I didn't say PC hardware isn't good enough, I said there's no point buying compromise hardware that's not what you really wanted, because in the long run it's all pretty damn affordable. If an Intel or AMD box is what you prefer, by all means buy one and enjoy!

One thing I want out of my hardware is the ability to run my OS of choice without a lot of hassle, and since my OS of choice is MacOS, that kind of narrows down the field for me.

I imagine it's pretty mediocre, but I don't know and I don't particularly care, because I don't spend much time playing video games anymore. If I was a gamer I'd likely buy a different machine for that.

Are computer purchases not consensual? Nobody is forcing you to buy overpriced RAM if you don't want to, so the rape analogy doesn't work.

I'm an Apple fan; I'm typing this on a 2018 Mac Mini that I spent roughly $2K on -- but it's 2026 and that Mac is still running just great. That works out to an amortized cost of about 68 cents per day -- which is to say, negligible compared to my other expenses.

Trying to save money by buying cheap computer hardware is like trying to save money by buying single-ply toilet paper -- you can do it, sure, but why make your life noticeably worse when the amount of money you'll save is trivial?

They may have fancy caps, but they have not figured out how to create proper iced drinks. I happen to be in Germany right now, and it would be easier for me to find a live unicorn than to find ice cubes in a drink.

I'm going to make a radical suggestion: how about we leave it all in the ground, and continue to enjoy living in a viable biosphere instead?

Those three statements are policy choices, not objective facts. Capitalists like to present them as inevitable, but of course they are not; they are only presented as such because it's in capitalists' interest for people to see them that way.

The way things are headed, the only way people are going to be able to obtain money to pay for those widgets is via social welfare programs.

Additional context: at the time of their release, both the Neo Geo and the 3DO were considered to be unaffordable, except by the very rich.

I don't think it's monopoly issues holding anyone back, so much as the fact that setting up a viable fab for RAM or storage takes billions of dollars and a number of years, and everyone is expecting the AI bubble to burst before then anyway.

e.g. why invest $$$ to build a new manufacturing facility, when by the time it comes online be competing with auctioned-off near-new equipment from all the belly-up data centers that didn't make it?

The real problem with C is that it doesn't have any built-in support for strings. Everyone is forced to fake it with char-arrays, which aren't quite the same thing and require very careful handling. The problem with that is, everyone has their off days, and so everyone who does string-handling in C eventually ends up shipping string-related bugs that introduce security problems.

strncpy() was not intended for null-terminated strings at all. It should have been named copy_null_padded_buffer(). Then its operation would have made sense to almost anyone. People wouldn't have minded the longer name much either, because hardly anybody uses null-padded buffers in modern software.

Note that a null-padded buffer that is completely full doesn't have any nulls in it at all. That's why strncpy() doesn't necessarily add a null termination. It also fills the entire destination buffer with nulls after the end of a short copy, which can be very inefficient when used with null-terminated strings.

TL;DR: don't use strncpy(). It doesn't do what anybody thinks it does.

It was easy: Turn the hue knob to the left for purplish skin, to the right for green skin, and then carefully center it for purplish-green skin.

Rather than guillotining anyone, the solution ought to be regulating the growth-rate of data centers so that they don't eat the economy. There's no reason to allow them to grow "as fast as possible" when it's not even clear how useful they'll be long-term. Unregulated capitalism leads to violent boom/bust cycles which cause economic pain.

Every computer manufacturer would love to have margins like Apples', and would raise their prices in a heartbeat to get them, if they could. You can call that corporate greed if you want, but it's also standard capitalism.

The more pertinent question to ask is: why is Apple able to command a premium, without losing sales, while other computer manufacturers cannot do the same?

The standard Slashdot answer will be "because Mac purchasers are idiots", but I don't think that is the reason. I think it's because Apple is able to sufficiently differentiate its products from those of its competition, such that customers don't make their purchasing decisions based on a dollars-per-megabyte analysis. If Macs were sold with Windows and featured a consumer-gaming video card (like most every other PC in the world), it would be different, but Apple is the only (legal) source for a MacOS-running computer, and its one of the few providers of a unified-memory architecture for local AI execution. Until it gets some direct competitors, that gives it the ability to name its price.

Socialized only to make sure they fail, not to provide for the general welfare.