I also kinda feel like having a magic sword that cuts through anything might be a bad idea when you’re on a spaceship and protected from hard vacuum by a thin shell.

I’m not really understanding what it is you are concerned about.

If it’s that the Javascript might be malicious, then a browser should be able to sandbox it. IIRC — and you probably want to confirm this, if you’re actively concerned — the Firefox security model is that if you open a file locally, it has local access, but if you open it from a webserver, it doesn’t. Like, Javascript running in your browser downloaded from a web server shouldn’t have local filesystem access.

If you want to examine some code, but don’t want the code to phone home in some way, I’d remember that at least DNS is probably also a potential side channel. I’d maybe run the stuff in a VM without network access, if I were concerned about that.

I were on the hunt for a software forge with public hosting and I was worried about policies changing down the line, I’d probably take a look at GNU Savannah. That’s not especially blingy and it’s restricted to GPL-compatible stuff, but I have a pretty solid level of trust for the FSF.

Thanks for the opt-out link.

Stephenson actually specifically addressed how people would feel uncomfortable around AR users from a privacy standpoint back in Snow Crash (as well as the fashion side).

It’s a gargoyle, standing in the dimness next to a shanty. Just in case he’s not already conspicuous enough, he’s wearing a suit. Hiro starts walking toward him. Gargoyles represent the embarrassing side of the Central Intelligence Corporation. Instead of using laptops, they wear their computers on their bodies, broken up into separate modules that hang on the waist, on the back, on the headset. They serve as human surveillance devices, recording everything that happens around them. Nothing looks stupider, these getups are the modern-day equivalent of the slide-rule scabbard or the calculator pouch on the belt, marking the user as belonging to a class that is at once above and far below human society. They are a boon to Hiro because they embody the worst stereotype of the CIC stringer. They draw all of the attention. The payoff for this self-imposed ostracism is that you can be in the Metaverse all the time, and gather intelligence all the time.

Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions, doing background checks on everyone within a thousand yards, seeing everything in visual light, infrared, millimeter. wave radar, and ultrasound all at once. You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead. For all he knows, Lagos is standing there measuring the length of Hiro’s cock through his trousers while they pretend to make conversation.

So, the issue is basically that a lot of people — I think including Stephenson, given his portrayal of the Metaverse in Snow Crash — expected that the bar was getting viable VR headsets, and then getting over the hump of writing enough initial software, and then it’d just explode.

The thing is that we have VR headsets that more-or-less work for playing VR games. We don’t have as many VR games as we do games designed around conventional hardware, but they’re out there. But…we haven’t really seen that explosion. People haven’t said “hey, I’ll drop maybe $300-$1k to have a larger FOV with more peripheral vision, some additional immersion, and the ability to use my head as an input.”

Like, you’re saying “I can get a VR headset and play VR games in 2026”, which is true. But the state of the field is just nowhere near where advocates hoped it would be.

Maybe, but I’d lean towards disagreeing.

Current HMDs have poor angular resolution, and are not drop-in replacement for existing monitors.

I’d get an HMD once it hits something roughly comparable to today’s monitors in terms of angular resolution, and comfortable to use for as long. I probably won’t buy one just to play VR games. I don’t think that we will never get to the point that they’re a monitor replacement, though. It’s more-portable and can fill more of your visual field.

And I think that at that point, it becomes a lot more appealing. You can have a private screen that people can’t see. You can potentially consume less power than a laptop screen, since you can have a dark environment where the light only needs to go to one place. Laptop form factor is kind of defined by the display; if you don’t have to do that, you can use other portable computer form factors. You can use the thing while walking.

Once you have an HMD as a monitor replacement, then it’s a smaller bump to use it for VR purposes.

Stephenson’s argument is mostly that either (a) it fails on the fashion front or (b) it’s creepy to have people just staring at random things. I think that fashion has been pretty flexible over the years, and that people already just talk at the air for cell phones with Bluetooth headsets.

I think that if we never get mainstream VR HMDs, it’ll be because by the time we get there, we have some sort of direct-to-brain connection that just supersedes them. Not because we can’t make something that people will accept because of fashion concerns or because they’re worried about looking strange by looking in random directions using it.

When I got whatever it was that I got new…I think an Asus device…that I used, I think that I had to order it online, and it sounds like OP was shopping brick-and-mortar. I dunno if he’d be able to find it brick-and-mortar.

Many open source operating systems exist that can turn a computer with multiple NIC’s into a router

Minor nitpick, but if you’re planning on sticking a NIC into a machine to make it a router, it’s probably more cost-effective to get a single NIC with multiple Ethernet ports than multiple NICs.

Yup, and with the evdev devices present.

Now I just have to figure out whether I want to get another external soundcard for my gaming rig or if I can live with switching the USB cable back and forth between the two PCs or if I can get used to control the volume with software. I really like hardware knobs though

I don’t know what you’re doing, but if your headphones are using a 1/4 inch jack or 1/8 inch jack and your devices have some form of audio output already, you can just use a plain ol’ analog mixer. That’ll give you knobs and let you hook multiple devices up.

I keep my headphones plugged into one. I rarely actually use the other devices, but sometimes I’ll want to be listening to a radio scanner or a shortwave radio or some other things, and it lets me just pipe whatever into the headphones.

searches Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/LiNKFOR-Channel-Separate-Controls-6-35mm/dp/B0DDKBJFWY

That’s $11 and looks like it’ll do 4 1/4 inch inputs. Looks like they also have RCA and 1/8 inch input versions (though those cost more, and there there might be more-inexpensive mixers).

Power supplies are largely fine as long as they’re not really old.

Oh, I didn’t think about PSUs in my comment. Good thought.

There was a period where a lot of bad capacitors went into PSUs and there was a rash of PSU and motherboard failures sometime around 2000. I remember some failed caps causing devices to die — I think I had a video card, a motherboard, and a PSU go. At the time, I thought that capacitors just must not last very long, didn’t find out about the fact that it was a specific issue with some capacitors until years later. But, yeah, today, that’d be pretty ancient, and I haven’t seen that for some time.

searches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitor_plague

The capacitor plague was a problem related to a higher-than-expected failure rate of non-solid aluminium electrolytic capacitors between 1999 and 2007, especially those from some Taiwanese manufacturers,[1][2] due to faulty electrolyte composition that caused corrosion accompanied by gas generation; this often resulted in rupturing of the case of the capacitor from the build-up of pressure.

High failure rates occurred in many well-known brands of electronics, and were particularly evident in motherboards, video cards, and power supplies of personal computers.

A 2003 article in The Independent claimed that the cause of the faulty capacitors was due to a mis-copied formula. In 2001, a scientist working in the Rubycon Corporation in Japan stole a mis-copied formula for capacitors’ electrolytes. He then took the faulty formula to the Luminous Town Electric company in China, where he had previously been employed. In the same year, the scientist’s staff left China, stealing again the mis-copied formula and moving to Taiwan, where they created their own company, producing capacitors and propagating even more of this faulty formula of capacitor electrolytes.[3]

I do think that one issue with PSUs is that power demands of high-end CPUs and GPUs have also increased. If the PSU is rated for your system, then no problem, but I’d want to make sure.

Also, PSUs have fans, and while I don’t think I’ve ever had a PSU fan go, thinking back…fans do have moving parts and are IME one of the more-prone-to-see-failures components. I have definitely had CPU fans and case fans die — start making noise and ultimately seize up, as the bearings wear out.

Cases basically can’t fail unless you destroy it on purpose.

True, though I’ve also had cases come with a lot of parts, especially if you have toolless mounting or something. That’s one where I personally have always thrown out my old ATX cases, though it’s not as if they’re nonfunctional or anything. I even have the leftover parts, but they’re in some box somewhere.

But I’ll concede that that’s probably just me. I mean, if someone wanted to, they could probably do fine with an old case.

Air coolers don’t go bad.

The aluminum/copper/etc heatsink itself will last forever, but for about the past 30 years, most will have had a fan on them. Now, granted, it’s also almost certainly replaceable, and it’s not hard to get new fans, but the fan can die.

Liquid coolers will eventually need maintenance, but as long as they’re not really old should be fine.

Huh. Well, that sounds good. I’ve been curious to see how these do. I’m on the first system I’ve used with an AIO liquid cooler. So far, it’s been remarkably quiet, had a lot of cooling capacity, and not had a huge amount of mass hanging off the motherboard — I’m glad that I got it, even if it cost more — I but I have wondered about pump longevity.

Used liquid coolers might be interesting, as long as one can get the appropriate mounting bits, haven’t been thrown out. I remember that mine came with a bunch of brackets and such for various sockets. Do need to deal with cleaning off old thermal paste, though.

I’m looking at a Trixie system right now, and /dev/input/js0 appears just as expected. Is it possible that you modified your Debian installation way back then, to disable your js devices? Maybe you (or some package you installed) applied a udev rule to block them?

Nope. Vanilla /etc/udev (well, okay, there are some unrelated changes for snapd and one to keep an JBOD enclosure form spinnign down drives). The joydev module isn’t even loaded.

A great many games rely on a library for joystick input.

Sure, but that doesn’t mean that they’re using the js API at the kernel level.

SDL, for example, which will use js devices depending on the circumstance.

Your own link points out that even SDL 1 — very old now — doesn’t use the js interface unless forced to do so.

I’m running Debian trixie. IIRC in the past, for a while when the evdev interface showed up, a problem was that games that could talk to both interfaces would sometimes get double input, because a number would aggregate all input from all joysticks, and so if one had both the js and evdev interfaces visible, they’d see it as two joysticks both; a fix was to not expose them via the js API, rather than leaving them exposed via both. I don’t know how that’s evolved over time, but it may have been a factor encouraging not exposing them by default. I’ve certainly seen the “double input” behavior myself, maybe ten, fifteen years back.

What - if anything - do you insist on buying new and what do you buy second hand and why?

• I would get a used PC as a whole, if I needed one for some secondary role. I did that once for a media PC, where I had no need for new hardware and just needed to throw a TV-out card into it. Often available cheap, because someone just wants to unload it.

• I’ve never purchased used DIMMs, but as long as I was okay with the speed, I wouldn’t worry much about it. Aging shouldn’t really be an issue. Maybe you could possibly get damaged stuff somehow, but…shrugs

• I personally would not buy used rotational hard drives. Those all eventually die. If someone wants to badly enough deal with it, they can set up redundant storage and try to get a little more value out of drives that haven’t died yet, just keep swapping drives and hope that they don’t have multiple concurrent failures. In my book, it’s just not worth the trouble. That being said, maybe someone has tighter financial constraints and less data concerns or needs to store a lot more data than me.

• CPUs…I dunno. Wouldn’t be my first choice to deal with secondhand. CPUs haven’t seen lots of single-threaded speed increases for a while, so for many workloads, older CPUs are fine. But you can get bent pins on them, and people might have overclocked them and had various forms of damage. And I don’t really want to deal with whatever thermal paste is left on them or so forth. I would avoid 13th or 14th gen Intel desktop CPUs, the ones that gradually destroyed themselves internally over time. You don’t know if any given CPU might have suffered damage.

• Motherboard. Not my first choice, since they tend to come with various spacers and screws and other things.

• Sound cards. Sure. I’ve used ancient sound cards. Technology hasn’t changed much there. I think that external, USB sound interfaces have kind of taken over here, though (as you illustrate). I do run Linux on stuff, and once support is in the kernel, it tends to just kinda stay there.

• Network interface cards: Sure.

• GPU: Sure, depending upon the workload. GPUs have seen significant performance improvements, so if you want the latest-and-greatest, I don’t think that an old GPU is a great buy. But if you just want video output on a server or something, then sure, anything will work.

• Keyboards: Not unless I was dead set on some vintage thing. These can last a long time, but keyboards are relatively cheap.

• Mice: No. I find that these things wear out. The buttons get a lot of clicks and eventually wear out. I’ve also generally had the little slidey feet detach over time.

• Webcams: Not unless I had some special use for them where I cared very little about image quality. Image quality has improved substantially.

• Monitors: Probably fine to do secondhand. Early OLEDs might have burn-in as a risk. If you specifically want high refresh rates or something, then maybe you want something newer, but for plenty of uses, older monitors are just fine. They’ll probably be dimmer at max brightness than when they were new.

Looking at using older hardware we have spare (a MacBook Pro 2012 or rpi4) seem to have a track record of underperforming

In what sense?

I’m having trouble finding good options particularly in regards to openwrt at least.

Everything I can get in local stores isn’t supported by openwrt (neither are the current routers).

IIRC, OpenWRT tends to support older hardware. I once bought new hardware to run it, so I know that it’s been out there, but if you want something to run OpenWRT and aren’t too fussed about having the latest hardware, you can probably grab something off eBay or something, especially if what you care about isn’t the WiFi side of things, where things have changed over time. Might be possible to run a USB WiFi adapter or something, if you want the latest WiFi protocol.

Would the MacBook Pro or rpi4 with a second Ethernet nic running a firewall before the routers also fix the issue of not getting security updates?

Pretty much, if you’re talking Internet-facing stuff. I mean, you might still want updates for, I dunno, NTP updates or something where the router talks to the Internet. And if it’s doing WiFi and there’s some vulnerability associated with that, theoretically you could be attacked locally. In general, I wouldn’t worry too much. There are probably a ton of unsupported, unupdated Internet of Things devices on LANs all over the place, so shrugs. It’d be nice to have maintenance and security updates for everything, but in practice, there’s probably a lot of stuff that is always going to be unmaintained on most LANs. Smart TVs, printers, whatever. Maybe we should change that, but as things stand, kinda the norm.

How do you calibrate controller deadzones?

Personally, I went with the hardware fix route for dealing with stick drift rather than the software approach of aiming to filter it out, and got a controller with Hall effect thumbsticks.

There are few Steam games I’ve seen that do use gamepads but don’t support Steam Input. Not saying that they don’t exist, but I’d be kind of inclined to suggest playing around with the global Steam Input settings if your gamepad isn’t working with any titles via Steam Input.

I would start with section 2.2.3: Joystick API deadzones and calibration, because the joystick API is the lowest common denominator for this stuff.

Most games don’t use the Joystick API any more (/dev/input/js*), but rather the evdev API (dev/input/event*) which is dealt with further down on that page.

I don’t even have the js devices on my system these days.

I’ve got a substantial existing backlog of owned games and am trying not to just jump on more things until I’ve worked through some of that.

Some things that I’d buy anyway:

• If Kenshi 2 comes out anytime soon. My expectation is that that’s years out.

• If something like Caves of Qud comes out. I already have some roguelikes to play.

• Additional good DLC for some games that I have been playing, like Starfield. The Rimworld DLC has been worthwhile.

• If something like Steel Division 2 with Wargame: Red Dragon’s modern setting came out. Steel Division 2 has reasonable game AI and good quality-of-life features, but I personally enjoy the newer setting of Wargame: Red Dragon. WARNO isn’t that — it’s much too fast-paced for me and has less unit variety, feels to me like mostly just directing a constant flood of units. Less of the intricate deck-building that characterized the earlier two titles.

• If Fallout 5 came out anytime soon, which I am very confident will not happen.

EDIT: If someone successfully comes out with some game that can be plugged into a local LLM backend — it’ll probably be a game in a new genre, simple ruleset run by the game with its own logic that an LLM is smart enough to reasonably play and generate text description for — I’d be interested in giving that a shot. There are some developers experimenting with that sort of thing, but I don’t think that we’re really there technically. Might not be possible to do this effectively with current LLMs.

EDIT2: I’d also go for a Noita 2 or Noita DLC. There is some developer working on an unnamed game for what looks like a Noita-alike that I discovered a bit back, but it’s in early development, and I don’t know whether the actual gameplay will wind up getting the kind of appeal that Noita has. I imagine that one could get similar mechanics but have a game that isn’t as appealing.