A $87,000 dinette set and a 97-cent roadster.

Try RiscOS for a glimpse of a world most of us missed.

I’d also suspect there are things that may not be “learnable” – if you don’t have great spatial perception or colour vision, that might not really be a skill than can be practiced.

The worry is that it feels like we’re moving past a consumer-directed economy and not in the wholesome Soviet five-year-plan way.

The almighty market has figured out how to collude and cram stuff that people don’t want down our throats (what consumer wanted everything to turn into an enshittified subscription?)

Real people may not want AI slop, but if there’s enough of a sense it will make line go up, we’re getting slop.

On the other hand, this factor might be the salvation: the current AI market is full of 2000-era-dot-com business models based on selling at a loss and making it up on the promise of global domination later. If the VC money dries up, and every “delve” costs whatever the actual amount it costs to drain the oceans and oilfields to pump into an array of Quadros plus sufficiently reimbuse all the ghouls that bankrolled the project, maybe the line doesn’t go up anymore.

It’s nifty that’s what’s worth the BOM price hike.

I wanted something like Memtest or advanced diagnostics, or a recovery tool which could mount popular filesystems and fix partition tables, or a burn-in suite. Or hell, boot-to-Tetris.

The Very Busy Tactical.

I suspect it could be seen as a proper noun.

If Acme and FooCorp create a bridge between their private network spaces, it’s an internet (common noun) but not the Internet (proper noun, referring to the one with Goatse).

Let’s find an English teacher. And yell at them for forcing us to read the same terrible novel in both 10th and 12th grades. Maybe after that, return to this subject.

I’d say it’s a bad thing because it’s the wrong threat model as a default.

More home users are in scenarios like “I spilled a can of Diet Sprite into my laptop, can someone yank the SSD and recover my cat pictures” than “Someone stole my laptop and has physical access to state secrets that Hegseth has yet to blurt on Twitch chat”. Encryption makes the first scenario a lot harder to easily recover from, and people with explicit high security needs should opt into it or have organization-managed configs.

Does the USA make a $25 aftermarket PS2-style controller to steer it with?

It will even be covered in orange stains like when Kyle ate Cheetos before borrowing it.

There is the technical argument that PoS was more energy efficient than running data centres full of ASICs or sometimes GPUs solely to produce proof-of-work.

It’s still different flavours of Let’s Prentend We’re Finance Except Without Grownup Boring Rules, but if we can avoid burning gigawatts and puffing the cost of GPUs, there’s a case for it.

Even the Grinch didn’t go on TV to tell peoole he was stealing Christmas.

That fault is common in vintage stereo amplifiers too. A popular mod is to install a triac so that the switch becomes basically a soft-switch toggling a few hundred milliamperes, rather than the full current draw for less arcing. See https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/is-your-unobtainium-power-switch-worth-5-and-an-hour-or-so-of-your-time.504673/ for discussion; not sure if it can be directly applied here.

To be honest, I’m amazed it took til Biden before we saw more pressure on TSMC as a flashpoint.

Even if we’re on nominal good terms because they’re a capitalist democracy, nobody likes single points of failure (earthquakes and industrial disasters happen even without geopolitical tensions)

But we’ve handled it miserably-- throw some money at Intel who can’t innovate out of their gilded cage anymore, and try to get a few TSMC facilities stateside-- when we should have been trying to completely diversify the supply chains with new players and new geographies.

In fact, it’s amazing that we lost the concept of second sourcing. That ensured no one vendor held you hostage. Like 8 different firms made 8088s, on up to the 486, but after that it dried up fast. You saw a few IBM badged Cyrix 6x86s, but who else sells a pin-compatible Ryzen?

I hope once China gets far enough up on the tech curve, they see distributing fab tech as a BRI programme. No reason your next bag of 74LS04s, or the 30-cent MCU in your thermostat, can’t be made on a 28nm fab in Burkina Faso.

Then you have the NexGen Nx586, which is arguably 386-like in having no FPU, but ended up being the ancestor of most modern x86 CPUs by decomposing complex operations into RISC-esque micro-ops.

The Global Foundries split was probably a way to get AMD out of the hyper-capital-intensive fab business. And without a tier-1 customer, Global had less reason to pursue smaller nodes.

Intel has that national-champion thing to keep it afloat. I can imagine there are defence contracts that will never go to a “TSMC Arizona Division” and they’ll pay whatever it takes to keep that going.

Once an egg sac hatched at our communal postbox and it was magical, all these tiny yellow spot sprite things bumbling around and setting off. Put a good narrator on and people would have watched for hours.

I think it’s more the £50 notes. Much like using a USD100 note in the States, it’s a bit big for most daily purchases.

I ended up dumping most of mine on a couple expensive souvenirs in shops expensive enough that they’d deal with it or breaking them in banks.

EA now being a model to aspire to?! What next? Cats chasing dogs? Sunshine at midnight? America showing responsible global leadership? nVidia making a fairly priced GPU?

Some people like to use a stored balance as a financial discipline tool. Don’t put a “real” funding source on the account and then you can only spend the $100 you committed to, and not go whale-mad and drop $500 on premium currencies.

It’s easier just to price in the fee than having to shut down or retool a project.