Yes. Most original NES, SNES, and Gameboy cartridges have probably lost their saved data by now, but the batteries can be replaced relatively easily. If I remember right, they’re a standard type, like the ones used for watches or hearing aids.

I know that some my old NES games retained their data at least into the 2000s. Been a while since I pulled them out and checked.

Edit: I realize this article is talking about the game data, not save data. I don’t know what type of memory older games used for the ROM or if it needs periodic power. I think the batteries were only for the writeable save data.

The concept is real. I mean, anyone who thought “vibe coding” would be a viable career path for long enough to actually have a career was just not paying attention to reality.

Right now it legitimately takes some expertise to get good results from AI coding. (Most people doing it now get, at best, convincingly passable results.) But the job of a “vibe coder” is much simpler than the job of a conventional programmer, and it will become increasingly simple to automate out the human’s role. It’s not like progress is going to suddenly stop. The fruit is hanging so low that it might as well be on the ground.

They actually want to increase what can be done in user mode, to reduce reliance on kernel mode code.

That’s basically what Apple did with macOS 11. They deprecated kernel extensions and replaced them with “system extensions”, and created new APIs so security tools, VPNs and such could function without kernel-level privileges.

Yeah, I don’t need 1440p in handheld mode. It supports 4K in docked mode and that’s good enough for me.

I’m still skeptical of the overall performance but we’ll see. The Switch aged poorly and I’m afraid the Switch 2 will be similar. I don’t want to see first-party games throttling to 20fps in 5 years.

Absolutely wild that this is not included with the console. Especially after Sony included Astro’s Playroom on every PS5.

mpv still works.

I love this font. I set my web browser to use it and prevent sites from choosing their own fonts. Some poorly-designed sites have layout issues without their preferred fonts but I don’t care. I do too much technical work to tolerate glyph ambiguity. I use the mono version in my terminal as well.

If anyone knows a similar font with serifs, I’d love to hear. I tried this on my e-reader but wound up reverting to serifs. It just didn’t feel right.

Let me put it this way: I audit open source software more than I audit closed source software.

There are two potential show-stoppers.

1. Field-specific apps that only run on windows. If you really need Adobe Creative Cloud or SolidWorks or something like that you might be out of luck. This is mostly true for apps that require GPU acceleration, which is difficult to rig up in a VM. You wouldn’t want to do that if it was a big part of your workload.

2. Mandatory spyware and rootkit DRM to prevent cheating with remote tests. Hopefully if they do such a thing they provide loaner hardware too. I’ve seen a lot of bullshit in my time but my experience is outdated, so I don’t know what’s common nowadays.

On the one hand, I’m not even running 4K yet, and it is vanishingly unlikely that I will own a >4K display within the lifetime of my PS5, so this makes no difference to me.

On the other hand, I would like to see blatant false advertising punished every time it happens. “Nobody really cares” isn’t much of an excuse when they clearly thought people cared enough to put it prominently on the box. Being able to play high-end video 10 years down the line is a legitimate selling point for a gaming console that doubles as media box.

The way I like to think of it is: Hard links are the same file, but with two valid paths. This is two different files that share the same data only as long as they are the same.

But…hasn’t ZFS always had copy-on-write functionality? How is this new feature different?

Edit: I think I found my answer here: https://www.ithands-on.com/2020/09/linux-101-zfs-filesystem-cow-system.html and I think I have fundamentally misunderstood what COW meant for years. Huh.

At best it works more or less the same as an ordinary package. It only gets worse from there.

Several times I’ve been stuck on a broken version of Discord because on the server side they force an update to the new client, and the new client has not been packaged as a Snap yet.

Getting native hosts to work in Firefox is possible, but a giant pain in the butt.

Basically anything that needs filesystem access is unreasonably troublesome. I gave up on getting Snaps to work with my external drives.

There is simply no scenario where I think “wow, I sure am glad this was packaged as a Snap!” There have been many scenarios where I thought “god dammit why is this a Snap?!”