FLOSS virtualization hacker, occasional brewer

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • So back in the days of the Atari ST we had compact disks (sic).

    Most games shipped on a single floppy disk (so 720k or 1.4Mb) and rarely used compression given the base system only has 512k of RAM. The crackers would strip the protection, repack the data and patch the loading routines to handle that. Depending on the games they could fit 3 or 4 games on a single disk.

    Nowadays the dynamics are different - games on consoles do use compression but they have to favour speed because they are streaming assets just in time. The PS5 even had dedicated decompression hardware to keep up with the data rate on it’s fast SSD.







  • When we first let the kids watch YouTube it was on the main TV with it’s own account. We have consistently monitored it and actively prune recommendations while slowly introducing them to the concept of “the algorithm”. From secondary school they pretty much need YouTube on their own PC’s for homework reasons and it’s harder to totally lock down - we use the family link controls to limit it a little but if they tried to get around them they could. The hope is we’ve at least prepared them a little before they have totally unfettered access to the internet.

    We did try YouTube kids a little but it was such a garbage experience we just blocked the app everywhere.