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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • PowerPC performed much better and made design changes that made much more sense long-term.

    There were also volume production issues and architecture advancement issues.

    Essentially, they couldn’t get volume guarantees and they were at the mercy of a much slower improvement cycle than they would have liked.

    PowerPC was absolutely an excellent top-tier processor, and the current Power11 line absolutely smokes anything else out there from either Intel or AMD, at the cost of being 100-200× more expensive. Like, think $30,000 USD for a single entry-level workstation, or $70,000 USD for the high-end one.


  • Windows 11 refusing to install on hardware it can absolutely run on.

    RUFUS is not only a great tool with which to build your USB installer (it has an option to download the correct and latest ISO directly from Microsoft), but in the subsequent steps it also asks if you want to modify the installer in some pretty useful ways. Such as bypassing a Microsoft account in favour of a local account, and neutering some of the more recent requirements. IIRC the TPM 2.0 requirement can still be nerfed.


  • 50 shades of grey. The writing was so cringe that I just couldn’t get further than one chapter or so.

    What I find so bizarre is that the women who go hardest for this stuff tend to be either repressed housewives or hardcore feminists.

    Because if Christian Grey had been an unemployed layabout in a decaying double-wide, it would be a horror novel instead of smut. The only reason why it’s smut is because Christian is filthy f**king rich and exemplifies almost every toxic masculinity trait imaginable. And that is in addition to behaving like a controlling abuser.








  • So what? Most of us were never meant to be impactful, or even lack the ability to be impactful. I would posit that life in general was only ever meant for us to vibe with the universe for a brief time. In the span of epochs, and especially once humanity makes itself extinct, vanishingly little will have any material impact on even the planet, much less reality as a whole.

    Unless you manage to trigger false vacuum decay. Then you have made the biggest possible impact by destroying the entire universe. Not sure this is an appropriate goal to reach for, but hey. You do you.


  • But somehow matter magically organizes itself into life?

    There is a recent, decently-supported hypothesis that the emergence of life is a byproduct of entropy, and the need for a system as a whole to almost “self-process” itself from a state of high order to one of lower order. So life is an emergent “engine” that allows entropy to function more efficiently. Or, at least a more efficient path than non-life.

    Downside is that life - as we understand it - is only possible under a narrow range of environmental conditions, and complex life even more so. So while “life” may exist throughout the universe in measured single-celled doses, complex life - especially sapient life - may be distressingly rare or even wholly absent except for us.

    Which is a real kick in the nuts when you examine the scientific evidence of how fast we are hurtling towards our own extinction.








  • I’m not aware of any blogging platforms that respect my privacy and align with my values.

    Why rely on someone else’s property?

    So long as you have a decent symmetrical Internet connection and your ISP does not block port 443 (https, and ideally also port 80 - plain http - for emergency fallback), you can self-host any kind of website you want.

    Stick with a static site generator, and your technical needs for hosting will drop down to practically nothing. You could run your website on almost any kind of a low-power device, including - if you have reflashed it with something like OpenWRT - the gateway router to your home network (although this isn’t something I recommend beyond a “holy shit, it worked!” scope).

    There are even people running static websites on computers close to four decades old (512k Macintosh, FTW), although the limiting factor there isn’t the hosting but the computer’s responsiveness in responding to page requests… they aren’t the most spry circuits in operation and are easily overwhelmed.

    Honestly, the sky is the limit for what you can do, and you can go as simple or as technologically complex as you desire.