MudMan

Yeah, man, storage is storage. Once you get down the redundancy chain enough even a crappy salvage drive on its last legs may end up being a cost-effective way to prevent some data loss later.

I’m actively considering going on a drive plunder run of old, semi-busted hdds both at home and in used sales sites to eventually build a static redundancy backup of files I know aren’t going to change in the foreseeable future. Because why not.

Huh This seems like such a pointless scam when the refurb drive market is such a widespread thing. These days you can just say they’re used and still offload them for decent prices.

Yeah, I guess that’s how mini PCs got popular in the first place. Just cram a laptop in a box, get most of the performance and less of the hassle. At a premium, of course, so I imagine on the manufacturing side it’s quite the win/win.

Still, a 10x multiplier in power consumption at idle and over 5x under load is pretty wild.

A fun one to put in perspective how hideously power hungry modern desktop PCs are is that I have an old (ish) laptop running as a local Plex server that also has a LLM loaded in there and a few other docker bits and pieces and it just sits happily humming at 10W idle (which is as much as my TV draws when it’s turned off).

I’ve looked into building a small form factor PC to replace it at some point but all the spare parts I have lying around would draw as much idle as when that tiny thing is going full tilt and I just can’t justify it for something that just stays on waiting for me to feel like rewatching The Matrix or whatever.

Yeah, man, getting into Home Assistant and messing with energy monitoring did more than thousands of chastising TV segments to get me to fully shut down my computers.

Who gives a crap about gaming use power consumption, give me idle benchmarks, you cowards. Do you even know how kWh work?

They already made it simple, are you kidding me? You are running a different OS inside an entrirely fictitious computer that doesn’t exist, and it takes a few clicks to set up on stock software that comes with your OS or is freely downloadable online. The whole thing is magic.

Magic that is still way below the awareness of common users. I’m not acting like “no one” wants to use VMs, I’m telling you that, at scale, this is not key functionality for the vast majority of the userbase. Which is entirely accurate.

And because the vast majority of the userbase is on Windows and doesn’t even know this would be a problem, that’s not WHY they’re on Windows or not on Linux. It’s not even a “tiny brain” thing, it’s just what people use (and don’t use) computers for.

That seems extremely inefficient. You already have a panel in your house with some capacity to push power to your appliances. It makes a lot more sense for most applications to just set up enough panels to feed that power and put them through an inverter.

I don’t see a scenario where you build a bunch of blank scaffolding in your roof (assuming you have an accessible roof in the first place) and then have to climb up there every time you buy a new microwave.

This is demonstrably wrong on a scale where it loops around to becoming hard to explain, so that’s a neat trick.

There are enough people who have never heard of or don’t understand the concept of virtual machines to keep Windows as the biggest mainstream OS several times over. There isn’t a “root layer” in computers as far as normal humans are concerned. They’re computers and then a Windows pops up and that’s how that works.

At the very most, they understand conversion layers on the basis of having gone from an old Macbook to a new Macbook, and even that is like a tenth of the market (still several times bigger than Linux adoption, though).

The idea that a mass of people are waiting on the sidelines, chomping at the bit for direct GPU access through an extra layer of software fine tuning to be able to run some brand name Windows app with no Linux version is absurd. Even games are not the problem, as evidenced by that being mostly solved via Proton and not changing much.

I don’t mind either way, but man, consider what other assumptions you may be making that are wildly off, particularly if they’re on something more important than your hopes for relative OS market share on home computers.

What type of news editor for a hardware review outlet gets that wrong? That’s as weird as the Snowden thing. If you have that job you’ve surely been joking about AMD’s shameful “we just want to use the same name as Nvidia” thing for ages by now. This thing is so surreal.

So to put the likelihood of this in perspective, let me just repeat it to see if I understand the claim.

You’re saying that one of the big reasons of Windows’ market share is how artificially inefficient it is to install Linux, spin up a Virtual Machine, run Windows inside THAT and then run a game?

That’s the mainstream use case that is propping up Windows adoption in this scenario?

Wait, did the guy refuse to call AMD’s 9070 by its official name out of spite there at the end? Is this a weird tech The Onion thing?

The amount of Simpsons I haven’t seen now dwarfs the pieces I have seen, and I’ve seen A LOT of The Simpsons.

But yeah, basically. It’s why old TV shows often depict injuries by just smearing red paint on someone’s face. They knew how to make better makeup, they just didn’t have to.

Oh, and why anything written down is in marker and with hilariously huge preschool letters. And why you get all those awkward extreme close up inserts on any object that is plot relevant. The medium is context for the message.

I’m gonna be honest with you, I watched 20 years of Batman reruns and never noticed this once.

CRTs were a whole thing.

It was a genuine Mandela effect moment when I saw clips from a DVD re-release or whatever it was in HD for the first time and went “what is THAT on his face”?

You… may not have been following the news for the past couple of years.

Doesn’t quite look like “quiet death mistaken for peace” out there, and it seems like the world destroying is very much being done with guns, as per usual.

Endless capitalist growth and wealth accumulation is still bad, though, don’t get me wrong, and oligarchy is, as always, tied to all the rest of it. That’s just a bit of a reductionist take.

The “underlying value” isn’t much of a concern if you’re someone seeking funding or a small investor. It’s also not much of a concern if the “unchecked moral hazards” are still funneling money towards a small group of capitalists. Or if the political ramifications of the reporting are impactful in other areas.

It’s not a media conspiracy if all the real world consequences are based on the same consensual reality. “It’s all fake reporting anyway” is not a valid response here, even without disputing the base assumptions, which I probably would.

Man, the hysterical, unhinged US market just has no chill.

Someone came up with a better chatbot-- “OMG, superintelligence is here and is inevitable, all hail our robot overlords and their broligarch creators!”

Somebody outside the US had an idea to train a chatbot for cheaper-- “OMG, US tech is doomed, they have no recourse against this and all the hardware is now worthless!”

Maybe if the markets weren’t constantly freaking the hell out about any semblance of technological innovation in search for the next Google or Apple they woldn’t have to deflate like a balloon each time reality sets in.

You were talking to it in Portuguese? Because I definitely managed to get R1 to freak out using less frequent languages and just spout gibberish.

In any case, that’s not unique to this model, either. People need to stop taking chatbot statements about themselves as if a person was self-identifying. Most declarations of a chatbot about itself are either enforced manually or wild guesses. The chatbot doesn’t know about itself any more than it knows about any other subject.

It’s telling that the takeaway is “the hive mind amalgam at the core of this corporation wasn’t a real progressive ally” and not “it’s super important to avoid fascists in power because as they go, so do the economic powers.”

We’ll learn the wrong lessons into oblivion. It’s likely we already did.

Man, people sure like a dogpile.

The movie was on in 11 theatres in the US. It was never a wide release. Small indie films are often financed on pre-sold distribution rights anyway. The movie did the festival rounds and is on Amazon Prime Video and other streaming services, it was probably fine for them, if clearly not a career booster for most involved.

I get that people don’t realize how many movies are made worldwide that pretty much nobody watches outside festivals, but I promise you it’s a lot more than you think.

Help. I started seeing the gap between the arms and the bottle as boobs and now I can’t unsee it.