I guess not many people remember that Microsoft was convicted of antitrust violations against Netscape (which effectively destroyed that command).

It makes food taste good without bringing the feeling of satiety. People can eat a whole bag of Doritos without feeling full, despite consuming a full day’s worth of calories.

The taste vs satiety hacking of modern fast food is a reasonable hypothesis on the cause of the obesity crisis.

It’s not just MSG though. It’s also disodium inosinate and disodium guanylate which work together with MSG to produce the most profound umami response.

You jest but would you really install Arch on your grandmother’s PC?

Who buys and uses all the stuff produced by those factories and delivered by those cargo ships?

I find it hard to believe that emissions would drop by 80% just by getting rid of all the billionaires. Or did you mean all of Western civilization when you said “those responsible for the other 80%”?

And a nice bottle of Chianti!

That’s one reason. I think there are many more. For one thing, we no longer live in communities. Our sense of belonging, solidarity, and social responsibility is largely gone. We’re now living in a sort of every man for himself type of situation. There are still some groups but they’re political or business based rather than community based.

You’re making an assertion without evidence. What’s there to understand about an unsupported (and likely false) assertion?

I’m a fan of Fly River Turtles (also affectionately known as Pig Nosed Turtles):

But with four legs so it can crawl out onto land and move from one tide pool to another!

It’s easier to organize a small group of people around a shared common interest than it is to organize everyone else around opposing that interest. Everyone else still has their own individual interests but they don’t all align.

Yeah I don’t hate Valve fans at all. I have a Steam account myself with a decent library that I play on my laptop.

I had no clue whatsoever about the hacked 3DS ecosystem until my friend basically dragged me into it by buying the consoles (refurbished actually)! Once I started learning about the scene I really got impressed with what the small homebrew community accomplished. In addition to emulators and some homebrew games, there are also a number of utilities in the scene. You can run an FTP server on the hacked N3DS and just bulk copy over files via wifi rather than having to pull the microSD card and sneakernet it to your PC. There’s also a program called universal updater which is a package manager of sorts that makes it easy to download and install emulators and other apps quite easily.

Of course none of this is as smooth and convenient of an experience as installing Steam games would be on a Steam deck, though I’m sure if you’re into emulators you’ll have to use other tools to get those installed anyway.

My friend and I are currently playing through some classic NES RPGs which we’d previously overlooked. The N3DS has pretty good battery life, lasting about 10-12 hours on a full charge; far more battery life than I have time to spend gaming in a day anyway (due to my job). The standby time is good but not great, knocking off maybe about 10% battery per day while sleeping. Lastly, a big plus for me is that replacement batteries are available through iFixit. I bought 2 of them and the install process is very easy (just a couple of screws and you’re in).

My hope is that iFixit will continue to make replacement batteries available long term. That could potentially allow my N3DS to last decades into the future, barring premature capacitor failure or some unfortunate accident.

I think the N3DS really shines as a dedicated older emulator (NES/SNES/SEGA/GBC/GBA) machine and it may be very hard to beat if you’re like me and prefer those older games. For newer games, especially PC games of the last decades or PS2/GameCube/Wii/Switch emulators, the N3DS is just not an option. I am looking forward to playing the Majora’s Mask remaster (written specifically for the 3DS) however!

The one I have is called the “New Nintendo 3DS XL” and it has a much faster CPU (804MHz Arm 11) compared to the original 3DS (268MHz Arm 11). While the CPU difference doesn’t matter for running DS or 3DS games (apart from a handful of games written specially for the New 3DS) it makes a big difference running the more intensive emulators (such as the PS1).

When I got mine it had the very last version of the 3DS operating system installed (Nintendo still maintains the update servers even though the eshop is shut down). Yet the instructions for the hack were easy enough to follow and I had no trouble getting up and running.

The Steam deck is an attractive option too though. The main reason I got into the 3DS is because my friend bought 2 of them and gave one to me so we could both do the hack and play lots of games and discuss them. I think the main reason to really prefer a 3DS comes down to form factor: if you really like the folding case, the stylus, and the dual screen setup (which really shines for many games in the massive DS/3DS library) then you’re not gonna get an optimal experience with the single-screen Steam Deck. I think in particular the stylus really matters for puzzle games which demand higher tap precision than you can comfortably achieve with a fingertip.

It’s hard for me to imagine anyone buying brand new AAA games these days. Between the huge back catalogues of previous gen consoles as well as the PC and the insane prices for new AAA games which don’t innovate very much anymore, I can’t see much reason spend that kind of money.

I have a hacked New Nintendo 3DS and it can basically run every console emulator up to and including PS1 as well as natively run GBA, DS, and 3DS games. The library for the thing is enormous and with a 128GB microSD card you can store a ton of stuff on it.

Oh and it can also run DOSBox and SCUMMVM games though I haven’t tried them so I can’t vouch for the play experience. I should think the stylus would make a decent mouse replacement but I’m not sure how well it works in practice. Arcade-style DOS games that use the keyboard only (Duke Nukem, Crystal Caves, Commander Keen) should work great though!

Yes. The ubercollectors pay that much. Below them is another, larger tier of collectors who pay hundreds for these old games.

People pay thousands of dollars for shrink-wrapped copies of games I rented for $5 as a child. Alcohol use is down. Drug use is down. Pregnancy is down. All this other nonsense is way up.

Sure they would. Interest is based on economic growth, not lifespan.

If you could live 25000 years you wouldn’t need to earn a billion by working. You could invest a single dollar at 1% interest and it would only take 2083 years to grow to over a billion dollars.

As prices go up it becomes more attractive to build more generating capacity. When capacity goes up prices will come back down.

Sure, we know loot boxes are bad because they exploit the psychology of gambling. But what about Steam sales? They’re exploiting FOMO, hoarding/collecting psychology. We know that Steam users are buying billions of dollars worth of games they never play.