Ruben Schade 🔰 🇦🇺 @[email protected]

You can tell I'm a highly experienced systems admin because if I ever see anyone asking a technical question about running Linux on their computer, I immediately close my browser, walk away and pretend I didn't.

Here’s why DOS is so important to retro gaming.

If you look at the library of all Nintendo consoles in the 20th century:

• NES: 1,616 games
• SNES: 1,281 games
• Nintendo 64: 388 games
• Game Boy: 851 games
• Game Boy Color: 720 games
• Virtual Boy: 24 games

TOTAL: 4,880 games.

Now that’s a lot of games. But remember, that’s 6 unique platforms. With the exception of the Game Boy Color being backwards compatible with the Game Boy, these games can’t be played across devices.

Meanwhile, what is DOS library? 8,382 games. And this is just what we know about, because so many shareware titles have been lost to time.

That is to say, DOS alone is nearly twice the size of all Nintendo consoles’ libraries combined.

And these DOS games are not insignificant. Many of them weren’t released on consoles. Titles such as Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall, Ultima VII: The Black Gate, and Rise of the Triad.

A lot of important publishers conquered DOS before they made their way to consoles: id, Epic, Ubisoft—among others.

DOS seems pretty damn important. Yet retro gaming channels on YouTube rarely talk about DOS games. And trust me, I’ve looked.

It’s important to talk about this because video games are the face of culture now. In 50 years, that’s how the next generations are going to remember us by.

Take Jimmy Connors Pro Tennis Tour on DOS. It’s an above average game, as good as anything on Genesis or SNES. Published by Ubisoft. At the time of release, it was beloved.

No one talks about it anymore.

I finally managed to see one of the new Piccadilly line trains at Hammersmith station today. They were being tested on the closed Piccadilly line. I really love them, and I managed to get a few cool shots. I will share some photos shortly.

It'll be funny if, having lost this right from my British citizenship, I get it back through Australian citizenship.

https://www.timeout.com/australia/news/australians-could-soon-live-and-work-visa-free-across-europe-under-a-new-two-way-deal-011426

The ethical case against using LLMs for work is straightforward and unambiguous

The productivity case against using LLMs for work is complex and requires an understanding of volatility, variability, biases, security issues, lock-in, and more

But it turns out that if you don’t have any time for ethics, you also don’t have any time for understanding complex systems, so neither case matters to them

Request for help from any Debian package maintainers that have python experience

It seems that if we wanted to package horusdemodlib for debian we are roadblocked on pypi package asn1tools not being in debian. What's the usual path way forward for this?

I don't expect asn1tools to add native Debian support. I'm assuming vendoring is frowned upon.

the majority of issues in programming or coding are not hard or require anyone to be particularly brilliant, they are usually business logic and program logic misalignments and being just smart enough to identify when someone is proposing an NP-hard or uncomputable problem