china is expanding energy tremendously to the point that the USA simply cannot compete. Even if data centers all get built tomorrow they will soon bottleneck because energy demands can’t be met in a timely manner. The median time to get a new power plant online is 5 years. Meanwhile china is investing heavily not only in expansion of their grid, but expansion into renewable energy. They’ve added 8x the power to their grid that the us did just in 2023 and if anything their pace has risen since then. Their renewable grid is 3x the size of the entire us grid

In terms of raw performance US firms were months ahead and that gap is shrinking. Dola-seed is ranked second behind opus by us firms with a gap of under 3% in benchmark performance

This performance gap closing and energy superiority is why ultimately DeepSeek v4 pro outperforms opus 4.6. Opus is the clear winner, but not by a very appreciable amount, and ranges from 11-26x more expensive. Chinas hardware isn’t more efficient but their energy superiority puts them way ahead; their cloudmatrix uses well over 100% more energy than nvidia g200 but their energy costs are sometimes as little as 1/8th American costs per kWh

The race to superiority here is ultimately does America substantially update and expand their grid before Chinas domestic chip manufacturing bridges the hardware gap that has been created by things like export controls? My money is on China here; Huawei, SMIC, etc have an engineering problem that is rapidly being addressed with gigantic state sponsorship (and frankly the major bottleneck is EUV lithography, which they are actively pursuing, though this is an issue that even with tens of billions will take many years to catch up to the west). While those barriers are real the American barriers are an extremely complex regulatory system (which is ultimately why trump is being directed to gut everything in terms of environmental and worker protections), funding (the oligarchs want this but not enough to part with their money, they want us to fund it), and unlike China the US drastically changes trajectory every 4-8 years.

Fair point, the experience is definitely worth the money for some as well as the hands on assistance. I guess this is more targeted at someone whos eyeing up a $250-300 modded gba on eBay

Yeah as the other person pointed out, if you want an experience that’s up to you. The upcharging makes sense for a class as they’ve got a lot more overhead. The upcharging makes far less sense for an already modded gameboy sold on ebay or marketplace

For roms you’d want a flashcart. No mod there, just buy the flashcart, put roms on sd, put sd in flashcart, play. There are flash carts for literally every cartridge based console you can think of. Even the disc consoles (eg Dreamcast, psx, GameCube) almost always have something like an optical drive emulator the replaces the disc drive with an sd card filled with roms (these are less “plug and play” than flash carts though, which literally are just cartridges with an sd slot and some firmware to load roms)

Imo a flashcart is necessary. There’s basically no drawback, unless you’re specifically into collecting originals. Occasionally they can struggle with edge cases (eg games on snes that used superfx chips or games that used rtc like Pokémon) but at this point 99.9% of those issues are solved (except maybe if you get a cheap Chinese clone cart with unknown firmware. Everdrive is the standard but for like 1/3-1/2 the price you can get lesser known models or clones and tbh most of these are fine. It’s pretty urgent to check Pokémon or Mario rpg works when you’re developing one of these I’d assume

I don’t know about the class but you can mod a gameboy for way cheaper than ~$350 and it’s stupid easy to do.

A backlit ips screen is like $60 from us sellers but you can also buy them direct from china for like 1/3-1/2 that. Honestly that’s really the only thing with a crazy markup. The brackets to center the lcd, a new glass lens, etc are like $2-3 each. The install is pretty easy if you can handle disassembling a gameboy and putting it back together. The soldering is 3-5 wires depending on what screen and it’s stupid easy soldering. Some are solder free, the soldering is to just tap the signals for buttons so specific combinations will bring up the screens OSD, some use capacitive touch on the screen bezel instead (or in addition to). Some require minor case modification but that also stupid easy ($2 flush cutters and just remove some plastic ribs, basically)

A lithium battery mod is like $25 domestically and if you can install the normal alkaline batteries you can handle this one. Depending on what battery and what model gameboy you may have to solder 1-2 wires to a usb c board (gba/sp batteries sometimes have it integrated and you can get a replacement battery door with a hole or they come with one (that probably won’t match), gb/color/pocket usually have a daughterboard). The toughest bit is cutting a hole for the usb c charger but if you’re reshelling a lot of replacement shells come with that already done.

Speaking of reshelling that’s also stupid cheap. $10-20 should cover a shell and buttons. That said this can also get stupid expensive for exotic cases (like $100-200+ for boxypixel cases, which are cnc cut aluminum)

So at this point you’re spending 70-100 to do the mods most people do and watching a YouTube video is enough because it’s really easy. If you have no tools a $15 soldering iron beginner kit, $2 flush cutters, a small screwdriver set, and cheap wire strippers will cover everything. Nonconductive tape like kapton is also nice to have (don’t be a hot glue person yuck) but not essential

After that it’s other cheap mods you can add but aren’t typically considered “essential”. LED lighting under the buttons is like $20 and it’s just a flex pcb that you line up and tack on via a few solder points. You can get a fresh speaker, 2 wires to solder. You can also do things like replace the speaker amp but tbh I think this is silly, every gameboy sounds like shit regardless because the speaker is trash. The audio amps are slightly less distorted and louder trash, but still trash. Use headphones if you care that much. An hdmi mod for gba is like $50 and probably the hardest install here, though still fairly easy. Some people recap them while they’re open but I’ve never seen a gameboy with caps that caused issues. Even if you do decide this is worthwhile it’s only really necessary to do electrolytic caps and there aren’t many to do, the sp literally only has 1 (it’s surface mount but stupid easy to do). Iirc the og dmg has the most with 6 and they’re through hole

The main other cost is the console of course. This is where things can be kind of wild. A gameboy confirmed in good working condition can be a little pricey for what it is. Even then it’s still not usually expensive, $50-100 depending on how much of a deal you can find. But this is USA pricing. If you’ll be in Japan I’m sure you can get used gameboys all over for like $20-40, if yahoo jp auctions are any indicator. Buying a broken one is a gamble though they’re usually simple to fix, especially if you’re already planning to replace the screen and speaker. Those and cleaning the power switch/battery contacts fixes 95% of broken gameboys, they’re built like tanks regardless of revision

The idea of a class is neat ig because honestly a lot of sellers sell modded gameboys for $250-300 in the USA but they’re just making bank off of people who watch YouTubers that talk about console modding, think it’s neat, but are too scared to do what’s probably the easiest set of console mods in the world. I don’t do it anymore but I would buy lots of broken gameboys from yahoojp and mod them (buying mods in bulk makes this even cheaper) and easily double or triple my money. Don’t buy from people like me, just do it. It’s so goddamn easy

Is plex an acronym?

If your device doesn’t have a client it probably has a kodi port. Jellyfin libraries can be imported in kodi with plugins (and plex and emby for that matter). Then you get the benefits of kodi (better skin support, more robust plugins, better subtitle rendering, etc) with the centralized metadata administration of Jellyfin and retain the option to use Jellyfin clients on devices with locked ecosystems (eg ios) or where you don’t feel like setting up kodi

Google did shit like this long before AI. Never use google for anything critical (or at all). while the odds are low because they want your data there’s always the chance they just delete everything you had. And their support is nonexistent so once they do you’re fucked, even if you make a big stink on social media like this

This happens all the time in FOSS

Someone comes in, contributes a bit, then forks, then closes it off once they realize there’s a path to monetization.

Plex is a particularly egregious example: the initial author forked xbmc to make a mac port. This led to a crazy amount of popularity very fast and they saw the path to monetization. They soon after created plex server separate from the client and went to the crazy step of rewriting everything GPL so they could fully close source.

This is legally fine but ethically fucked; they had a derivative app that technically no longer shared code with kodi but there was the fact that design cues, data structures, etc were mostly inherited. Plex wouldn’t exist without kodi. And that’s totally fine, derivative works should be allowed and encouraged. But what’s fucked is that they made serious efforts to close source and give nothing back to the community that they were built from. Code? Nothing. When they got 40 million in VC? nothing.

See also a bunch of players in 3d printing, notably Bambu at the moment. But they’ll keep getting away with it thanks to a combination of governments that are like “money is more important than fairness or progress” and idiotic consumers that are like “oh I have to spend 30 seconds longer figuring something out? Ugh fuck you im gonna buy what some YouTuber was paid $400 to recommend”

valves Linux support is objectively good but it doesn’t magically undo establishing the anti consumer guidelines that now dominate the industry

Piracy also existed before (and after) steam, what’s your point?

Don’t forget the entire internet, newspapers, telephone listings, radio, television, movies, video games, every surface of a store, public spaces like parks and sidewalks, and probably your dreams in the near future

Advertising is cancer and it destroys anything that tolerates it for even a moment. An industry with zero ethics or morals. If you work in advertising you’re a disgusting scumbag piece of shit and your parents are ashamed. No amount of money is worth it and the world would be objectively better without you in it.

https://youtube.com/shorts/jm2c--qzSbk

If you buy these things you’re a fucking creep

You’re not wrong that physical media was essentially doomed, and arguably it should have been as digital distribution is faster, easier, and objectively better for the planet (look into the environmental cost of manufacturing vinyl records, for example)

But who popularized the current dominant model of “you’re only buying access, not the game itself”? And before you go on about how it would be impossible to make a digital equivalent to distribution equivalent to purchasing physical media, remember gog exists and has been around and successful for almost 2 decades now

It is not “give me everything”. It is “give me an option that actually gives a realistic path forward for change and doesn’t just give households with $70k/yr income or more enough comfort to turn a blind eye to all the rot that Trump laid bare”

Why do you think a war was started for no reason

95% of domestic manufacturing that remains is military shit. Can’t have China do the injection molding and machining for your top secret bombs meant to do genocide

Almost all of your examples are exactly what they mentioned

Obamacare - shitty mild reform forced after literal decades of working class begging for drastic reform. The essential “meat” of it in terms of progress was ending the ability of insurers to deny for pre-existing conditions. The cost of this was the individual mandate, forcing everyone to buy (still privatized and ridiculously expensive) insurance, which was ultimately a huge win for insurers. They sold a significantly higher amount of shit coverage high deductible plans, especially to young people, who generally never meet the deductible. So now they had the monthly premiums for those people while essentially paying $0 in coverage. In turn many of those people became extremely resentful and saw the gop as saviors when they eventually removed the individual mandate to pander to them. Romneycare, the original bill, did nothing to address the huge administrative overheads that plague our system (5-10x the rate of other countries), no regulatory controls for price gouging, etc because it was designed to look like something was being done while ultimately serving the corporate monopolies involved in health insurance, which the democrats were happy to adopt because they are corporatist in nature

Green energy investments were paltry and pathetically low considering the scale of the issue. Americas grid is not even 25% green energy. Meanwhile China has 3x the capacity of Americas entire grid in green energy alone

When has significant antitrust action occurred? Honestly? The last real movement was breaking up the telecoms in the late 80s/early 90s. Even that was pointless as the telecoms eventually re-convened through mergers and acquisitions over the next 10-15yrs and have reemerged as Internet monopolies with price fixing and everything. Monopolies exist everywhere in the USA - obviously in tech to an almost unprecedented level, health insurance through companies like Aetna and Cigna, mass media is overwhelmingly owned by 6 indicates/companies, even shit like the major music record labels have dwindled from like 14 to like 4 from 2000-now because no controversial merger is ever blocked. Even fucking grocery chains and food brands that have been demonstrably shown to price fix are either given a slap on the wrist fine or nothing at all

Gay marriage was not codified in a way that prevents repeal at any point, similar to abortion rights. As a result it is in a precarious situation where the republican evangelicals are actively funding court battles to challenge it

Aid abroad was to generate “soft power”, eg “I did you a favor so you now owe me the world”. While aid is good it was extremely often exploited for imperialist motives like perpetuating the military industrial complex

Every single one of these is an example where the democrats presented idealized progressivism, watered it down to something tolerable for the donor class (and sometimes even beneficial), and still went into it kicking and screaming (the complaints people have about fetterman, that they had about manchin and sinema, were about Lieberman in the ACA days). Neoliberals eat it up because it feels like progress with marketing and the democrats then leave the issue behind forever as “solved”, eg “we did the absolute bare minimum to appease enough of the masses to continue to secure power”

This is specifically an optics move because they can’t pass it. Make headlines about this and a few other progressive moves in the run up to November and gain votes from the “fell for it again” neolib crowd. Then “whoops, 1-3 democrat senators are just real sticks in the mud and won’t go for it so I guess we give up”. Then frustration from the base and they eventually kill whatever momentum because they prove that when it comes to action they almost always cave. Then the gop sweeps up and regresses as much as possible.

Lieberman, sinema, manchin, now its fetterman. who will be the next “this 1-3 person group personally stops any and all progress in America for like a decade”. The ones that give those dumb neolibs ammo, because of course the party would do so much if it wasn’t for them and you just have to vote more so that the 1-3 person group can become a 3-5 person group

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1588892/

“The cumulative impact of excess medical care required by smokers at all ages while alive outweighs shorter life expectancy, and smokers incur higher expenditures for medical care over their lifetimes than never-smokers. This accords with the findings by Manning et al. (1989) of positive lifetime medical care costs per pack of cigarettes, but disagrees with the results found by Leu and Schaub (1983, 1985) for Swiss males. The contradictory conclusions of the analyses are undoubtedly due to a large difference in the amount of medical care used by smokers relative to neversmokers in the United States and Swiss data”

The only studies I can find that confirm shortened longevity incurs lower costs occur outside of America, which shifts things greatly due to cultural differences in receiving medical care and Americas totally fucked healthcare billing

Also I’ll point out that I said I don’t agree with the original poster, that I don’t care if you smoke, and now I will say that you’re a fucking moron with poor reading comprehension. Sorry that I won’t confirm your bias so you don’t feel worse about smoking, idiot. But again, smoke all you want, I don’t care, but don’t act like it doesn’t increase the cost burden on public health (as do your other examples but I also don’t care if you eat cheeseburgers every day and drink yourself to death)

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12474721/

“873 studies identified, 11 were included in quantitative synthesis, which compared 19,759,529 smokers with 206,913,108 non-smokers for direct health care costs. Mean age ranged from 34.5–60.6 years for smokers and 34.3–65.1 years for non-smokers. Mean annual health care costs ranged from $65,640–$1297.1 for smokers and $54,564–$724.4 for non-smokers. Annual incremental direct health care costs for smokers versus non-smokers ranged from –$458 (95% CI [confidence interval]: –2011.0 to 1,095.0) to $11,076 (95% CI: 10,211.9 to 11,940.1) in 2025 US dollars. Meta-analysis revealed smoking generally incurred greater health care costs than non-smoking, with a mean annual incremental cost of $1916.5 (95% CI: –439.9 to 4,272.9). The result was not statistically significant (MD = 1,916.5; p = 0.111). Substantial heterogeneity was observed (I2 = 99.9%). Sensitivity analysis excluding studies of chronic disease yielded a reduced incremental cost for the general population, with a statistically significant difference (MD = 583.9, p = 0.02), although heterogeneity remained high (I2 = 98.0%).”

Literally the first recent meta I found. If you want to smoke I don’t care but suggesting it isn’t a public health burden is asinine

Not that I agree with that person but smokers objectively cost more than non smokers even with a shortened lifespan. Smoking increases the risk of and worsens basically every chronic condition as well as being a well linked factor to critical loss of lung function and several cancers. Unless you like, just let someone die if they get a smoking related illness (which is basically all of them depending on how liberal you are with the word “related”)

Do you mean “in another 0 years” because reddit is at least 50% bots, possibly as high as 70% depending on the study