Yeah thats really odd. A WTF if there ever was one. There was some cool tech like Grand Central dispatch, but seriously it wasn't worth the training and tying you to a single hardware vendor.

Enough to be statistically significant? My own experience isn't but it wasn't good. For work we had two mac mini build machines, and they both died within three years, granted this was in the intel era where heat management needed to be better, but still sad.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

That's going far past anything I would know; I'm software, not hardware and it was a long time ago. All I remember is that there were a pair of uprights that helped hold the chip up and it went from the motherboard almost to the top of the case.

This reminds me of something that was done back in the (I think) 90s for one of the Pentium chips. Instead of it lying flat on the motherboard it had all of its connectors along one edge and stood upright on that edge in a special mount that kept it upright so that all of it was exposed to the air and didn't need a heat sink or special fan. Yes, it had its drawbacks, mostly that it couldn't be used in a laptop and needed a tall case, but it worked and worked well. I know, because I used one for several years back then and only replaced it to upgrade.

One good example is ModemManager. It can't exit until either the modem is on-line or it times out, generally because you either don't have one or it's not connected to anything. Why it doesn't start out by checking to see if you have a modem and if not exit right away I don't know. Personally, one of the first things I do is disable and mask it so it doesn't even try to start because it's been well over a decade since I last needed it and nuking it that way makes a significant change for the better in the boot time. HTH, HAND.

As a game developer: Even a few percent are, as the article points out, millions of users. Us indie devs cannot compete with AAA studios in marketing. It's not that the playing field isn't level, it's not even the same playing field.

But in a niche, you have a good chance to be noticed and word of mouth spreading. And that means grabbing as much of the niche as you possibly can.

And it matters to you Windos users as well, because it means games are developed without being tied to a specific OS or driver feature. Which means your new game will run even if you're not running it on the latest hardware.

And finally, it matters because Linux gamers are more useful to a game developer. Maybe 3% of the Steam users run Linux, but for my last game, at least 30% of the useful bug reports came from Linux users.

No, it is not. "Too big to fail" is just bullshit bingo. The reason banks et al managed to get saved by taxpayer money with that phrase wasn't that they were. It was that they had a solidly entrenched lobby and connections at the highest levels. "Too big to fail" was simply the icing they coated the shit with to make the public swallow it.

I happen to be a member of a social club that's organized as a 501-C. I've sent a copy of TFA to the club's treasurer so that she can be on the lookout for any funny business and not be taken unawares. If any of you know about any non-profits that might be affected by this, please give them a head's up!

One particular home is a brand new, probably a $25 million dollar plus creation, very modern and sleek. The entire house, HVAC, lighting, cameras, gates, door locks, etc. is controlled by a central service on a network. Things go wrong all the time. When the system goes down, nothing works.

Let me guess: that home, as designed and built had no built in batteries or generator to pick up the load when the inevitable power failure occurred. How long did it take for that brain phart to be corrected and how long was the house dark when the omission was first discovered?

Have you met seriously religious people. Like the ones currently running the USA?

I agree with you on AI But without Monero it would be a lot harder to buy drugs on the darkweb and I do value that

Hobby game developer here - same thing applies. It doesn't matter how good the game you make is. If nobody knows that it exists, it won't sell, simple as that. And there are literally a few hundred games published EVERY DAY, so no you can't hope to be somehow discovered by accident or through the Steam (Epic, GOG, etc.) recommendation features. Well, not at scale. Maybe a few people will randomly find you, but without some marketing efforts, it's just that - a few.

Marketing, no matter how much we techies dislike it, is an essential part of any at-scale business. Customers need to know you exist. They need to know your product exists. They need to know your product can do something they would like.

There's a fine line between advertisement as manipulative exploitation and getting information to people interested in it. For a while, I had hopes that the Internet and search engines would solve that problem. Imagine if there were no advertisement. Anywhere. At all. But you had a magic machine on your desk or in your hands that, if you need something, can tell you where to get it. Need new dishes - here's all the shops selling dishes in the vicinity. Need a new computer - here's all the places you can look at computers and here's all the online shops who'll send them to you. Need a blowjob - here... well, you get the idea.

Unfortunately, it seems I massively underestimated how much advertisers like to keep their jobs, and the whole shit became even worse online.