When the Raspberry Pi 3 first came out I was shocked how much it could do with less than a gigabyte of RAM (it technically has one gig but it shares it with the GPU). Linux is ridiculously lean when packaged right.

I have an Android tablet with four gigabytes of RAM that sometimes crashes running Firefox with multiple tabs, something the Pi somehow managed with a fraction the resources. Windows often struggled with eight gigabytes before I upgraded.

And DuckDuckGo results are 90% AI slop.

The frustrating thing about that is how they didn’t even slow down with their bullshit after that scandal, and some of the most hated DRM in recent history have a direct lineage from Sony:

• SecuROM, a widely hated DRM that limited how many times you could install a game, required online check-ins or it’d lock you out of playing, and blocked common IT tools while running, was also developed by Sony.
• Denuvo, which obfuscates and encrypts the game executable after scattering DRM checks throughout, adding extra CPU overhead and lowering game performance, was later produced by the same (former, now independent) SecuROM team.

Things started going downhill when Lenovo wasn’t fined into oblivion in the 2010s for putting malicious spyware on the laptops they sold their customers. And I mean actual literal spyware, as in “installs a root certificate and decrypts and reads all your ‘secure’ internet traffic, ostensibly so it can place random ads in it”. While also leaving gaping holes for attackers to use, of course, but letting a random program written by someone with ties to Israeli intelligence install backdoors throughout their customer base earned Lenova slightly more money so it’s all good!

And that wasn’t even the first or last time Lenovo have done something like that. They just… got a free pass, and this type of thing gradually became the norm. It’s infuriating.

Since their current cash wouldn’t fit in a 32-bit integer that’d mean it’s at least 64-bit. An integer underflow would require a debt of over 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 units-of-currency before it rolled over to positives.

Man, this bubble is even bigger than I thought! /s

Epic are currently trying to make a push into mobile after preparing the way with all those lawsuits, but their mobile app store shows they learned absolutely nothing from how poorly EGS was received.

How bad is it? So bad it doesn’t even have a library. To know which games you own, you have to browse the list of all apps on the store and find the ones that have their price replaced by a download icon.

Plus Second Life already tried the same idea and failed, and did so without requiring several hundred dollars of specialized equipment per user like the Metaverse did.

The game was Windrose and it was making over a hundred gigabytes of unnecessary writes per hour at 90,000-130,000 writes per second, for the record.

After the devs tweaked their database caching it went down to ‘only’ 20-60 writes per second, which still feels insane to me.

I believe you slashed where you meant to dash, if you catch my drift.

The memory surplus wouldn’t be immediate after the bubble pops; at least not for regular people. What they’re currently producing isn’t one-to-one compatible with desktop PCs - most of the secondhand stuff from decommissioned AI datacenters wouldn’t be usable outside of servers, and it’d take a while for the newly freed fabs to start churning out consumer-grade memory again, factories to install it on consumer chips, and for it to make its way to the market (mass shipping is much slower than people think). That delay would hit producers hard, possibly gumming up the works even further. Modern economics is not at all equipped for supply chain failures.

There’s a reason people are panicking about this bubble, and that’s not even going into the far more devastating stock market crash likely to happen when it pops. It’s a nightmare in both economic and technological terms, but a small group of people stand to make a ton of money from it so they’ve gutted the regulatory agencies that would have prevented things from getting this bad, or at least softened the blow.

The moment emulation began embracing mod support, it became peak gaming. You can now play your favorite old games with randomizers to mix things up, higher resolution models and textures to make them look more modern, patches to disable obnoxious elements (goodbye, low health alarms and lengthy animations for basic world actions), and even add entirely new content (this was extremely difficult in the past, but modern decompilation projects have made better tooling possible as a side effect).

There are even projects combining games so you need to swap between them to progress, so you can be playing Super Metroid and find a key item for your playthrough of A Link to the Past where a missile upgrade used to sit and vice versa.

Hasn’t HTTPS Everywhere been dead for years? Enabling forced HTTPS is a native feature in every browser now afaik.

I have the page with instructions for this prominently bookmarked because it was such a nightmare to figure out the last time I migrated my OS to a differently sized drive.

And you can use a keyfile separate from the database for even more security. If the database is backed up on Google Drive and the keyfile is saved on a USB or in a (non-Google) email somewhere for the rare times you add a new device, your passwords should be safe even from keyloggers or Google themselves.

What a strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

Windows went all-in on AI including for internal development, despite removing their dedicated QA teams years ago.

Yeah, but a small handful of American (or non-American but willing to pay bribes) CEOs will make tons of money off of this as the economy craters.

We’re already at the point where Windows programs sometimes run better on Linux with a compatibility layer (WINE/Proton) than they do natively. The stuff that doesn’t run is mostly games ladened with kernel-level DRM that Linux (rightfully) can’t emulate.

Linux even runs old Windows programs better than Windows itself, and long-term compatibility is supposed to be one of Windows’ biggest selling points.

Didn’t the PS5 boot signing keys leak recently? The word when that happened was that it blew PS5 modding wide open in a way that couldn’t be closed without new hardware, though I guess publishing anything that used Sony’s key would have their lawyers after you real quick.

The last console I owned was the Xbox 360. Once I started seeing non-gaming advertisements on my home screen, I lost all interest in the product line.

Sometimes I think internet connectivity was a mistake.