I occasionally “refresh” my PC with new board, CPU etc. I never buy the top of the line stuff and quite honestly there is little reason to. Games are designed to play perfectly well on mid range computers even if you have to turn off some graphics option that enables some slight improvement in the image quality.

I saw a video on Gamers Nexus about how shitty a company they are. Hopefully word spreads amongst gamers & builders that they’re no good and they should be avoided.

And downloading updates is a good thing. Means that the fresh installation isn’t vulnerable to something that was fixed between when the USB / DVD was pressed and the time the person installed it.

Linux has made leaps and bounds with usability and ease of installation but it’s no better than any other modern OS - which is a good thing. Installing Windows from a USB stick is not difficult - the simple path is literally, pick a language, select your wifi, choose who is logging in, click install and go grab a coffee. About the only difficulty if you can call it one is that some installs will ask for a serial number because it’s a commercial product.

Also, the number of questions & buttons during installation is one thing but the certainty of a functioning system is another. Linux is better at supporting old hardware, Windows is better at supporting new hardware. Choose accordingly if that matters.

I don’t even know what this graph is even supposed to mean. Bitch about Windows all you like but the installation process is typically very simple.

Well NY can certainly sentence him, and he can potentially serve a custodial sentence. But I suspect that even if the judge handed him time in prison it wouldn’t be four years and would almost certainly be appealed or delayed to be mostly irrelevant. But I would dearly, dearly, DEARLY love to see this asshole go to prison and preferably never come out.

He’s still there today whispering in Trump’s ear. At least if Trump were out of the picture it might derail the presidency and allow some of the weirder weirdos & grifters to be shown the the door. It may also reset republicanism to some degree since they don’t have to care what some narcissist dickhead thinks at any given moment or pursue his vendettas. Also it would be karmic.

America is fucked. Ukraine is fucked. The world is fucked. The only glimmer of hope is Trump drops dead before his term is out.

Seems like a plausible strategy. If the roof is lashed down it can’t catch the wind and therefore is less likely to weaken over time and go flying. Certainly better than doing nothing.

Viable solutions with sand or rock have been developed and I expect over the next few decades a large number of such projects will be produced.

A lot of energy storage solutions do exactly that - use heat as energy. i.e. solar heads rock, sand, salt etc. and then later on that heat is turned back into useful energy - either pumping water around households to heat them, or to drive a steam turbine. The bigger the volume of rock / sand / salt, the more efficient the process is.

If only there were some way to take energy made from sunshine and store it in some form for later. Like in a battery. Or as heat. Or in a flywheel. Or just use the energy for something we’d really like to do as cheaply as possible. Like sequester CO2. Or desalinate water. Or run industries that would otherwise use natural gas.

So in my mind extremism is bad either way you go and it is not something that anyone should brush off and say “these left wing extremists are fine” because reality never works out that way. Extremism is monstrous either way.

I suspect “true” Communism is something you’ll only find on the pages of a book. Because in reality it goes from being a revolution, to a party, to cliques, to a power struggle, to a purge, to a dictator. And people get shot, tortured, beaten and sent to death camps every step of the way.

The point I’m making, which I think is obvious and demonstrable, is extreme left aren’t just do-gooders while the extreme right are evil. It’s hard to think of any communist / marxist-leninist / whatever revolutions that weren’t followed by purges, gulags, education camps, progroms or what have you. In some cases, the body count was in the millions, e.g. Pol Pot.

So in my mind extremism is bad either way you go and it is not something that anyone should brush off and say “these left wing extremists are fine” because reality never works out that way. Extremism is monstrous either way.

I think people who’ve enjoyed years under communist governments might disagree a little about the comparison here.

Russia has messaging for useful idiots on the right and messaging for useful idiots on the left. To the right they’ll say stuff like “America should stay out of foreign wars”, “we should make Ukraine pay for the assistance”, “the price of oil will go up” blah blah. To the left it’s shit like “Ukraine are Nazis”, “America is perpetuating this war”, “NATO are the aggressors” blah blah

The goal either way is to sow division, doubt, demoralise, create instability, create distrust and sap European & US power’s resolve to support Ukraine. And also to devalue information with false, misleading and contradictory information. It’s not hard on social media to see how this shit spreads around with insincere actors pumping false news and misinfo into the feeds that gets picked up by the useful idiots.

I once developed an electronic program guide for a cable TV company in New Zealand and I’d lose my mind if I had to use timezones. The basic rule of thumb was:

a) Internally you use UTC religiously. UTC is the same everywhere on Earth, time always goes forward, most languages have classes that represent instants, durations etc. In addition you make damned sure your server time is correct and UTC.

b) You only deal with timezones when presenting something to a user or taking input from a user

Prior to that I had worked for a US trading company that set all their servers to EST and was receiving trades through the system which expressed time & date ambiguously. Just had to assume everywhere that EST was the default but it was just dumb programming and I bet to this day every piece of code they develop has time bugs.

The only reason people use JS is because it’s the defacto language of browsers. As a language it’s dogshit filled with all kinds of unpleasant traps.

Here is a fun one I discovered the other day:

new Date('2022-10-9').toUTCString() === 'Sat, 08 Oct 2022 23:00:00 GMT'
new Date('2022-10-09').toUTCString() === 'Sun, 09 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMT'

So padding a day of the month with a 0 or not changes the result by 1 hour. Every browser does the same so I assume this is a legacy thing. It’s supposed to be padded but any sane language would throw an exception if it was malformed. Not JavaScript.

The problem is, that most languages have no native support other than 32 or 64 bit floats and some representations on the wire don’t either. And most underlying processors don’t have arbitrary precision support either.

So either you choose speed and sacrifice precision, or you choose precision and sacrifice speed. The architecture might not support arbitrary precision but most languages have a bignum/bigdecimal library that will do it more slowly. It might be necessary to marshal or store those values in databases or over the wire in whatever hacky way necessary (e.g. encapsulating values in a string).

If a woman is that shallow and materialistic then the guy is dodging a bullet. Anyhow, it’s a weird thing to say since “android phone” could mean literally anything from a basic $100 smartphone all the way up to a $50,000 Vertu diamond and white alligator skin. i.e. it could mean the guy is sensible with his money or even more shallow and materialistic than the girl could ever dream to be.