Seriously, they got so expensive so fast.

At this point, if I want a burger, I’ll go spend $11 at Chili’s and get an actually good burger, some chips, fries, and a drink.

Why would ANYONE who is not literally bereft of any other option go to McDonalds at this point?

Listen, I can’t just not use Amazon. Where else am I going to get my SYPHILICHODE nail trimmers and LEAKCROTCH underwear?

You can’t just find horrible garbage to buy ANYWHERE, you gotta buy it on Amazon.

I can live without it for a week, but man, these underwear don’t last too long so I gotta keep buying more!

(/s in case this was not sufficiently clear, but this is the ultimate problem with all these pointless little internet symbolic gestures: nobody will notice, remember, or care about them since they’re only going to be a very minor stoppage in buying things, which everyone ends up buying ANYWAYS after the week is over.)

Hey, Tesla tires and wheels are suuuuuper expesnive relative to normal cars.

Like several hundred dollars per tire (or in the case of the fatty dumpster, like $600) becauase the cars are so heavy you can’t just use ye olde normal tires on them.

I would very much like EVERY tire and wheel thief to go after nothing but Teslas and leave everyone else alone. Better money, and absolutely nobody will ever recall seeing you steal shit.

Hey if you’re near a Tesla storage lot, there probably IS a couple hundred cybertrucks nearby.

Sitting there, having their wheels stolen and rotting since nobody is buying them, but that’s still technically nearby.

Elon has always been a terrible person

The problem with Elon is he’s been provably an idiot for the past 25 years.

The first thing I ever heard about Musky is that back in 2000-ish he wanted PayPal to take their infra, throw out all the Linux/BSD in use, and move everything to Windows NT.

Anyone who was even remotely IT adjacent in that era can come along and tell you how utterly moronic that idea is.

Anytime I’ve ever heard him blather on about some stupid shit that doesn’t exist except in his delusions or talk about, well, ANYTHING technical or specialized all I was ever able to think of is that he got lucky that Thiel didn’t drain all of his blood and leave his corpse in a ditch.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

Uber-like surge pricing on electricity

We don’t really: that story you heard from a few years ago was the only company that billed like that. The customers made a bet that the pricing averages through the day (lower at night, higher cost during the day) would average out in their favor over fixed-cost billing, and frankly, it did right up until it didn’t.

They took a risk and got bit by, frankly, not understanding how the system works and basically ate the spikes.

Everyone else paid $0.09/kwh or so during that whole period, and the electric providers ate the cost because when you’re averaging out spikes across millions of kwh, it won’t lead to bankruptcy.

“Work 50% longer weeks so you can make something that’ll both make me richer AND cost you your jobs!” is not the motivational speech he thinks it is.

Or, if it was named by users of Microsoft products:

New Teams (2) Final-Final (1) Final-THIS ONE

They’re almost certainly doing that because they’re forcing you into SMS 2fa as a ‘backup’ to the TOTP solution.

Cheaper to get everyone’s phone number so you can send them a text message when they fuck up their totp app/delete it/get a new phone/whatever than deal with support calls.

It’s stupid and insecure and incredibly dumb, but, well, business decisions.

You’re thinking the MOS (now western design) 6502, not the Moto 68k chips. 68k is Macintosh and Amiga and other systems of that era.

No, they won’t.

At best you’ll get some sort of nearly worthless concession because they have to slap in cellular hardware to make the ad bit work - something like you’ll get free traffic updates on your gps nav (sold seperately) - since they need some sort of enticement.

No way they’d offer anything remotely looking like a meaningful discount.

Look launching our billionaires into deep space is no better than interstellar littering.

We should be better than that.

I bet we could launch them into Jupiter or Saturn no problems.

For bandwidth intensive stuff I like wholesale internet’s stuff.

The hardware is very uh, old, but the network quality is great since they run an ix. And it’s unmetered too so it’s probably sufficient.

Every platform ends up coated in a layer of CSAM filth, so I wouldn’t really attribute this to a malicious intent desiring Bluesky to be destroyed as much as people are horrible and gross and the internet is a prime example of why we can’t have nice things.

The real test here is if Bluesky is going to do the legal minimum, or actually do something aggressive, proactive, and useful.

You can find reasonably stable and easy to manage software for everything you listed.

I know this is horribly unpopular around here, but you should, if you want to go this route, look at Nextcloud. It 's a monolithic mess of PHP, but it’s also stable, tested, used and trusted in production, and doesn’t have a history of lighting user data on fire.

It also doesn’t really change dramatically, because again, it’s used by actual businesses in actual production, so changes are slow (maybe too slow) and methodical.

The common complaints around performance and the mobile clients are all valid, but if neither of those really cause you issues then it’s a really easy way to handle cloud document storage, organization, photos, notes, calendars, contacts, etc. It’s essentially (with a little tweaking) the entire gSuite, but self-hosted.

That said, you still need to babysit it, and babysit your data. Backups are a must, and you’re responsible for doing them and testing them. That last part is actually important: a backup that doesn’t have regular tests to make sure they can be restored from aren’t backups they’re just thoughts and prayers sitting somewhere.

I’m sure an AI babysitter won’t be immediately and utterly broken and bypassed by every single kid in these “classes”.

(Seriously: we’re talking about 8-12 year olds here and the absolutely are smart enough and incentivized to break the ever-loving crap out of this stupid idea.)

contrast to their desktop offerings

That’s because server offerings are real money, which is why Intel isn’t fucking those up.

AMD is in the same boat: they make pennies on client and gaming (including gpu), but dumptrucks of cash from selling Epycs.

IMO, the Zen 5(%) and Arrow Lake bad-for-gaming results are because uarch development from Intel and AMD are entirely focused on the customers that pay them: datacenter and enterprise.

Both of those CPU families clearly show that efficiency and a focus on extremely threaded workloads were the priorities, and what do you know, that’s enterprise workloads!

end of the x86 era

I think it’s less the era of x86 is ended and more the era of the x86 duopoly putting consumer/gaming workloads first has ended because, well, there’s just no money there relative to other things they could invest their time and design resources in.

I also expect this to happen with GPUs: AMD has already given up, and Intel is absolutely going to do that as soon as they possibly can without it being a catastrophic self-inflicted wound (since they want an iGPU to use). nVidia has also clearly stopped giving a shit about gaming - gamers get a GPU a year or two after enterprise has cards based on the same chip, and now they charge $2000* for them - and they’re often crippled in firmware/software so that they won’t compete with the enterprise cards as well as legally not being allowed to use the drivers in a situation like that.

ARM is probably the consumer future, but we’ll see who and with what: I desperately hope that nVidia and MediaTek end up competitive so we don’t end up in a Qualcomm oops-your-cpu-is-two-years-old-no-more-support-for-you hellscape, but well, nVidia has made ARM SOCs for like, decades, and at no point would I call any of the ones they’ve ever shipped high performance desktop replacements.

• Yes, I know there’s a down-stack option that shows up later, but that’s also kinda the point: the ones you can afford will show up for you… eventually. Very much designed to push purchasers into the top end.

Yeah DNS is, in general, just goofy and weird and a lot of the interactions I wouldn’t expect someone who’s done it for years to necessarily know.

And besides, the round-robin thing is my favorite weird DNS fact so any excuse to share it is great.

I mean, recovery from parity data is how all of this works, this just doesn’t require you to have a controller, use a specific filesystem, have matching sized drives or anything else. Recovery is mostly like any other raid option I’ve ever used.

The only drawback is that the parity data is mostly equivalent in size to the actual data you’re making parity data of, and you need to keep a couple copies of indexes since if you lose the index or the parity data, no recovery for you.

In my case, I didn’t care: I’m using the oldest drives I’ve got as the parity drives, and the newer, larger drives for the data.

If i were doing the build now and not 5 years ago, I might pick a different solution but there’s something to be said for an option that’s dead simple (looking at you, zfs) and likely to be reliable because it’s not doing anything fancy (looking at you, btrfs).

From a usage (not technical) standpoint, the most equivalent commercial/prefabbed solution would probably be something like unraid.