Dave.

Microsoft is shit. Windows, is shit. Windows 11 is a privacy goddamn nightmare.

But in the end of the day, it just fucking works, those damn bastards ensure that. And even when something doesn’t work, it seems, for some unknown reason, most of the online solutions do fix the issue.

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

(Pause for breath)

Hahahahahahahahahahaha

Only if you count “most of the online solutions” as “run SFC /SCANNOW and if that doesn’t work, just reinstall your OS”.

There’s a lot to be said for “http://yourISP.com/~username” being available 24/7 at no particular effort to you.

90% of users when they are presented with the UAC popup when they do something:

“Yes yes whateverrr” <click>

Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.

They need to learn how to use their tools better. Winscp does all that transparently for you if you press F4 on a file on a remote system. Or maybe they did and you just didn’t see it…

It’s quite a handy function when you’re diving through endless layers of directories on a remote box looking for one config file amongst many.

Most times what I get when asking it coding questions is a half-baked response that has a logic error or five in it.

Once I query it about one of those errors it replies with, “You’re right, X should be Y because of (technical reason Z). Here’s the updated code that fixes it”.

It will then give me some code that does actually work, but does dumb things, like recalculating complex but static values inside a loop. When I ask if there’s any performance improvements it can do, suddenly it’s full of helpful ways to improve the code that can make it run 10 to 100 times faster and fix those issues. Apparently if I want performant code, I have to explicitly ask for it.

For some things it will offer solutions that don’t solve the issue that I raise, no matter how many different ways I phrase the issue and try and coax it towards a solution. At that point, it basically can’t, and it gets bogged down to minor alterations that don’t really achieve anything.

Sometimes when it hits that point I can say “start again, and use (this methodology)” and it will suddenly hit upon a solution that’s workable.

So basically, right now it’s good for regurgitating some statistically plausible information that can be further refined with a couple of good questions from your side.

Of course, for that to work you have to know the domain you’re working in fairly well already otherwise you’re shit out of luck.

If library devs do versioning correctly, and you pin to major versions like “1.*” instead of just the “anything goes” of “*”, this should not happen.

Your unit tests should catch regressions, if you have enough unit tests. And of course you do, because we’re all operating in the dream world of, “I am great and everyone else is shit”.

1. Replace CMOS battery.
2. Get small UPS.
3. Discover that small UPS’s fail regularly, usually with cooked batteries.
4. Add maintenance routine for UPS battery.
5. Begin to wonder if this is really worth it when the rest of the house has no power during an outage.
6. Get small generator.
7. Discover that small generators also need maintenance and exercise.
8. Decide to get a whole house battery backup a-la Tesla Powerwall topped off by solar and a dedicated generator.
9. Spend 15 years paying this off while wondering if the payback was really worth it, because you can count on one hand the number of extended power outages in that time.
10. In the end times a roving band of thugs comes around and kills you and strips your house of valuable technology, leaving your homelab setup behind and - sadly - without power. Your dream of unlimited availability has all been for nought.

Conclusion: just replace the CMOS battery on a yearly basis during planned system downtime.

Jobs also believed that 3.5" was the perfect touchscreen size for the human hand, neglecting the fact that (a) the human hand size varies drastically and (b) people are willing to trade ergonomic perfection for more screen estate because it’s more usable that way.

There’s plenty of custom ROMs for cars from all major manufacturers, you just don’t know where to look.Google “ECU remap” or “dpf delete” for an idea. ECU remapping has been done by bold individuals ever since there were programmable ECUs, around 1985.

Apart from engine/drive line tinkering, there are also plenty of third party software that can tinker with body computers for “lifestyle” adjustments.

Is it easy and accessible? No. Because of environmental laws - and vendor lock in - you can’t generally and easily dick around with the control software in your car. But it does exist.

You’re right, I try to use {insert cryptocurrency that I’m heavily financially invested in} for my every day transactions as much as possible, you should too, and you can get amazing returns as well! It’s win-win nobody loses ❤️

What if I want to buy a cheese sandwich today with BTC?

A cheese sandwich can remain the same fixed price in dollars for years, with only the relatively slow change in actual value due to inflation.

I’ve seen BTC swing 10% in 24 hours. Does the cheese-sandwich-maker have to look up the rate this instant and calculate a spot price for me?

Will they have more or less dollars at the end of the day, when they need to pay their bills and buy more cheese from their suppliers?

“Just buy cheese from someone who takes BTC”, doesn’t help, it just kicks the can further down the road.

“Just add a bit of a buffer in the price to take fluctuations into account”, means that I go buy a cheese sandwich with dollars from next door because it’s 50 cents cheaper for the same thing.

As an investment vehicle, BTC is doing hot laps of the track (with occasional accidents), but until its volatility issues are sorted and it becomes “boring”, it’s not going anywhere as an actual currency.

Webrings were themed though, so if your interest was cars, or cats, or ham radio, you could get on a webring for one of those topics and cycle through them.

And it wasn’t all random, you could move left or right on the ring , or jump randomly. So a good webring manager could group sites together as you went around the ring as well.

To be honest, I was surprised it had any idea about FFMPEG. The biggest problem is that it sounds so authoritative.

If it said, “hey I don’t know a huge amount about X” then you could work with that. But it will blithely say “no problem” and spit out 6 pages of non working code that you then have to debug further, and if you don’t know the terms in the area you’re working in you end up blundering around trying to find the right trigger word to get what you want.

I end up having to play twenty questions with chatgpt. For example, I’ve been asking it for code examples for ffmpeg mpeg4 encoding with C++.

It will happily spit out completely non-working code, where the core part - feeding image frames to the encoder - works, but it doesn’t initialise or tidy up the encoding afterwards.

Until I say, “hey this code doesn’t seem to work and creates corrupted files”, and then it’s like, “oh yeah you also need to do a bunch of other stuff, just like this”. Repeat as it slowly adds more and more pieces until finally you end up with something that actually works.

Or it will happily dream up function names or mix python and C functions, or will refer to older APIs even when I’ve specifically said “use API version x.y” and so on and so forth.

If I didn’t know enough about the subject already, I’d never be able to tease out the answer. So in a sense it’s a mostly useful reference, but it can’t be relied on to actually and consistently provide a result because it’s all statistics and fuzzy text generation behind the scenes, not actual knowledge.

I hate how bloated the kernel is. I’d like it to fit into main memory.

Take a copy of lspci, lsusb. Use them to build a kernel from source with only the bits you need and then make the bits you might need modules. Include your filesystem driver into the kernel and you can skip the usual initramfs stage and jump straight to your root filesystem.

Might take a few tries, but at least it doesn’t take 18 hours to compile the kernel anymore…

Digg was Reddit, before Reddit came along. And then they tried to monetise it all and pushed out a site layout update that “enhanced” that monetisation aspect (sound familiar?)

Basically they fucked it up right there.

I left Digg in 2010 and never went back, and now the domain and it’s remnants are owned by some advertising company.

Also, things not designed for food use or human consumption don’t have to follow strict rules regarding their composition, and they’re not monitored.

Nobody is checking PVA glue for heavy metals or melamine or pesticides or any other number of things that will give your insides a bad day.

Nobody is issuing a recall if your bottle of glue ends up with ground up glass in it.

Because it’s not food, and it doesn’t matter, until you put half a cup of it in your pizza because Google told you it was a good idea.

i like how the answers are the exact same generic unhelpful drivel you hear 20k times a month if you’re…

Searching for a solution to any problem on the internet.

There are a million ad- laden sites that, in answer to a technical question about your PC, suggest that you run antivirus, system file checker, oh and then just format and reinstall your operating system. That is also 90 percent of the answers coming from “Microsoft volunteer support engineers” on Microsoft’s own support forums as well, just please like and upvote their answer if it helps you.

There are a million Instagram and tiktok videos showing obvious trivial, shitty, solutions to everyday problems as if they are revealing the secrets of the universe while they’re glueing bottle tops and scraps of car tires together to make a television remote holder.

There are a trillion posts on Reddit from trolls and shitheads just doing it for teh lulz and Google is happily slurping this entire torrent of shit down and trying to regurgitate it as advice with no human oversight.

I reckon their search business has about two years left at this rate before the general public regards them as a joke.

Edit: and the shittification of the internet has all been Google’s doing. The need for sites to get higher up in Google’s PageRank™ or be forever invisible has absolutely ruined it. The torrent of garbage now needed to ensure that various algorithms favour your content has fucked it for everyone. Good job, Google.

I work in OT. The number of “best practice” IT mantras that companies mindlessly pick up and then slavishly follow to the detriment of their mainly-OT business is alarming.

Make your own damn best practice that suits your business best, don’t copy and paste something from a megacorp. Sure, include elements from megacorp’s best practice if they are applicable, but don’t be a slave to the entirety of it.