What's the latest with Intel's Management Engine / Minix that runs on every Intel chipset? Is that still a thing? Did they harden it? Or can you still get access?
That... Shouldn’t be terribly difficult? Though I don’t believe UEFI has sound drivers (you’ll have problems writing one yourself because even frickin’ sound-codec chips have NDA-only datasheets these days), and the stupidest thing is that the “graphics output protocol” doesn’t indicate vsync so you can’t do tear-free blitting, which is literally worse than VGA.
About 10 years ago, it became "common knowledge" about mainboards that onboard sound has become good enough for almost anybody. It has never been true for me, maybe because my recent mainboards have been lower middle class (AMD B350 / B650) largely chosen for good CPU power converters.
Because my two (PC) laptops since 2020 have both had really damn good headphone outputs, I can believe that some good / expensive mainboards have it, too. It's not exotic technology anymore. Meanwhile, my desktop PC has a 20+ years old M-Audio prosumer card that also sounds great. (Now rigged with a PCIe -> PCI converter card off AliExpress)
Bluetooth sucks against the raw codec of a soundcard. If you want lossy music, that's it.
But given autotune trends and how genz-ers grew up with shitty early smartphone loudspeakers and not much better BT ones they aren't used to proper music and their tastes are rot forever.
There are a lot of parallels: It has a janky set of buggy drivers. It has backslashes in paths. It has a shell that is "inspired" by COMMAND.COM. And it's basically a program loader where every program immediately replaces it and drives the hardware directly.
I basically had this setup back in the day. I don't really know how I ended up with it, I was 7 at the time and none of it was intentional - but my bootloader had two entries: I could boot into Windows 98, or I could boot into Worms.
As far as I know, Worms is a normal DOS game, so the only way for that to happen should be a DOS install configured to just auto-start Worms on boot. Which makes sense as a way to keep a kid away from anything that could cause trouble.
I very vaguely recall that there used to be a very few PC games that worked as boot floppies and possibly didn't use DOS at all, but it was a rarity and Worms definitely wasn't one.
No, I set it up. My parents were non-technical. I had a CD-ROM re-release of Worms for DOS from one gaming magazine or another. I guess the installer set it up somewhere somehow but I remember it wasn't easy to get it installed and there were further problems trying to launch it. It's possible the installer itself was a DOS program, not a Windows program.
BIOS can only manage VESA which is much much slower than the capabilities of a modern GPU, so they might have meant graphical performance in regards to that.
VESA BIOS Extensions support direct framebuffer access in protected mode, and I don't imagine the lack of accelerated 2D operations would be a practical bottleneck when implementing NES-style graphics on modern PCs.
UEFI GOP additionally supports accelerated bitblt, but again YAGNI for 2D game performance at reasonable framerates on a modern PC.
Welcome to Amiga games, in many cases the floppy would contain the boot loader that would directly jump into the game.
At least on the Amiga 500 you would not go through the trouble to start Workbench, only to load the game, unless you were a lucky owner of an external hard drive.
Your comment said "welcome to Amiga games", as if it were unique to Amiga. The context of the thread is PC, where they had their own booter/bare-metal games.
So you don't have to go to "Amiga games world", you're already in the proper world.
And yet, your little slice of the world doesn't represent the world at whole.
If you're ignorant of the situation, maybe don't come out with such a self-centered (and arguably, arrogant) statement; and especially don't double down on it when corrected.
I recall many IBM-PC games are bootable games. I inserted a floppy , resets the computer, and then it directly boots into the game. The disk must contain a boot sector and drivers and such.
As well, although I think in the Amiga this was more common, to buy games that were already prepared like this.
At least on my circle for doing the same with PC games, we built the floppies ourselves, then again, it could be a side effect that you could hardly buy any legal games in Portugal during those days, even regular shops would sell pirated games as originals.
I think putting people in prison for "copyright infringement" is inherently illegitimate, so this doesn't change my view of the situation, which is that everyone involved should be ashamed to even continue existing.
There was always content that wastes people's time because people have always confused length and complexity with comprehensiveness and depth.
These were always poor proxy metrics for "good content," but in a lot of environments, especially professional ones, they were how work was evaluated. Naturally others used LLM to generate content that satisfies these metrics.
The slop epidemic is a consequence of what people erroneously valued for so long. Now they have it, and it's meaningless, and even if most of it was always meaningless, they can't easily tell the difference between "fluff with something meaningful" and "fluff with only fluff" anymore.
But now we're "democratizing" wasting people's time. If the AI-boosters have their way, we won't even be able to have good conversations about something as simple as the movies we saw over the weekend. It will all be "bespoke, AI-generated content." The conversations will be the equivalent of telling a story about a weird dream you had last night.
The solution was always not to view wasting people's time as proof of effort. But we did, and now AI is replicating it, and the result is this dysfunction.
If we properly valued conciseness over complexity and didn't insist on 5 paragraphs of polite fluff in business communications, it wouldn't be nearly as bad.
The issue is we have let the attention economy overrun us. It’s not people being too verbose. Shorter content is the objective these days.
You are more consistently rewarded, typically financially, for putting out 100 terrible blog posts than 10 great ones. The terrible ones tend to be short too.
Your time is saved letting ChatGPT write all your emails. The recipient’s time is wasted by emails with little to no substance that the sender couldn’t even bother to spend time on.
Hell there are people using LLM’s to comment on forums now. That’s not what I come here for. This has always existed to some degree but it has, as another person pointed out, been so democratized that it’s becoming a bigger problem. Now I have to constantly expend mental effort questioning if I’m talking to actual people. When I discover it’s a bot, it’s infuriating. It’s disrespectful, frankly.
We all came here to talk to each other. Not be duped by facsimiles of each other. I want to talk to you.
Exactly. People often forget that Congress can only exercise a limited domain of enumerated powers. The big one is regulating Interstate Commerce, which is already huge because of how interconnected the country is today, and is even bigger because of creative stretching of its reach (did you know that the Civil Right's Act's ban on discrimination by businesses is within Congress's Interstate Commerce power, because somebody might patronize your business from out of state?).
Anyway, I suspect Bob Hacker has a strong case that such a law as applied to himself would be beyond the scope of Interstate Commerce. Until he tries to sell or make his OS widely available, at least.
Given how broadly the commerce clause has been interpreted I don't think we can rely on that to save us here. Criminalizing Bob publishing his OS on GitHub is still too authoritarian for my liking.
Just off the top of my head, something like "physical hardware with web access sold in the US without an ID check at the checkout counter must include this feature in its preinstalled OS" would be a better way to write the law in my opinion. Plenty of ways around it if you're a hobbyist or for some reason really don't want to comply, but a big enough hassle that all the major commercial OS providers would probably find it easiest to just include the feature. (Especially since this is a feature most parents would probably appreciate anyway.)
why do you think any court in MAGA America would allow this?
we know, for sure, that Clarence Thomas takes bribes. You think Facebook wouldn't cut him a check? Ditto for plenty of other Trump-installed justices on all levels.
If your child needs a helmet to use the internet, as the politicians announcing HR8250 seem to think[1], Apple or whomever is free to offer that as a feature. There is no need for this to be legislated, especially when the legislation does not work in open source environments.
[1] Not hyperbole. They said that. It was an analogy, but one that highlights how ignorant of the technology the authors of these bills are.
It means you have the option to not save transcripts in the first place, or have a deletion schedule. There's no tampering because there was no evidence to tamper with. Authorities show up after the fact.
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