I mean, if youÃ(TM)re running AIs, youÃ(TM)re gonna want 128GB at least, and a fast GPU. At that point, it being a MacBook Pro isnÃ(TM)t going to make much difference. ItÃ(TM)s gonna cost $7000, which I grant you is a lot of money, howeveræ now find me another laptop with a GPU around the performance of the laptop 5080, and 128GB of RAM the GPU can access.

A laptop or desktop with 128GB of RAM will likely be around $7000, with RAM costs being what they are. Even a 64GB laptop is already around $4000-5000.

Sure, some manufacturers could throw in decent chargers and such, but honestly most of them are pretty lame.

Apple used to give you a 5W adapter. It would charge your iPhone, but slowly. It hung around (along with the green dot going back to the first generation iPhone because of a recall where the prongs might stay plugged in) until 2025 or so when Apple finally discontinued them. Likely the only reason being to those countries that insist on a charger being sold with every phone.

Even though you and I know that for the most part, those are going in the trash as e-waste because they aren't terribly useful unless you have a lot of USB powered trinkets. To which you probably can ask your friends for those adapters before they trash them.

The faster chargers they aren't going to give it to you for free.

Note that some phones come with faster chargers - Samsung, Qualcomm based ones, OnePlus, etc., because they don't use standard charging protocols like PD (OnePlus I believe only recently switched to PD) so if you wanted fast charging you needed to use their own special charger as a standard one wouldn't work. Qualcomm ones use QC (QuickCharge, a Qualcomm proprietary system that's dying out along with Apple, though at least many third party adapters support both).

It's funny, but they all still come with cables. You'd think as a standard object they'd get rid of them as well, but chances are they are valuable to have around since they do break often so you're less likely to toss it since you'll probably save it for when you need to replace a broken one.

The present age verification laws are creating FAR more problems than they solve.

Which is what the OS age verification was supposed to solve - the OS verifies your age and that's it. You don't have to send your ID to a million third party agencies. Of course, these agencies don't have to worry about OS verification taking over since not every OS will have that functionality (usually phrased as "open source OS exclusion").

All those Linux users will be keeping those third party services alive.

That's fine, competition is good. Though it's only a duopoly so it's not exactly ideal, but if it means communications with Mars gets competitive then it can only be a good thing.

Would bring a whole new meaning to the concept of "tip your server".

In the bad old days where servers were basically PCs in tower cases (with some being in nice double-wide cases), this actually happened. It was sitting under the desk of the person who basically was the IT guy in charge (he did stuff requiring high performance computers, so no one was going to question his need for a high performance computer to be a server back in the early days where office networks were starting to become a thing).

One day he accidentally kicked it and it tipped over. and landed flat. All we knew is it didn't boot. Not quite sure what the issue was, but likely the processor fell out of the slot and I think the drives were none to healthy after that. I think he moved it to a corner of his office after that and carefully routed the network cable out of the way.

The early days of networking were fun. Rarely did offices have Internet access so if you needed to do something on the Internet there was a computer with a modem in a open office. A year later it got upgraded to a PC running WinGate when the entire office and everyone's PC got networked together, but there was a delay accessing the Internet because it had to dial in to the ISP.

Tip your server, just like you tip your cows.

Utilities will love this. Production just popping up all over the place.

Balcony solar generally isn't that much. Especially in North America where it can only provide half the load. Most balcony solar installations generally have less than 1000W of capacity which compared to the daytime load is basically nothing. (This is because they plug into a weedy 110V 15A outlet which restricts how much power can be pushed anyways)

A proper rooftop solar installation will generally have anywhere from 5-20kW of capacity - the larger installations generally include battery storage because it's usually not affordable to release it on the grid.

It's basically guaranteed that balcony solar systems will be used by the home it's plugged into.

Where do you live where this makes sense?

Well, technically, we're letting Natalie do it, which is, of course, worse in every way imaginable, since she's immune to the sense of embarrassment that sometimes restrains him from acting on every little whim.

To be honest that was actually my first theory, since the bots didn't seem interested in exploring the rest of the domain. I suppose there's no way to know for certain. I concluded that it must be an imbecile's attempt at harvesting, though, because the queries weren't really exploring the string space in any useful way. Here's a sample:

"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&re&results_&results_pagenum=2980 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=5440&template=41&type HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=33500&templat HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=32640&templ HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&res&results_page&results_pagenum=39300 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_&results_pa&results_pagenum=12340 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_r&res&results_pagenum=6100 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=2&go=Search&group=0&group_restrict=1&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=2920&te HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&nam&results_&results_pagenum=17940 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results&results_pag&results_pagenu&results_pagenum=37720 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&results_pagenum=9360&template=41&type_r HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_restrict=1&q&r&results_pagenum=28040 HTTP/1.1"
"GET /index?author=15&go=Search&id=48&name_&results_pag&results_pagenum=10400 HTTP/1.1"

The only thing this is fuzzing is the query string parser. It's not testing the limits of string buffers, it's not using interesting characters, it's just brain-damaged. The fact that it's also fetching different page numbers shows it's trying to follow page links and failing badly at doing so.

The site gets plenty of sniffing from garden-variety pests. e.g. this half-hearted attempt to find a framework or two that I don't have:

"POST /__rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/session HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth HTTP/1.1"
"POST /__nextjs_action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /.action HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_rsc HTTP/1.1"
"POST /api/auth/callback HTTP/1.1"
"POST /_middleware HTTP/1.1"
"POST / HTTP/1.1"

(of course, none of these URLs exist other than /, and you definitely can't just POST to it)

All this said... I've seen that spammers regularly misconfigure their tools, they'll try to register accounts with names like #[X:\LISTS\NAMES.TXT] and it only makes sense that some other cybercriminals trying to get rich quick have a similar lack of interest in programming shit correctly. Generally people don't turn to script kiddie shit if they have a personality conducive to putting in an honest hard day's work perfecting their craft.

The OSS exception prevents something being taken away. That is a win, even if we did not win something.

And what is that something?

All the OS age verification stuff does is avoid the third party age verification systems currently in place for things like Discord and other stuff. If you use Windows, macOS, iOS, or Android, the age verification can be done via an attestation from the OS. All the Linux exception does is not require Linux to support it.

That means a Linux user wanting to use Discord and accessing age-restricted features would require using the same third-party services they always had (these services are not going away since basically all OSes right now do not support it). And those third party services would require IDs and such, which will not be securely stored (since many have experienced breaches).

All I see is that if you run Linux, you're going to have to give up information to some third party who isn't trustworthy and who may experience a data breach tomorrow.

I believe Linux already supports CPU hot-swap if the hardware supports it. It was needed by IBM so their POWER mainframes could literally do just that.

Unfortunately I don't think there's many x86-based servers that support CPU hot swapping.

Or maybe it was a competitor who wasn't interested in stealing the laptop so much as stealing the game before its release?

In any other timeline, I'd agree. But given Gamescom has been going on for years and such stuff hasn't really been a thing, stealing laptops of some indie developer doesn't really get you much.

I'd think it was more for the hardware - tho laptops may not be worth too much, but you can bet they would have 64GB of RAM and likely a nice SSD, both of which can net you north of a grand. Plus SSDs and memory are tiny and can be stripped from the laptop in minutes.

I suppose we might find out if someone finds a bunch of laptops stripped of memory and SSDs. (If you want to use those Bitlocker exploits it requires the original machine so if the hardware is "discovered" then you know it was just for the hardware.).

The right-wing loonies are coming for the EU too. It's a constant battle, it never ends. There will always be people who vote for hate, everywhere. Countries outside the US are not immune to this nonsense either.

Correct. It's why it's a constant battle. In Europe, the last time it happened was in Germany just prior to WWII.

It is no coincidence that the US voted the way it did because WWII is basically a distant memory and the lessons of the past were forgotten. Especially since the rise of American Exceptionalism that happened in 1956 when the US became the superpower and took over from the UK.

I believe the plan was to give that sobriquet to Lake Michigan, in honour of its decidedly flaccid silhouette.

I had a problem where AI scrapers were absolutely DETERMINED to fish out every possible query string from a search results page. Almost all of the query strings they tried were invalid due to shitty and dysfunctional string substitution. "&page=100" wouldn't be followed by "&page=101", it would be followed by "&pag&pag=1010" or something even more insanely half-baked, until the query strings were like 100+ characters long. It was the technological equivalent of watching HIV mutate in real time.

But the insane thing was that, aside from page number, they were always requesting info about the same other criteria: filtered by the same user, the same page type, and with no text string. So I just took those particular values and started banning logged-out users who requested that combination of criteria.

I figured I'd need to change my tactics in a couple of days once the botnet got bored of that particular page and moved on to requesting bogus entries for another user.

MariaDB> select count(*) from ip_bans;
+----------+
| count(*) |
+----------+
| 671671 |
+----------+

It hasn't.