Economies require population growth. From the perspective of not having to compete with others for land, resources, etc., a more manageable population size absolutely is preferable.

Hell, remember when Covid lockdowns had most people at home? Traffic was light and gas was cheap. It's the only part of that situation that I actually kind of miss.

Ah, the Game Gear. When through batteries like Charlie Sheen on a coke binge and while it technically did have a color display, it was like the worst cheapest passive matrix garbage panel imaginable. If that wasn't bad enough, the library of games kind of sucked, too.

If that "we have X at home" meme was a thing back then, Game Gear would've had one. I'm sure by now though, there's at least a few of us olds who fondly remember playing a bad port of Sonic the Hedgehog instead of finishing their homework. I wasn't one of those spoiled kids though; it took a lot of begging just to get my folks to finally buy me a NES. Even then, my games library was more-or-less the local VHS rental joint.

An iPad or Android tablet with a screen you can actually see and boatloads of free-to-play games, is the real innovation since then.

Except it's not. It's a modern PCB for the original vintage chips, which means you could go through the entire hassle of transferring everything and having it still not work in the end if the problem was actually a faulty chip.

Don't get me wrong, there's certainly some failure modes that genuinely are attributable to a failure of the PCB itself. But realistically, that mostly comes down to hardware that was stored in less-than-ideal conditions. If you've kept your PlayStation 1 in a nice climate controlled closet and it no longer works when you feel like scratching that nostalgia itch, the failure is most likely a bad component, not the PCB.

I was about to comment that people are getting way too excited about this, but the Kickstarter campaign really hasn't raised all that much. This seems more like a "because they could" thing, rather than something there's a huge demand for. Personally, I'm fine with emulation; I already have enough tech crap and not enough room for all of it.

This is basically the tech equivalent of a Bernie supporter voting for Trump. You may be protesting that you didn't get what you wanted, but you'll end up with an end result that's objectively worse than just tolerating the enshittification of the side you are already on. If you hate Google taking away your custom ROMs, you're going to really hate Apple's walled garden and everything it entails.

Plus, you better absolutely love Liquid "ass" (see Apple's YouTube thumbnail flub if you didn't get the reference), because this fall they're cramming that UI change down everyone's throats whether they want it or not. That's probably gonna drive me back to Android, because as much as I prefer avoiding Google, I'm not willing to suffer through a miserably bad UI out of principle.

You seemed to have missed that Counter-Strike has been a thing for a little over 24 years.

In their heyday, consumer 3D TVs actually became pretty decent in the picture quality department. There even were models that used the same type of passive polarization technology glasses as the cinemas. What killed 3D TV was the lack of content, so I'm not getting excited for any new 3D display technology while the chicken-and-egg problem still exists.

This kind of works around that by the fact that it's for video conferencing, not watching Avatar III: Space Casino Electric Boogaloo.

You know, sometimes there doesn't actually have to be a practical purpose to a business spending a whole bunch of money chasing the latest tech. Like, look at when Hertz decided their fleet needed a whole bunch of EVs? Terrible idea, but they went ahead and did it anyway, because they wanted to incorporate the latest shiny into their business, practicality be damned. Then of course, when it finally dawned on them that they'd made a huge mistake, they had to dump them at a loss. This actually seems kind of cheap compared to that.

Most companies with enough sense won't be buying any of these 3D videoconferencing gadgets, because a webcam and Teams is already adequate. But their target market for this is companies with more dollars than sense, and that's still most definitely a thing.

That actually is mentioned already in the summary.

For a brief period before the transaction fees went kind of nuts, there actually were people trying to use this shit as actual currency. In the early days, you could mine it yourself, or mine alt-coins and exchange them for Bitcoin (mostly because there was still speculation in those days that some alt-coin might steal Bitcoin's thunder), or just buy Bitcoin directly from some sketchy exchange. Then, for all your trouble, you could figure out what Bitcoin was worth at that exact moment in time and trade it with someone else in exchange for goods or services.

Very few people outside of contraband dealers, ransomware criminals, and shady folks trying to circumvent sanctions actually bother to use Bitcoin as a currency these days. It's largely just a greater fool investment vehicle now.

Heck, I'm still slightly miffed that I spent half a BTC back in mid 2014, to buy an Intel NUC DN2820FYKH through TigerDirect. (True story, I actually even still have it) Today, that'd be worth about enough to buy a Model Y and the obligatory "This is just my ride - not a political statement" bumper sticker.

But if we're talking $3 million or... a teenager? Yeah, the buyer's remorse would be hitting pretty hard.

This must be very location dependent, because to me that sounds like you're describing the workers at the Apple Store. 'Round these parts, the Starbucks tends to be staffed by college kids who aren't god-fearing enough to land a job at Chick-Fil-A.

Haven't you seen the color of cars lately? That's the in thing now. Everything needs to look all dystopian so the beings watching our interdimensional reality show don't forget that this is the mirror universe timeline.

Funny, I was just thinking today about things that would make me want to go to Starbucks more frequently. Cheaper drink prices? Maybe a better selection of snacks? Nah, what they've really been missing all this time is useless AI tech for their employees to play with while they're making my beverage.

But why stop there? Let's ride this crazy train to its logical wreck and have Starbucks do a collab with Suno. Now when your drink is done, you'll hear an AI-generated song play through the store's speakers, about how your venti double mocha soy latte with no whip is ready.

Musk on X kind of reminds me of ye olde days when you'd have these overbearing BBS SysOps who were absolutely in love with the sound of their own speech. I'm fairly certain that falls under some sort of god complex.

Granted, you can technically still block Musk on X, but you really can't escape his influence over the platform.

My theory has always been that all microblogging services inherently devolve into cesspits. The post character limit and abysmal handling of threaded replies makes it so that every discussion inevitably turns into people yelling insults at each other. Seriously. You're not fitting that five paragraph essay about why vaccines are actually a good thing into a tweet, so you may as well tell the anti-vaxxer that their mom is a hoe instead.

My continuance of this line of thought is that perhaps some people are just over it. They left X and don't need a replacement for the pointless online drama.

We've actually kind of circled back around to where Slashdot's Apple story icon almost looks as if it fits the "new" design paradigm. Did I miss the story where we complained about IOS 26's UI changes, or are we leaving that one for Reddit?

Instead of making Siri not a steaming pile of hot garbage, we got a distracting, low-contrast UI redesign that no one over 40 asked for.