alphafold had set the field of protein folding back a decade

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

I love this book! it’s long but dense, it’s trashy but it’s also high art, it’s tragic but it’s also inspirational. I’m glad Dumas was paid by the word, because it means he wrote as much. You should check out the musketeers books if you haven’t already, I think Count is a stronger book but they’re all written in the same engrossing style.

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

this is fine until you need autotools which is worse than cmake

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

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

because they’re not a vigilante justice organisation they just want the media to talk about it

it’s the only way they can get the news to engage with it

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

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

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