At this point Void feels like Slackware for the 21st century. It’s comprehensive and less full of “modern linux” hairballs than some others, but they seem pretty good on package updates. I like it being non-systemd as a first class thing rather than trying to backport it on an uncooperative parent distro.

You see low voltage ones for things like memory backup on hi-fi gear. I have some 3F/5v capacitors in an old Technics tiner.

This is big “if we break your old toys, you’ll HAVE to play with the new ones” energy.

Tell me when they port FVWM. Seriously. FvwmButtons-- a pretty trivial dock except it can swallow other windows-- seems like it would be out-of-bounds on Wayland unless it was owned by the compositor itself to access the other windows. I don’t see any of the new taskbar-tools used with Wayland compositors offering similar functionality (I could be wrong) and that seems an amazing loss of feature parity.

When it was new it had minor charm-- the idea it was cheap and there were trillions of coins in circulation made it so penny-ante that people could have fun with it, and experiment with the tech on a tiny budget.

I played a little with it back in 2014 or so. You could buy some by interacting with a Reddit bot, and I mined a few coins on a GTX 660 (midrange gaming card for the day.

I recall sending 5000 coins to a local dogs-rescue that tried to join on the novelty, and paying for some used RAM in part with it.

By then BTC was basically unplayable without a rack of ASICs and it was already moving past the “currency” phase straight to “speculative asset”.

If you’re thinking amplifier, just grab your favourite Japanese '70s hi-fi range and go from there. Can hardly go wrong.

A half-scale Harman/Kardon 330c but with an OLED info display in the panel that held a tuning scale might kill it.

The key is to use the right materials. They sold a modern CD-based stereo a few years ago that apes the look of a small Marantz 22xx, but being plastic garbage, sort of fails the mission. Conversely, Yamaha did some new silver-face amps that don’t look like dollar-store tat.

In 2006, it was the least hot garbage choice though.

If your software supports authorize.net, you can often use some other gateways with a drop-in compatible API by changing the endpoint.

What the hell is with the “Thank you for your attention to this matter?”

You’re shitposting to a global media audience, not politely asking Facilities to restock the vending machine with Snickers bars.

Are you just in full Business Guy Autocomplete mode? A Bigly Language Model?

XFCE’s old panel was a distinct mimic of CDE’s. I liked it…

But now CDE is open source and NsCDE gives you the same look with a highly customised fvwm config if you don’t want to stick to the Motif universe.

The UK issued silver dollars once. They were dated 1804 and considered “bank tokens” as they had less silver than their denomination required at the time. They basically stamped a new design on Spanish colonial 8-real coins and passed them as five shillings.

The UK had a hard time with coin supply for most of the 1700s until 1816 when they finally downdized many coins.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

It’s nifty that’s what’s worth the BOM price hike.

I wanted something like Memtest or advanced diagnostics, or a recovery tool which could mount popular filesystems and fix partition tables, or a burn-in suite. Or hell, boot-to-Tetris.

I’m surprised there aren’t a small range of full-height 8-platter 5.25" form factor drives, the kind that would be 1GB in like 1993, for the bragging rights for max-capacity-in-a-single-drive.

I suspect it could be seen as a proper noun.

If Acme and FooCorp create a bridge between their private network spaces, it’s an internet (common noun) but not the Internet (proper noun, referring to the one with Goatse).

Let’s find an English teacher. And yell at them for forcing us to read the same terrible novel in both 10th and 12th grades. Maybe after that, return to this subject.

I’d say it’s a bad thing because it’s the wrong threat model as a default.

More home users are in scenarios like “I spilled a can of Diet Sprite into my laptop, can someone yank the SSD and recover my cat pictures” than “Someone stole my laptop and has physical access to state secrets that Hegseth has yet to blurt on Twitch chat”. Encryption makes the first scenario a lot harder to easily recover from, and people with explicit high security needs should opt into it or have organization-managed configs.

The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.

Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.

EA now being a model to aspire to?! What next? Cats chasing dogs? Sunshine at midnight? America showing responsible global leadership? nVidia making a fairly priced GPU?

It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.

The problem with attribution is the difficulty of 1000% accurate compliance.

If you grab 100 lines of code from a repository, or five paragraphs from a story, there’s probably a claim there. If you grab a single word, there’s probably not. But in the middle, there’s a paralysis of uncertainty-- is n lines similar enough to create liability? Can you remember where you saw what reliably? You end up with a bias towards “over-attribution” and it becomes difficult to pare it back. Does everything need a full Git-style commit history? Are we forever stuck keeping a credit on a project because it’s difficult to prove you’ve fully scrubbed their contributions?

Focus on how we pay artists (ideally lush grants) and forget about credit. Maybe establish a culture where it’s voluntary and acceptable-- that people feel that they’re allowed to cite their raw materials, and reuse doesn’t make the work lesser-- but don’t try to use the courts to force people to try to remember and track where they saw something when they just want to create, or it creates a hostile environment.

Hey, the broken clock’s right!

IP law always had a built-in scale pronlem. Without a registration-required copyright model, and probably some sort of mandatory licensing rate system, the sheer logistics of finding and arranging rights made a lot of business models inpractical. (For example, why aren’t modern bookstores just print-on-demand kiosks, or streaming services have All The Content? In large part because it would cost thousands to track down owners and negotiate terms for $1.87 in royalties multiplied by every item in the catalog.)

This was ignorable for a long time, or even a commercial advantage for firms with access to large, pre-negotiated catalogs. The AI boom created a surprise market of non-incumbents who need to get access to a lot of IP in a streamlined manner.

If we open the door for bulk IP clearance to grant the AI bubble a stro ger legal footing, it can also allow other, potentially more interesting business ideas to slip through.