The only innovation most companies allow themselves to afford to make is in marketing. Most of the industry has to be dragged kicking and screaming into doing something legitimately better.

That’s why new PC hardware news is no longer in the realm of “This guy in our lab figured out how to propagate a clock circuit much better, giving us twice as much space to put logic at a very small cost increase” and more “The screen on the fan cover can now rotate!!! (*not compatible with AMD CPUs)”

Boy have I got news for you.

Look up the Zizians.

(Ok they’re only a tangential offshoot of people who maybe really like the Basilisk thought experiment and mostly don’t believe it. But hey. It’s underway!)

I can’t place why, but the thought of used enterprise SSDs still sketches me out more than HDDs. Maybe it’s just that I only ever think of RAID in terms of hard drives, paired with a decade+ of hearing about SSD reliability issues, which are very different from the more familiar problems HDDs can have.

The power and noise difference makes it more appealing to me, moreso than the speed, personally. Maybe when consumer bottom-barrel SSDs get a little better I could be convinced into RAIDing a bunch of them and hoping one cold spare is enough.

EDIT: I can acquire new ~200$ 4TB Orico branded drives where I am relatively easily. Hm.

Once every few months I remember that there’s virtually no chance my name and information aren’t in these databases, especially now that my country has gone through a recent war phase. Even if I didn’t sign up to Instagram and Facebook when I was a teenager, my family, friends, and whole neighborhood use unscrupulous online services that can be used to map out communities like that. I live far from the border with Palestine but let’s not pretend that makes a difference.

Been thinking of getting a used Switch Mini exclusively to solder in a chip and use it as a nice emulation handheld. As long as it doesn’t rat itself out over Bluetooth or something to its older brother gathering dust behind the tv (which has never been touched by the light of piracy), I should still be good I guess.

It’s unfortunate, but what I’m actually worried about is that world where different devices will report on each other.

But, being real, after 5 blades, all the satires jumped to unrealistic numbers and more extreme silliness. It was like the various comedy writers figured out that the various razor companies would be glad to slap one more on there, and sell it as an entirely new thing that needed a new handle as well. So they said (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ and went hard.

Are you telling me the Gillette Facefuckerupper of legend isn’t real?

(The Wenger Giant was a real novelty product. Yes I hate consumerism yes I hate “collector” culture but it tickles my brain just right to imagine that I’ll be able to snag one someday. They’re really expensive rarities now and serve no practical purpose but they do reveal that stodgy old Swiss executives can still have a sense of humor. Until then, the trusty no-name gas station multi tool is perfectly usable.)

I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.

The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.

Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.

I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.

I don’t see the humor in it anymore. Whenever it comes to even admitting the crimes happening to/in Palestine, it’s always decent people getting the entire book thrown at them, while others who actually do something evil get off scott free.

You can’t just ask for accountability for crimes. You have to kiss the ring and you have to be made an example of. What we are seeing with the response to student action is actually unprecedented and it’s genuinely unhinged. And it’s not just the US, it’s most of Europe too.

It’s not enough that our brothers and sisters in Palestine are getting rounded up and massacred. You have to support it with every fiber of your being or you’re a terrorist. After planing my whole life to move to the West I’m now genuinely scared I’ll be jailed for thought crime if it keeps getting crazier.

I learned it maybe this week and I’m now upset that I can’t remember from where.

Edit: I have bikeshedded my way into finding where I heard it instead of doing something else. It’s this Zack Freedman video, and here’s a transcript screenshot.

On one hand, nice to have my country mentioned in a context where we’re not being warcrimed, on the other, I’m somewhat disappointed that our government actually lifted a finger in the investigation of a foreign intellectual property case.

I’ve always been curious about this stuff and I know I need to make some effort soon, ever since we moved our home recordings from VHS to DVD some 15-20 years ago.

My understanding is that SSDs are also likely to lose data when unpowered for a long time, which is why they haven’t been recommended to me for external backup drives.

“Spinning rust” is much cheaper than I thought, even if I have to pay 200$ in shipping to get a bunch of massive used server drives here. And it seems to not have that problem, with the downside of either needing to be completely powered off or wasting a bit of power when it’s not active. I’m still not sure where the HDD parking technology is at.

Of course ripping all the physical media would also be nice. A lot of the original discs I have (most of my discs are straight shitty copies with one file, yay third world) have things like special features and multiple audio tracks, things like that. I wonder how those should be organized.

It’s so ubiquitous that for about a second I thought wait what I thought that was the good one until I remembered that I’ve been using qBittorrent for a decade.

For a time, it just was the client.

This is exactly why I’d want a GPU in a home server.

That and transcoding. Wonder what the best option would be without breaking the bank/wasting too much idle power. All the GPU talk online seems to be for gaming.

That second paragraph reads like a genuine slop-tier YouTube short you’d hear someone blasting next to you at half volume in public.

Narrated by an unnaturally upbeat and grating TTS voice, of course.

Never got into Splatoon but it looked like great fun and kind of perfect for low-stakes competition.

Fucks sake Nintendo

I think the table turning is in terms of what constitutes “content”, ostensibly the reason you’re on their service.

Standard tables: you sign up to this website to see stuff posted by people and pages you want to see, you can post your own if you wish

New and improved AI tables: bend over and enjoy the warmth of the slop cannon interspersed with Enhanced Consumer AI Personalized Advertising Experiences™

The user abuse was always part of the process no doubt.

The souls games weren’t on sale, but I’ve passed the message along about the mods. I think he’s taking a break after pushing those games to the absolute limit but I’m glad something like that exists.

Avant-garde is my jam, it’s just hard to convince people who aren’t into that kind of game to play. I love the Cosmo D games, for example, but I know most of my friends wouldn’t enjoy them if I recommended them.

I went with Ultrakill! I might get it myself. I think older style graphics boomer shooters are a core part of the current wave of PC games.

Unfortunately he’s never been able to get into Outer Wilds despite it being one of my favorite games that I always shill. I’ll still push for him to play it.