As someone who used to be conservative (I considered myself an "independent conservative" back then), I became apolitical (mostly due to dealing with severe health issues), up until 2020 when I started getting back into politics, Trump scared me. I was nervous in 2016, I warned my family about him but they wouldn't listen to me, they would say "Well we'll look into that" but they never did. 2021 and the insurrection were the nail in the coffin for me, family members have supported him completely without budging on any issue. I've been shocked at the reelection, I've practically endlessly watched Trump speak and he seems to be completely incapable of telling the truth, or even doing/saying the right thing. I have family members who are sold on him, they lap it up.

I had a discussion with them about the insurrection after it happened, and one of them said that it was actually Antifa posing as Trump supporters to make Republicans look bad, to make it look like Trump wanted to overturn the election but in reality it was Democrats wearing Maga hats trying to take over the world (!), yet the more I asked, they kept doing mental gymnastics to justify it, or to pass the blame onto the other side. An example is that they said there would be hyperinflation under Biden, and also that Biden is a communist who wants to be a dictator, and has establishment figures pulling the strings to control him. One line that struck me, was when they said "What about the Murder of Ashlee Babbit?', it was the way it was said and the wording that sounded way too cult-like to me, as if they were being programmed to have very specific and automatic responses. They expressed things that showed that they believed that the whole world basically revolved around republicans and democrats, how George Soros was trying to dominate everything and destroy the world, etc. You've heard it all, they've been mentally programmed to not only regurgitate it, but believe it wholeheartedly.

This election terrified me, but I'm interested (in not really a good way) to see what happens.

It is, back in the 90's there were a lot of competing architectures, some very good, but that all basically died out at the hands of Intel and market consolidation around x86; I've seen lots of good technology just die off. If MIPS had taken off, Windows might've been primarily for that platform due to the fact that Microsoft developed a lot of NT on the Jazz architecture (custom-built MIPS systems with ARC firmware), some of that can still be seen in SGI systems (which use ARCS firmware, a modified ARC, and MIPS cpus). I've noticed there's a lot more competition nowadays with CPUs than there were even 10 years ago, mostly due to how ARM is basically showing how bad x86 really is. Windows (NT) also used to be available for the Alpha architecture, but support for that was pulled before Windows 2000 went RTM, there was even a binary translator available for NT4/Alpha similar to Apple's Rosetta called FX!32.

As the main developer of a relatively large 3D simulator project in C++ (in development for over 20 years), I've encountered some users who have Windows ARM systems that they wanted it to run on. Since I already had Mac universal binaries for it, porting to ARM/Windows and providing builds for it wasn't hard at all, I basically did it in case the industry moves in that direction. Builds are done on a VM on a Mac system. I don't like Windows anymore (I think it's a huge mess, it's very bloated and slow compared to competing platforms, WIndows 11 seems to be more about ads and marketing of Microsoft stuff), but in situations like this you need to use it and build for it, since most users use it. X86 translation appears to work pretty well in it, but I always want the sim binaries to be architecture-native. I mainly now develop the C++ code on a MacBook Pro with an ARM CPU, was previously mainly using Debian Linux for development, but the Mac system is extremely fast and has relatively low power usage, I've badly wanted to leave the x86 architecture since I've considered it to be a legacy one for a long time now (I used to use SPARC and MIPS systems quite a bit, a long time ago). I'd probably prefer RISC-V if it was gaining a lot of traction in modern systems, since I'd rather have an open architecture.

My simulator is at https://www.skyscrapersim.net/ if you're interested.

I used to be a serious Winamp user in the late 90's/early 2000's. In the mid-to-late 2000's I started using the Winamp clone Audacious since it ran on Linux. I now use it on both Linux and Mac (I think I used to run it on Solaris/sparc too back in the day), for most of my music listening, and have barely used Winamp for over a decade, mostly because I abandoned Windows. I think things would be a lot better if development was poured into something like Audacious instead of trying to revive a proprietary app from the dead (with severely restrictive and questionable source code). I downloaded their git repo when it was online too.

I've been on /. long enough to remember when most people here leaned libertarian. Ian Freeman would've been celebrated as a hero. I'm shocked at the current unquestioning acceptance of whatever the Establishment media says. Sad.

Here's a different take on this story and a deep dive into Ian Freeman.

In other news, water is still wet.

I know they will eventually get it. But they are not currently instilling confidence.

I use manual rsync at home, but on my AWS server I use Rsnapshot which is a wrapper around rsync that mostly manages incremental backups. For my mom I set her up with Duplicati which uploads to AWS S3.

Dunno. Have you ever had to try to work with PayPal? I've talked with Google people. Never once after years of trying have I ever even thought I might get a PayPal person on a phone call. Just an PayPal == email bitbucket.

Define "Net Plus". To a for-profit company net plus means something very different than it does to you, I'm sure. If it costs more to produce than the market value of the end-product, it isn't a net plus, by any definition.

It caused 2 updates, in which one update caused the self destruction. The windows updates don't display files as it's deleting them, what happened is that the icons on the desktop disappeared, and then I opened up the My Computer for drive C, and saw that the disk usage had dropped by almost 100gb or close to it. When I looked around the hard drive, most everything was gone permanently. I wanted to like Windows 10, and wanted to like Microsoft again, but after this, I simply can't. I'm pretty surprised that you'd just blindly bash me over my comment.

I normally run Debian Linux on my Xeon desktop, but recently rebooted into Windows to keep it up to date. I did the "security update" everyone is talking about on here, and it eventually wiped most of the C drive (I actually watched it deleting everything, and it literally wiped out probably close to 100gb of data) plus it even damaged the operating system, so upon reboot, the OS wouldn't boot anymore due to missing DLL's. Luckily I had a backup (from ntfsclone) and restored from Linux, but I don't really want to touch the Win10 installation anymore, and now believe that Microsoft has horrible quality control.

370 foot boat...

There is nothing environmentally friendly about a 370 boat that accomodates 50 people (including crew). No matter who is or isn't buying it.

Seriously, how tiny are your hands that you can only hold a single earbud in them? To imply your arm can't reach both sides of your head also indicates you are less than 2 years old and probably shouldn't be wearing earbuds anyway. (Some obvious exceptions for people who don't have typical bilateral symmetric human anatomy.)

They have a booming blackmarket and "undocumented labor" (slave trade) back and forth across the Chinese border, though. We'll never hear about it but there will absolutely be plenty of cases if this thing continues to spread as it has been.