theodric

No, because I wouldn't trust it not to be messed with. I want it to run DD-WRT, but I'll flash it with DD-WRT myself.

My point was that HR "just being morons" adds fuel to the fire for people pushing anti-diversity narratives. It feels stupid, because it is stupid. It came from a good place (stop shutting women out of jobs) and devolved into the typical corporate "GMD says we have to increase diversity by 10% this year" metric-chasing bureaucratic crapola. It's not even the only similar instance in my career, but I won't be doxxing myself further.

We had a physical laborer position in the datacenter (lift and shift) get "flagged for diversity (female)" and sit open and unfilled for a year because we were unable to recruit a woman. THIS is the kind of thing that causes problems: some HR analyst pulled the datacenter team stats, saw there were no women working in the grunt team, and decided to try and change that by force. We had LOTS of women in the datacenter group, majority in analysts and coordination, pretty balanced overall, but just none in the grunts. No thoughts were given to why women didn't and likely wouldn't apply for that role. By god, I tried. The few I got to interview noped out once the job responsibilities were made clear. We eventually closed the position unfilled as part of a scaledown/budget giveback.

I'm sure an argument could be made about how the org should seek equity by restructuring the way the team works to eliminate the need for physical strength and replace it with machines, allowing any operative to do the job, but those arguments never seem to come with a budget attached to buy lifts or powered carts to allow us to change the way things have been done in the computing center for 50+ years. Talk is cheap, companies are cheaper. Furthermore, overcoming societal norms such that a woman would choose to apply for that role over a less physically taxing, traditionally male-coded one is likely to be more difficult even than finding budget for machines.

You can get some nifty fold-flat BS1363 doodads, though. I have a USB-C charger that collapses into something about the size of a stack of 6 credit cards. Something similar is currently available as the "Galvanox Flat USB-C Charger" on Irish Amazon.

See also: https://plugsocketmuseum.nl/GB-foldingPlug1.html

My international travel "brick" for laptop + phone is an Anker PowerPort Atom III Slim, which is flat multi-port charger with an IEC-320-C8 input. For the Continent, I plug in a "0cm cable" that's a Europlug nub. For US and UK/I, a NEMA cord with a compact BS1363 "shaver adapter" with a 1A fuse in it. Really wish I could get something flatter to be the adapter! Maybe I'll have to make one.

> the US 110v thing is kinda limiting, and 220v is way better

More efficient with copper certainly, but 110V is safer: cf. Ohm's Law. Lower voltage penetrates skin less readily, so you're more likely to escape unscathed from a 110V zap.

In Ireland, on worksites, the corded tools are 110VAC/50Hz (115V, 120V... mains/2 on a transformer-- and 'mains' varies wildly according to my several years of data captures in a range between 214-240).

Speaking of copper efficiency, the British Isles do all kinds of silly things like running ring mains to enable the use of smaller conductors for higher loads on domestic electrical sockets, and notionally to provide a safety factor.

Perhaps a phone supported by postmarketOS or Ubuntu Touch, for certain projects?

For any suspend to RAM support at all: Amlogic, Rockchip, or i.MX SoCs have the best chance. Radxa Zero, for example. Lattepanda x86 also. But their quiescent draw is much higher than a phone's.

Revolut, UBS, ABN AMRO

A fine one-off.

Pi SoCs have no sleep/suspend mode, so you'll be pocketing it powered on or waiting for it to boot every time you go to use it. Furthermore, you have to destroy a PSP to build this, AND buy an overpriced Pi (seriously, go look at the prices now) to shove in it, which will probably cost you more than a more capable and already-built modern retro portable.

All that aside, I have been down such paths enough times to know that this stuff is drawer filler within 3 evenings. People killing vintage hardware to build "cyberdecks" that are basically unusable and will just end up in the dump soon after is just the latest atrocity along the path to hell. Do what you will.

Any sufficiently advanced simulacrum of love[...]

People will pay good money for artisanal, hand-crafted clothing, or watches, or cars, or whatever, but I doubt that the market for artisanal mathematics is now or will ever be very large.

It's just stubbornness, in the end, that is manifesting as a kind of gatekeeping Luddism. I see the same thing in my Mastodon feed from folks in the software engineering world, particularly people who have a great love for writing code and hold it as a core part of their identities. I understand being irritated at a machine having been trained on (potentially, inter alia) your work with no compensation to you, and now it is perhaps better at (some of) what you do than you are; or maybe companies are now making a lot of money off of something that benefited from your contributions; but I find it extremely improbable that we will be able to refuse our way out of further progress now that so much money has been invested and so much momentum has been gathered.

I don't think I feel any discomfort about a machine being better at anything that I can do than I am at it. Maybe it's because I'm a mediocre person. I personally think that if there's something that I'm better at than a machine, then we need to build a better machine. Imagine what I'd be able to do if I used that machine!

I have a Racknerd VPS that's $20/year, and it hosts a couple personal websites, an Outline instance, and is the Wireguard hub for all my NAT'd sites.

Political will and priorities. It seems like there's always money and enthusiasm for another war, but not to pay for uniformly decent schools with reasonable class sizes and happy, fairly-compensated teachers. Sounds too much like the S-word, probably.

What I'm suggesting here is going to require serious investment on top of what should IMNSHO already be made, because we're talking about creating 3 parallel class streams for different tiers of ability. 3 sets of lesson plans, 3 very different kinds of student with different goals and ways of approaching life. They can't just throw that at one teacher and expect success, but their current track record suggests they would sure and damn well try.

There are several reasons my mother burned out from the classroom, and she's one of many many many such cases: low compensation, vast amounts of unpaid work time developing lesson plans and grading when not in front of students, larger class sizes and no aides to help handle the stress and chaos of another 20 teenagers on top of the 25 you already had in the room, corporatization/enshittification/growing lists of demands placed on teachers to shoulder more classes or pericurriculars, and so on. Hell, I know one (1) current schoolteacher, and they're also presently burned out and on leave. Could just be a coincidence, I guess!

We could also try something that has not yet been attempted: investing heavily in developing people who show signs of talent at an early age and streaming ALL children's education according to their capabilities and interests at a young age, in order to eventually bolster the available pool of highly talented people without having to rely on poaching talent from elsewhere in the world (depriving those countries of an opportunity to benefit from the highly talented people that they sweated and paid to train).

Brilliant Labs was selling one for quite a while, but it looks like it was discontinued in favor of their new, more standard device https://docs.brilliant.xyz/monocle/monocle/

To gain the same effect as one that is soldered down, while giving themselves a simpler portfolio of assemblies and a cheaper FRU to swap in the event of failure.

"Does Data have a soul? I don’t know that he has. I don’t know that I have. But I have got to give him the freedom to explore that question himself."

Man whose compensation package is strongly tied to the economic performance of his company says company's economic performance will be great in 2027 and 2028 (so people should invest now to benefit from that bump)

FWIW, my C13 Yoga (Morphius) runs full-fat Linux significantly better than it ever ran ChromeOS

> ChromeOS is by default more lightweight than traditional Desktop OS

Maybe? The shipping ChromeOS on the Lenovo ThinkPad C13 Yoga Chromebook (R7 3700C/16GB RAM/NVMe disk) is a dog. The system is nearly unusable. Can't even play YouTube videos properly, lags out with a few tabs, and maxes out the fan and practically freezes once you start trying to run serious Linux applications under Crostini. However, once blasted with MrChromebox firmware, and loaded with openSUSE, it runs very adequately. In fact, I'm posting this from inside Firefox with 17 tabs open, plus two instances of Okular and a kernel build running in the background, with no issue.

YMMV, I guess.

I regret to inform you that Mr. Kling and his browser have been pre-canceled on Mastodon due to his politics (support for DHH, Charlie Kirk, anti-DEI stances, etc.)

Fascinating stuff; thank you for sharing. Can I follow your work somewhere??

I mean...there's some precedent. The XKL TOAD ("Ten On A Desk") implements the PDP-10 instruction set, and will happily run TOPS-10/TOPS-20. LCM had one doing just that.

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10277383... https://www.twenex.org/?network

>Who sets their air conditioning to 82F?

Italy did! The minimum summer temperature was only 1.4°F less than that. Dunno if they've kept it up. Summer this year was brutal in Europe. https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/italians-sweat-for-ukrai...

I'm reminded of the situation at Verizon in Switzerland ~12 years ago where they didn't have any central air conditioning in the building "for the environment." Swiss summers can be HOT. I've seen 40°C/104°F in my time there. This ended up with a bunch of engineers buying floorstanding AC units for their desks that blew cold air onto them and barfed the resultant differential + work heat out the rear vent. Truly insane.

My wife's SE 2020 is on its third battery. It was fine until she accidentally upgraded to iOS 26, but now it's a mega lagfest. Apple's refusal to allow OS downgrades is infuriating, because it's still a perfectly adequate device otherwise.

"Learn to code" already failed to flood the market and drive down labor costs sufficiently, but AI will achieve that.

Better: learn to prompt, learn to plan, learn to ideate, learn to configure your harness. Maybe learn to plant vegetables, also.

Teen welfare is just the excuse. The teens are collateral damage along the path to mandating identification and de-anonymizing the Internet. The teens aren't enfranchised, so they can't meaningfully complain, and once they can vote, their problem is over, so why would they fight?

Put another way: why should American employers be forced to hire Americans? If the labor pool is indeed substandard, they arguably have a vested interest in improving the quality of that labor pool rather than simply giving up on it. The $100k (and it's consequences) are putting a finger on the scale in a nationalist manner to prefer local products. It's tariffs for people.

It comes down to whether you have a globalist or nationalist mindset. Depending on which, you will come to a different conclusion about what to think. Should a government prioritize the individual success of citizens of its country, or the profitability of companies domiciled there (and therefore overall national economic performance)? Which approach, which tide lifts more boats by a meaningful amount? Which comports with a government's stated duties?

You decide!

The idea that the agent does not actually have agency is rather discordant. We need new words!

Speaking as someone who ran away to the hills to become an on-grid farmer, I do recommend having a grid connection. Makes life a LOT simpler. Milking machines and chillers use a lot of power, the sun doesn't always shine enough days in a row to keep your batteries topped up, and small wind turbines are basically useless.

It's a rack KVM keyboard and constrained thereby. The remainder was a heavy-duty shelf-drawer and a 14" CRT monitor. I decom'd a few of these in a very, very legacy facility a few years ago. They're decent keyboards.