Near the peak of the NFT craze I was gifted (as part of an initial mint) an NFT, which I turned around and immediately sold for $3k. Last I looked it was worth about $200. That’s the extent of my experience with NFTs.

Don’t look at Backblaze drive reports then. WD is pretty much all good, Seagate has some good models that are comparable to WD, but they have some absolutely unforgivable ones as well.

Not every Seagate drive is bad, but nearly every chronically unreliable drive in their reports is a Seagate.

Personally, I’ve managed hundreds of drives in the last couple of decades. I won’t touch Seagate anymore due to their inconsistent reliability from model to model (and when it’s bad, it’s bad).

Also most people who have only used Windows, bought their computers with Windows pre-installed, where the manufacturer loaded a custom Windows image that already has all of their drivers installed and configured. So it’s not just that they’ve never used Linux before, they’ve often never actually installed any operating system from scratch on any computer and had to deal with the setup process.

Not too long ago I was messaging with someone who kept complaining that Linux was taking HoUrS to get drivers configured and how it clearly wasn’t for them because Windows “just works”. Meanwhile I’m sitting there thinking of the last time I installed a Linux distro on a machine it took a few minutes to install the proprietary Nvidia drivers and I was done, while the last time I installed Windows on a machine it took ~4 hours to get all of the drivers loaded properly, including blacklisting the f*****g Windows Update utility so it would stop trying to replace my network driver with a broken version that kept taking down the network connection on the machine, and the insanity of having to update, reboot, update, reboot, update, reboot, update, reboot over and over again for half a day until finally all the updates are actually installed and running.

We tried the first half and they all shot each other, mission accomplished?

Agreed. I’ve also been very impressed with Perplexica (linked to a self-hosted LLM on Ollama). It ties into SearXNG and will perform web searches, dive into the results, and summarize what it finds. Not just the pages themselves, but the specific information on those pages that addresses your original questions, including references which link back to the pages that were used to generate the summary. It’s easy to identify hallucinations when it links to the specific page where it got the information from (though I have yet to experience any hallunications with Perplexica yet).

Syncthing could be used to replicate a directory somewhere, but that doesn’t address backing up the phone itself (apps, settings, SMS messages, etc.). Only option I’m aware of is iCloud. You can connect the phone directly to iTunes on a computer and back it up that way, but that only works with a hardwired USB connection and can’t be automated, so it’s a non-starter for a regular backup system. Android probably has more options, I’m referring to iOS specifically here though.

Agreed, but most people don’t backup at all. Then complain very loudly when they lose everything and blame everyone else other than themselves. Saw it daily fixing people’s phones.

I’d love to back up my phone locally, if there was an option, but AFAIK there isn’t, so I’m stuck. This is a problem with companies forcing you into their cloud ecosystem and removing your ability to bypass it and control things yourself. It’s only getting worse.

Yes it’s a common phrase. If an apple costs $2, and you have 10 apples, then you have $20 worth of apples.

Trying to find common ground between the rational and the batshit insane, is a futile endeavor.

I agree option 1 is the correct choice, though it does appear they are slowly going that direction…

Really? Because every new Windows version is even worse than the one before it. There are now 3? 4? different places to change network settings, but only one of them actually works correctly, if you modify the wrong one it will act like it worked but will silently break all networking on the machine instead.

If they can charge 30% less without Apple’s fees, then why are their prices the same whether you buy on their iOS app or direct on their website? Why have they been overcharging users who don’t buy through the iOS app by 30% all this time?

I had something almost identical to this happen to me on Friday. Last year our company moved to a super locked down version of Teams, to the point where I couldn’t even open images that people put in the chat because of security issues, instead the image they posted would be replaced with an error image saying that I wasn’t allowed to open images, blah blah blah. That problem was resolved a long time ago though.

On Friday I was trying to send an image of some data processing to a colleague, and every time I put it in Teams, it would show up as that stupid error message. I spent a solid hour trying to figure out why that problem was back, was my computer not authenticating with MS properly, etc. Turns out my file browser was sorting by time order instead of reverse time order, and the screenshot at the top of the list from May 2 2024, was a screenshot of the error message that I used to send to IT when they were investigating the problem.

Yeah that’s about 2 and a half round-trips between Dallas and Houston, that’s…not a lot to be calling this thing ready to go and pulling out the safety drivers.

I wonder how these handle accidents, traffic stops, bad lane markings from road construction, mechanical failure, bad weather (heavy rain making it difficult/impossible to see lane markings), etc.

You’d think they would be keeping the safety drivers in place for at least 6+ months of regular long-haul drives and upwards of 100k miles to cover all bases.

Market self regulation assumes informed consumers that are smart enough to know what things mean

Not just smart enough, but informed enough. That means every person spending literally hundreds/thousands of hours per week researching every single aspect of every purchase they make. Investigating supply chains, performing chemical analysis on their foods and clothing, etc. It’s not even remotely realistic.

So instead, we outsource and consolidate that research and testing, by paying taxes to a central authority who verifies all manufacturers keep things safe so we don’t have to worry about accidentally buying Cheerios that are laced with lead. AKA: The government and regulations.

That’s a complicated question. Bigger memory can split it between more banks, which can mean more precharge penalties if the memory you need to access is spread out between them.

But big memory systems generally use workstation or server processors, which means more memory channels, which means the system can access multiple regions of memory simultaneously. Mini-PCs and laptops generally only have one memory controller, higher end laptops and desktops usually have two, workstations often have 4, and big servers can have 8+. That’s huge for parallel workflows and virtualization.

I’d be in trouble, since between ZFS and my various VMs, my system idles at ~170 GB RAM used. With only 32 I’d have to shut basically everything down.

My previous system had 64 GB, and while it wasn’t great, I got by. Then one of the motherboard slots died and dropped me to 48 GB, which seriously hurt. That’s when I decided to rebuild and went to 256.

Sure in a decade or so it might have matured enough to have shed all these issues

That’s the point. They want to set themselves up so that when the issues are shed and it becomes a realistic product, they’re already in a place where their product can be the one that takes over the market. If you wait until a product is viable before starting on development, you’re too late.

I abandoned Google when they started throwing shopping links at the top of every search, even when searching for things that have no relevance to shopping, and they started artificially promoting scams and paid material above actual results.

Google Search was best around 10-15 years ago when their only focus was providing the best results they could (remember when you could actually click the top result and you would be taken to the most applicable page instead of some unrelated ad or scam?). Now their focus is on providing the best product possible for their actual customers (paid advertisers) even when it means trashing their own product in the process.

They won’t. Musk has a hard-on for doing everything with visible cameras for some stupid reason.

Pretty sure the country of origin for Apple products isn’t the US anyway. They’d be coming from China, India, etc. Reciprocal tariffs on the US should have no effect on Apple products sold in other countries.