Discussion: you can have an “extinction event” in any ecosystem-- not just biological ones.

For example, the abandonment of steam locomotives in the mid-20th-century, or the Home Computer crash of the 1980s.

Similar to a biological mass extinction, you have:

• A discernable ecosystem change, either a sudden event (the introduction of reliable, mass-produced diesel locomotives), or a measurable decline of “habitability factors” (as hundreds of firms brought cheap 8-bit computers to market, retail space and overall consumer interest saturated)
• a rapid diversification of new and exotic types to fill the vacated niches (the cabless “B-unit” and flexible “road-switcher” locomotive types didn’t exist in the steam era. The post-crash computer market brought in new entrants like cheap IBM clones, the C128 and Atari 130XE, all chasing a sub-$1000 market that was now free of Sinclair, Coleco, and Texas Instruments)
• followed by a shake out and consolidation of the survivors/winners as they select for fitness in the new world (ALCO was a strong #2 in the diesel locomotive market in 1950, but didn’t make it to 1970. The C128 never became the world-beater its predecessor did.)
• a few niches largely untouched (China was still building steam locomotives into the 1990s. The Apple II series lasted about as long.)

My objections:

1. It doesn’t adequately indicate “confidence”. It could return “foo” or “!foo” just as easily, and if that’s one term in a nested structure, you could spend hours chasing it.
2. So many hallucinations-- inventing methods and fields from nowhere, even in an IDE where they’re tagged and searchable.

Instead of writing the code now, you end up having to review and debug it, which is more work IMO.

Not to mention the Xbox Box, and the shipping cintainer full of 'em, the Xbox Box Box

Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.

The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.

We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.

I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I’m not sure where the extra resources should go.

Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.

They’ve pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.

There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn’t

Hyundai did it. Their rep was abysmal in the 80s/early 90s. Their ad slogan was literally “Hyundai. Yes, Hyundai.” because you’d have to say that to anyone who asked what steaming pile you spent $5999 on. But they doubled down on warranty long enough to become a credible choice.

BYD also has the advantage of being able to enter a fairly green-field market. There’s few to no cheap electric cars from established brands to conpete with.

It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.

I’m also curious about the logic of what items get locked up.

I went in a few shops recently, and all the toothbrushes were locked up. I know personal-care items tend to be the first things in the cages. Yet plenty of other items with higher value and margins are out in the open.

Is there some virtue-agenda in play? Don’t make it too easy to steal your way into healthy or presentable?

Also on modern firebreathers.

I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

I’ve had KVMs that don’t like the ‘fancier’ USB keyboards with NKRO. It would work, but it wouldn’t listen for its own ‘switch to different console’ hotkeys. Reconfiguring the keyboard to run in 6KRO-only mode addressed it, but not every keyboard can be configured that way.

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

I got a ~6k Dogecoin windfall a few years back. (Found the coins I bought in 2014 at <0.1c, sold at 25c)

I think I put like 1k into my more conventional investments, blew like $2k in indulgences (new GPU, collectibles), and set most of the rest aside for the revenuers.

We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.

I think you’re thinking of the Socket A Athlon/Duron/Sempron. A lot of coolers used shitty mounting designs so it was possible to get it off alignment or over-pressure it and crack the die, and no heatspreader + poor thermal controls allowed for a meltdown if the mountng was bad.

The K6-2 was pretty solid aside from not quite holding performance crowns.

I wonder now about the social norms of the “default” versions of things in replicators.

Would you go on one ship and “soft drink” is Pepsi and another Coke, like venues today? How is it negotiated?

Or do you spend your life building and refining a profile? How is that carried around?

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

They’ve got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it’s a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with “plausible bullshit” in their products.

I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I’m not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.

I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify “yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases” and “You’re going to actually have to CALL the function under test”, but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn’t need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.

I’d be hesitant to trust it with “summarize this obtuse spec document” when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn’t suitable.

Maybe the problem is that I’m too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association “why not try glue on pizza” type discussions, but when you already know “send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW” having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.

I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent “here’s why it’s broken” sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.

Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that “Carrying battleaxe” doesn’t mean “katana randomly jutting out from forearms”, maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.

There are some recent $1 notes where the same serial was issued twice.

https://www.mycurrencycollection.com/blog/1-2013-new-york-duplicate-serial-number-mistake

Is it a GE product?

It has some of the design cues of the export models of the UxxC series models.