I love retro gaming on real hardware, but the prices for turn-of-the-millenium software are outrageous. whatever was popular 20 years ago tends to suddenly become very expensive, but after a certain point the price does go down again. I used to collect NES games, when they got too expensive I moved to big box pc games, and now I’m building a Wii and Atari 2600 collection. The 2600 is so old that most of the people who are nostalgic for it aren’t actively collecting it. meanwhile, the Wii is still comparatively new (though that will likely change in a few years).

so, I guess my advice is: buy whatever’s cheap. I had never played the 2600 before but I ended up developing a genuine appreciation for the console. similarly, I’m picking up Wii games because I love the Wii and I want to make sure I have all the essentials before they get really expensive.

Another alternative is to just buy a console and then use a flashcart/softmod. or use an FPGA system, which will get you a native-like experience.

it sucks that a thing I like so much has become a festival of unrestricted capitalism, but I think it’s still possible to carve out a niche and enjoy yourself.

I’m probably not going to pay $10 a year with additional fees to have my music on a website unless a lot of people are already using it

this pretty much sums it up. I thought trump would be incoherent, but some of the stuff out of his mouth was borderline surreal. Harris had completely tuned herself to ‘beat’ trump, and while it worked, it’s painfully clear that she doesn’t have a single original thought - nothing but platitudes, the same canned phrases about working families and small businesses, same tired defence of Israel.

you can still get the logical journey of the zoombinis on steam (and on android/ios). no joke, I think that game taught me deductive reasoning

I have spent the last 10 years of my career writing open source scientific software

ignorance is one thing, but it’s a whole nother level of loser behaviour to intentionally do unpaid work for big tech companies in your free time

the number of people willing to bat for this on Lemmy is truly disturbing. what do they think these ai models are trained on?

I understand that this is a big loss for the emulation community, but as someone who did a bit of romhacking during COVID, I found their moderation to be terrible and arbitrary.

it’s still mostly red hat even for arm, though Cray (who still supply a lot of machines here in the UK) ship a horribly butchered version of SLES

typeset my thesis using latex, biber and zotero. Very painless, the only slightly painful part was configuring the character encoding

irrelevant to the thread, but it actually took only 3 years for clement atlee’s government to create the UK’s national health service

the vast majority of the internet is shit, it’s a slurry of Content from content farms designed to top google search results or go viral on social media. if all that were to disappear then the internet would absolutely become a better place

on ‘funding the nhs’: his shadow health secretary says he will employ privatisation to reduce NHS waiting lists: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-59910107

incidentally he also accepted £175000 from donors linked to private healthcare and health insurance firms: https://www.thenational.scot/news/24250557.wes-streeting-takes-175k-donors-linked-private-health-firms

as an occasional creator of internet videos,I would much rather host my own videos, because bandwidth is actually very cheap. but YouTube has a complete monopoly on internet video, so I have to host my video on their website, subject to their weird and arbitrary conditions, their trigger happy copyright system, and their general terrible treatment of their creators. they pay an absolute pittance for impressions, which is why most professional YouTubers use other revenue streams

the company, Google, that you are paying, didn’t make the videos, doesn’t fairly compensate the people who did, and they are effectively holding them and the very concept of internet video hostage

people on Lemmy mostly support a free, non-corpo, decentralised internet instead of the parasites at Google because Lemmy is free and decentralised and non corporate

get real

this is not correct, on average trans women don’t perform any better at competitive sports than cis women

check the results section of this review paper for more info: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10641525/

I picked up a radxa zero last year and have been quite enjoying it. the hardware is better than a pi zero but costs less. same with a lot of other SBCs

but raspberry pi has a lot of inertia behind it, a lot of software and hardware support. people will keep using them, just like they keep using Ubuntu, even though it’s a soulless corporate husk of what it one was

1. almost every major political party in the UK has an anti-immigration stance, so they certainly do act like it’s an issue
2. despite media scaremongering about immigration, there’s no credible evidence that immigration in the UK has negative social or economic consequences overall
3. the lovely people behind reform UK previously campaigned for us to leave the EU in order to reduce immigration, and not only did it not reduce immigration but it was also a multi-year political shitshow (and it tanked the economy, and it pulled us out of the EU human rights convention, and it fucked up supply chains, and it decimated arts and science funding, etc etc)

to be honest I’m kind of amazed that UK voters would fall for the same obvious grift twice

last time I signed into my Microsoft 365 account for work I got two separate 2fa prompts and two captchas, it was like being in an episode of the crystal maze. the mere act of signing into something is now tedious and difficult

I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt

after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.

I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable

my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad

Pathfinder 2e is definitely more complicated than DND 5e, but in return you get a much more interesting, expressive game, in my opinion. When people say it’s cleanly designed they are normally comparing it to pathfinder 1e, which is a labyrinth of bizarre rules, pointless edge cases and overly crunchy rolls.