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

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

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.

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

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

last time I signed into my Microsoft 365 account for work I got two separate 2fa prompts and two captchas, it was like being in an episode of the crystal maze. the mere act of signing into something is now tedious and difficult

I run a small personal blog/portfolio website that doesn’t get more than a hundred or so human visits per day, but it gets hammered with bot traffic, not just malicious bots but tons of different search indexers and scrapers, many of which don’t respect robots.txt

after setting up cloudflare I noticed a very significant drop in malicious traffic and in bandwidth use, which also corresponded to less bandwidth and CPU usage for my VPS.

I know cloudflare has recently had a few bad customer service stories but for small and medium sized websites their service is invaluable

my own personal criticism of cloudflare is that, as a VPS user, I get hit by cloudflare challenges more. but now that they’ve moved to hcaptcha it’s not too bad

I work in computational biophysics. The field has been slowly chipping away at the structure and function of every protein for decades (it’s a solvable problem, it’s just going to take a lot of time and energy) and recently a bunch of clueless SF tech bros have bumbled their way into the field and declared that they’ve solved everything.

I love kde, I love the file picker, I love window management, I love dolphin, I love the panels, I love Kate, etc… but every time I have to switch to a new tty to restart kwin, part of my soul dies

when I think of other famous psychologists my mind goes to people like zimbardo or milgram, because of their attention grabbing studies. but they are not great examples because their work has big problems with ethics and replicability. after that, maybe pavlov or skinner? but their work is most famous for its less ethical uses. harlow? or a bunch of his contemporaries who got famous mostly for torturing monkeys? maybe piaget?

I only did psychology to a college level but I think a lot of 20th century psychologists are famous for the wrong reasons. Freud was full of crap but at least he didn’t torture any monkeys

a more genuine take would have included a series of scenarios (e.g. drunk/distracted/tired driving)

I agree. they did tesla dirty. a more fair comparison would’ve been between autopilot and a driver who was fully asleep. or maybe a driver who was dead?

and why didn’t this news article contain a full scientific meta analysis of all self driving cars??? personally, when someone tells me that my car has an obvious fault, I ask them to produce detailed statistics on the failure rates of every comparable car model

the biggest causes of bsods and other crashes on windows up to xp were drivers. after xp, Microsoft required drivers for windows to go through their signing and verification program, which was controversial but it did solve the problem

modern windows rarely crashes outright but in my experience it does break in small ways over time, without the user doing anything

in terms of disabling windows components, it’s true that this can break your system, but I would argue this is still Microsoft’s problem. there are many windows competents that are deeply coupled together when they have no reason to be

in my opinion this is very straightforward. the people working directly on power, water and materials don’t have any control over how those things are used and often don’t/can’t know what they’re being used for. however, at some point, a decision is made - for example, someone at the company that makes the steel alloy decides to sell it to raytheon - and so whoever made that decision is responsible.

and yes, if you work on a weapon safety system, you are working on an essential part of that weapon and so are responsible for its use

i mean, i probably wouldn’t resent you for mopping the floors at BAE. but if you actually design or build the missiles, yes, that is unethical

a lot of people are using the example of ukraine to say ‘sometimes the missiles are for the greater good’, and while i would agree with that specific example, you don’t have control over where your missiles go. russian tank, yemeni refugee, etc

i also think saying ‘the parts will be made anyway’ is kind of a dodge, the question isn’t whether the parts will be made, it’s whether you will make them