I use it as a desktop. I like that it’s free of the nasty surprises of modern Linux (flatpak/snaps, systemd, X11 is still pretty first-class) while not feeling quite as isolated as Slackware and its sort of pre-broadband approach to packaging.

My biggest issue was poor support for an old Epson scanner that rewuired a binary package that wouldn’t install cleanly as it was designed for Debian; solved by buying a $10 used Canon scsnner which worked out of the box.

I like it better than Devuan for a non-systemd distribuition because, as its own thing, you don’t end up with as many “do I need to follow the Standard Debian guides or do something special” questions.

Yeah, but it was the norm prior to 1909 and was a little more aspirational than “he just got perforated, let’s slap his face on the half dollar.”

What’s sad is that the obverse of the 250th dime is probably the best of the redesigns. For the first time since 1946, we’d have a circulating coin with an idealized figure of Goddess Liberty instead of a dead politician.

The typography is atrocious though. And the lack of a cohesive design language sucks. The Charles III coinage from the UK are so much better as a thematic set.

One huge issue is that LLMs do weird and stupid things differently than how humans do them.

If you’ve developed an eye for reading human-made changes, you’re not necessarily going to recognize new and surprising failure modes as easily. It’s literally harder than regular code review.

Humans with modern tooling, for example, rarely hallucinate field/class/method/object names because non-spicy autocomplete keeps them on the rails. LLMs seem much more willing to decide the menu bar is .menuBar and not .topMenu, probably because their training corpus is full of the former.

The “default” mode for a USB keyboard allows submitting 6 keys + modifiers. Some boards define nontraditional input descriptors that allow more, but that mode is not guaranteed to work in places like the BIOS menu or naive KVM switches.

To avoid phantom keypresses when you hit three keys in a “square” on the matrix, a diode can be placed in series with each switch so current can’t go through an “indirect” route.

Mostly Goodwill and Craigslist finds.

JVC JR-S301 receiver (rebuilt) Three tuners (Sansui TU-717, JVC T-X55, and MCS 3050) because they’re a cheap source of lights and knobs Sony TC-RX79ES tape deck (belts replaced) Sony DVP-CX860 300-disc changer (not great at feeding discs, I mostly use it as a depository after ripping the discs to FLAC) Onkyo CP-1030F turntable (automatic mode is wonky- it keeps resetting after 3 seconds of play)

The difference between Chase and Chipotle is that one is less eager to give you the runs.

Part of it is not finished DRAM that was sold yet, it’s wafer capacity at the factory.

Sam Altman has promised orders for a kazillion wafers that don’t exist yet. It’s been argued this is less legitimate demand and more an effort to crimp the scaling ambitions of other competitors.

If his cheque bounces early on, the manufacturers are likely to reassign his slots to other buyers.

The manufacturers are taking a fair bit of risk though. If they aren’t getting paid before work starts, and the bubble pops in the middle, thry could end up with a lot of (partially or fully) finished wafers that they can’t just slice up and sell to Corsair and G.Skill.

It was a literal 100-level course project in my CS programme in 2000 or so.

You didn’t even do it with a programmed CPU, you used 74xx logic gates and counters wired on a breadboard

When they first launched, their whole main message was “it’s a cheaper cut for the devs!” Perhaps I’m being selfish, but that’s not a message that resonates to me as a buyer.

Hint: most of us don’t get hot and bothered about exactly how much margin Walmart lets Tyson take on their chicken nuggets, so trying to apply that message to games is weird.

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

I see a Roadmaster wagon. To the used-games store!

Some mainboards have very few PCI-e slots.

I ended up with a similar adapter because the onboard SATA on my board was flaky with optical drives and I rip CDs.

Lexmark was originally spun off of IBM’s printer and keyboard division in Lexington, Kentucky. You saw a lot of their printers sold with cheap home computers around the turn of the century; they leaned heavily into the “$39 inkjet printer with $75 cartridges that used all three colours to make black” business model, and were largely squeezed out of the home market by customers who didn’t buy their second printer from them. It feels a bit of a throwback to see the name now, but they retreated to the commercial market.

The keyboard division was further spun off into a firm called Unicomp, who still builds derivatives of the quality “Model M” keyboards they sold on the old PS/2 machines.

Most full-range manufacturers make servicable printers, as long as you go high up enough in the product line that they’re selling to businesses that care about duty cycles and maintenence costs, although I think at some point you reach units that are sold as an ongoing service arrangement with on-call staff instead.

It’s fun. I saw it in the weird $3.50 cutrate cinema the local real estate tycoon runs as hobby business and there were like 9 people in the hall.

Not even friend shaped. ;_;

A Greaseweazle mihht be another angle; you could image discs at lest.

These coins will never circulate.

Commemorative coins like this are usually sold at a significant markup (even beyond the fact a “silver dollar” has about $30 worth of silver at today’s bullion prices. Some of the markup is often set aside for a fund-raising purpose.

These will go directly into the albums of coin collectors, who to be blunt, tend to skew old, white, and MAGA. (If you go to a coin show, there will be plenty of right wing and Trump paraphernalia).

The ironic thing is that “really successful” commemorative coins tend to not appreciate well, because they glut any market. The most valuable modern coins tend to be either stuff that was deliberately underproduced (example: the 1996-W silver eagle that was only available with the purchase of almost two ounces of gold coins) or stuff that was ugly and unexciting and so they produced far less than the original allotment.

There are plenty of people who drag down their inheritance of 1970s proof sets, mail-order/shop-at-home products that are $10 worth of coin in $100 worth of packaging, high-markup bullion items, and market-glut commemoratives, just to discover that Grandpa should have bought AAPL instead. Often the “investment” didn’t even beat inflation, and in the worst cases, they actually lost money in nominal dollar terms. I suspect a bag full of Kirk dollars would be a red flag to any appraiser in 2050.

I ended up with two hubs. One sits on top of the desk mostly for transient devices, and one is taped to the bottom of the desk for semi-permanent devices. Then there’s only two cables to the machine.

And the tendency to provide numerous m.2 slots.

Give me an x4 slot and I can slide a m.2 adaptor in, but if it goes the other way, it’s only by way of a janky hacky mess.