It wouldn’t be my first choice, but it’ll probably do the job. Depends on what you want to do with it. There’s fewer people choosing this path, which means that when things go wrong, you’ll have fewer sources of information to help.

Some old Dell office PC with a good amount of RAM and an SSD would be just as well.

If it’s enough negative thoughts pile up, they’ll eventually breach a threshold where people avoid the company. I was looking forward to Metroid Prime 4, but I’m thinking of skipping it now.

There’s a model that id used for open sourcing their engines. The source code is open, but the assets (textures, models, sounds, etc.) are still copyrighted and you still have to buy the game to get them legally. This means the company still sells copies on Steam or wherever, and games that replace all the assets can still sell them without any licensing costs, too.

I’m a little surprised this model never caught on. Even id only ever published the engine to the previous game–Quake 3 was open sourced a little after Doom 3 was released–and the practice seems to have stopped when John Carmack left.

Possibly because nobody has tested it in court, or some other subtle legal issue?

If it’s compsci, then it doesn’t need to be bare metal. It should be a language that’s good at demonstrating abstractions. Java wouldn’t be my choice, here. Elixir would be a good one.

You might want bare metal as a prereq to an operating system course.

If it’s software engineering, OTOH, then yes, a bare metal language has a bigger place.

GNU HURD remains ignored.

Libertarian Socialism has little to do with US libertarians. The term was openly stolen for the Right. The intellectual history is completely separate.

Murray Rothbard: "One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over… "

While it’s true that lots of libertarians prefer Linux, the first ancap I met in an online forum was a Romanian-born Christian living in the US, was so fundamentalist that he was actively looking for a church where men and women sat on different sides of the pews, loved Microsoft, and hated Linux. He also had a habit of changing the definition of words in the middle of debates. People found him completely infuriating.

Someday, Windows might be as good at gaming as Linux.

It works for some games more than others. I never liked playing shooters with console controllers. Conversely, games like Vampire Survivors are prefect for that type of controller.

It’s a series where a dragon kidnaps a princess, and a plumber from New York must save her. To do so, he must gather mushrooms by hitting bricks while jumping with his fist, jump on turtles to make them hide in their shell, and dodge fire breathing plants.

In the most recent 2d incarnation, the fire breathing plants will sing at you.

The people who made this were on a lot of drugs.

They have x86_64 models.

Yes, everyone forgets them. Mostly for good reasons.

Arm is better because there are more than three companies who can design and manufacture one.

Edit: And only one of the three x86 manufacturers are worth a damn, and it ain’t Intel.

Edit2: On further checking, VIA sold its CPU design division (Centaur) to Intel in 2021. VIA now makes things like SBCs, some with Intel, some ARM. So there’s only two x86 manufacturers around anymore.

Yeah, that’s kinda what my GP post was getting at. But it’s all managed by corporations, not individuals.

Setting up a web of trust could cut out almost all spam. Of course, getting most people to manage their trust in a network is difficult, to say the least. The only other solution has been walled gardens like Facebook or Discord, and I don’t have to tell anyone around here about the problems with those.

Not really, I just have trust issues with my ISP, and I’m willing to spend three bucks a month to work around them.

I’m hoping my makerspace will be able to do something like that in the future. We’d need funding for a much bigger internet connection, at least three full time systems people paid market wages and benefits (three because they deserve to go on vacation while we maintain a reasonable level of reliability), and also space for a couple of server racks. Equipment itself is pretty cheap–tons of used servers on eBay are out there–but monthly costs are not.

It’s a lot, but I think we could pull it off a few years from now if we can find the right funding sources. Hopefully can be self-funding in the long run with reasonable monthly fees.

IIRC, it’s nearly impossible to self-host email anymore, unless you have a long established domain already. Gmail will tend to mark you as spam if you’re sending from a new domain. Since they dominate email, you’re stuck with their rules. The only way to get on the good boy list is to host on Google Workspace or another established service like Protonmail.

That’s on top of the fact that correctly configuring an email server has always been a PITA. More so if you want to avoid being a spam gateway.

We need something better than email.

I agree, and I think there’s some reliability arguments for certain services, too.

I’ve been using self-hosted Bitwarden. That’s something I really want to be reliable anywhere I happen to be. I don’t want to rely on my home Internet connection always being up and dyn DNS always matching. An AWS instance or something like that which can handle Bitwarden would be around $20/month (it’s kinda heavy on RAM). Bitwarden’s own hosting is only $3.33/month for a family plan.

Yes, Bitwarden can work with its local cache only, but I don’t like not being able to sync everything. It’s potentially too important to leave to a residential-level Internet connection.

It’s in more stuff than you think. High density polystyrene is what a good chunk of disposable plastic spoons/forks/knives is made of.