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 is fine until you need autotools which is worse than cmake

I bought a 3700x in 2021 and after 2 years of my computer randomly powering off (and replacing my PSU, ram and GPU in that order) I replaced the CPU and found that the problem was fixed. I sent the CPU back to AMD and they confirmed it was defective and issued a replacement. I haven’t had a random poweroff since.

perhaps I am just unlucky, but I think I’ll take my chances with intel

updating packages in kde neon is like playing russian roulette, it’s worse than pop os in my experience

pointers are fine, but when you learn about the preprocessor and templates and 75% of the STL it goes negative again

c++ templates are such a busted implementation of generics that if I didn’t have context I’d assume they were bad on purpose like malbolge

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

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be

in my opinion this is very straightforward. the people working directly on power, water and materials don’t have any control over how those things are used and often don’t/can’t know what they’re being used for. however, at some point, a decision is made - for example, someone at the company that makes the steel alloy decides to sell it to raytheon - and so whoever made that decision is responsible.

and yes, if you work on a weapon safety system, you are working on an essential part of that weapon and so are responsible for its use

i mean, i probably wouldn’t resent you for mopping the floors at BAE. but if you actually design or build the missiles, yes, that is unethical

a lot of people are using the example of ukraine to say ‘sometimes the missiles are for the greater good’, and while i would agree with that specific example, you don’t have control over where your missiles go. russian tank, yemeni refugee, etc

i also think saying ‘the parts will be made anyway’ is kind of a dodge, the question isn’t whether the parts will be made, it’s whether you will make them