dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️

INB4 chumps discover that cooling hardware in a vacuum is, in fact, quite difficult.

And if you really want a simulacrum of a real product for whatever reason, Aliexpress exists and has the same crap available for a fraction of the cost, and doesn’t enrich Jeff Bezos.

No shit. All they have to do is finally grow the balls to build SSD’s in the same form factor as the 3.5" drives everyone in enterprise is already using, and stuff those to the gills with flash chips.

“But that will cannibalize our artificially price inflated/capacity restricted M.2 sales if consumers get their hands on them!!!”

Yep, it sure will. I’ll take ten, please.

Something like that could easily fill the oodles of existing bays that are currently filled with mechanical drives, both in the home user/small scale enthusiast side and existing rackmount stuff. But that’d be too easy.

Amazon boycott March 7th through forever. There’s no need to give them an end date. Our action is completely toothless when we literally spell out for them exactly when we’ll come crawling back start giving them money again.

In a way, we brought this on ourselves by tolerating scalpers. Gamers made it known that they’ll go hysterical and pay any price to have it now. If enough of us don’t do that, scalping video cards won’t be a lucrative business and the fuckers will be forced to give up. I guarantee you the reason the stock is disappearing so fast is because resellers have their fucking bots set up to spam all the retailer web sites, and the rest is people trying to compete with them.

What a rat race. Fuck the entire thing.

We have it better than we’ve ever had it at any point in the past, also: Broad PCI-E backwards compatibility means you can stick your old card in your new board and tough it out for a few months until the fervor dies down and/or the scalpers lose their shirts sitting on their inventory.

The model uses “advanced reasoning, thinking, and multimodal capabilities”…

Well, LLM’s are incapable of actually doing the first two, so we’re already off to a great start.

I don’t think it’s much in the way of hyperbole to say that if they make this the default or worse, only search output option then this will be the thing that literally destroys the company.

No one except idiotic boardroom denizens actually wants this. Google failing to provide actual search results is the singular one and only thing that could actually get users to switch away from using it – and not do that thing where they just grumble and bitch and moan but keep using it anyway. And if no one is searching on Google then nobody is seeing ads on Google, which means Google will not be selling ads.

I will laugh so hard if this happens.

Only if you can keep it working for ten consecutive minutes. I went through three of them under warranty until my warranty expired, then Epson told me to fuck off.

If have a Canon color laser now. If that conks out and everything on the market by then is locked out shit I’ll just convert my 3D printer to a plotter, or maybe go back to clay tablets.

You can format a flash drive with whatever the hell file system you want. Just, don’t expect anything formatted exFAT to work in any dedicated device made before 2019, nor even the majority of them made afterwards.

The ones who need to get their shit together are the manufacturers of printers, media players, car head units, set top boxes, game consoles, and all the other things into which you might want to insert a flash drive (or memory card) that is not a full-blown PC.

Yeah. Just prepare for dust. Wear a mask, open a window…

I don’t think anyone is suggesting you take a hose to your indoor units. How on Earth you would contain the splashback is anyone’s guess.

Use your hose on the outdoor unit. I use compressed air on the indoor ones, like OP. You can buy the cleaning foam stuff, too. Probably from whoever made your split system, in fact. I’ve never found it to be necessary, though.

Stupid time! You made me look bad. Ooga booga booga!

Story time!

I used to work doing delivery for Dominos, in the early Paleolithic before all of these damn app based food delivery schemes existed. Or, in fact, not only before you could get reliable maps on your smartphone, but before most people knew what a smartphone was.

Our store’s delivery service area included the city in which we were based and a significant fraction of the countryside it was nestled in. We’re talking, you go from blocks of rowhomes on numbered streets, 3rd Ave, 4th Ave, etc. and a quarter mile up the road all of the sudden you can only see four houses before the horizon and every mailbox seems to skip about 300 numbers.

So TL;DR: I wound up with a delivery out in the hinterlands to a place that I thought was on a little side road off of the main rural road out here, but actually turned out to be a sub-lot that was accessed by the main road itself, not the side street, and I guess the post office was just drunk when they handed out the house number. Whatever, says I, I am already parked here, it is a nice summer night, and it is but a short 50 yard trudge across the fallow field in between.

Which had a ditch in it.

Which I did not see.

Because some turkey had weed-whacked the tall grass in it to appear superficially at the exact same overall height as the surrounding level ground, possibly as a gag.

Well, down I went and in deference to not landing on the pizza I twisted around and wound up flat on my back in the grass, with the pizza bag and its contents on top of me, clutched to my chest. Upside down.

I thought for sure this was going to be a drive back to the restaurant for a remake, but I found by the light of my little flashlight that the pizza was perfectly intact, all toppings and cheese in place, and quite resolutely glued to the bottom of the box. Nobody would ever know.

…I stopped eating the pizza from work at that point.

Well, we’ll have to ignore the gaping plot-induced stupidity on display by practically everyone throughout the entire story, because without it the books would have been quite short. So setting that aside, because I’m sure it’s been trampled to death already.

The complete unwillingness for the wizarding world to utilize even basic Muggle technologies and knowledge is absolutely baffling. It’s insinuated that they don’t need Muggle things because they can substitute them with magic which is “equivalent.” This is self-evidently hokum.

These idiots still write with quills, read by candlelight, don’t use the Internet, and despite having literal magic at their disposal their communication systems (such as they are) are laughably inferior to common Muggle ones even in the context of the time period in which the story is supposedly set. Come on. Owls?

Magic users demonstrate basically no understanding of science and are all demonstrably the worse off for it, still having a nearly medieval understanding of how the world works, and rely on magic as a crutch to weakly compensate. This even when it’s obvious to an outside observer that a basic piece of mundane knowledge or technology would be not only easier and significantly less dangerous than whatever the fuck their homegrown solution is, but also more effective. This is treated in supplementary works by Rowling as if it’s a point of pride by wizards and witches who deliberately eschew anything of Muggle origin – even if this means going to great lengths to shoot themselves in the foot simply to maintain that attitude of aloofness, which only serves to underscore the sheer stupidity apparently heavily ingrained into magical culture.

The fact that neither Harry nor none of the other Muggleborn kids are puzzled by this, nor why they apparently deliberately fail to bring so much as a common yellow #2 pencil with them from the mundane world out of sheer habit makes zero sense. (And yes, this is touched upon in the already recommended Methods of Rationality.)

Magical consumer goods are also seriously customer hostile. Who the fuck thought even half of those things were a desirable marketable product? Is there an evil wizard version of Willy Wonka lurking around someplace? Think of all the pocket change a Muggleborn lad could make by bringing a case of jelly beans with him to school to sell to his classmates where you don’t have a one in twenty chance of one of them tasting like earwax. Or chocolates that can’t hop away from you when you aren’t looking. I mean, for fuck’s sake.

And following from the above, everyone is so concerned about the damage to the karma done by the unforgivable spells, or whatever, which is supposedly why nobody goes to all-out war with the Death Eaters. But then no one gets the brain cells together to realize that Voldemort and especially his goons are surely vulnerable to conventional weapons. All anyone has to do is camp in a corner with a shotgun and then call out they-who-must-not-be-named, enticing them to appear to simply get Swiss Cheesed before having clue one what’s going on. Maybe Voldy can’t be truly killed by any form of physical harm, but the entire premise of the story begins with the observation that he can be put to considerable inconvenience, putting him down for quite some time, and thus buy the protagonists plenty of time to figure out his stupid riddles and find all his horcruxes. Then simply drive over whatever’s left of him with a steamroller.

What a useless pile of words spent moaning about ad clicks, specifically to gain ad clicks.

Don’t talk, “organize.”

Okay, how? How do we effectively organize to fight against an enemy who has already for all intents and purposes won, in a way that won’t get us rounded up and shot by the Gestapo? Please tell us.

“We don’t know, that’s your problem. Just ‘organize.’”

The answer is apathy.

You have to remember that most users simply don’t care. The majority of consumers are some combination of either not technologically savvy or just outright intimidated by technology, are not very well educated, are incredibly reluctant to read, are not particularly observant, will not leave their routines or comfort zones without very significant motivation, and have spent their entire lives being the very frog in that gradually boiling pot of ever more numerous and intrusive advertising to the point that they just accept this as “normal.” They’re busy. They don’t read tech headlines. They don’t understand what’s going on under the hood, and nor do they want to.

Normal people don’t see the world like us nerds do. I am positive that these streaming services (and many other businesses) have studied this and understand it very well. If they lose 1% of their business which was made up by vocal nerds, but whatever odious change the just rolled out results in an increase in profit that is greater than the revenue from those subscriptions lost, they’ll go ahead and do it anyway.

They think they have a captive audience because by and large they functionally do have a captive audience. This stuff works, and people keep paying for it en masse.