I put out one of those big plastic storage units with like 30 little drawers recently, figuring although 2 were missing, someone could still use it. I stood it next to the dustbin, on trash day where it would be optimally visible for anyone who wanted to scrounge it.

The bloody HOA took a picture and sent a nastygram.

Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

My objections:

1. It doesn’t adequately indicate “confidence”. It could return “foo” or “!foo” just as easily, and if that’s one term in a nested structure, you could spend hours chasing it.
2. So many hallucinations-- inventing methods and fields from nowhere, even in an IDE where they’re tagged and searchable.

Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.

Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box

Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.

But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.

Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.

There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.

As a (non-game) developer, AI isn’t even that great at reducing my burden.

The organization is enthusiastic about AI, so we set up the Gitlab Copilot plugin for our development tools.

Even as “spicy autocomplete” only about one time in 4 or so it makes a useful suggestion.

There’s so much hallucination, trying to guess the next thing I want and usually deciding on something that came out of its shiny metal ass. It actually undermines the tool’s non-AI features, which pre-index the code to reliably complete fields and function names that actually exist.

I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

The experience could be somewhat tamed by a lottery process.

Accept a token deposit for a week or two, and then draw from people contending for a given seat, then give them another week to pay the balance. Any unclaimed seats are put up at will call night-of-the-show. Limit the number of deposits taken from any given card to prevent “I’ll claim 30 seats and only buy 1” gaming of the lottery.

There’s probably some more complexity about it (if you want N seats together), but I think that would dramatically cut back on the frustration for “the tickets were only available for 14 seconds and the server was being DDOSed by scalper bots.”

Having to put down a deposit with no guarantee of a ticket also makes “buy All The Seats” scalping theoretically impossible and economically riskier. If there’s 5/1 contention for a ticket, you’d have to find a way to get 3 lottery slots for a better than even chance of getting it. If the deposit was $10, you’re spending $30 for the chance to buy a $50 ticket-- so if you can’t resell the ticket for at least $80, you lose. Under current policies, if you can sell that $50 ticket for $51, you’re ahead.

Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.

The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.

We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.

I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I’m not sure where the extra resources should go.

Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.

They’ve pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.

There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn’t

It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.

Yeah, I’d suspect Rifas before dust when I hear “exploded on first power up”

Also on modern firebreathers.

I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

I’ve had KVMs that don’t like the ‘fancier’ USB keyboards with NKRO. It would work, but it wouldn’t listen for its own ‘switch to different console’ hotkeys. Reconfiguring the keyboard to run in 6KRO-only mode addressed it, but not every keyboard can be configured that way.

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

I got a ~6k Dogecoin windfall a few years back. (Found the coins I bought in 2014 at <0.1c, sold at 25c)

I think I put like 1k into my more conventional investments, blew like $2k in indulgences (new GPU, collectibles), and set most of the rest aside for the revenuers.

We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.

I think you’re thinking of the Socket A Athlon/Duron/Sempron. A lot of coolers used shitty mounting designs so it was possible to get it off alignment or over-pressure it and crack the die, and no heatspreader + poor thermal controls allowed for a meltdown if the mountng was bad.

The K6-2 was pretty solid aside from not quite holding performance crowns.