yes but if you initially charge for it then you can make MORE money.

Honestly they could go the MMO route of old and charge you for the game, then charge you a monthly sub, then charge you via an ingame shop and people would gladly pay it. I mean hell just look at WoW, that thing is still raking in money 20+ years after initial release and it does all of the above.

well duh. You can test this yourself and even ALLOW the agent to access the internet. if you asks it to build something let it pick it’s own language. 9 times out of 10 it’s going to pick a language that tech bros and tech blogs have been raving about on linkedin and other sites. AND then it generally wont’ utilize the latest API or update to said language if no one has written about said latest API/update. months ago I tried this as a test. Claude selected Smithy and Rust I believe (can’t remember exactly) but the problem was it was utilizing an out of date Smithy version to try and get it to work with an up to date Rust version even though the latest Smithy was available it refused to utilize it. Why? well no one wrote about Smithy. So it would use the version it could find blog posts and articles written about it.

Now if you take internet access away from the agent, it’s not going to know what to use.

Bloodborne on the PS4 when it first came out was the last physical game I bought. Not sure why I did cause all my other PS4 games were digital.

I remember for my birthday one year I wanted the Sega CD Memory card/cartridge thing. It was literally just a memory card BUT I thought it was some magical tool, officially licensed/made by Sega mind you, where I could then go to blockbuster and rent games and it would then SAVE those games…in their entirety…to the memory cartridge. thus allowing me to have a bunch of games without paying full price for them. This is what I believed the thing did. that was my birthday present. a memory card.

it was easier it just took longer and less common only because many people just didn’t know about it or even how to to do it.

Take for example the SNES. the thing was region free. yup, you could play SNES games from Japan, Europe, etc on a US SNES quite easily. how? well there was a notch in the US SNES that you would have to cut out or sand down. that’s it. that was Nintendos region lock and anti piracy measure. a plastic notch. pirating games was word of mouth type stuff. Someone knew someone or knew a place you could mail away for games etc. A friend of a friend’s cousin in some random college dorm room had a t1 line and could rip the games from the internet OR had one of those special carts like for the N64 that could rip games when you plugged a cart into it. OR you’d go to a flea market and hope you got lucky that ONE dude would show up with all his warez/pirated stuff that you could score for dirt cheap.

For the PSX it was a bit harder as you had to get a mod chip and solder that into the board in order to turn your console region free and pirate stuff. So you had to find someone that sold the chips and then install it yourself. luckily for me a local comic book shop actually sold them. But it was stuff like that, in most cases word of mouth to find the stuff.

Dreamcast was a hell of a lot easier. literally download and burn to disc, that’s it. but again this was '99/00 and most people were still on dialup so it took time. I’d get all my dreamcast games via IRC channels which mean a direct IP2IP connection to someone to download the stuff directly from them. So you had to ask them first if it was ok. Warez on the PC pretty much worked the same way. There were plenty of Warez sites but finding the good and honest ones took time. again a lot of asking on IRC.

based on the populace and demographic that use WhatsApp the most this will 100% not fly. And if they do roll this out some dude in India will have it circumvented within hours by clicking on random things in the phones settings menu (I’ve watched those factory lock bypass videos…friggin nuts)

a new hobby of mine is finding old PCs and getting some linux distro running on them. I started doing this after getting into some youtube content where people refurbish 90s PCs to either get Linux or community rebuilds of old Windows OS’ going on them and seeing what modern or close to modern software they can run. THEN you get into a rabbit hole of finding VERY interesting projects of people still maintaining like ancient versions of firefox for example.

There’s a sort of cozy comfort to it. getting a mid to late 90s PC going again, booting it up, and hearing the Windows 95 startup sound just instantly sends me back to my childhood. And the thing is this tech surprisingly holds up after some 30 to 40 years much better than modern tech.

A fun new project I’m working on is hooking an old floppy drive up to a modern PC and using it to start games on steam. I saw a short video of that recently where a guy had all these floppy disks labeled with like Counter Strike 2 or Marvel Rivals which he would pop into a floppy drive hooked up to his PC and when the floppy was inserted it simply started the game. It’s nothing complicated at all. It’s just putting a very simple like bash script onto a floppy disk to simply tell it to start a specific game via steam when the disk is mounted. Why am I doing this? man I miss putting physical media into a PC to start a game. having one of those old floppy disk containers and flipping through them all to find a game to play.

also note that the site https://minerva-archive.org/ isn’t quite there yet as I imagine it’ll take time to get fully going so don’t get hung up if you can’t search/browse for anything.

yeah at the time I REALLY wished I knew the easiest fix was a stupid bracket I wouldn’t have gone through so many. I loved my zip drive but after like the 4th or 5th one dying on me I gave up.

for repacks it’s mixed. some work fine, others not so much. Generally you want to try and install them via Lutris or Heroic Game Launcher. Like the newest Star Trek Voyager game I couldn’t get installed at all. I’m on Arch Linux and tried it via Lutris. The fitgirl repack just doesn’t complete the install for whatever reason. I think I just need to fiddle around with different proton versions but I got tired of dealing with it.

I’m honestly surprised no one is talking about this more. It’s not like all these guys just suddenly decided “you know what? we should stop raping children” after Epstein was “caught”. Someone else took over, someone else is running the show now, not like all that child raping and blackmail was going to stop.

well to be fair the previous two times at least they came up with some kind of excuse for it. this time? nadda.

there are a couple youtube channels I recently discovered that do just that. take REALLY old computers and parts and try to make them semi-viable for modern computing. and I’m talking stuff that is easily nearly 30+ years old.

BoomerTec and Action Retro. BoomerTec I really like as he’ll just pick up random old PCs and explain all the parts inside and even give a history on them. His vids are like really awesome relaxing sunday morning watches. He even finds FOSS stuff that will still work on really old pcs. because of his channel I even discovered forks of firefox that are still actively developed for 32bit or community builds of Windows XP that are still updated today. For example his recent vid he bought a PC from 1998 off Ebay and got Firefox, Photoshop, and OpenOffice working on it. even games.

Action Retro pretty much does the same thing but with a focus on Linux. He’s done videos of taking like old Compaqs from the 90s and getting linux running on them. Really impressive stuff.

Veronica Explains is also good for this. Her video of taking old chromebooks and getting linux working on them is very detailed and thorough. Extremely easy to follow even for first timers. Also what I like about Veronica Explains is her videos remind me of old TechTV Screen Savers and Call for Help.

I’ve tried the qbz flatpak but noticed it was a bit slow and buffered a lot when compared to just using the site. However seeing that TUI you posted, I will be setting that up today and checking it out. thanks, had no clue someone built a TUI for it.

Yeah I also wanted the blur/dim for unfocused windows. I tried going the DWL route because there’s a patch to do just that but it’s an absolute headache to get working on NixOS. I mean I couldn’t figure it out for the life of me, just kept failing to build. so I settled with River.

sounds like me this past week when my external SSD decided to finally crap out on me. running around the house plugging it into multiple devices to make sure it was dead.

The ability to have virtual desktops only on the primary screen

sigh. I guess. I think I just need to settle on the fact KDE is never going to allow dedicated virtual desktops per monitor. I really want to use Plasma but this is a deal breaker for me.

it’s already available? CachyOS for example switched to using it as the default like a month or two ago. It’s already out there.

Hideki Sato was the greatest console designer ever. period. I mean just look at the beauty that is the Sega Mark III