• 19 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 27th, 2023

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  • You can buy a used office computer from businesses that are upgrading (downgrading) to win11 for less than 50 bucks. They tend to be relatively low power, relatively quiet, lots of PCI slots and USB ports so there are many upgrade options, yet low entry price for a decent computer. If you plan on using as a jellyfin server: either mind the chip now for transcoding capabilities (there’s lists out there) or know that if you want that, you’ll have to put in a GPU at some point if the onboard can’t transcode well.

    I have a mix of external and internal SSD’s. Some are running way not as fast as they theoretically could, but it all works well enough for me. You can start with what you have, storage is still expensive.





  • An over engineered toothbrush is a dental product just as much as a very cheap one and there are for sure greedy people interested in trying to get people to log their brushing data on a corporate cloud and later link together their insurance and their dental habits at some point and there are for sure people willing to pay for detailed brushing data. It’s just the very beginning of it all still. Give it 20 years, your insurance company or dentist will ask you how come you’re not logging your brushing.




  • Still in disbelief how they wreck it even in the simplest things.

    Remember how clicking the audio system tray icon would open… The common audio settings and nothing else, idem dito for the network icon. For some incomprehensible reason they jammed those system tray icons menus all together a few years ago, you need more clicks, it’s less intuitive and less efficient. For what reason? No one knows.

    Remember how right clicking an icon would open a quite extensive context menu? Gone. Now it’s a few BS options I never need. For example “open with…”: gone. Now in the freaking context menu you have to click “more options” for another, full context menu to appear.

    Incredible BS tiny changes with a big negative user experience impact I truly cannot grasp why they’d do it. Only reason everyone sticks around is (bad) habits, vendor lockin and obligations for certain software by school or work who insist on keeping Microsoft because they themselves are also vendor locked in or just very very scared of change.


  • Most countries will be raising taxes on fuel even more and in general it will become less available fast: gas stations, mechanics who know how to fix the ICE old timers etc. it will become a hobby thing (like old timers today already). Certain niches will keep ICE way longer (heavy construction vehicles etc) but it will suddenly become quite rare in 20 or 30 years to see a regular old ICE driven by a regular person doing regular things like commuting or so.









  • Definitely impossible for most tracks. Possible for some, but at high costs. Germans have been upgrading some lines for decades now… The best (worst) example being the north-south towards Basel. For high speed the paths need to be further apart from eachother, there need to be better barriers between tracks and what’s around them, the curves indeed need to be wider, the ‘tilt’ in the track in curves might need to be adjusted too… All of which leads to necessity of many new bridges and tunnels where this upgrading is impossible due to surroundings. It costs many millions of € per km and many decades to accomplish. The French on the other hand mainly went for “build new lines”, it was clearly the better approach to get shit done fast (tho skipping many possible stops altogether on the new lines).


  • Not necessarily. The divisions in middle east today have roots to end of WW1 and collapse of Ottoman empire and decline of British empire. There would still be a shit load of oil in middle east. There would still be limited amount of water… It could be very different, which countries ally, what kind of regimes etc, but not necessarily more peaceful region as a whole.


  • The way the economy in the soviet union was micromanaged in super centralised way was key to its collapse, especially the final 10-15 years. Soviet Union did have great innovation spurs in IT, rocketry, etc but it was impossible to diversify said innovations further, impossible to mass market it, impossible to mass export it. The centralised economic system lagged enormously and was incredibly inefficient, 1 town having 500000 jackets but no shoes, other town having 100000 chandeliers but no food etc. On top there was really really high levels of corruption. The economic model was essential in the demise of the Soviet Union, once they let go of some regulations a tiny bit, it all fell apart fast. China paid attention, they keep trying to waggle between statecontrolled and free market… They are well aware similar risks still exist in their state-owned companies to this day.