The 2600 used a MOS 6507, which is a cut-down 6502, which had ~3500 logic transistors (not counting the ones necessary because NMOS), running at a max of 3MHz. Add very primitive graphics and 8k RAM.

Can’t be arsed to slog through suitable processors but ARM cores back then could kill that thing dead. 2002 is six years after the Palm Pilot while Moore’s law was still in full effect. The 2600 is from 1977, two decades more ancient.

There should even be more than enough cycles left over to generate the video signal in software.

My condolences for buying an Intel CPU…

Just for the sake of argument, let me turn this around half-ways: Just as guns don’t kill people, people do, so AI does not produce slop, people do. Generative AI has its uses, where it becomes problematic is when people who can’t even judge a medium use it to produce something in that medium. It’s perfectly possible to get good stuff out of Stable Diffusion, but you have to know a thing or five about visual media or it’ll dazzle you. Applies the same for all genAI I’ve ever looked at.

Likewise, humans are perfectly capable of producing horrendous slop without aid of these tools – just look at the romance novel isle or what Hollywood was up to last year. What’s different nowadays is that it has become very easy to generate that slop, there has been an explosion of slop. If I were to imagine a silver lining it would be that people are probably going to get bored of it and non-slop, AI or non-AI, will see an increase in prestige and value. Just as the invention of photography saved painters from doing portraits.

Bonus:

Summarise the fable of the robot and the antipsychotic

“The Fable of the Robot and the Antipsychotic” is a story that explores themes of mental health, technology, and the human condition. In this fable, a robot represents modern technology and its capabilities, while the antipsychotic symbolizes medication and support for mental health issues.

The robot, designed to optimize efficiency and productivity, struggles to understand the complexities of emotions and human experiences. It encounters an individual who is grappling with mental health challenges and is hesitant to seek help. The robot, despite its advanced programming, cannot provide the emotional support the individual needs.

Through the interaction, the fable highlights the importance of empathy, understanding, and the role of medication in managing mental health. The robot eventually learns that while it can assist in many areas, the human experience requires compassion and connection, which technology alone cannot provide.

In the end, the story conveys that while robots and technology can enhance our lives, they should complement, rather than replace, the human touch in addressing emotional and mental well-being.

In their defence it’s very useful trash outclassing, in general practice, what Russia is fielding (Bradleys are sturdy, practical, and their autocannons pack a punch), it’s just the accounting that’s straight out of Hollywood: The sums you’re seeing announced prices old stuff at the replacement value, that is, what new stuff costs, stuff that they would have bought anyway. It’s entirely imaginary dollars.

Your instincts are wrong, it’s pretty much all donations. Ukraine bought some stuff from German suppliers from their own money but the vast majority is refurbished stuff as well as Germany covering Ukrainian orders from German suppliers. 25 million Euro for 5100 anti-tank weapons from Dynamit Nobel, sounds about right for the PzF3.

Companies are certainly profiting from it, sure, but it’s overwhelmingly paid out of the German budget. And the companies then again pay taxes in Germany, hard to assess actual cost for the tax payer, also e.g. how much could those old Leos actually be sold for in the state they were in before refurbishment. Especially the US accounting is rather suspicious, there, as they would have scrapped the old stuff which costs money and shipping it over to Ukraine might actually be cheaper.

It’s mostly about throwing ACID at the problem, sqlite just happens to be battle-tested to a ludicrous degree, it’s light enough to not be unconscionable overhead in simple situations (unless you’re on embedded), and performant enough to also deal with nastier situations so I prefer it over some random K/V store with the same guarantees. It’s also a widely-used and stable data format which might come in handy.

That said, if you want to go lightweight do consider good, ole, POSIX filesystem guarantees, in particular that mv is atomic (as long as you stay on the same filesystem but that’s easy to ensure by mv’ing within a directory). That’s not durable on its own, you’ll need to fsync for that, and consistency and integrity is up to your code.

Easier to do than to get never-exercised edge-case code to work flawlessly. Are you sure you can’t just throw sqlite at the problem? It’s often overkill but, hey, it’s there on the shelf, might as well use it and I’ve seen it out-perform hand-rolled data structures. Non-persistent ones, written by very confident C coders. And remember crashes are unavoidable, if nothing else then someone can trip over the power cord.

Crash-only software. To be resilient you need some kind of ACID anyway which means that you can let go of your shutdown procedure and just send yourself SIGKILL instead.

Protip, in general: Buy workwear. No, not high-viz stuff, look at trousers for plumbers, for carpenters, cooks, catering, etc, you’ll find good quality at good prices instead of good quality at insane prices (fashion) or shoddy quality at insane (but the other direction) prices (fast fashion). They will have a cut that first and foremost focuses on comfort and function (i.e. you can squat in them), only then go for looking somewhat stylish. Which, yes, works. Colour choice will be limited, but black will be among them so stop complaining.

I’m not even Christian what would I care about depictions or inspiration being “problematically Pagan”.

What I can say is that it’s unlikely that much of the parallels (like the Osiris thing) existed before Rome became Christian as over in staunchly monotheist Palestine people wouldn’t have taken inspiration like that, while turning multiple gods into one sounds quite reasonable for a people going from polytheism to monotheism.

For modern Christian, I think, the question is “How much did the Romans change”. That is, how different was early, pre-Roman, Christianity to what’s now considered authoritative, like the Bible, which wasn’t brought down from a mountain by Jesus.

Yeah, artists skew left but you won’t find a more bigoted libertarian than a young polish programmer. Most of them are also pretty spoiled too because of the degressive tax system that favours them so much.

The temporarily embarrassed millionaires don’t tend to be the ones going into gamedev: Our wages suck and being an indie is about as likely to make you rich as playing the lottery. I’d mostly limit that kind of behaviour to FAANG folks as well as people who should have studied business economics instead (or actually did) and probably can’t code for shit anyway, in short: Techbros. They’re about as toxic as your average corporate lawyer.

Assholes existing is a general feature of contemporary society, don’t pin it on people understanding “there are 10 kinds of people” jokes.

About 50% of developers are 25-35. We skew young due to more and more people becoming programmers, that is, for the same reason that cobblers skew old, but not first vote kind of young.

And your source doesn’t even make an attempt to correlate voting behaviour to profession, much less specialised field (programmer vs gamedev), not to mention that not every gamedev is a programmer, all in all not enough data to slander a whole profession. Do better.

The reason gamedevs skews progressive, btw, is because artists do.

But OTOH yes you’re right in Poland’s case it’s not imported culture war BS it’s Catholicism.

Super Hexagon!

Sol Invictus, in particular it’s also where the halo in depictions comes from… which isn’t really “other sun gods”, it’s in particular the Roman sun god. Misremembered the resurrection part, that’s Osiris who isn’t a sun god and the Horus parallels have been shown to be bunk, aside from getting nursed by Mary depictions being inspired by Horus getting nursed by Isis.

People are fuckin hilarious

That we can agree on.

why the hell are you calling it queer theory

I’m calling it queer theory because that’s what it’s called. It’s where terms like “heteronormative” come from. Much of it is about the relationship between social norms, or just what’s common, and non-normative individuals, with a particular focus on sexual and gender minorities. And it, indeed, does not look too kindly on gender essentialism because that would mean erasure of non-binary gender experiences. Also because queer theorists don’t like normativity which essentialism boils down to in practice, in one way or the other.

I am, broadly speaking, a huge fan of it. If I were to critique it… well, it isn’t neuroqueer theory. I like the name though, “queer” should IMHO also apply to neurodivergent people. Can we get a letter? N is free, isn’t it?

“gay agenda”, “gender ideology” are terms you randomly introduced into the conversation.

Second part, how do you say all this and not question the current “sTrAiGhT tHeOrY” existence we live

You mean… heteronormativity? The kind of shit that queer theory analyses? Also there’s plenty of queer straights around. Like, aces exist, trans folks exist. Enbies can also be straight.

It isn’t, and it is. As said: A matter of perspective. What it definitely is part of is the theory of praxis.

Queer theory itself certainly doesn’t vibe with the essentialism inherent in stuff like “kill all men”. But that doesn’t mean that the two don’t get associated in a 12yold’s brain if “kill all men” is what he hears from a blue-haired lesbian. I’m talking in caricatures, of course, just vaguely gesturing at broader political/social interactions.

And, also, granted, in a different socio-economic environment that blue-haired lesbian probably wouldn’t matter, at all (might even have been a political lesbian appropriating queerness). But our 12yold is also seeing his parents getting fired from their jobs, denied housing assistance, is getting made fun of for it in school, is simultaneously worrying about how to, one time, get a girl and found a family and the situation looks dire indeed – not a siltation which would be conducive of taking a level-headed look at the situation and conclude “that women was just angry, it doesn’t mean anything”. Instead, it’s a convenient point to project generalised ire at, a scapegoat silencing that overpowering help- and hopelessness.

So, in short: “Why do they hate us”? Probably, almost certainly, not for any good reason. That doesn’t mean that nothing can be done to make em love you, in fact it wouldn’t be hard at all because they’re love-starved and looking for at least a hope of a better future. Take them along for the ride and you’ll have an ally for life. Antagonise them, don’t step in when others pointlessly antagonise them, and you shot yourself in the knee.

Actually I read that as misandry. Especially considering that when it comes to trans enmity TERFs are very much a driving force and those tend to be almost exclusively cis women, not men.

Thinking that posting “kill all men” is a net benefit to society?

My point being: You’ll have to dare a perspective shift to actually understand the issue. No, it’s not about gay marriage and stuff. People by and large, at the utmost, just don’t give a fuck. Live and let live is popular as ever. Hearing, as a 12yold boy, “Men ruled the world for millennia now it’s our turn, you have no problems, men, boys, by definition can’t have any problems, also mutilating your genitals is perfectly justified look at this one random study which says that if you don’t wash yourself then circumcision reduces AIDS rates”… yeah. 12 years is significantly less than millennia, why in the everloving fuck would you blame the poor kid for it and don’t get me started on the circumcision shit the US is cooked.

As said: Dare that perspective shift. It’s not about queer theory, it’s not about emancipation, it’s about institutionalised cattiness and bitter, over-zealous rhetoric creating a particular appearance. It’s also pretty much limited to the US, there’s bits and pieces floating over the Atlantic but our gender relations and politics over here aren’t fucked-up enough to generate that kind of shit ourselves. Also we don’t mutilate genitals.

Or, differently put: Take all the pain you’ve ever seen within the community created by ace and bi erasure, about TERFy enmity, about transmeds, about whatnot, and funnel it onto a young kid who has no letter, not even the “A” for ally they stole from the aces, because why would you give a fuck about ally status when you’re bitter and want to let off steam. Do that in queer spaces. Do that with your therapist, don’t do it in a public political space – the 12yolds are reading – and even more so don’t try to justify it as “part of the struggle”. And actively work against queer spaces becoming self-pity circlejerks of bitterness. Be uppity, be brash, be loud, be fun, be colourful, don’t be aggressive. Hug a homophobe they hate that, don’t spit fire on them their neuroses love that.

There’s some equivocation going on there: On the one hand we have a theoretical model, due to Adam Smith, that says if you have perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information then you get very very nice results and that’s called the free market. Then you have peddlers of institutionalised market failure saying that any regulation that would make people’s choices more rational, or give them more information, is making the market unfree.

In short: While classical liberals and specifically ordoliberals are saying “there shall and must be regulation, so that the real-world market comes closer to approximating Smith’s free market”, neoliberals say “there shall be no regulation because Adam Smith doesn’t like monopolies but we do so let’s poison the conversation by calling inherently unfree markets free”.