You can say both, back in the PS2 era people called the big one also the PHAT model. I don’t know if it has a specific meaning, though.

That’s what you get for buying a cheap device, sadly.

Not always. I bought a Unihertz Titan 2 for 250€ last year and it can be easily unlocked with Fastboot. They even put the full firmware packages up on Google Drive so you can restore a bricked device with SP Flash Tools.

God that is just awful.

I can hear Ed Zitron laughing hysterically all the way over here in Europe. What a load of BS.

I’m just tired at this point. Years ago, contributing to open source projects felt good - you helped out the developer and in turn, any other human who used the software. There was a sense of accomplishment and pride in doing something great for someone else.

But in 2026, Github is just filled with AI-generated projects. The people running these projects often don’t have any idea what they’re doing and they don’t take ownership of their code. The LLM blasts something out, they ship it and then they forget about it. That’s not a good baseline for building something.

I have set up a PlayStation 2 to run Homebrew last week and that development scene is one of the best examples for how AI ruins a whole community.

There is a project for running games on the PS2, called OPL (Open PS2 Loader). Over the course of the last year, the main developers of OPL all left and the only active fork that gets any new features is RiptOPL. RiptOPL uses this banner on their Github:

Yeeeah, I’m not gonna contribute to that kind of cringeslop. I tested it out and it’s got stupid features (pressing a button aggressively vibrates the controller) and the same (if not even more) bugs than the main OPL. Because the developer didn’t fix anything! He just took pending pull requests from the main project, added some cringe banners and useless slop and let the AI do the work.

There’s also a file manager, called wLaunchELF. You can browse the filesystem of your console and launch applications from memory cards, USB sticks and harddrives. You can also spin up an FTP server and transfer files over Ethernet.

The most active fork that gets new features is wLE R3Z, whose developer used AI to build the thing and had to turn off all Ethernet features - because the LLM couldn’t figure it out and he didn’t have any clue either. We are actively losing features and the homebrew projects get worse at this point. Capable developers either leave or decide to not contribute at all and that ruins the PS2 homebrew scene.

I am also active on vogons, a retro-computing forum and the amount of LLM-driven hobby projects in there has skyrocketed as well. I don’t know…someone’s LLM figured out how to control notebook brightness on DOS because it had crawled an internal Intel datasheet. It’s useful, I guess…but if no one did the work, there is no one to admire for doing it. All of this feels hollow and useless, I didn’t get into the hobby of retro computing to have a computer do the hard stuff for me, doing it by myself is the whole point of it.

I do write my own software without LLM support and I am currently learning Sveltekit and having a ton of fun. I am not putting anything up on the web to get crawled by bots, though.

Fun fact: A lot of devs know what they’re doing is shit and try to hide it. I have seen so many people putting CLAUDE.md into their .gitignore so it’s not added to the projects. Motherfucker, if you don’t want people see you using AI, then just don’t use AI.

I have one. Live in Europe though and it’s a small agency where I’m a solo dev.

Damn, I should’ve just pissed of one mod instead of blocking all of these manually…

I only listen to it on YouTube because there are no adbreaks (except the ads YouTube plays, but I never see them).

On my podcast app, there are three long ad breaks in almost every episode. It’s really annoying, but par for the course for podcasts made in the USA. Whenever I listen to something that was produced in that country, it’s always part of a large network like iHeart and they love putting their ads in. Even if they don’t have a sponsor, they promote themselves. Can’t just let go of the ad space if no one booked any ads, capitalism at its finest.

Ironically, I feel like this is something LLMs could help with. Transcribe the audio, figure out where the ad breaks are and skip them.

On some popular subs, they added new moderators and brought the subs back online by themselves. It was a total shitshow and a clear sign Reddit didn’t give a fuck about the wishes of their voluntary moderators and users.

They had a really bad POSIX subsystem that was coded by an intern, so they could say “We’re compliant” and get some sweet government contracts.

NCommander made a lot of videos about it on YouTube and had to patch the hell out of it to even get the most basic programs to run.

That’s definitely default behaviour, the start menu is a resource hog. I can recommend StartAllBack.

Same here, I only use it for VR as well (Reverb G2 support is BAD on Linux).

It’s so fucking annoying when you only boot into Windows every few weeks or so, it immediately hogs my CPU pulling down updates (which often takes 20 minutes or longer).

When the Steam Frame comes out I will finally ditch this dumpsterfire completely.

I feel this post in my heart and just wanted to say I support you 100%.

What I really hate about macOS (and iOS) is Apple prioritizing fancy design over functionality. Liquid Glass is just bad UI with shitty contrast, to the point where they had to dial it down before the final release to make it somewhat useable. And doing things like hiding the username field in Apple Mail so you have to enter a fail state first before it gets shown to you is absolute garbage. Apps don’t have to look as clean as possible, they have to be fucking functional.

…and why are we still including .DS_Store files when zipping a directory and creating them on network drives? What is this? 2001 Windows XP with its useless Thumbs.db files? Even Microsoft has long moved on from storing thumbnails in this way.

Don’t you dare criticize the worlds’ most popular generic superhero movie franchise!

I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.

They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.

I’ll just block you here too.

Oh no, don’t threaten him with a good time.

You’re trusting unsigned, reverse engineered, and amateur developed drivers in ring 0

Up until 2025 most of the software for controlling your periphery like mice and RGB controllers used a driver called WinRing0 which had been discontinued for years. Its author even actively discouraged people from using it, but due to convenience and cost cutting it was bundled with software left and right.

I rather trust a Linux kernel developer developing a WiFi driver than some shady manufacturer selling cheap mice and bundling it with closed-source software that never gets an update.

I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.

One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.

I’m sure A24 doesn’t care, but I feel better now. “New workflows” is just corpo-speak for getting rid of people.

It also has basically the same plot with the same enemies. Except they added a red lady villain that is weirdly sexualized and a kid gets magic powers - because nature.