• 4 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • 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)




  • 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.







  • 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.





  • 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.






  • The Internet boom didn’t have the weird you’re-holding-it-wrong vibe too. Legit “It doesn’t help with my use case concerns” seem to all too often get answered with choruses of “but have you tried this week’s model? Have you spent enough time trying to play with it and tweak it to get something more like you want?” Don’t admit limits to the tech, just keep hitting the gacha.

    I’ve had people say I’m not approaching AI in “good faith”. I say that you didn’t need “good faith” to see that Lotus 1-2-3 was more flexible and faster than tallying up inventory on paper, or that AltaVista was faster than browsing a card catalog.


  • I have to think that most people won’t want to do local training.

    It’s like Gentoo Linux. Yeah, you can compile everything with the exact optimal set of options for your kit, but at huge inefficiency when most use cases might be mostly served by two or three pre built options.

    If you’re just running pre-made models, plenty of them will run on a 6900XT or whatever.