If they're so awful, why do we need aggressive tarrifs to keep them off of American streets? I don't think anyone was making people buy them over domestic alternatives...

(muffled sounds of discord)

WTF?! Xi Jinping himself busted down my front door, grabbed my debit card, and put down a deposit on a new BYD. And what's worse, he picked one in that really insipid grey that you can never find in a parking lot.

No wonder DEC went broke. My VT220 didn't come with any hunks crawling out of the screen Ringu style.

Bought the Blahaj because I'm a side sleeper in need of a pillow.

Did not read the EULA.

Because Wayland is a hot mess.

Yeah, it's surreal. Back when the Oregon Trail Generation got their first 486 class PCs with 14.4 dialup, all the safety guides were about "never use your real name."

The fear of some theoretical elite AOL pedophile corps and being able to age out of an embarrassing "ponygirl1987" account actually made good prep for the idea of "you have multiple identities for different contexts" and "keep personal and work stuff isolated."

So the Nippon Ham company is starting with sausages with bones, and working their way up to the perfectly round cylinder of roasted meat with a large straight bone through the centre that anime and video games have teased us with for decades.

Gotta start somewhere.

Seems like a good balance-- big enough to not devolve into territory battles, small enough to look full in the end.

The fun thing is seeing what content is missing-- it seems like some fandoms never really migrated to the Fediverse. For me, a lack of Genshin stands out; anything this big usually gets a Fallen Qiqi out of principle.

And also start the compensated-hours clock the moment I step into the car. We're giving you eight hours a day, not 12 now.

Spiders.

Even black widows basically have to be harassed into biting.

Sometimes there's a map, but I wish it had landmarks. Is that cluster of lights in the distance Chicago or Salt Lake? Sorry, the map only shows the origin and destination cities.

The web3 that can be named is not the true web3, or something like that.

The "branded" Web3 was about "how do we create the third Web BUBBLE" more than "how do we create the third Web experience." The people who missed buying AOL shares in 1996 or Amazon in 2002 wanted their chance to get in on speculation, except without the utility of an actual service or product underneath the hype.

If done right, it could be a positive curator. Rules like "any drivers you get off of Windows update met certain tests, are not padded with unrelated crapware, etc."

But I suspect that won't fly. My main experience with WU drivers is a tendency to replace new drivers with old, broken ones. And I doubt printer makers-- the guys who made a 600MB driver to do the same tasks that a LaserJet 4 did with a 30k driver 30 years ago-- would play ball.

There is an entire industry "domaining" that trades domain names like baseball cards. It usually boils down to two things:

• People register pdrq.com because they hope someone will have a wonderful new product named PDRQ later and will pay $10,000 for a domain that cost them $11.

• Even if there's no direct buyer, there are services that will run low-quality ads on the page. and you can more or less estimate traffic and revenue from typos or dead links pointing to the domain. A three character domain, all letters, will get more than 12 characters with random digits mixed in. If you get $12 a year of random clicks seeing ads for "hot singles in your area offering PDRQ", you're ahead and can justify holding it as part of a portfolio.

I'm more concerned that they reanimated a 30-years-dead Rear Admiral, a founding mother of computer science, and assigned her to help your job search.

B-movie premise: the dead rise and the capitalists realize that they're cheaper labour than the current precariat.

Why is the answer never "Biden has to do something bold and public to earn the votes of the unexcited, rather than leaning on I'm-not-Trump?"

The student loan thing night have worked if the courts didn't shoot it full of holes. Why is he not promising to pack the courts to force it through? Stonewall any legislation that limps through the knife-edge House until they codify Roe? Go for the fucking jugular on something!

Showing some real backbone to Bibi might help, but we can't possibly have that.

I keep expecting they'll reschedule marijuana for the desperate hail mary. You'd think it was perfect for him because in many ways it wouldn't really change the status quo of state-level legalization, but shows he's at least read a dorm room poster at some point in his life.

Every sort of microcontroller/breakout board imaginable. I'm fond of the nanoCH32V305 (144MHz RISC-V CPU, 32k RAM/128k flash, and GPIOs for days)

Soldering project kits. I bought a NTP capable clock kit to learn SMD techniques, then discovered that the Chinese market has no need for time zone support, but I had little need for the time in Beijing.

There's a surprising amount of miniature stuff there-- terrain parts for model railways, or dioramas or wargaming. The actual model railway stuff seems sort of thin on the ground, mostly resold and expensive foreign brands or toy grade stuff.

I got one of those ominous looking wire-stripper-cutter-tools and rather like it.

The Lord Archmage will need to be disturbed. He's reading "My Pet Cockatrice" to schoolchildren.

My fitness goals are:

• Get to <80kg
• holds up manhwa volume Him.

That's potentially a viable attack route: register a billion dead accounts to fill up the database. Reaping them if they never complete an activation step like confirming a ToS or email verification would help protect the server.

My porn works differently. All the male characters turned into catboys.

Aside from anything else, the cooler looks spiffy. Not an over-the-top RGB monstrosity, and it's obviously designed to be compact.

Oh, boy! As an American consumer, I'm even more perplexed what the hell they are.

Like 15 years ago, Rakuten seemed to be a normal ecommerce site. I think they bought buy.com or something to get a foothold in the US market. Then they pivoted to being some sort of cashback referral service.

I'm not really sure why that would lead customers to think "yeah, I want cloud storage from the people who made a weird janky digital simulation of the Piggly Wiggly Value Club Card!"

(AWS made it work because they could say "we have the infrastructure to host one of the busiest sites on earth, it's good enough for you", but Rakuten does not have that credibility in the US)

Even if it blew up in their face, I could see a non-sycophant reason for supplying Trump a bond, potentially with sweetheart terms: it would be the ultimate marketing coup within the industry. "We bailed out the highest profile defendant in American history, sure we can help you with your sixth DUI of the week!"

I'm mostly interest in that drop on the "Homosexuality" chart in Q3. I know Steve is carrying that department, but really, we can't let the numbers go to shit every time he takes a week off to visit his parents!

I guess I'm the only one who LIKES the latching plug.

And the demolition plans are in a disused washroom in the basement behind a sign that says "beware of the leopard." That's an absurd justification.

Normal users are not going to root around in the registry and twiddle things to mske the OS treat them with respect. Most of them won't search for it, and many of those that do won't have the skills to deploy a registry hack or identify legit info instead of malware or pranks.

The right answer is a third button-- "No, forever." We all know it's the right answer; I'm sure even Microsoft has focus group data. It doesn't exist because someone in Redmond's bonus is tied to how many people are cowed into signing up for OneDtive.

I've got a CS degree and 15 years of dev experience, and have come to the conclusion that you can't negotiate in good faith with Windows anymore. It is going to take you down whichever hellpath their biz-dev team demands, and any attempts to fight it are going to be undermined and replaced with a new set of hacks or a differeny gauntlet of dark patterns for a few months later.

Maybe LTSC and Enterprise versions are a bit better, where they might have to preserve the goodwill of big dollar corporate customers instead of chasing some trifling revenue hack, but do we as ordinary users on home/pro licenses not deserve the same respect? And even there, don't those business customers have to spend undue effort crafting and deploying policies to cram the endless stream of spam back in the box?

What I don't get is who they're posturing for now.

They showed the developers that the game was fixed and there was no plan to negotiate in good faith.

They've shown the userbase they aren't responsive to strongly held concerns.

They've shown a potential IPO audience that they're capable of burning down the platform in record time and not even waiting until after they cashed out to do so.

They've shown everyone they don't even have the most basic understanding of corporate bullshit speak. It's not hard to put together "We hear your concerns and will assemble a committee of top minds who will proceed to ignore these concerns."

I guess they just want to say they didn't back down. That and $12.50 gets you a cup of coffee.

Finally, API bindings I can understand.

Except Aliexpress is still fun.

Let me spend 6 hours looking at slightly different screwdrivers and keycaps and dodgy anime merch and ICs that haven't been used since 1988. Way better than 84 pages of KWJIBO brand home goods.

I believe "headpats" is the only valid answer.

She may also need an elecyrical socket.

I find embedded stuff fun.

Here's a single line of code, and it has distinct outcomes you can see, without 48 layers of abstractions and guardrails.

Sometimes the publisher changes the logo in ways that break the look too.

Really old Tokyopop releases had a small logo, and newer printings have a big red bar at the top-- even within the same series.

As someone who identifies as a UnionPay card, I feel very unwelcome.

Of course! I had always heard the issue was low water levels, but you can clearly see the reactor has not enough R and too much B. G levels look all right.

Damn Polychrome Sync never works right.

The real thing that matters is if they reach "good enough". 7nm/5nm/3nm is a useful technical milestone, and a measure of the quality of their tooling, but at the end of the day, the question is if they can make parts that fulfills a real product need without foreign dependencies.

Size is not everything-- don't forget when Intel stumbled on 10nm repeatedly, yet they were still printing money with 14nm+++++ because the process was "good enough" to deliver a chip people wanted.

I also have to wonder if the music is going to slow down for some of the IC industry soon. Yeah, we can feed every transistor that can be fabbed into AI/ML, but flagship smartphones are getting both expensive and ridiculous. Are enough people buying a $1500 phone, whose main feature is that it folds into an origami crane, that it can drive new process nodes? Or will a mature 7nm design provide enough performance and battery life for 90% of customers? What's the current killer app for more than a $200 phone? Maybe the camera, but image sensors have completely different manufacturing constraints.

The ability to propagate the politics depends mightily on the success of the community though. It's sort of the other side of the 'brain drain' principle-- if people have to leave the community for educational or economic opportunity, they're probably not going to be able to reconstruct the same echo chambers.

Even when you see a preserved group within a larger population (think of Chinatowns and Little Italies), they're inherently getting a lot more cultural exchange than back in the home country.

A lot of the most self-destructive policies (neglecting education, running the environment into the ground, skate-where-the-puck-was-in-1972 economic policy) are just begging for decades of brain drain. The kids are going to leave because there's simply nothing there but the Gizzard Extraction Plant, and that got automated in 2032.

PHP.

It picked a niche and fits exactly into it. It's a language for server side web pages. It's not a general purpose language shoehorned into the task, so it wisely sets boundaries. PHP could avoid a lot of async/await/promise hell because you can work in the mindset of HTTP requests-- terms of short lived requests that are compiled elsewhere. You don't have fragile runtime environments (see: server-side JS), since it just plugs into Apache or Nginx, which are at least battle tested and known quantities to operate.

It's batteries included. Hell, it's the entire Duracell company included. The standard library is rich and centrally documented, including decades of community nitpicks, even before you go into composer repos.

It's non judgmental. You can write procedural code, or object-oriented code, based on preference and fit to task.

It makes ad-hoc easy and formal possible-- If I need an array of [227, "Steve" => "meow", 953 => new FreightLocomotive()] I can get it, or I can enforce types where it's relevant and mitigates risk.

In the end, it's about bailing out the rich. They should have diversified their bets away from commercial real estate.

Covid mashed fast forward, but remote knowledge work was a thing before it. It was a foreseeable risk, even just from guessing normal rich people motivations: once the San Francisco crowd figured out they could cast a bigger net for talent, AND pay lower-cost-of-living city salaries to them, it was going to spread.

If we're going to cast the Zuck as a sci-fi android, I'd put him as closer to Isaac (The Orville) than Data.

He may want to consume data about human interactions, but you know he's going to pepper any conversation with the phrase "inferior biologicals."

I'm surprised that chipmakers waited this long. I have the feeling they all treat their firmware divisions as a necessary evil.

Has there ever been positive news associated with the lowest levels of firmware, or is it at best begrudging "AGESA 4.2.0.0 finally fixed the issue where the memory is clocked down to 250MHz when there are two runners on base" fix notices.

If they can toss the problem on a bunch of enthusiasts and people willing to finance open-source developers, they get it our of their hair and earn some public praise.

Realistically, it might be interesting for long-term platform support-- if someone wants to keep tweaking and optimizing a 10-year-old platform, they'll have more tools at their disposal to do so.