has basically FUCKED my entire feature stack.
Fascinating that some open source projects forbid contributors from using LLMs.
My prediction: In a few years, the progress gap between projects with/without this policy will be brutal.