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”

“Homers enemy” was the episode of the Simpsons where they hire frank grimes, a guy who was a caricature of a “tough life orphan bootstraps” person, to work alongside Homer. It basically played on the idea of “what if you just put a normal actual person alongside this cartoon buffoon”

In one scene they invite him to dinner to try and smooth things over. He goes nuts at the comfort of homers life - 2 cars, a gigantic house, etc and how that is completely unobtainable for him and undeserved for Homer

That was in 1997. Already at that point home ownership was extremely difficult if you didn’t have a very well paying job or a family that could “gift” you a down payment and possibly co-sign.

The funny (or maybe not so funny) part is that most of the Gen X people I know who bought houses in that era absolutely had the “my affluent boomer parents helped me get in this house” situation and over the last 25 years have morphed into “no one helped me get where I am, I busted my ass for everything” people.

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

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

It’s also why electronics are a dumb pain in the ass now. Remember when vga and composite existed? You’d just plug in a monitor and it would just work, immediately? And if it didn’t it generally mean a broken cable or hardware fault?

HDMI could be much much closer to that. Have you ever plugged in an hdmi cable and just gotten a black screen until you plug it back in 2-3x? Have you ever had issues with hdmi-cec/control not working right, or other weird behavior like vrr not showing up as an option despite adequate hardware?

This is sometimes because of an old cable that is not correct (there are multiple hdmi versions that are all identical looking and backwards compatible, but not forward compatible) but more often because of a failed hdcp handshake

Hdcp is the anti piracy measure built into hdmi. When you connect and while you watch it “negotiates” between hardware to make sure you’re not making copies. A handshake needs to occur with hdmi because it needs to communicate data like resolution, refresh rate, audio channels, etc but this handshake is generally pretty bulletproof. VGA did something similar with the ddc pin once automatic resolution detection became a thing.

But the hdcp handshake is far more complex and as a result fails more often. There are multiple revisions of the protocol and the key systems changed drastically between version 1 and 2. So if you have an hdmi 2.2 source and an hdmi 1.4 display there needs to be a bridge negotiation, which is more likely to fail. If the vendor wrote shitty firmware it’s more likely to fail. The most frustrating part is that even with the revisions the spec was designed around a direct connection (eg Blu-ray player>hdmi>tv) so modern signal chains (eg game console>tv>earc to av receiver with other hdmi devices connected) can trip it up, especially if the devices mix spec (eg older av receiver with a brand new tv) or you have a complex chain (eg hdmi switch/splitter to multiple displays, capture cards, couplers, hdmi over Ethernet, etc). Zero thought given to error handling as well, so if the handshake fails there is almost never any diagnostic info given to troubleshoot. It just doesn’t work, and you’re scratching your head wondering if it’s one of the 5 devices in the chain, if one of the 11 cables is bad, etc.

And of course all this is to prevent piracy and is completely and utterly moot. The old hdcp master keys were leaked like 15 years ago so with enough know how anyone can manufacture a compliant device. Even with revision (which occurred with 2.0) this would require changing the key in every single legitimate hdcp device, which is impossible as many don’t have a route to update firmware. Even without this it’s pointless as there are a number of other methods. The ADV7611 is a chip that was manufactured out of necessity, there are versions that ignore hdcp for corporate environments (eg needing to feed a signal to dozens of screens). This led to Chinese manufacturing creating hdmi splitters that also ignore or strip hdcp for very low cost.

And even outside of that as long as a stream is decoded it can and will be captured. HDMI isn’t even in the picture for modern piracy groups that do web rips and Blu-ray remuxes. Blu-ray has been cracked multiple times because when software players decode the encryption the decoded steam has to exist in memory, thus things like makemkv, which gets the volume key from memory by pretending to be a Blu-ray player. Similar things for webrips.

This is also likely a huge part of why age verification and the push to kill older hardware with windows 11 are a thing. Most streaming uses a drm called widevine, from google. This has 3 versions - one that decrypts and renders in software (l3), one that decrypts in hardware and renders in software (l2), and one that decrypts and renders within a trusted hardware environment like a smartphone (l1). L2 is rarely used and l3 is the most common by far because many people don’t have hardware compatible with what l1 needs. Even with this there are things to break it: rooted android devices that are hacked to break the trusted environment and extract frames from l1 encryption, decompiled apks that are hacked allow capture, and people have even extracted widevine keys and negotiated an fake l1 device similar to the hdcp leak. This is a big part of why you are being pushed to consume on smartphones/tablets and if you want a computer to get one with TPM

And even with all this failure the streaming industry and Hollywood are pushing to continue things. Hdcp 2.2+ is already proposed with end to end encryption as well as requirements for hardware drm on every device in the chain