You can, although i dont recomend it. That said, repurposing old macs into home servers is something I've seen a fair bit of.

I *suppose* the mac minis could be quite useful for an office mac if you have a primarily mac infrastructure, but Apple have discontinued MacOS Server since 2022, so YMMV

Its shocking how ingrained this has become for some people. I still occasionally use twitter, although not much anymore because its become a shockingly hostile place for most people, but I saw the other day some poor woman getting the shit kicked out of her because she made the fatal mistake of posting about finally getting her PhD on a *very* interesting looking paper about the evolution of cooperative behavior in ants. And the comments where just stacked with people telling her its a stupid topic and how she should be having babies and getting married instead of being a scientist.

Now, yes some of that was *definately* sexist nonsense. But theres also an underlying massive hostility towards intelligence and intellectuals, and its so disheartening to see, because it feels like we're slipping back into a new dark ages. I saw one person refered to it as the "Endarkenment".

Just teeth grinding imbiciles raging against knowledge because it might contradict their idiotic views on vaccines or whatever.

Not just Lincoln, the North made a mistake after the Civil War, like Congress and The People made a mistake after J6. Insurrectionists who are put down, we now know, can't be forgiven and allowed to make nice. We see that they with their misguided culture breed and grow and rise back to cause a load of trouble. Rather we have to prosecute insurrectionists severely, to show everyone that this was serious, damaging, deadly, and they can't be allowed to break the law with impunity again - because they've been executed or imprisoned for life.

I think I saw someone swimming in some sewage en route from scraping a bear carcass off the road, let me go check.

1. I got asked once if I played world of warcraft since they say a guy with the name "thegarbz" playing. I said no. By the way I know exactly who that person is because he impersonated me as a joke. I found that flattering and funny, but it has no impact on my life beyond that.

Reminds me of my first email account ;) One of my professors said we all had to register for an email account (this was in the mid-90s) so we could submit our homework to him, so I registered his name at hotmail.com to mess with him ;)

I don't trust single points of failure.

Yeah, this. If I have to sign up to some site that I don't care at all if it gets hacked, I use a throwaway password. Oh noez, someone might compromise my WidgetGenerator.foo.bar account and generate some widgets in my name, heavens to betsy!

His surname is one transposition away from "AI Mode".

Yeah, because all even/all odd is (from basic statistics) rare, and happens to be rarer than the percentage of people who play all-even or all-odd, so you'd be more likely to split any winnings.

Reminds me of that famous Frank Zappa quote;- "Comparing Guitarists is a stupid sport".

Now Zappa was no slouch on the guitar, considered by many as possibly the most inventive guitarists of the 1970s, but he was far less enamoured with virtuosity than his reputation suggested, eventually even giving up on playing it live, and handing over axe duties to his young apprentice, Steve Vai. For him it wasnt how well you could play the instrument, its what the music you played on it sounded like that interested him.

I feel the same about programming languages. Python might not be the flashiest, its missing some key features, its slow (although in modern days a lot faster than it used to be), and so on. But I can get the job done faster and cleaner than I can in almost any language except maybe Ruby (which nobody seems to use anymore). Is it the best language? Hell no. Does it matter? NOPE. What matters is everyone on my team knows python, and it gets shit done. Flash and virtuosity is for teenagers and shredders. I wanna play the blues.

The last great holdout for windows was games. For office stuff, the transition from monolithic AD/Exchange stacks to cloud based stuff made Macs a viable platform for many organizations, particularly with software devs finding the Unix system under the hood productive for developments meaning that while Sysadmins have traditionally been mac hostile, devs are often mac friendly (well, other than the dotnet guys), and with the corporate drones enjoying the user friendlyness and fashionable appearances of the machines, windows centrality to the office has been under serious challenge.

But games where unchallenged. While modern macs are respectable for games that have been ported, its undeniable that windows was clearly the winner in this field, with access to Nvidia (and increasingly AMD) GPUs and APIs well suited to gaming.

But Valve has different ideas, and despite the attractiveness of the XBOX subscriptions, Valve have a near monopoly on the ecosystem, and Valve do NOT like Microsoft breathing down their necks. So proton (A wine fork that works shockingly well) has been under constant development and is now at the stage where many windows-only games run as well, if not better, under Linux, even on small machines like the Steamdeck (I have one at home, and it runs..... every game I've tried. Oh and with the emulation stuff makes a pretty great nintendo switch emulator too)

So yeah, the final fortress in windows dominance has toppled. Linux is just a straight up better server. Macs are viable and friendly. And now Linux even plays games better, or at least competitively.

And with Microsoft hell bent on turning windows into a hellscape of chatbots , corporate surveilance, subscription slop and advertising, people have had enough.

If Microsoft doesnt change its ways, its going to lose everything its worked for.

Yeah it seems to me the choice is either
1) a stable orbit with a 50% duty cycle, which means more collectors AND heavy batteries. Expensive.
2) Parking it in something like a lagrange point. Extremely stable forever-orbit, but extremely expensive per kg to get it to that place. And space junk from abandoned shit will never go away
3) geostationary orbits that require a tonne of fuel for constant adjustment burns.

None of this of course factors iin cosmic ray shielding and the enormous amount of infrastructure to deal with the fact that the only way to remove heat is radiating it. Massive amounts of GPUs running at full throttle with no obvious way to cool it.

Or, they could just drop these things in the ocean and use ocean currents to power the GPUs. Hell, you could even just use nuclear down there and never have to worry about a meltdown or radiation leaks, because salt water is the ultimate radiation shield and diluter of radioactive particles.

... which, to be clear, is a good thing. Working around the compiler is dangerous and a code smell, so it shouldn't be something that is easy to do. It usually indicates that either the compiler's capabilities aren't sufficient to meet your needs (in which case, a better solution would be either a better compiler, or to re-evaluate the wisdom of your approach), or that you are doing something the wrong way and should find a way to do it that works with the compiler, rather than around it, so that you get the benefits of the compiler's co-operation.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. The thing that makes rust a "hard" language is its punishing borrow checker step that simply refuses to compile if you've got code smells that hint at page violations or other memory goonery. Rust punishes you, but in doing so it makes you a better programmer.

Its something I fell in love with Crystal over (which, btw does NOT do a borrow checker), its static analysis step that refuses to compile if your doing things with variables that introduces un-handled nulls. I could feel myself becoming a better coder (which is a hard thing to achieve for someone with 20y experience) simply because it was pointing out anti-patterns in my coding and requiring me to fix them. Its a shame crystal never really took off, its a genuinely good and speedy little language. Who knows, maybe some day. Python sat in obscurity for two decades (Python, for the youngsters in the audience, is OLDER than JS, Java and so on. Y'all only hearing of it recently doesnt make it a recent language) before finally exploding in popularity

Steve Jobs back? Like him or not, the best Apple days, products and innovations were done during his iron fists days. And he drove countless companies down this same path, to the point some are now better than current day Apple is.
Since he will not return, hope whoever is confirmed do more than just damage control and play catch up.

Although Tim Cook has been a perfectly fine leader commercially (The man is a supply chain god, by all accounts), he's never had Job's innate sense for the market, consumer, and for design.

I've long maintained they should have given the top job to Jony Ive. Jony is the reason Apple stuff went from grey boxes to attractive and elegant looking designs that actually made the damn things into fashion accessories. Sure the iphones are technological marvels, but if they still looked like plastic chunks with fold out keyboards, there really would be no reeason to buy one over the equally technical marvels like the Nokias , Androids or bloody windows phones. That was Ives design eye that gave us the modern phone.

Apple would do well to repeat the old move it pulled off with Jobs, and hire back Ives to take over the company.