Thunderbolt (4 etc) has been leading to things like external graphics cards and external PCI slot boxes hitting the market. This may end up taking a significant share of the "expandability" crowd away from the "internal upgrades" market.

I see this as especially significant with laptops. For years I've been using a large thunderbolt dock with my laptop at home, making it a pretty good desktop machine when I'm at home. It adds a 24" display, big external speakers and bass, camera, conference mic, external storage, gig ethernet, etc. And yet I can pull a single plug, stuff it in the bag, and hit the road with it, something not easy to do with a desktop computer. (not that it stopped us from hauling towers, monitors, keyboards, etc to LAN games in the 90s!)

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen performance CPUs or additional ram available via thunderbolt 4 yet. (or does it exist and I've just missed it?)

Maybe the next "mac pro" won't be a stand-alone computer, but instead it'll be a plug-in accessory that turns ANY mac into a mac pro?

So companies opened literally thousands of data centers that use huge amounts of electricity and water both of which are increasingly in short supply.

Now they have basically unlimited money because they are dangling the possibility of freeing the Epstein class from their long-standing dependency on us filthy filthy peasants.

But the problem is they don't quite have unlimited power and people have noticed how terrible the data centers are for their communities so they can't just keep building them.

So because of that they are starting to have to prioritize what their data centers are going to support and to do. At least in the short term. They are still building data centers here and there and they are gradually getting state laws changed by buying off State legislatures.

The Epstein class is always been really big on buying up the state legislatures. They are big and powerful enough that they can use them to ram through anything they want no matter what voters actually want but they aren't so small and numerous that they're too expensive or troublesome to buy up. And it can be hard to buy a national government completely.

First off about 60% of people never move from where they were born. Of that most of them move for work.

Second of all it is perfectly fucking reasonable that you should be able to move to any major city or town and not have to worry about whether or not you have water. Having water is one of the most basic elements of functioning civilization.

I am so sick of the absurd length and excuses people come up with to blame individuals for systemic problems just so they can preserve some kind of weird libertarian worldview where we don't actually have to take care of each other.

Meanwhile the reason is reservoirs are low is largely because we fucked up the water cycle with climate change. We didn't need to but it helped corporate profits and it got a few men closer to being trillionaires

And we are on track for another 1,500 this year

I think you're having a hard time with the scale of what's going on because it's numbers that aren't normal for human beings

But I seem to remember them all being pretty crazy expensive for what you got. I guess it would be probably quieter than the equivalent Windows PC or hackintosh but most of the models I see out in the wild are the really expensive ones that would have sold for $5,000 and up

A quick search shows 5 million gallons daily. The Southwest states are currently fighting over the Colorado River or what's left of it and everyone wants to build data centers there because they get very few natural disasters. I think some parts of Arizona get big dust storms but those are easy enough to deal with. And the rest of the Southern United States doesn't even have those.

Remember it's not just about how much water an individual data center uses it's about how much water is available to that specific community.

Never mind the fact that we are seeing dozens of these data centers built. A large city might use 100 million gallons a day so the 10 data centers you might easily see near a large city could guzzle 50% of the water.

All of this because the rich don't want to have to pay people and they don't like to have to pretend to be civil to consumers or employees

It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?

We can build wind and solar farms or if we put them next to cities we don't care about nuclear power plants so it's at least possible to meet energy demand even if it's unlikely as long as the right wing are in charge since as always who's going to pay for it right?

But you can't magic water out of the sky. Climate change is fucking up the water cycle. So we are in a drought and that is probably going to continue.

Data centers want fresh clean drinkable water and they want to fill it with deadly chemicals because that's the cheapest way to cool their data centers. The chemicals are necessary to prevent the water from gunking Up their cooling systems however it means you can't recycle the water. The data center could recycle that water but that costs money and they are already blowing through it like crazy.

Even if individual people still have water in their pipes, which is by no means a guarantee anymore, farms are going to be short on water and that means food prices are going to go up. And that means the price of everything goes up because you have to pay people enough money that they can eat enough calories to at least survive or they start to get violent.

And yeah I'm sure there's a bunch of people who own guns looking forward to occasionally getting to shoot somebody in cold blood. Most people I know who own a lot of guns think that sounds awesome.

But when it's not just the occasional punk kid but is a systemic problem what you're going to find is was hungry people find themselves a demagogue and organize themselves into a military and they come at you. And your stash of knock off AK-47s isn't going to stand up against a organized military force of any size.

Remember you have to shoot every single one of them but they only have to shoot you once.

so will Mila Mozilla.

What about the Strait of Hormoooz?

What, you give male aliens a mulligan?

"Sorry, but we don't have an insurance code to cover 'sub-atomic vaporization chain-reaction'."

The mods don't block a lot of the box because they want the engagement to grow there forums. Reddit doesn't mind the bot engagement either the problem they're having is that it's become so obvious that it's infecting their data sets and their advertisers can't pretend anymore that the leads they're getting are worthwhile. So they have to clean things up a bit or their business model is at risk

Modern bots can get past most captcha unless it's a huge pain in the ass that starts to impact users.

Reddit has a problem where it adds too much friction it loses users because it's not as useful as site as Facebook.

I'm an introvert so Facebook isn't my thing but people I know who are extraverts or just want to find hobbyists with the same niche hobbies make a lot of use of Facebook to do that. And it does work for that purpose.

But Reddit doesn't have any of that and the bots have kind of made the discussions almost useless.

Honestly I would love the bot spam to go away. Because a lot of the political forums require accounts with high karma and long tenure non-political forums get really low effort shit posts like hey remember this game from your childhood isn't it great upvote me!

So it kind of wrecks any meaningful discussion or nerding out.

The trouble is all that is good for engagement so nobody really wants to take it out completely. What Reddit really wants is to be able to tell the bots from the real people so that they can continue to sell the data the real people generate and advertise to them