Man, what about false positives? Ruined date night at minimum, possibly ruined reputation, relationships.
Sorry, we put a picture of your junk into this box. We don’t know what’s in it, or what it does with the picture, but it says you have chlamydia, and I think the box looks trustworthy. Here’s your divorce papers.
Good journalists go back, edit their original review to call out the bait and switch of hiding the microtransactions from reviewers, and adjust their score accordingly with microtransactions taken into accout.
And release a follow up “article” just letting people know what happened and that they’ve updated the review, so it doesn’t fly under people’s radar.
Seriously, reviewers need to stop softballing when this shit happens. It’s one thing for review copies to maybe be missing the final coat of polish. It’s something completely different to completely leave out a feature known to be contreversial in an attempt to pump up scores, then turn it on after the initial wave of buyers can no longer return their purchase. Not like they spontaneously developed this shit since review copies went out.
By the DS they even stopped using watch batteries to power the save chip in the game cart, as they started using save ram that didn’t need to stay powered on to keep the save.
At least on older game carts the little save battery could die after around a decade or more, finally releasing your beloved Pokemon waiting for you back into the ether.
These puppies? Unless the nearly infinitely impossible happens and enough cosmic rays hit the save RAM chip to flip enough bits and completely corrupt them, they are doomed to wait there for your return forever.
What’s far more likely is that maybe only a few rays hit them. Then who knows how long they’ll be trapped just partially corrupted but still as valid data? Untold eons of experiencing the deformation of who and what you are, waiting and hoping for the many changes to become too much so you can writhingly and suddenly cease.
What I’m getting at is that we should all take hammers to our old game carts. It’s the only safe way to release the poor spirits trapped in all the save data.
Definitely not a scheme to increase rarity so I can sell these seven copies of nintendogs I got from multiple family members. Maybe at a markup. Nope.
I see it happen a lot online with people “looking for help with”, but really just looking to vent about, open source software.
And I encounter it a lot at work with policies, reference docs, and little PowerShell scripts I’ve written.
“Hello I am tech support. Sysadmin, please help with strange situation A”
Sure thing, you’ll need to do X.
“But that doesn’t match our documentation, it says to do Y and that’s not working”
My man, look at the changelog on the first page. I wrote it and made most of the updates for the first year we had it. This is an exception, and adding it to the doc would have bloated it outrageously for how infrequently this comes up. Especially to explain the why. I’d also need to try to cover all the other rare exceptions, which would turn the doc into an absolutely useless shitshow. Anyway, I should have a PowerShell script to handle it, give me a bit to find it.
“Ahckstually, Numpty #3 says our team has a PowerShell script to handle it already, no worries! Thanks!”
Motherfu- My brother in christ who do you think wrote that? You know I used to be on your team, and I just said- My name is in the first line of the scri- I mean cool, glad I could help you get it sorted.
Similar story, talking with a vendor. Again, I’m the one not in quotes.
I need you to connect me with a technical resource on your side for assistance with attempting an alternate solution Y for the issue we are facing, which Important Muckety Muck #7 in my company said you were able to do for them. I understand that I previously suggested that we could do X on our side as a solution for our problem. As we’ve moved forward in other places on this project, we have found that X will not work for us as a solution for reasons A, B, and C.
(He’s breathing loudly through his mouth, hanging agape between words like some great panting missing-link-between-man-and-ape who has somehow found his way into a sales position. Somewhere in the dark recesses of his mind, the sounds of the wind through jungle trees, the calls of ancient and exotic birds and animals, the quiet noises of strange insects alien to this modern time and place, all combine into a beautiful primal music lost to the modern world. It flits through his subconcious, never quite fully able to be grasped.)
“I am the technical resource. According to my notes, X was identified as a solution to your problem.”
(This was not some poor third world guy stuck in a call center having to follow a basic help desk script. Same first language, a few states away, he’d been involved with this project the whole way)
AS STATED IN MY PREVIOUS EMAIL
Yep, there’s already horror stories about other implants where the patients were left high and dry when the company that made them went under.
It really, really depends on the shape it’s in, and if it’s one of the few models that people consider “collectors” models. The only one I can think of is Sony Trinitron.
You might be able to find someone who is willing to pay for it regardless, but it’s a really niche market. It’s more of “it’s not just a massive doorstop, you might be able to get $20-80 for it”.
People have taken it way past the point of sanity now, but they are better for game consoles from PS1 era and below. Especially for 2D games, as the pixel art was often designed around the square aspect ratio, and the tendency of CRTs to soften images and blur minor details.
It’s how the waterfalls in Sonic appeared transparent. Every line alternated between waterfall and background, so when the TV blurred it slightly it looked transparent instead of alternating lines. You’ll also often see it in old games with dithering, using a checkerboard pattern of two colors to approximate a third color in between the two when “smoothed” together.
Like I said though, people take it way too far. Most people don’t need a reference quality Sony Trinitron monitor meant for professional video editing studios with less than 500 hours of time powered on so it’s still in perfect shape. You do you, but there’s some real elitist shit I’ve seen, and some audiophile level “$600 cable for digital signal” delusion going around.
As long as you aren’t streching a “square” image to a widescreen one, it’s really up to preference on the blur/softening side. And even the streching is just the one point I’m personally elitist about.
As moderm screen resolutions get better, we get better and better approximations of CRT screen effects through using graphical shaders. There’s some mad genius shit out there that does things like simulating how the electron beam scans across the CRT vacuum tube.
It’s such a shame. All of this stuff would be useful and amazing in an ideal world, where every company was forced into using interoperable standards, no one was harvesting your personal data, and no one was taking deals to promote specific options for profit.
It’s 2024. Fuck the hype “future tech” from the past: the jetpacks, hoverboards, flying cars etc. Where are all the quality of life improvements technology was supposed to bring?
Like, it’s how many years since voice assistants became a thing, and as far as I know the first real useful option for a locally hosted non-data siphoning one is what the Home Assistant project rolled out last year. That still needs a good bunch of hands on tinkering to be useful, and even more to be able to use it outside your home.
This physically hurts to comprehend. ChatGPT and the other Large Language Models that make up the current AI boom in popular science and tech spaces right now are not sentient. Please leave armchair misapplications of psychology at the door.
They are the wrong tool for any job besides text parsing and generation.
There are vague arguments to be made that since their learning corpus is based off an absurd amount of human produced text, that the end result model may somewhat represent a condensed sort of summary of the emotions and psychology in the training data, but that’s a hell of a stretch.
It is literally and conceptually impossible to run “ChatGPT through the conditions of the Milgram shock experiment”. It cannot administer a shock to anyone. It does not understand the concept of a shock. It does not understand the concept of pain, or of being. It has not been given any input or output capabilities except text.
Machine learning being used to optimize designs towards certain metrics? Hell yes!
Using an LLM as a human participant analog? Do not pass go, please leave all professional credentials and accomplishments in the shred bin. I guess you can collect $200. There has to be some sort of gain out there or people wouldn’t keep misapplying LLMs to problem spaces and publishing it as “groundbreaking research”.
Oof. Before they even released anything too.
My man, you just reintroduced “probably”. Literally a sentence later. You can check this.
Edit: sorry, that came off a lot harsher than I meant it. Just laughing at “No probably about it… probably”
First result for googling “nointro archive”: https://archive.org/details/no-intro-2021
89GB for all known good cartridge game dumps from Atari 2600 to Nintendo DSi.
You can cut that size significantly by using a rom manager program to deduplicate, keeping only the final revision available in a language you speak instead of having every released copy of the game.
Nointro is a group that documents file hashes for good dumps of cartridge games. As in the dump works, it’s verified to match across multiple dumping attempts, and it doesn’t have any added “intro” crud from whatever group dumped it.
People regularly compile the actual game files matching the nointro group hashes, and toss the whole package up on archive.org.
Disc based games take up a ton more space because unless you start tinkering with the wide variety of compression options, each game is the full size that a disc could handle, even if it physically took up only 1/10 of the space.
Some disc games are nice and don’t do anything with the empty space. Some games put random garbage data in empty space, which is hard to detect for compression. Some games put garbage data in the empty space, then check that the garbage data is present at the expected location on the disc as an anti piracy measure.
I think the most compressed that you can go with discs is by using MAME’s CHD format, but not every emulator supports reading that format.
You can always just not use the smart features, and if you do want them, pick up a chromecast to plug into it. Walmart’s one is like $20 and holds its own against the more expensive ones.
Don’t forget the TPM module! Which has also been pretty damn ubiquitous on mobos for a long ass time.
This is all just clickbait and easy upvotes on lemmy with the big pro-linux movement.
As I understand it, most companies are making transition plans away from VMware. A lot of contracts are multi-year, and transistioning your virtual infrastructure is one hell of a project if you have any amount of complexity to your infrastructure.
It’s also one of those types of projects that is likely to be pushed down in priority whenever there’s fires to fight. The price hike is absolutely insane, but in the balance of things it might be better business sense to keep paying while you investigate alternatives and migration plans.
I’ll never forget one of my first campaigns, where a few sessions in, the one “edgy” character in our crew of demented murderhobos decided that he didn’t want to go in a cave that the rest of the party were going in. Nothing could move him on this.
Every 15 minutes or so through a multi-hour session while the rest of us explored the cave and fought beasties, the DM would ask him what he wanted to do, as a kindness that turned into a running joke by the end. His character was determined to use his abysmal crafting skills to try and make caltrops from stones outside the cave. I think that when the average rolls were calculated out over the time it took, he crafted something like three poor quality caltrops.
The player insisted that he was fine with all of it, seemed to have fun just hanging out, and it did technically fit his character. Still, it really cemented the importance of being flexible with your RP to not kill game flow.
A session or two later the DM gave each of us a “joke” magic item of questionable utility. Edgy got a pouch of infinite stone caltrops. The DM then learned a hard lesson about the cheese potential of “joke” magic items.
I was using a third party site for AIM or some other instant messaging service (there were so many competing then) that worked on PSP to chat with my girlfriend into the wee hours of the morning without going over my texting limits. Looking back I have no clue how she was responding so late into the night.
It was a magical time in the early days of handheld internet connected devices. Wish I spent that time on someone more worthwhile, but that’s youth for you.
You will own nothing and be happy.