On a related note, I've gotten a small monthly payment from a business that still uses FoxPro 2 and Netware for its most critical application. The owner is finally retiring in October and I've already done all the work to move his actual data into another format, but this dude insists that he paid tens of thousands of dollars for this system and it's the only one he's ever gonna buy.

He's had three IT guys retire on him; I'm the youngest person he could find who can claim Novell experience (I'm 48), so he's been paying me for the last four years to keep his system up and running. The only thing I've done in all that time is clone his old drive to new ones, replace his DLT drive and make sure Legato is still working.

No. A government agency that contracts out work to a private company has a duty of oversight. They must make at least a minimal effort to ensure the contract is being executed in a lawful manner. They can't just hand out the work and turn a blind eye to any abuses of the law and only act when they are made painfully aware of violations of the law.

Chicago's violent crime rate isn't REALLY that high. On a per-capita basis, it's kind of middling; Danville, Illinois is a vastly more dangerous place for its residents and nearby Elkhart and Goshen are similarly worse than Gary, Indiana, where I live. Coverage of crime in Chicago (and Gary) drives a particular narrative among those of a certain political bent that some community with a majority of non-white residents are the equivalent of Robocop's Detroit or post-occupation Fallujah. It just isn't so.

While I'm at it, one of the biggest current drivers of violent crime in Chicago right now is the redevelopment of the Robert Taylor and Cabrini Green public housing facilities. Both of those communities were turned into mixed income housing without any plan or thought given to how the diaspora of their residents would impact the area. What happened in actuality was that Chicago's majority-black street gangs lost their longtime strongholds, which allowed LatinX-majority gangs funded by Mexican and South American cartels to move in and (violently) compete for territory. The ongoing territorial disputes do make some areas of Chicago dangerous. I am not denying that. It's just something a lot deeper than "Chicago has all the crime." Street gangs exist in every big city. Violent crime exists anywhere there are human beings. Chicago does not need or deserve to be singled out when the godless urban hellholes of St. Louis, MO and Omaha, NE are both much, much higher in terms of violent crime rates per capita.

nVidia's strategy is not to back fill the midrange but to continuously release new hardware so that bargain hunters have to fall back on previous-gen cards for decent bang for the buck. An RTX 3080 is currently a pretty good deal if you can find one and probably cheaper than current 4070, for example.

AMD has pretty decent offerings in the mid range, but if you're using it for AI or content creation tasks, you'll find out pretty quickly that CUDA is the big name in town, and gamers already think AMD's name is mud. They're pretty nice if you're a desktop Linux person, though.

DaVinci Resolve Studio, the application that tends to be at the forefront of my PC buying decisions, actually runs better on AMD GPUs than on nVidia, but unfortunately, those cards are more or less unsupported by most of the other content creation software I use.

You are mistaken. You get HEVC 420 and, on some chips, HEVC 444.

There are lots of reasons to want nVidia GPUs for creative applications, especially since a lot of stuff wants CUDA to work properly, but it's missing an important workflow for native camera output. I can transcode everything over to Avid (or ProRes, were I an Adobe person) my editing software likes better, but even that's kind of awful since I have to tie up one or other of my desktop systems just doing that.

Intel's "gaming" cards supports this, along with a bunch of other creator-friendly nice-to-haves like AV1 hardware codecs.

I normally use a Threadripper for editing, and it DOES have an Arc card installed, since that plays nicely in Resolve Studio solely as an accelerator card, but my 13900KF + 3070Ti does not. As a desktop platform, it also doesn't have the PCIe lanes to run a second GPU, either.

It's absolutely idiotic that I'm better off using the SoC in my tablet for certain aspects of video editing than a contemporary "high performance" desktop CPU.

In nVidia-land, it's entirely possible to install content-creation centric rather than gamer drivers for the same hardware, which suggests your assessment of that hardware as gaming-only might be more than a little off-base. As far as I am aware, this isn't addressed with either nVidia or AMD workstation graphics, either.

Nearly all consumer cameras made in the last five or so years that are capable of producing RAW video output do so in 10 bit HEVC 422 chroma sampling. Pro stuff, like Arri or RED cine cameras uses 444 chroma sampling and I definitely understand why consumer GPUs don't handle that. If you're buying $75k cameras, needing a $5k accelerator card isn't a big deal.

Intel and nearly all contemporary ARM SoCs, including Apple Silicon, support HEVC 422 in hardware. Neither AMD nor nVidia offer 10 bit HEVC 422. They support 8 bit HEVC 420, but doesn't exactly help me when I'm trying to keep my videos in a format I can easily color grade.

It's hilarious to me that a $1000 RTXwhatever is less valuable for one of my main needs for a GPU than a $100 Arc A380.

And that's useless in the highly likely possibility that not everyone you might want to communicate with has an iPhone.

But I have literally observed groups of people, full blown adult humans with jobs and potential value to society, shun people with disfavored devices because they won't join the cult. I also know many grandparents, aunts and uncles forced into the land of blue bubbles because access to someone's kids is held hostage because "you can't FaceTime" and/or "you mess up the group chat."

I choose not to use SMS or related services because I don't like giving out my personal cell number. My phone exists for my convenience and no one else's and I dislike the ongoing assumption that chat messages will be responded to in something close to real time.

But Apple chose something incredibly and deliberately hostile even at the presentation level of its application. It trashes attachments and it makes text hard to read. It is not going to stop making those choices at every opportunity because doing so is the only way Apple can pretend it is delivering something of value to its users in imessage.

Telco services and giant tech companies can't agree on a universal service for real time chat with attachments across any part of the Western world. Government regulation is really the only fix, because getting 40 new "Standard" chat tools that everyone and their brother are trying to monetize doesn't solve anything.

You have to agree to a Meta Terms of Service and that is already a bridge too far.

I bring it up, too. I'd consider it, if I could find even one other person willing to use yet another messaging app. The response is usually "It's OK, we'll just text." And then I have to explain that I have SMS blocked and no, we can't. I really don't want people to have my phone number... which is another problem with Signal, although I do understand they are working on that.

The fallback for me almost always winds up being email.

Also, to every European about to bring up Whatsapp:
You've given every detail of your life to Meta. That is not better. It's just awful in a different way.

Real time chat has been a war since the internet was commercialized in the early 90s. It's not going to get better unless a government entity puts the good of citizens ahead of a profit motive. Otherwise, we're all going to live in our messaging holes forever, or have 11 different applications we need to use, understanding that not every user will tolerate dealing with some or other service provider.

Fuck them.

Apple is utterly hostile to anyone outside The Cult. The deepest proof of that is white text on a green background for members of the herd who do want to communicate. It literally wants the process of communication to be worse, and it stands as an impediment to the one thing to expect from a communication device.

I don't even use SMS, but in knowing how much Apple fucks something fundamental, the important thing to understand that its tech is not worthwhile. It is a barrier, and the best thing to do is to remove it from the equation, not to wallow in the ghetto it created for its herd.

I'm pretty much always a contractor working on a specific project. These things are not relevant to my life either.

I have the good fortune that I am able to dictate terms of communication with others. I like E-mail for accountability and standards of functionality across platforms. If Signal ever figures out how to make an account without tying it to an existing phone number, I'll probably tolerate that for personal communication.

I'd quit a job that forced me to use any variety of SMS or sign up for a Meta service before anyone could fire me.