MudMan

I mean… the normal speed for seeing behind your car is the speed of light, so that may come a bit short of expectations.

In any case, I agree that by itself it’s not a big deal. After the broken windshield wiper, the pieces that fall off and the sticky accelerator one may… you know, infer a pattern. Which, really, is the news here.

Isn’t this pretty much the same system Google was intending to implement on Chrome before backtracking? That’s my understanding anyway.

Ultimately the issue is that we’ve gone to extremes. The response to the data market that runs the Internet is now that many people are against ANY amount of information being dislodged from users to anybody else. That is obviously way more strict than pre-internet standards, when people’s location data was widely available and TV advertising ran a whole lot of live reporting and segmentation data, but it has become the goal.

Mozilla (and Apple, and for a bit Google), are suggesting to go back to a world where someone quietly aggregates some info without tracking individuals in excruciating detail and now advertisers don’t want to lose the granularity and resell ability of the spy-level data gathering… and users don’t want to give up even aggregated info.

We’ve scorched the earth so badly there is no path forward, so we stay where we are. I have no moral stance on this, but it seems to be what’s happening.

Hah. Your bar for “super rich” and mine may be in different places.

And you’re preaching to the choir, I’d much rather sail myself. But nerding out about the specifics aside, it’s very weird to leave it out of the renewable-powered sea travel conversation the way these guys are doing.

Admittedly it’s WAY easier to operate a motor boat than a sail boat, so depending on how you like to recreationally bleed your unlimited money I can see reasons for that choice.

But I fully agree that we’ve had renewable energy-based ships with unlimited range for millenia. The claim that “The aim was to demonstrate that zero-emission sea travel [is possible today]” broke my brain a little.

Right, but now you’re giving me arguments for using original hardware, not for modifying it.

See, that’s the part that loses me. I use original hardware all the time, I have tons of original hardware and software for a whole bunch of platforms, including ones that are trivial to run in cycle-accurate emulators and FPGA reproductions. All good there. I even have some flashcarts and softmods to allow cross-region usage or to consolidate libraries. No problem with that.

But that is based on using the original hardware, unmodified. Once you start gutting it for mods then you’re working against your argument that complexities and sublteties of original hardware are important. I mean, yeah, I do care to at least have a way to go back to sanity check the sublte ways in which original hardware parses the code in a rom. But for that same reason I want to see how the default composite or RF signal subtly interacts with that output and with a period-accurate CRT display. I want to hear the CD spinning when it’s supposed to spin and the original loading times.

To be clear, I think this is just a case mod, but I’m talking about the modding scene more generally. I don’t see why you would think “total accuracy” is important in the interaction between the CPU, VDUs and RAM but not on the I/O. Wouldn’t the CD drive and the video signal be part of “total accuracy”? Wouldn’t the form factor of the shell and the controllers be a part of that accurate experience as well? If you push me I’d even say I consider a MiSTer FPGA solution with a correct analogue out signal and an original controller feeding into a CRT is far more accurate to the original NES than the original Analogue NT that was made from gutted NES parts, or even than an original console pushed through an HDMI scaler or mod.

I guess there is no accounting for taste, but I do struggle to follow the logic where running the original CPU and video chips on completely different I/O is justified by trying to maximize for accuracy.

Okay, but you can do that with a softmod or a flash cart on the Saturn, too. You don’t need to rip out its guts to transplant them to a different case. Even if you had a Saturn with a faulty drive you can add a ODE solution without having to sacrifice the original form factor.

Plus, yeah, Saturn emulation is harder and less accurate than other systems, but we’re pretty much there these days for most of the stuff you want to play. You can do all sorts of cool cases and consolized devices to play old games these days, why break apart an original Saturn for that?

Let me agree with you explicitly on loving the return to a sane power configuration here. I was watching Hardware Unboxed’s retest of this after the patches and it takes almost fifteen minutes of them reiterating that the 9700X and the 14700K are tied for performance and price before they even mention the bombshell that the 9700X is doing that with about half the wattage.

The fact that we keep pushing reviews and benchmarks focused strictly on pedal-to-the-metal overclocked performance and nothing else is such a disgrace. I made the mistake to buy into a 13700K and I have it under lower than out of box power limits manually both to prevent longevity issues and because this damn computer is more effective as a hair dryer than anything else.

We don’t mention it much because Intel was in the process of catching on actual fire at the same time, but the way this generation has been marketed, presented to reviewers, supported and eventually reviewed has been a massive trainwreck, considering the performance of the actual product.

Okay, people will likely bash me for this hot take, and if this is for you feel free to enjoy it, but…

…why do this instead of using a FPGA or emulation-based solution?

If you don’t want to run original media or don’t want to output original video out signals, why bother to use original hardware at all? I can see it as a way to upcycle heavily damaged Saturn units, but there aren’t that many of these in the wild in the first place, why dismantle an existing piece to make what is effectively a completely different product? I don’t see the point.

Well, camel case does help readability on file names. But I guess that’s the point of case insensitive names, it doesn’t matter. However you want to call them will work.

I mean, it’s less of an issue on Linux for both design and user profile reasons, but imagine a world where somebody can send all the normie Windows users a file called Chromesetup.exe to sit alongside ChromeSetup.exe. Your grandma would never stop calling you to ask why her computer stopped working, ever.

Yeah, right? Are we pretending that having case sensitive file names isn’t a bad call, or…? There are literally no upsides to it. Is that the joke?

Hah, I handed one to a kid just this week, too, and they loved their time on it. I’m just assuming a lot of people aren’t actively playing theirs.

I’ll add the homebrew community to what I said above regarding the emulation community, too.

I would have loved a stereo Switch, for sure.

And I hear you on the impact on 2D games. Man, the 3D remasters of Sega classics on the 3DS are amazing and it sucks that they will remain trapped in there indefinitely.

And yeah, emulation. You can get stereo output out of it right now, but it’s just such a hassle even if you have the hardware. You can do it, but the 3DS was so seamless that it just isn’t the same thing. Pulling that thing out of mothballs if you haven’t played it in a while is immediately magical. It still looks sci-fi because it just works. Having some convoluted emulation-to-VR setup or whatever is fundamentally different.

Well, the fact that not everybody has good stereoscopic sight should mean that, on accessibility alone. But I’ve also never bought into that particular criticism.

I mean, I also don’t have a useful game mechanic for super detailed graphics and you don’t see me complaining about games looking good. I thought playing through little dioramas looked great and was super fun, and that was all I needed. When the DS had its phase of shoehorning touch controls on everything I found that extremely obnoxious. Not every gimmick needs to be at the core of every game.

The original implementation without eye tracking gave it an (undeserved) reputation for that, but I don’t think the current version of it is givin people headaches at all. Having played a 3DS with 3D on full just this week, I also don’t find the resolution was the dealbreaker. Obviously the Switch is way ahead of its performance, but coming from the DS they delivered a big bump in 3D performance along with the stereoscopic display.

What I think they had is terrible timing. The 3DS had a rocky launch and then had to make that back during the peak of “stereo 3D sucks” cyclical backlash coming from rushed movie conversions sold at a premium and TVs doing it poorly in the living room. Weirdly a lot of that was coming from the same people that keep hoping that VR would be the next big thing. At the same time. The cognitive dissonance was harsh there for a bit.

Still, it was a thing, and everybody lumpled the 3DS along with it. “Turn the slider down and never think about it again” was a meme, which sucks, because plenty of 3DS games look great in stereo.

I mean, there are seventy million of them out there, so collectors will be fine for a while, but… man, we really missed a step not embracing the crazy cool 3D display tech in these. I really loved it.

Also, point people at this thread next time Nintendo comes after the emulation scene, because… yeah, this is why.

It is a replacement for a specific portion of a very complicated ecosystem-wide integration involving a ton of interoperability sandwiched between the natural language bits. Why this is a new product and not an Assistant overhaul is anybody’s guess. Some blend of complicated technical issues and corporate politics, I bet.

So an interesting thing about this is that the reasons Gemini sucks are… kind of entirely unrelated to LLM stuff. It’s just a terrible assistant.

And I get the overlap there, it’s probably hard to keep a LLM reined in enough to let it have access to a bunch of the stuff that Assistant did, maybe. But still, why Gemini is unable to take notes seems entirely unrelated to any AI crap, that’s probably the top thing a chatbot should be great at. In fact, in things like those, related to just integrating a set of actions in an app, the LLM should just be the text parser. Assistant was already doing enough machine learning stuff to handle text commands, nothing there is fundamentally different.

So yeah, I’m confused by how much Gemini sucks at things that have nothing to do with its chatbotty stuff, and if Google is going to start phasing out Assistant I sure hope they fix those parts at least. I use Assistant for note taking almost exclusively (because frankly, who cares about interacting with your phone using voice for anything else, barring perhaps a quick search). Gemini has one job and zero reasons why it can’t do it. And it still really can’t do it.

I genuinely think Linux misses a beat by not having a widely available distro that is a) very closely tied to specific hardware and b) mostly focused on web browsing and media watching. It’s kinda nuts and a knock on Linux devs that Google is running away with that segment through both Android and ChromeOS. My parents aren’t on Windows anymore but for convenience purposes the device that does that for them is a Samsung tablet.

Here’s how fried my brain is from retro collecting, I was about to genuinely say “nah, don’t bother, these are cheap, just buy a second set of them and keep them in proper storage”.

As if that was a reasonable thing. Don’t get into retro hardware kids. Not even once.