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jasomill

Re:My Favourite Laptop on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @09:22AM (#50352350)
I don't get around to using it much because I have a lighter hand-me-down Dell something-or-other that works well enough for the little I do on laptops, but after two GPU replacements under AppleCare and a post-warrantly recall, my 2011 17" MacBook Pro is still running, triple booting Sequoia, Linux, and Windows 11.

Windows was fun to set up because this particular model had broken ACPI tables such that the only way to get all hardware working in Windows short of hotpatching the firmeware is via BIOS rather than UEFI boot, which surprisingly works fine if you use a the Windows 10 first-stage installer to install it, which surprisingly works fine because all the first stage does is partition and set up the disk and restore an image, and it doesn't really care about the contents of the image.

This is much better than my approach of acquiring obsolete versions of competitors' software to qualify for then-generous "competitive upgrades" that were often themselves available at steep discounts when the next version dropped.

For instance, there was not much of a market for the PCjr version of Lotus 1-2-3 in the early '90s when I used it to qualify for the $20 competitive upgrade to Excel 4.0 I found in the bargain bin at a local electronics retailer after Excel 5.0 released, which of course qualified me for even less expensive (not than $20) version upgrades in the future, not only to Excel, but to the full Office suite.

Re:Apple reports fourth quarter results on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:13AM (#50351584)
Not to mention the fact that Apple, unlike most of the industry at times, has never seen itself as a software company. Someone needs to build all the devices used to interact with all this AI, and there's no evidence any major "AI company" other than Google, and to a much smaller extent Meta, has any interest in doing so.

If I were Apple and wanted to make a big bet, I'd be dumping money into a top-secret robotics lab.

Re:Apple reports fourth quarter results on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @08:03AM (#50351507)
And presumably didn't work in shrinkwrapped retail software development, where costs for production, distribution, and retail markup were considerably higher, especially for low-cost consumer software — disk duplication costs for a $50 game are similar, if not higher, than for a $500 word processor — and for smaller developers that typically worked through a third-party publisher.
At least a handful of companies, including, incidentally, Valve.
Re:Apple reports fourth quarter results on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:31AM (#50351215)
The iPad mini was released at a price point lower than the contemporary iPad, and IIRC this continued for several generations.
Re:Intel stock collapse worsens as $3.5T chip rout spreads on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @07:25AM (#50351157)
Define low price, because looking at sold listings on ebay, you can get a used RTX 3070 for around $250, which is as capable as any 10-year old 8 GB card, and certainly more capable than a 660 Ti.

Still not great given that I paid about the same for a new-in-unopened-box RTX 3070 a couple years ago, but price increases no lower-end cards without enough VRAM for AI at least haven't skyrocketed like the top end of the market.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:43AM (#50350780)
Note that Fedora CoreOS is a very low maintanance atomic Fedora system designed with fully automated updates in mind, and along with the systemd podman integration you mention, can easily be set up to automatically update both OS and containers.

Which may not be ideal for serious production workloads, but is perfect for non-mission critical appliance workloads like Pihole.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:32AM (#50350691)
I suspect many new users get confused by the fact that lots of Nvidia hardware works poorly out of the box, rather than not at all, where the latter would at least provide a clue that a non-inbox driver might solve the problem.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:16AM (#50350568)
By Arch, you mean that wiki with tons of information on installing and configuring software on Linux, right?

Say what you will about Arch, its community seems to have a rare gift for writing useful documentation.

Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @06:12AM (#50350521)
I can't think of anything I've ever had trouble running on Fedora + containers, with the latter typically for proprietary software that depends on specific or ancient userlands, or simply to avoid cluttering up my base system.
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:48AM (#50350353)
Re:WTF Ubuntu? on Tuesday November 03, 2026 @05:23AM (#50350173)
As I understand it, this is based on the Ubuntu LTS kernel, but doesn't necessarily rely on upstream's release schedule for fixes.

Given that most of the Proxmox userland comes from Debian Stable repos directly, it's probably not the worst idea in the world if you want to run ZFS on mostly-Debian Stable.

Oh, and while I'm not sure when the fix was applied, CVE-2026-98432 is patched on my Proxmox (no subscription, all ZFS including root) server.

That's Phil Spencer. Phil Spector was a record producer (and convicted murderer).
In no particular order: the early-game shooting mechanics that make you wonder how Shepard ever got out of basic training, the ludicrously overpowered biotics that, once leveled up, can basically be rotated to permastun enemies, the Mako driving controls and physics, RNG equipment upgrades that make it difficult to get meaningful late-game armor upgrades without save scumming, the fact that every indoor environment outside the main hubs uses one of three maps with different props all come immediately to mind.

Note that the Legendary Edition addressed a couple of these, specificially the shooter mechanics and Mako controls.

With that said, ME1 is one of my favorite games of all time, warts and all, and despite the fact that I didn't get into the series until after Andromeda released, it's probably one of my most-played, as well, with at least one 100% Insanity run on every character class (with at least one per class carried through ME2 and ME3).

FromSoftware is an order of magnitude smaller than the giants of the industry, and don't need to fund the development of multiple AAA games per year.
Anthropic's consumer terms of service[1] don't prohibit commercial use.

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/legal/consumer-terms

I'm more interested to know if LLMs lead to more intelligent decisionmaking than whether they boost "productivity" by any measure.

Because everyone in the world doing more of the wrong things faster isn't necessarily a good thing.

"A toaster is just a death ray with a smaller power supply!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibOkPx_Ej30

Re:OpenIDEA: The IDE you know, rebuilt in Rust on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:24PM (#50328203)
Even at 60 MB, assuming the app is on the order of "hello world", that's almost two orders of magnitude more overhead than Win32 on my x64 Windows 11 box (tested with C, assume Rust with the windows crate would be similar).
Re:Domain hacks with unusual Unicode characters (2018) on Sunday November 01, 2026 @12:56PM (#50327925)
Note that, in addition to normalizing domain components, the process also maps U+3002 IDEOGRAPHIC FULL STOP (。) to U+002E FULL STOP (.) for use as a separator, a nice touch for domain names encoded in blackboard bold.

Also, the author's one-liner, updated for Python 3:

  python3 -c 'import sys;print(sys.argv[1].encode("idna").decode("ascii"))' "℡"
Regrettably, hypocrisy is not a defense in any legal system I'm aware of.
One reason might be that, while bicycles are required to yield the right of way to pedestrians, delivery drones ("personal delivery devices") are pedestrians under Pennsylvania state law[1].

[1] https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/75/00.001.00...

Acts of civil disobedience are not, as a rule, intended to directly benefit anyone, and arrest is not only an expected, but often a desired outcome.
The specific code[1] applies to obstructing "pedestrians", which Pennsylvania state law[2] defines to include "personal delivery devices",

A ground delivery device that:

(1) is manufactured for transporting cargo or goods;

(2) is operated by a driving system that allows remote or autonomous operation, or both; and

(3) weighs 550 pounds or less without cargo or goods.

IANAL, but this certainly sounds like it applies to this case.

[1] https://codelibrary.amlegal.com/codes/philadelphia/latest/ph...

[2] https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/75/00.001.00...

Re:ChatGPT and Codex usage limits merging on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:26AM (#50325471)
In a world where the the moral equivalent of "subject to change without notice" is all but ubiquitous as a term of service, this is thoroughly unsurprising.

Most consumer protection laws can be easily satisfied by offering a full refund.

Re:OTape on Sunday November 01, 2026 @08:12AM (#50325335)
The whimsy of the write_protect field with its intact, broken, and taped_over states, and associated rules and diagram.

But yes, the fact that the format is implemented as a ZIP archive containing audio files stored in one of several media container formats rather than as an application of an existing and widely supported media container format seems like a misfeature for a format that I assume most users will be more interested in playing than "unzipping".

And if the goal is a format that's easily editable with off-the-shelf tools, requiring the physically first file in the ZIP to be uncompressed with an empty extra field so its contents appear at a fixed byte offset seems counterproductive, when the stated goal of making the format easy to identify could be accomplished by requiring the manifest file to be stored first and giving it a more distinctive name than "manifest.json", given that the file name is the first variable-length field in a ZIP local file header and cannot be compressed.

Re:Infinite Mac: BeOS on Saturday October 31, 2026 @06:05PM (#50320714)
Perhaps they're thinking of the CFPlugIn architecture, which is basically COM IUnknown without everything Microsoft built on top of it.

https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Co...

Re:Infinite Mac: BeOS on Saturday October 31, 2026 @05:22PM (#50320374)
I was amused to recall this a decade later when, as a result of Disney acquiring Pixar, Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were put in charge of Disney's animation studios and Jobs got a seat on Disney's board of directors as its single largest shareholder.
Also creator of and writer on Person of Interest, which had an okay first season but gradually got amazing in later seasons, following a roughly inverted arc from Westworld.

Person of Interest was probably the first example of superintelligent AI that actually left me thinking that it could really happen (and with the conclusion that this was not a priori a good or bad thing).

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