Veritasium just released a video about people picking 37 when asked to pick a random number.

On the topic of games with an online component, wouldn’t it be great if they could run indefinitely?

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

Can’t you use Proton on Mac? I’d think that would solve most compatibility problems.

Still, Indie games continue to be developed. This will be gaming’s salvation when the big studios are fully committed to squeezing every loot box/DLC/microtransaction out of “Live service” forever games.

I don’t think Clash of Candy Shadow Tanks is going anywhere, but there will always be the next Stardew Valley passion project.

On that note, I think Indy’s have embraced a retro aesthetic because you don’t need a whole art team rendering your graphics. Combine this with AAA games being rather formulaic (can’t risk a big studio budget trying unproven ideas) and I think you have an audience willing to accept older graphics in retro games.

Correct. When people say “ChatGPT isn’t real AI” they mean it’s not AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). The term “Artificial Intelligence” has been the proper term for the study of machine learning since the 1956 Dartmouth Workshop.

It’s all AI, from the computer player in Battlechess to ChatGPT. It’s not all using the same techniques, or have the same capabilities.

First computer was a Commodore Vic-20. Second was a Tandy 1000TX. I remember dialling into BBSes pre-internet, but not on the Vic-20 of course.

I can still remember the feeling of seeing my first computer in person. Even in the late seventies it was rare to see even things like Atari 2600’s. By the early eighties most of my friends had an Atari, Intellivision, Colecovision, Atari 400/800, Coleco Adam, Commodore Vic-20/64, Apple II, Tandy Coco, etc. By the late eighties most of the people I knew had PCs of some sort (Tandy 1000TX in my case), Atari ST, or Amiga. Modems were still rare. It was the nineties when modems and BBSes seemed to really explode, quickly displaced by the Internet. Granted I remember connecting to Gopher before I personally connected to BBSes.

I look back on how things changed from 1980 to 1989, and it seems so much more sweeping than 2010 to 2019.

My monochrome Brother Laser is around 15 years old. Works great on Linux, as it should on any cups system. It’s still the same printer or was 15 years ago, drivers shouldn’t change.

I think I’m on the 3rd drum for that thing. Lord knows how many pages. Just keeps trucking.

What? Mein Kampf has dislodged Protocols of the Elders of Zion?

Better start training the Mentats.

Just got a new Sansa Clip to replace my dad’s old Sansa Clip. Solid device.

I think you’ll need a “real computer” to act as host device. Having said that, you could use a Raspberry Pi to be your “real computer”. You might be able to fake something out, but an MP3 player will usually act as a storage device, and another device will have to act as host to load it with files. You might find an MP3 player that can connect to some cloud service, but that undermines the whole point.

I’ve currently got 2 functioning MP3 devices. Well, technically 1, since I gave one to my dad.

The one I gave to my dad is this guy, a Sandisk Sansa Clip. It connects as an MTP device via USB cable. Copy files into it’s storage, disconnect, and go. Any computer capable of acting as an MTP host should work.

The one still in my possession is an earlier version of this one, the Mixxtape. They are regularly on sale for around $60 USD IIRC, so not the cheapest, but it can also play back via a tape deck, like my very first MP3 player, the Digisette Duo Aria MP3 player, with a whopping 32MB of storage! I guess my first MP3 player wasn’t the most capable, but the Mixxtape evokes that nostalgia for me, plus is far more capable. Again, it mounts as an MTP storage device, so any other device capable of hosting an MTP connection should work.

As to your comment on OS, I’ve been using Linux primarily for well over a decade, and it supports MTP just fine. The only problem you’ll run into is older MP3 players from before USB Mass Storage Class (MSC), Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) and Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) were widespread. I think some early models had custom file transfer schemes. That hasn’t been a thing for well over a decade. Except maybe for iDevices. Apple (as always) is special. From my experience, plugging any MSC/PTP/ or MTP device into just about any Linux computer will “just work”. It should “just work” for Windows as well.

Finally, a “real computer”. Something like a Raspberry Pi 400 kit should work fine, but there are also lots of perfectly fine ex-office computers for sale refurbished at similar prices. Best Buy also has refurbs. An old laptop would work as well. You might be able to use the Pixel to host. I know the Pixel supports USB-OTG or whatever the successor protocol is, allowing it to act as a USB host for limited power devices. Only way to find out is to try.

Not sure how this would work, but potentially one advantage of blockchain over peer-to-peer is less metadata needed?

All the encrypted messaged just get dumped into the public blockchain, you might be able to glean who (or at least where) a message was sent from, but the reader could be anyone with a decryption key. A bigger channel, like a newsletter type thing would just involve more read keys being available. Kind of like old school cold war numbers stations or encoded messages in the classifieds. You might be able to figure out that KGB agent Pyotr placed a classified ad for “Golden Lab, found near 5th Ave. and Main St.” in the “lost and Fond” section, but there would be no way to know which of the papers many readers would be able to decode the message.

Of course the practical problem would be the size and scale of the blockchain. I think Bitcoin 1.0 was only able to do 7 transactions/second. With each message a transaction, and each read requiring the reader to pick out their message from the pile, my above hypothesis would have to be compromised in some fashion to be usable.

Total agreement from me! I like being able to change my sort.

I found that back in the old days of Facebook (pre-enshitification, or at least full steam enshitification) I could log in, catch up on what all my distant relatives and friends were up to, leave some comments, maybe post something myself, and log out in around 10-15 minutes max. Then they started “improving” things, and suddenly there was “engaging” content, and it took at least ½ an hour.

I think it makes sense that from Facebook’s perspective, a chronological feed is worse.

Having said that, some people post more than others, so I do appreciate using the Hot and Active sorts for Lemmy in addition to Top - Day. It’s a feature I miss from Mastodon. There is a headline bot that I like following, to catch the recent headlines, and the weather. Problem is that something like ¼ of my feed can just be the bot, and yesterday’s headlines aren’t news anymore, I’m more interested in the ongoing discussion. So I do appreciate the non-chronological sorts, when they make things better for me, and not a corporation’s bottom line.

Such a shame that HP no longer supports RPN. SwissMicros makes HP “style” calculators.

It’s cool to see an emulator/simulator like this.

I remember an old HP driver that would just take up all the unused RAM, until it was needed. Then it usually used enough less RAM to let whatever happen. This is some time ago, but I wonder if some Windows application is “reserving” RAM.

I’d recommend a more detailed look at per app and per process RAM usage. Maybe look at Process Explorer? See how RAM usage changes under load?

Too cute!

I’m trying to stop forwarding cute animal pics, no fair!

Wasn’t that an old example of perverse incentives? IBM ranked or paid bonuses based on lines of code. In short order, all their code became bloated and inefficient.

This was an old example in the 90’s and maybe the 80’s, so could have been over of the other OG computer companies (Digital, Sun, HP, etc). Could also be apocryphal. Point is, it’s a classic example of dumb management ideas.

Twitter had an outage at the same time Threads: An Instagram App was launching. Threads now has something like 100 million accounts in a matter of days.

So apparently lots of people and businesses are replacing Twitter with Threads. It’s just over here on Lemmy, most of us seem to be Reddit refugees. There is a lot of discussion about Threads federation via ActivityPub (if you are on the right communities at least), but otherwise I think we are all mostly just happy to leave all that corporate BS behind.

Heard about this earlier… on Mastodon.

I think “working closely” with Twitter might not be such an advantage.