Physical held the least amount of info (you probably weren’t going to find much). Software like encarta was cool - had lots of info. But in the days of dinosaurs libraries was where it was at. It was common to ask an adult a question and you get either “I don’t know” or some BS that you believed was true (but wasn’t).

If you really wanted to know, you’d ask the librarian at school or at your towns public library and they’d help you find a book on that topic. Libraries were magical places - even for the people who were too cool to admit it.

I’ve been playing around with AI a lot lately for work purposes. A neat trick llms like OpenAI have pushed onto the scene is the ability for a large language model to “answer questions” on a dataset of files. This is done by building a rag agent. It’s neat, but I’ve come to two conclusions after about a year of screwing around.

1. it’s pretty good with words - asking it to summarize multiple documents for example. But it’s still pretty terrible at data. As an example, scanning through an excel file log/export/csv file and asking it to perform a calculation “based on this badge data, how many people and who is in the building right now”. It would be super helpful to get answers to those types of questions-but haven’t found any tool or combinations of models that can do it accurately even most of the time. I think this is exactly what happened to spotify wrapped this year - instead of doing the data analysis, they tried to have an llm/rag agent do it - and it’s hallucinating.
2. these models can be run locally and just about as fast. Ya it takes some nerd power to set these up now - but it’s only a short matter of time before it’s as simple as installing a program. I can’t imagine how these companies like ChatGPT are going to survive.

The most annoying thing isn’t even the price hikes or the direct sales - it’s the ambiguity they’ve introduced into things. “Hey we need pricing for xyz”. “Ya, we’re not sure if we’re going to quote that”. Like wtf? We’re a middleman who has deployed VMware on our systems for decades mostly because that’s what end users want - but it doesn’t matter to us, we can deploy in other options easily enough.

But like - It’s like quote it or take the account - but the customer has a project and you won’t make up your mind. Seriously, we have quotes stuck in pergatory for over 6 months, yet they won’t call the end user and sell direct. Customers literally can’t buy VMware even if they are ok with a 1000x cost - and they wonder why people are moving on.

Budgeting season is sept-Dec. I think everyone I know is kicking off a migration project for 2025 to another platform - mostly because they can’t get a quote/licenses. VMware is screwed and it’s only just begun.

He’s gonna get rid of the income tax too right? Right?

No? So everything costs more and farmers go out of business. Got it. But hey, you maga aholes got to own us libs. That sure was awesome! /s. Have fun being homeless you tools.

Anyone still defending Microsoft at this point has cognitive dissonance and deserves what they get. Seriously people - just use Linux. And for the 1% of you that can’t get that 1% of your programs working in Linux - just dual boot.

It’s like people forgot how to use computers.

I’ve been a dual / triple / god knows how many OS booted since the 90’s.

Windows has gotten into bad habits lately - it’s not staying in its lane. Meaning it hasn’t respected other boot partitions for a long time, and recently there seems to be a lot of people having problems with windows nuking their linux installs.

My strong recommendation is to buy a second hard drive if you dual boot. Then windows can be “over there” - I’ve never had a problem dedicating ssds to the OS. My second recommendation is to do this now, why wait until you’re forced into something? You’ve got a year to learn Linux and get comfortable with it.

Devastator and jetfire

Clear winners

98 Volkswagen Jetta. Rampant problems for everyone, not just me. Body molding falls off, window motors fail, water pump fail, wiper motor fail, 3 starters and an alternator, frame problem wearing out at the wheels, and the clear coat peeled.

When my third window motor failed, I drove my pregnant wife and her sister (who were in the car) to a dealer instead of whatever plans we had. I bought a Highlander on the spot and drove home in that. My wife drove that Highlander for 14 years.

I went from one extreme to the other! :)

This isn’t an iPhone problem. This doesn’t happen normally. There’s one of two things going on:

1. you jailbroke your phone/sideloaded/installed some shady app. Solution: hard reset that phone and set it up as new. Do not copy over anything, and use the phone as close to stock as possible for a bit. These notifications will stop. Then you add apps and stuff slowly until you figure out what is the offender.

2. you’re being targeted. Somebody did something nefarious and they are probably good at it. It’s not easy to get into a stock device. I find this option possible but unlikely unless you’re a VIP or you’ve REALLY pissed off an ex lover or are married to overly attached girlfriend.

*Edit

Maybe there’s a third option. Maybe the phone’s hardware is just borked somehow - a chip or sensor or something is broke. /shrug. I suppose that’s possible too.

Agreed. Now that said, OP didn’t mention WHY he wanted WiFi hardware removed. Due to framework’s philosophy-it would be absolutely trivial to put one back in. Literally five screws.

Like if I was trying to keep a kid off the internet - it would probably fail. I know I’d just buy a card a pop it in when no one was looking. But I’m a rebel like that. :)

I literally just bought a framework 13 laptop and was poking around in it (because it’s a repairable laptop). It 100% has a removable wireless card, and I was surprised because I assumed those were all soldered onto main boards these days.

https://guides.frame.work/Guide/WiFi+Replacement+Guide/96

I have it. I don’t know why, but it won’t sink its claws into me. It’s a great game but something isn’t clicking for me. Most people like it though from what I can tell.

Yup. There’s a story reason for it. It’s actually part of the charm of the game. But that first bit (which should be an intro cake walk, but isn’t) is a bad design choice IMO.

Not everyone likes every genre of game - so here’s my grouped list:

The “I’m a nerd and like to build things and I like to watch lava lamps flow” Factorio

The “I enjoy tough but fair games that I can totally become OP in once I figure it out” Elden Ring

The “I just want to chill” game Stardew Valley

The “I like to build things” game minecraft Honorable mention-Terraria

The “Metroidvania” game Hollow Knight

The “Arpg” game Diablo 2 Honorable mention - PoE

The “I like action and smashing things in an open world” game Neir Automata Honorable mention - God of war (play one of the originals so you can 1st hate the remake, and then get to THAT point, and then happily eat crow and let Kratos be your baby daddy.

This one has been sitting in my steam backlog since the dinosaurs roamed the earth. I should get on that…

This is the third update in like six months that is horribly broken. There was a windows 10 update that wouldn’t install because the recovery partition that Microsoft’s installer created was too small. The prior win 11 update just won’t install for lots of people and there’s no real rhyme or reason. Now this crap.

They just don’t give a shit anymore. Microsoft had a great run folks, time to move on.

I still for the life of me can’t figure out what’s so great about secure boot and tpm. All it’s ever done for me is prevent me from booting a legitimate OS, or a bootable flash drive with iso images on it (like ventoy). It’s also pretty good at giving me a headache trying to figure out how the keys work and how to register them.

I just turn them both off and live in ignorant bliss.

Honestly-I always wondered how in the hell women with nails even just a little bit long typed comfortably on a keyboard. I figured it was either a) not a big deal or b) a super pain in the arse and another example of the world (for whatever reason) not making a simple product to solve a simple issue (like bandaids that match people’s skin color for example).

Now I know! :)

Phones must be a bitch as well…. The solution to that might be a bit harder to pull off…

• I walked around with a ruptured appendix for weeks without knowing it. In my case, the pain was very minimal (not normal)
• there was so much raw sewage in my abdomen, they decided to gut me from my pelvis to my sternum, take everything out, and powerwash me
• there was a problem with the hospital pharmacy. I woke up in the ICU with zero pain meds and my nurse screaming murder at the pharmacy tech over the phone. “For the love of god he’s up, I need that morphine RIGHT FUCKING NOW”
• don’t know how long it took, but that was pure hell.
• then I got full bowel blockage, multiple times, throwing up and all, with my stomach cut in two trying to heal. Surprisingly the blockage was almost as painful as the unmedicated seppoku I experienced.

Take my upvote for bowel pain being horrific.

Another data point. I also literally broke my back from a fall on the ice. If bowel pain was a 10, I’d put breaking my back at about a 6.

Tying fishing flies

Looks really hard. Not terribly hard to make some respectable flies with a little bit of instruction.