Sweet! You’ve probably already found this, but if you’re interested in these devices the Retro Game Corps channel on YouTube is an invaluable resource. That guy does a beyond excellent job reviewing options and giving quality advice!

Yeah, for sure. The analog stocks work flawlessly & I love them. I use them for games where they’re native (i.e. ZDoom & mods), where they emulate a mouse (i.e. Minetest), or where they emulate a d-pad (i.e. psx games). All cases work great! For d-pad games I find myself switching back and forth between d-pad and sticks depending on the application (i.e. Tetris needs precision & is better with d-pad, NBA Jam needs adaptivity & is better with sticks).

I have an Anbernic RG353M & it sounds like it fits your needs. Emulates up to PSP. Moddable: I run ArkOS which is Debian-based - so I can SSH in, apt install programs, run custom bash scripts I wrote, etc. I also ported a desktop game to run on it. So moddability points are high! Also dual-boots into Android, so Android games are available if that’s your thing. It comes with the Android dual-boot right out of the box!

Downsides:

• It can be a little small in my hands for long play sessions. I have a custom 3D printed handle extension which works great and solves this problem.
• There’s a hardware problem involving the 3.5mm audio jack output where chip noise gets in the audio. Annoying, but ignorable. Switching to Bluetooth headphones is a fine workaround too.
• In long play sessions when the device gets hot horizontal bar artifacts show up on the screen. Like the audio thing, they are annoying but ignorable. When they show up I normally interpret it as a sign I’ve been playing too long and take a break while the device cools down.

Overall, it’s got those hardware quirks above but I still like it and I don’t regret it for the price (something like ~$100 a couple of years ago I think). Battery life is very good, even for graphics intensive games. It can go many hours without needing a charge, and generally it has better stamina than I do!

Nice try FBI

I’ll go a little against the grain here. I think that LLM chatbots will definitely find application helping lonely people, and some people will develop a real connection to the bot. A relationship with a bot might be similar to one with a human, but it will never be identical. So it won’t replace human connections, but that doesn’t mean it wont have significant utility and be meaningful to people.

A coworker recently sent me a Word document with edits and comments they had added. When I downloaded & opened it (in Word on Windows!) it told me that it had the edits/comments but it wouldn’t let me see them unless I log in to my Microsoft account and then view it online in the web version of Word. What the actual fuck?

Fuck that. I responded to my coworker and asked them to just send me the edits via email in plain text. I’m not winning popularity contests at work, but what the fuck Microsoft?

If you’re nervous about the switch consider dual-booting. Then you’re not fully committed to the switch & you can have your old Windows system back whenever you want it.

Main steps are:

• Run a defrag on your Windows machine to physically consolidate all your Windows data to one area.
• Break that partition into two (Linux will go one the new empty side)
• Install Linux from a USB as normal, but don’t choose to wipe your drive completely. Choose a manual option instead where you specifically indicate your intended Linux partition from above.
• Optional: Once installation is complete you can set up another partition to hold files which can be available to both OSs.
  • Boot into Linux & define the remaining unused space in the Linux partition as a new NTFS partition & give it a name which makes it obvious what it is (i.e. “sharedspace”)
  • Then boot into Windows and move the existing data you’d like to share between OSs here (work documents, movies, music, etc.)

Some useful links:

• Video on setting up a dual boot
• Howtogeek used to have a great walkthrough for doing this but I’m getting a 404 error when I try to follow the link now :(
• Optional: Setting up Linux symlinks to point to the shared space partition

What’s a “gang input”?

I saw numbers on this recently. It was something like 80-90% of all antibiotics are given to livestock. So this is a huge contributor.

Lol!!! Yes!!!

Trying to prevent bacteria from developing antimicrobial resistance. At these rates in 30 years antimicrobial resistant bacteria are projected to kill more people than cancer.

When you grow up everything you write will need to be in cursive.

You’re being a wet blanket.

The Empire Strikes Back

Could switching your user agent help? Try setting yourself to Windows+Chrome.

What’s Google?

I’m very skeptical that this “model poisoning” approach will work in practice. To pull it off would require a very high level of coordination among disparate people generating the training data (the images/text). I just can’t imagine it happening. Add to that: big tech has A LOT of resources to play this cat & mouse game.

I hope I’m wrong, but I predict big tech wins here.

Google has way too much power & influence. BREAK THEM UP!!! This status quo is ridiculous.

This drives me nuts too. Who the hell decided to do this? I avoid the stations with ads.

I hear what you’re saying and it makes sense. But I do not believe that my particular case was one of priming/manipulation/freq bias. The topic of conversation was too uncharacteristic, too random, and there were too many similar ads within moments. It was either a colossal coincidence or a breach in privacy.

I suppose it doesn’t matter. My phone is much more locked down now.