I'd say it's neither, it's laws failing to keep pace with technological development. All the precedent around clean-room engineering implicitly assumes it'll be painstakingly done by a team of humans taking months or years of work. This means that while there is a way around copyright, the effort it takes to reimplement something poses enough of a barrier that complying with the license is the easier option in most cases. If we treat AI the same way we treat humans here, it means that the barrier is gone. Their blog post brings up the example of Phoenix Software's reimplementation of the IBM PC BIOS. It took a team of engineers 4 months to write the initial version of that work. The authors were able to produce their own clean-room PC BIOS with zero human involvement in less than an hour. Currently both of these are treated as being legally equivalent.

Apple sold the the base model M1 Macbook Air through Walmart for $600 between when they stopped selling it directly up to early this year. It looks like this computer is about as performant as that one, so I guess they started to have trouble sourcing components and came up with the Neo as their replacement.

I agree with your analysis. A senator posted his notes from yesterday's private war briefing yesterday here: https://x.com/ChrisMurphyCT/status/2031531835453309125

The US leadership knows they can't destroy Iran's nuclear weapons program or cause regime change. The objective seems to be mainly destroying lots of missile launchers, boats, and drone factories (which Iran demonstrated could do enough damage and use up enough interceptors to make Israel stop attacking them and sue for peace during the 12 day war). When the bombing stops and Iran restarts production, the US will go bomb them again. The US also didn't seem to expect that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz, and currently has no plan as to how to get it safely back open.

In essence the war is about making Iran less of a threat to Israel no matter the cost to the US or to the rest of the West.

From the Github repo (https://github.com/ExxistanceDC/Segagaga-English-Translation), the translation went through a process called MTPE (Machine translation, post-editing). This works just like it sounds. The initial translation is done with machine translation, then human translators review and edit the resulting translation to try to correct any mistakes.

> What I call the “playtesting translation” — a base translation that allowed the artists and playtesters to get started early and understand what they were working on — was developed using a combination of DeepL and ChatGPT 4o/4.5. That translation then went through a substantial, months-long human translator review. I don't think that the end product feels “machine-translated,” but that’s ultimately for you, the player, to judge.

> and I don't understand why some users are boycotting the translation due to the AI used in the translation work, but that's beside the point

Segagaga has a ton of obscure, referential, meta humor that isn't easily translated to English. The "cleaned up machine translation" approach means that a lot of this is lost. Looking at some screenshots of the game, the script seems stiff and overly formal, much like how direct machine translation of Japanese text reads. https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:2jjromh55tf7pp7s4hsvurf4/po... Obviously it's better than nothing, but people are pissed off because the "edited machine translation" workflow leads to poor results, not because of some reflexive anti-AI bias or whatever.