My understanding is that Pokémon is surprisingly cheap if you want to actually play the game as they reprint staples to oblivion (often <100$ for tier one decks).
It’s all collection based , which in and of itself is not necessarily an indictment on the value of Pokémon cards, but is much closer to greater fool theory than I’m comfortable with .
The main reason is that these days every rare collectible card in Pokémon is an alternate version of a cheaper card from the same set. For example, N's Zoroark ex ASC 286/217 is a $120 card, but the same set has a more common, mechanically identical $1 card numbered 137/217.
This is very much intended so that collectors chasing the nice full art / textured rare cards flood the second hand market with the less desirable cheaper versions. Players can then easily buy those cards for almost nothing and with ample volume available.
Very few non first party game where worth playing on the ds if you had access to anything else to be honest, at least when I was a kid. I do wish we had actually pocketable ish consoles from the big 3, but it seems like this market is covered by android devices.
I mean seriously people are defending Victorian England as if an entire genra of art (social realism) was not created to describe the horrors of industrialism at the time.
Doesn’t decapping chips require hydrofluoric acid ?
If so I cannot express enough respect, the one person I’ve interacted with that regularly worked with it put the fear of god with by showing what one insignificant miss for anything else did to his finger
No, the default acid used is nitric acid. Which should definitely be treated with respect, but isn't nearly as nasty as anything with fluorine.
But if you have a few examples of the chip and can break a few eggs to make an omelette, there are techniques that just involve hitting the epoxy with a blow torch and/or opening it up with plyers.
Not just regular nitric acid either, but red/white fuming nitric acid in many cases!
Back during my teenage years I used to make the stuff for decapping projects and amateur rocketry by grabbing the ingredients from our local hardware store and distilling it in a make-your-own-moonshine kit I bought off of craigslist.
Worked great up until the police were called because the store employees thought I was making bombs. I hear heating up sulfuric acid is the better way to decap epoxy chips nowadays.
A careless move with a skill saw can take your finger off too. I don't think acid deserves such a scary reputation. I guess because it doesn't make an obnoxious sound does make it easier to forget. But in both cases you must follow best practices (fume hood, goggles, bicarb wash nearby) , and suffer consequences if you don't.
For DoltLite in particular, push/pull/clone/fetch are an elegant solution to the local-first sync problem. You can use data conflicts instead of CRDTs.
In general, branch and merge seem to be required primitives for agentic writes. Would you let a coding agent change your code if it wasn't in Git? We think the same will apply to databases.
Because the fact that it is a tech gadget makes me more likely to write stuff down instead of believing I can remember everything. That’s about it , at least for my use case
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