I read what sounded like an intelligent follow-up on this subject. But I’m not smart enough to verify for myself, so I still refrain from using ventoy - even though I’d love to start using it again.

It was basically “wacky code from all over the place, poor coding practices, can’t find anything bad, but methods used are sus af”

Says one dude I read on the internet :/

I will try it! Never heard of it. I also hate the markdown nonsense.

It’s super easy on the steam deck. You don’t need to know Linux. You boot into desktop mode, open Firefox, install emudeck by clicking on a link. Then you configure in there a bit and download roms - all pretty straightforward and easy. A noob can do it in a couple of hours.

Now that said - the steam deck is hit or miss emulating switch games. Most games work awesome. But not every game. It’s not clear to me if the hardware is a little too slow for emulation overhead, or if it’s more an issue between the emulator and the game. My take is it’s a bit of both.

Someone else will have to comment on modding the switch as I haven’t done that, but I bet once modded, it plays every game 100% fine.

Assuming my prior paragraph is true: if the ONLY thing you want to do is switch games - then I’d skip the steam deck. If you want to do OTHER things as well (snes, nes, all other older consoles, actual pc games that play on steam deck) then ya, steam deck all the way. Make sense?

Their insistence on sueing the world of emulation ensures I’ll never buy another Nintendo console ever again. (And I’ve bought all of them so far). Their actions cause the opposite effect of what they want - they are creating pirates.

And the sunk costs aren’t even a thing tbh. You can just go pirate your books with zero moral dilemmas since you actually paid for it and they took it away.

My wife is not good with computers. I moved her over to Linux with vanilla gnome. It took one 1/2 hr session and she was off and running. The next day I got a bunch of questions - another half hour. About a week later she said “this is SO much better than windows - I love it!”

Linux is easy to use. Installing and maintaining-no. But using - yes.

I agree. Newegg used to be great but not anymore. Amazon often has what you’re looking for and at the best price. Not everyone has a micro center or equivalent nearby.

I agree, post an alternative instead of just bitchin!

No, my pc doesn’t have an internal optical drive…. But doesn’t everyone have a usb portable drive?

Will never happen. Those platforms literally push addiction. It’s why the fediverse won’t ever compete imo - there’s no dopamine hit here of likes, # of friends, send a snap right now (or whatever they are called), streaks, etc.

I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.

Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.

It’s like people forgot how to use computers.

Oh right! Forgot about that one! FOUR major screw ups.

This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.

I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.

deleted by creator

Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).

Now I know! :)

Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…

Until it shows up for everyone. That’s not paranoia, Microsoft has a bit of a trend in this department.

I’m old

I remember dlp tvs and 40 inch tubes that weighed 200lbs.

I bought one of the first 1080p large screen LCDs that wasn’t $10k. A Sony XBR 46” for like $3000. At one point, I thought “man I should replace that TV, I can get a bigger screen, a thinner bezel, and better blacks”

And then I remember that this 20 year old TV has no internet connection, no ads, no bs, a million connections of any type (want to hook up that retro console - boom this tv can do it) AND it still looks good after all these years. It’s arguably a great tv, better than a lot of the crap being sold today. Funny and unexpected.

I think I’ll keep that TV forever.

Somebody much smarter than me needs to hack this system. I’d pay to support it.

It’s beyond BS that functionality gets deleted from a product I purchased. I knew the risk of investing into an ecosystem that “required” an app to work. Shame on me, I get what I deserve I guess. Still doesn’t make it right.