It will shift to streaming that can run on anything and things like mods, running older clients, and cheats will essentially be impossible. Unless of course you pay for them with in app purchases, which publishers love

Short sighted consumers will eat it up because “oh now I don’t need an expensive console, I can just run an app on my tv!”

Then comes the death of all the above, as well as a generation of kids having access to not just gaming, but 3d modeling and serious digital art, programming (as well as learning through modding and finding ways to cheat), music production, video editing, etc. how many of those things were only available to kids via piracy? Capitalists don’t give a shit about this. They’re salivating at everything become a streaming client which both essentially eliminates piracy as well as turning a one time software purchase into perpetual subscription hell.

The crazy part is everyone but the tiniest sliver of people will be fucked by this. You know how musicians have shifted to basically making dick from streaming, and view it essentially as advertisement to funnel people into physical merch and concert ticket purchases, their only remaining revenue streams? Developers will be in the same place. It’s arguably advantageous now to be on something like gamepass but that’s because Microsoft is purposefully taking a small percentage barely above costs (10.5%). Once it’s dominant do you think they won’t shift to 30% like apple, steam, and google? And probably even more once distribution outside of their platform is unfeasible?

And for the short sighted consumer saving $3-500 on a console once every 5-10 years becomes another $30 subscription, which outpaces the cost of a console in 2 years and also robs you of the shred of autonomy you did have

I don’t mean people actually being in space. Perhaps a better word choice would be place, eg “we could be in a place where…”

The frustrating part is that we could be on the precipice of an amazing time. We could be in a space where it makes sense to dump tons of resources into rapidly progressing automation because it would enable people to finally stop doing tedious labor.

But a combination of our inability to demand collective ownership of these systems and a similar disdain for social welfare means the prospect is instead terrifying. We need to continue to allow people to work cash registers for well below livable wages because otherwise they’ll starve.

There is an alternate reality where the end result of AI is that people are just free to live how they want, to socialize, to explore art and novel ideas within their passion, engage in social supports, etc. but instead we will continue to prop up the need for mind numbing and tedious labor out of a fear of homelessness because collectivism is scary and bad

The frustrating part is that getting around it sucks. I’m told Kagi has better support for this but from what I’ve read it relies on users downranking the domains, which is a fools errand given the flood of these sites. I’ve also seen people that maintain blocklists for this that work with things like adguard and uBlock but then you still get pages of slop, but all the links just 404 now

My conspiracy is that this is allowed and not dealt with to push people to use LLMs directly, which are quickly becoming the most effective way to search for information online (with the caveat that you either need to have the knowledge to identify errors or be willing to double check the information given for flaws. Also taking like 4-7x the energy to process queries)

I don’t even care about an ai overview at the top. Give me a search engine that ranks down the sea of blogs that launched a year ago and have 5,000+ articles that are just ai generated bullshit designed to capture as many search queries as possible

Ecosia, ddg, google, brave, etc are all laden with this shit and it clogs up the searches. “How do I do x” and an endless stream of “achieving x is possible. Here’s a bulleted list of the next 12 paragraphs, then a bunch of summarized info from Reddit posts that only answers your question in the most basic obvious way and has no accounting for any kind of edge case or even just non traditional but acceptable use case. And even if you just wanted the basic answer its useless because the LLM fluffed the sentence long answer with 12 pages of meandering nonsense”

ram is a volatile commodity that, while difficult to manufacture, is not as difficult as say a gpu or cpu. As a result in the past manufacturers have been pushed to sell supplies at or even below cost. It seems like a no brainer to start up a new fab right now but the reality is that would take years to get to a point where it’s outputting any kind of reasonable supply and in that time prices could (and hopefully will) return to a much thinner margin

Apple could, for example, start up a fab. They have the cash. But it’s a lot of cash, it doesn’t stop (the fab needs continual significant investment to stay competitive), and when ram prices dive they are stuck holding the bag for this 15-20 billion dollar fab that needs several billion dollars a year to keep playing the game. This is why they stick to fabrication of things where they can differentiate (eg m series processors) and control the market. And then they can do what they’re doing right now: leverage their huge position to get far better prices than someone like valve, who’s barely a player in the hardware game, and ensure the architecture of their custom silicon maximizes ram performance (uma) and even use that influence to codesign new types of ram that align with their interests (lpddr5x)

Momentum is hard to overcome and it’s been done this way for many many years

The guy who is largely attributed to making the medical residency system so punishingly difficult in terms of hours was coke addict btw. William Stewart Halsted. That was like 1890 and residents didn’t have their hours limited until 2003 (and even then, barely)

china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid

In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance

This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh

The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.

Fair point, the experience is definitely worth the money for some as well as the hands on assistance. I guess this is more targeted at someone whos eyeing up a $250-300 modded gba on eBay

Yeah as the other person pointed out, if you want an experience that’s up to you. The upcharging makes sense for a class as they’ve got a lot more overhead. The upcharging makes far less sense for an already modded gameboy sold on ebay or marketplace

For roms you’d want a flashcart. No mod there, just buy the flashcart, put roms on sd, put sd in flashcart, play. There are flash carts for literally every cartridge based console you can think of. Even the disc consoles (eg Dreamcast, psx, GameCube) almost always have something like an optical drive emulator the replaces the disc drive with an sd card filled with roms (these are less “plug and play” than flash carts though, which literally are just cartridges with an sd slot and some firmware to load roms)

Imo a flashcart is necessary. There’s basically no drawback, unless you’re specifically into collecting originals. Occasionally they can struggle with edge cases (eg games on snes that used superfx chips or games that used rtc like Pokémon) but at this point 99.9% of those issues are solved (except maybe if you get a cheap Chinese clone cart with unknown firmware. Everdrive is the standard but for like 1/3-1/2 the price you can get lesser known models or clones and tbh most of these are fine. It’s pretty urgent to check Pokémon or Mario rpg works when you’re developing one of these I’d assume

I don’t know about the class but you can mod a gameboy for way cheaper than ~$350 and it’s stupid easy to do.

A backlit ips screen is like $60 from us sellers but you can also buy them direct from china for like 1/3-1/2 that. Honestly that’s really the only thing with a crazy markup. The brackets to center the lcd, a new glass lens, etc are like $2-3 each. The install is pretty easy if you can handle disassembling a gameboy and putting it back together. The soldering is 3-5 wires depending on what screen and it’s stupid easy soldering. Some are solder free, the soldering is to just tap the signals for buttons so specific combinations will bring up the screens OSD, some use capacitive touch on the screen bezel instead (or in addition to). Some require minor case modification but that also stupid easy ($2 flush cutters and just remove some plastic ribs, basically)

A lithium battery mod is like $25 domestically and if you can install the normal alkaline batteries you can handle this one. Depending on what battery and what model gameboy you may have to solder 1-2 wires to a usb c board (gba/sp batteries sometimes have it integrated and you can get a replacement battery door with a hole or they come with one (that probably won’t match), gb/color/pocket usually have a daughterboard). The toughest bit is cutting a hole for the usb c charger but if you’re reshelling a lot of replacement shells come with that already done.

Speaking of reshelling that’s also stupid cheap. $10-20 should cover a shell and buttons. That said this can also get stupid expensive for exotic cases (like $100-200+ for boxypixel cases, which are cnc cut aluminum)

So at this point you’re spending 70-100 to do the mods most people do and watching a YouTube video is enough because it’s really easy. If you have no tools a $15 soldering iron beginner kit, $2 flush cutters, a small screwdriver set, and cheap wire strippers will cover everything. Nonconductive tape like kapton is also nice to have (don’t be a hot glue person yuck) but not essential

After that it’s other cheap mods you can add but aren’t typically considered “essential”. LED lighting under the buttons is like $20 and it’s just a flex pcb that you line up and tack on via a few solder points. You can get a fresh speaker, 2 wires to solder. You can also do things like replace the speaker amp but tbh I think this is silly, every gameboy sounds like shit regardless because the speaker is trash. The audio amps are slightly less distorted and louder trash, but still trash. Use headphones if you care that much. An hdmi mod for gba is like $50 and probably the hardest install here, though still fairly easy. Some people recap them while they’re open but I’ve never seen a gameboy with caps that caused issues. Even if you do decide this is worthwhile it’s only really necessary to do electrolytic caps and there aren’t many to do, the sp literally only has 1 (it’s surface mount but stupid easy to do). Iirc the og dmg has the most with 6 and they’re through hole

The main other cost is the console of course. This is where things can be kind of wild. A gameboy confirmed in good working condition can be a little pricey for what it is. Even then it’s still not usually expensive, $50-100 depending on how much of a deal you can find. But this is USA pricing. If you’ll be in Japan I’m sure you can get used gameboys all over for like $20-40, if yahoo jp auctions are any indicator. Buying a broken one is a gamble though they’re usually simple to fix, especially if you’re already planning to replace the screen and speaker. Those and cleaning the power switch/battery contacts fixes 95% of broken gameboys, they’re built like tanks regardless of revision

The idea of a class is neat ig because honestly a lot of sellers sell modded gameboys for $250-300 in the USA but they’re just making bank off of people who watch YouTubers that talk about console modding, think it’s neat, but are too scared to do what’s probably the easiest set of console mods in the world. I don’t do it anymore but I would buy lots of broken gameboys from yahoojp and mod them (buying mods in bulk makes this even cheaper) and easily double or triple my money. Don’t buy from people like me, just do it. It’s so goddamn easy

Is plex an acronym?

If your device doesn’t have a client it probably has a kodi port. Jellyfin libraries can be imported in kodi with plugins (and plex and emby for that matter). Then you get the benefits of kodi (better skin support, more robust plugins, better subtitle rendering, etc) with the centralized metadata administration of Jellyfin and retain the option to use Jellyfin clients on devices with locked ecosystems (eg ios) or where you don’t feel like setting up kodi

Google did shit like this long before AI. Never use google for anything critical (or at all). while the odds are low because they want your data there’s always the chance they just delete everything you had. And their support is nonexistent so once they do you’re fucked, even if you make a big stink on social media like this

This happens all the time in FOSS

Someone comes in, contributes a bit, then forks, then closes it off once they realize there’s a path to monetization.

Plex is a particularly egregious example: the initial author forked xbmc to make a mac port. This led to a crazy amount of popularity very fast and they saw the path to monetization. They soon after created plex server separate from the client and went to the crazy step of rewriting everything GPL so they could fully close source.

This is legally fine but ethically fucked; they had a derivative app that technically no longer shared code with kodi but there was the fact that design cues, data structures, etc were mostly inherited. Plex wouldn’t exist without kodi. And that’s totally fine, derivative works should be allowed and encouraged. But what’s fucked is that they made serious efforts to close source and give nothing back to the community that they were built from. Code? Nothing. When they got 40 million in VC? nothing.

See also a bunch of players in 3d printing, notably Bambu at the moment. But they’ll keep getting away with it thanks to a combination of governments that are like “money is more important than fairness or progress” and idiotic consumers that are like “oh I have to spend 30 seconds longer figuring something out? Ugh fuck you im gonna buy what some YouTuber was paid $400 to recommend”

valves Linux support is objectively good but it doesn’t magically undo establishing the anti consumer guidelines that now dominate the industry

Piracy also existed before (and after) steam, what’s your point?

https://youtube.com/shorts/jm2c--qzSbk

If you buy these things you’re a fucking creep

You’re not wrong that physical media was essentially doomed, and arguably it should have been as digital distribution is faster, easier, and objectively better for the planet (look into the environmental cost of manufacturing vinyl records, for example)

But who popularized the current dominant model of “you’re only buying access, not the game itself”? And before you go on about how it would be impossible to make a digital equivalent to distribution equivalent to purchasing physical media, remember gog exists and has been around and successful for almost 2 decades now

Why do you think a war was started for no reason

95% of domestic manufacturing that remains is military shit. Can’t have China do the injection molding and machining for your top secret bombs meant to do genocide

This is specifically an optics move because they can’t pass it. Make headlines about this and a few other progressive moves in the run up to November and gain votes from the “fell for it again” neolib crowd. Then “whoops, 1-3 democrat senators are just real sticks in the mud and won’t go for it so I guess we give up”. Then frustration from the base and they eventually kill whatever momentum because they prove that when it comes to action they almost always cave. Then the gop sweeps up and regresses as much as possible.

Lieberman, sinema, manchin, now its fetterman. who will be the next “this 1-3 person group personally stops any and all progress in America for like a decade”. The ones that give those dumb neolibs ammo, because of course the party would do so much if it wasn’t for them and you just have to vote more so that the 1-3 person group can become a 3-5 person group