My idea was a worm that just torrents random shit and dumps it on your desktop like a cat bringing you a dead bat with “I broughted you a pwesent ^w” energy.

Gacha can be moderately acceptable if the math is fully documented and enforced. If you know it will take <= 180 pulls to get Raiden Shogun, and each pull costs $3, then it’s just a $540 DLC with extra steps and the tease thst it might be cheaper if you’re lucky or have banked pulls.

But transparency is key-- the developer should be expected to offer a calculator or lookup table for any RNG item, especially if it’s some combination of multiple drop mechanics or hsrd-to-convert currencies that dissuades back-of-the-envelope estimates.

Even in Vegas, the slot machines are required to disclose their payout rate.

There’s also significant differences in the gacha appeal factor. If there are no leaderboards or PvP, and the game mechanics can be completed with F2P only, that is inherently less pressure to spend then on a game where you regularly get your ass handed to you by a someone with a Black Amex and all seven-star limited banner units.

Low value foreign currency, i.e. for collectors?

You can buy a lot of issues in packs of 100 or even 1,000 notes for a few tens of dollars, and it’s not worth calling Brinks for some old Soviet roubles or Zimbabwe dollars. Would likely still smell like money.

As a (non-game) developer, AI isn’t even that great at reducing my burden.

The organization is enthusiastic about AI, so we set up the Gitlab Copilot plugin for our development tools.

Even as “spicy autocomplete” only about one time in 4 or so it makes a useful suggestion.

There’s so much hallucination, trying to guess the next thing I want and usually deciding on something that came out of its shiny metal ass. It actually undermines the tool’s non-AI features, which pre-index the code to reliably complete fields and function names that actually exist.

I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P

Can we get the politicians to shift from illegal aliens to Sasquatch? Build a wall across Washington state and make Canada pay for it?

Why not just subsidize the shit out of the USPS?

I buy a lot of AliExpress stuff, craft and hobby electronics stuff, and have run into situations where a domestic vendor will have what I want, sometimes even at a competitive price, but their shipping will be $5-10- maybe discounted if I spend $50, 100, or more, while the Chinese option is $2 postage, or even “free postage if I spend $10.”

If you could mail a 100 gram padded envelope for under $1, it would cloae the gap substantially.

Don’t they still have some of those GPUs primarily designed for office and commercial scenarios that need a lot of outputs, but not a lot of triangles? The classic “trader PC” with four monitors, or a machine driving the menu screens at a fast-food?

Or that there’s a huge amount of legit demand for mature node chips and it makes sense to own the supply for it.

The 5000 microcontrollers you inyeract with each day, by and large, do not need 5nm processes.

We saw a few years ago how relatively cheap, commodity-grade, low-complexity chips suddenly become vital when you can’t get them and they have unfinished cars piling up at the assembly plant.

On a less deranged take, there’s definitely potential to mend the Sino-Soviet split. Their interests and capabilities dovetail quite a bit, but I suspect unification is wildly impractical for any number of cultural and historic reasons. OTOH, if they presented a Warsaw Pact-style alliance, perhaps using the cudgel of mutually assured economic destruction instead of nuclear destruction, that’s a hell of an act for the West to try to follow.

Needs a sheet of rub-on tattoos with vaguely “I didn’t serve in the military but really want to imply I did” to “outright white supremacist” themes.

My favourite is that “Three Percenter” design that effectively coopts the design of one of America’s least-successful coins. I sort of want to talk one of their ears off about numismatics and watch their brain smoulder.

I suspect Intel has a broader product range than AMD to justify the headcount, but I’m not sure where the extra resources should go.

Their networking chipsets were gold-standard in the 100M and Gigabit era, but their 2.5G stuff is spotty to the point Realtek is considered legit.

They’ve pulled back from flash, SSDs and Optane.

There must be some other rich product lines that they do and AMD doesn’t

It can also throw things against the wall with no concern for fitness-to=purpose. See “None pizza, left beef”.

So thry’re saying they have plenty of licenses for the use case, but somehow people are still pirating?

Maybe their license management paradigm is just garbage. This could be the vendor, but also poor IT policy if the users can’t requisition what they need.

As usual, service problem.

So much licensing fuckery-- dealing with floating or reissuing licenses, users needing to move to different machines-- could be solved via affordable site licensing. But that might leave dollars on the table if users don’t overbuy.

The appeal of state media is that the bias is obvious.

We know who’s paying the bills at the CBC or Xinhua, but it’s gonna be a lot more subtle for the local broadcaster who mysteriously drops their investigative series right after the target buys a premium ad package.

It also means you can triangulate. If the BBC and TASS both report the same details on a story, those are probably legit.

Yeah, I’d suspect Rifas before dust when I hear “exploded on first power up”

Also on modern firebreathers.

I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

The kid has a PCjr and what looks like an Atari 65XE/130XE. I think he has the wrong one set up for a good gaming experience.

AlsoHeatsinks.

I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.