Not if the pool is all of the colors. I haven’t even had all of them before.

https://gatorade.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Gatorade_Thirst_Quencher_Flavors

There are some that I could distinguish from the others.

Have you played the existing Legend of Zelda titles? I mean, there are a ton of them. Even if you stop at Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild:

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

Thanks for the added insights! I haven’t used it myself, so appreciated.

Linux has a second, similar “compressed memory” feature called zswap. This guy has used both, and thinks that if someone is using a system with NVMe, that zswap is preferable.

https://linuxblog.io/zswap-better-than-zram/

Based on his take, zram is probably a better choice for that rotational-disk Celeron, but if you’re running Cities: Skylines on newer hardware, I’m wondering if zswap might be more advantageous.

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

The original retail price of the computer was US$1,298 (equivalent to $6,700 in 2024)[18][19] with 4 KB of RAM and US$2,638 (equivalent to $13,700 in 2024) with the maximum 48 KB of RAM.

Few people actually need a full 48KB of RAM, if you have an extra $6k lying around, it can be awfully nice.

TECO’s kinda-sorta emacs’s parent in sorta the same way that ed kinda-sorta is vi’s parent.

I compiled and tried out a Linux port the other day due to a discussion on editors we were having on the Threadiverse, so was ready to mind. Similar interface to ed, also designed to run on teletypes.

It’s a compressed RAM drive being used as swap backing. The kernel’s already got the functionality to have multiple tiers of priority for storage; this just leverages that. Like, you have uncompressed memory, it gets exhausted and you push some out to compressed memory, that gets exhausted and you push it out to swap on NVMe or something, etc.

Kinda like RAM Doubler of yesteryear, same sort of thing.

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

zram, formerly called compcache, is a Linux kernel module for creating a compressed block device in RAM, i.e. a RAM disk with on-the-fly disk compression. The block device created with zram can then be used for swap or as general-purpose RAM disk. The two most common uses for zram are for the storage of temporary files (/tmp) and as a swap device. Initially, zram had only the latter function, hence the original name “compcache” (“compressed cache”). Unlike swap, zram only uses 0.1% of the maximum size of the disk when not in use.[1]

Open-source RAM is better.

Many text editors today just load the whole file into RAM.

been the case for decades

One data point: emacs normally loads the whole file, unless you’re using the vlf package or similar.

TECO and ed might not. Dunno.

Another user in the BlueSky thread showed a photo that appears to be a Best Buy case of RAM, showing a 32GB set of two DDR5 DIMMs going for over $400 USD, a 64GB kit for over $900.

If I hit Google Shopping, which indexes a ton of retailer sites, I can find 2x16GB DDR5 DIMMs for far less than that at various retailers that haven’t jacked up prices yet.

https://www.google.com/shopping?udm=28

My first hit for “2x16gb 32gb ddr5” sorted by price is this:

https://pcpartshawaii.com/products/kingston-fury-ddr5-32gb-2x16gb-5200mhz-cl40-ram

Kingston Fury DDR5 32GB (2x16GB) 5600MHz CL40 RAM KF556C40BBK2-32

$100.00

They say that they have two in stock.

These guys are next lowest:

https://www.barcodediscount.com/catalog/kingston/part-kcp548us8k2-32.htm

Price: $103.06

Oh, gotcha, good point.

I think that it’s the other way around — he’s fine with using a controller, is unhappy with the mouse.

Though if someone does want to play first-person shooters on a gamepad, I understand — I’ve never done it myself, that the preferred route by people really serious about the gamepad is the gyro-using flick stick. I understand that Steam Input plus appropriate configuration can provide support for it to games that don’t natively support it, and the WP article says that there’s some kind of direct support that went into Steam Input a few years back that I hadn’t been aware of.

If you’re playing PC games on a TV from a couch — I’m just guessing here, but if you’re (a) using a gaming controller and (b) having difficulty seeing the aiming cursor, I’m wondering if that might be the case — one other issue you might run into with PC games is FOV.

It’s pretty normal for FPSes (I haven’t looked at third-person shooters, though I assume that the same is true) to have something of a fisheye lens effect, because the monitor actually represents only a small portion of your visual arc, yet you want to let the player see something comparable to what the character would. Even more true for a TV (bigger, but also usually so much further away that it is a smaller portion of the visual arc) than a monitor.

https://expertbeacon.com/do-humans-have-120-fov/

Research shows the average person sees about 135 degrees horizontally per eye. Stitch our binocular vision together, and we get approximately 114 degrees of FOV.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Field_of_view_(FOV)

• PC games should be designed with a high FOV of around 85-110 because players normally sit closer to their display.
• Console games should be designed with a lower FOV of around 55-75 because their players usually sit further from a display; normally the distance between a couch and a TV.

Usually there’s still going to be some fisheye lens effect (the FOV setting is higher than the actual portion of our visual arc that the display takes up), but it’s not so dramatic as to make people nauseous or look weirdly distorted.

You can typically fiddle with the FOV setting in PC games, but games are also gonna be balanced for one FOV, so if you crank your FOV in a PC game down, it may make the thing more-difficult than the game designers intended.

I’m pretty sure that Wolfenstein 3D had mouse support, unless it was added later, and I’m sure that (original) Doom did.

checks

https://soulsphere.org/apocrypha/keyboard/

Debunking the Myth that Doom was Keyboard-only

It also mentions Wolfenstein 3D:

I don’t know if I used the mouse with Wolfenstein 3D when it first came out. But I recall playing the Mac port later with a mouse, and that it didn’t feel great there.

I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse

You might also consider, if you’ve never tried one, using a trackball. Might be a benefit outside of just games, too, if you’re using a PC. There are some people who really strongly prefer them and dislike mice for various reasons (including some people who find mice to be more-problematic for some sort of repetitive stress injury they have).

I prefer a mouse as pointing device, but one can’t really use one if lying on a couch or in bed or something, and I keep a trackball around that I sometimes use in those cases.

Trackballs aren’t as common these days as a mouse alternative, given that laptops with trackpads have become more-prevalent, but I’m more accurate with one than with a trackpad, and if I couldn’t use a mouse, I’d probably spend a lot more trackball time.

We do have a trackball community here: [email protected]

There was an era, very early on, when PC first-person shooters were generally played with the keyboard. Wolfenstein 3D. I remember people who specifically wanted to play Doom with the keyboard rather than the mouse.

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=3814&controllersupport=28%2C60&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

Steam list of third-person shooters sorted by user rating for which controllers are preferred or full controller support is present.

then why not write modern software like how that was written?

Well, three reasons that come to mind:

First, because it takes more developer time to write efficient software, so some of what developers have done is used new hardware not to get better performance, but cheaper software. If you want really extreme examples, read about the kind of insanity that went into trying to make video games in the first three generations of video game consoles or so, on extremely limited hardware. I’d say that in most cases, this is the dominant factor.

Second, because to a limited degree, the hardware has changed. For example, I was just talking with someone complaining that Counter-Strike 2 didn’t perform well on his system. Most systems today have many CPU cores, and heavyweight video games and some other CPU-intensive software will typically seek to take advantage of those. CS2 apparently only makes much use of one or two cores. Go back to 2005, and the ability to saturate more cores was much less useful.

Third, in some cases, functionality is present that you might not immediately appreciate. For example, when I get a higher-resolution display in 2025, text typically doesn’t become tiny — instead, it becomes sharper. In 2005, most of it was rendered to pixel dimensions. Go back earlier, and most text wasn’t antialiased, and go back further and fonts seen on the screen were mostly just bitmap fonts, not vector. Those jumps generally made text rendering more-compute-expensive, but also made it look nicer. And that’s for something as simple as just drawing “hello world” on the screen.

I mean, they did make a lot of money, but they also had an extremely high valuation.

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/NVDA/nvidia/pe-ratio

NVIDIA PE ratio as of November 20, 2025 is 48.45.

Something like 20 is typical for a mature company. Tech companies have, in the past, often had higher ratios, but that’s based on their expectation to grow a lot rapidly, and expecting NVidia to dramatically grow from their current — already very high — valuation is asking a lot.

If NVidia were a small tech company that was doing well and clearly had a lot of market to expand into rapidly, that would be one thing.

I think that in general, the market has been pretty good to NVidia. Their share price is up 31.22% since the start of the year. 1,247% over the past five years.

There’s Mono. I don’t know what portion of .NET compatibility issues that addresses in 2025.

Thanks for adding it!