I got one for work. It literally just pastes into ChatGPT

I have memories of some random afternoons at the consulting firm my mom worked at, where everyone’s just poking at spreadsheets. I can’t imagine how cool the memory of going into the server farm and doing some hardware work there would be

Folder structures are a bizarre thing for many people

When learning about this I learned that in the analog days folks would actually put physical folders inside of physical folders and it both makes tons of sense and is mind blowing at the same time. -Late Millennial born to IT parents

With the amount of password resets I have to do at work, I can’t say I’m shocked

qbittorrent search makes it stupid easy too

Signing the photo on the camera would achieve this, but ultimately that’s just rehashing the debate back when this Photoshop thing was new. History shows us that some will fight it but ultimately new artistic tools will create new artistic styles and niches

And I use AI to determine the right brightness level for my phone screen (that was a feature added several android versions ago)

UN, which… failed to keep dictatorships out

The UN while created with noble intentions certainly fell for the paradox of tolerance. They tolerate the dictatorships and human rights abusers because if they didn’t they’d be much less empowered to take action against them, or worse they’d form their own competing UN made up of nations motivated to join them and you’d just end up with another NATO and Warsaw Pact for example. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

Ultimately the challenge comes down to how do you ultimately tame the leaders of the world who have absolute power. The founding fathers of the United States of America thought they had the solution with democracy and the many checks and balances they implemented into this new form of government they setup, but even that has its challenges and failures that they never could have forseen. The UN was the next experiment, trying to take the similar principles onto the world stage, and it’s been less successful (but at least has had some successes)

There’s actually a real world example of this. Some cats that are disected in schools are euthanized cats from shelters, because the alternative is cat farms that breed cats just to be killed and disected

Contextual ads can be simple images/html without 20 thousand scripts buried in

Oh that’s good to know! Too bad my nearest target is 20 miles away and a very annoying drive over a poorly designed arterial road

You can usually snag items for 75% or more off about 1-2 years after launch on Steam (and by extension all other PC game sales platforms) and it’s consistent enough that you can count on it (and I do!). I’ve never seen discounts go that deep on consoles, at least not for games I actually play.

I recently got my first current-gen game console a couple of years ago (Nintendo switch) and was floored at how expensive all of the games are and how meager the sales are. PC gaming is shockingly cheap when you get down to it

I just hope it makes it out of development hell unlike Kerbal Space Program 2

x86-64 is a CISC architecture

In many cases it’s actually RISC under the hood and uses an interpreter to translate the CISC commands and run them in the most optimal manner on the silicon

ARM and RISC-V absolutely scale up to multi-hundred watt server CPUs quite easily. Just look at the Ampere systems you can rent from various VPSes for example

The big benefit that ARM and RISC-V have is they have no established backwards compatibility to keep carrying technical debt forwards. ARM versions their instruction sets and software has to be released for given versions of ARM cores, and RISC-V is simply too new to have any significant technical debt on the instruction set side.

Atom cores were notable for focusing the architecture on some instructions then other instructions would be a slog to execute, so they were really good at certain things and for desktop use (especially in the extremely budget machines they got shoved into) they were painful. Much like how eCores are now. They’re very carefully architected for power efficiency, and do their jobs extremely well, but an all eCore CPU is a slog for desktop use in many cases

There’s even extreme edgecases where a compromised machine being part of a botnet actually improves security because the malware shores up security to help itself remain persistent and not find itself removed/blocked by other malware or attackers

My experience when I worked in support for a device manufacturer is that if you get high enough in the support tree and can demonstrate that this effects you (and the support person will also have a matrix of affected devices) you’ll still get a repair/replacement outside of warranty for them bricking your computer with a bad update.

We had a specific instance where a specific budget model of phone sold by Boost mobile would brick after a specific update for people who had subsidy unlocked it and taken it to a GSM carrier such as T-Mobile (this was shortly pre-merger) or AT&T. This update rolled out about 2.5 years after this devices release, so most customers were ~12 months outside of warranty. Since the scope of affected devices was so narrow our directions from the top was to replace affected devices regardless of warranty status, and the replacement would come with a standard 30 day replacement warranty

So in short, I would expect HP to repair/replace affected devices that bricked after this BIOS update regardless of warranty status, but I would expect some amount of hassle in terms of reaching a specific support department before you get assistance and standard refusal of service for customer induced physical damage (smashed screen, smashed ports, mashed potatoes in the ports, badly bent, etc.)

Don’t forget to check food pantries. Many nonprofit foodbanks don’t gate based on income, particularly those operated by churches. It’s often stuff that’s close to expiration, or very cheap brands that you might not want to eat, but it’s better than literally only eating cream cheese and will give you more variety of calories and nutrients to work with

Some neighbors did an experiment one year where they got a 3lb bag of potatoes, cut them all in half then tossed half of them into a garbage bin full of dirt and ate the other half, placed said bin of dirt and potatoes at thw side of the house and periodically watered it. They ended up with more potatoes than they knew what to do with and declared “never again”

Edit: just realized I half described that story already. I’ll just add they had moved to the area from Idaho not long before trying this

Some people just randomly get hemmroids for no apparent reason