technofiend

I view it like the automotive world - lots of people like to buy a car and trick it out in some way. Same with PCs. Just think of it like that.

I once publicly stated it's understandable that someone would post an ad that says "No YouTubers" because people don't want to be content for others. The reply I got was "but you're being recorded all the time anyway", as if those are remotely related.

The exact opposite is true in some places: being a massive asshole is often rewarded because those people are able to bully others into getting what the assholes want done. Only it's dubbed "influencing". The higher up you go the more toxic and defensive the political landscape.

... and you don't have to worry about it.

Not to be argumentative, but I have a concern that whomever I buy my solution from will have vibe coded it instead. I guess that means my support contract entitles me to hassling them about it, but I'm starting to worry it's just LLMs and vibe coded apps all the way down.

The Cray 1-ish machines I had access to at Shell and Chevron were most definitely tucked away in rooms with no visibility into them. In fact the Chevron machine room had pretty stern "no photography" placards, which I took seriously and is sadly why I don't have a photo of sitting on the loveseat of their machine.

Getting access took just short an act of God and I was a sysadmin in the central support group! They didn't want us puttering on the machines, so as far as I could tell it mostly sat idle.

I've been beefing about this for decades; X Window didn't do this by default and you could adjust window manager behavior however you liked to prevent windows stealing focus in X, even for newly realized windows. Microsoft Windows decided for some reason the newest window gets focus, which is annoying as heck. I really don't want my attention involuntarily switched because my window manager things it knows better than I do where I should be looking.

So you don't think Plaid sells customer data? And by extension charging for customer data requests by Plaid and other aggregators isn't in fact charging for it?

Plaid does in fact sell your data, but they ask for permission first. So does JPMC, for that matter: https://media.chase.com/news/chase-launches-chase-media-solu...

"...Selling your data would be idiotic...same reason it would be for your bank [to sell your data] in that trust is the entire business model." I'm afraid that ship has sailed and taken your data with it.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/jpmorgan-chase-fintech-fees....

You did say "I'd like this to be the end of my Windows usage." Even so, if you're not ready to move tomorrow, you can give up some privacy for the next year and continue to get patches by logging in to Microsoft. Windows 10 LTSC is a possibility if you somehow qualify for a license, although there's no guarantee the latest Nvidia drivers will work on it, some version of them will, or you can punt and run Linux on your current PC until the steam cube comes out. Pick a Linux distribution you like and run Steam, or go down the rabbit hole of running native Steam OS.

I personally preferred Fedora for this but mostly because my employer is a redhat shop. It's not otherwise (as far as I know) any better or worse than any other distro for gaming.

When I paste code into the native MacOS Teams chat, my peers using Window Teams see a literal black box. I wish it worked! I really do. Or we all had MacBooks or Linux desktops.

Even Microsoft MacOS apps are second-class citizens next to the ones found on Windows. I personally feel this is $WORKING_AS_INTENDED because honestly why would Microsoft empower people to exit the platform? It would be like creating an open source version of Active Directory and giving it away.

Completely shared experiences with regards to both Forrest's books and Estes' rockets, except after enough losses of the latter I got pretty fatalistic about new rockets. They were assembled and flown same day as soon as the glue dried, with maybe a slapdash decal; there wasn't much point investing too much time or energy when the wind or a tree was going to take them anyway.

huh.. maybe publicly communicated recovery was then. I was seeing knock-on effects hours later and didn't see full recovery until late afternoon EST.

It can be a life changing amount of money but not always in a good way. If you're not careful, your spending expands like a gas to fill all the available volume and you're just marching sideways towards retirement with nothing saved because it's too fun spending money.

The same text is on their M3 page, so at this point you have to assume it really means they haven't gotten to a point where the support page needs updating. Although it would be nice if they updated their page to just say that instead I guess beggars can't be choosers.

It's just anecdotal but when I asked why our Xerox workstations at JSC had dancing Snoopy line art, I was told Charles Schulz himself was a big fan of the space program and he'd drawn art for the program and extended its use to them in perpetuity.

I have been on a team that won a silver Snoopy but was a subcontractor and didn't get one myself; just the Boeing employees I worked with did. Every once in a while I Google them on the off chance I could get one as a piece of memoribilia, but they are thousands of dollars.

It's happened more than once that people thought $2 bills were fake; here's a recent example: https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/houston-school-confuses-2-...

I had someone pocket a Susan B. Anthony $1 coin and put their own money in the register to replace it, but that was because it was a rare coin, not because they thought it was fake.

It's $10,000 worth of tires on a $500 car. IOS is so crippled, it's complete overkill.

Oh there are myriad online options; I don't want to store my tax returns in the cloud.

I love everything about this. I've often thought families that wanted to extend their network between trusted friends could set up a literal private branch exchange (aka PBX) with only their friends as fellow members.You have a way for people to call each other without handing kids a smart phone and can also avoid the inevitable costs and unwanted calls associated with real land lines.

IO on many little files is dramatically faster in Linux on ext4 vs Windows thanks to NTFS' journaling overhead. So if you're doing development, you really want to do it inside wsl2.

I cancelled Facebook in part due to a tug-of-war over privacy defaults. They kept getting updated with some corporate pablum about how opting in benefited the user. It was just easier to permanently opt out via account deletion rather than keep toggling the options. I have no doubt Microsoft will do the same. I'm wiping my Windows partition and loading Steam OS or some variant and dual booting into some TBD Linux distro for development.

When I truly need Windows, I have an ARM VM in Parallels. Right now it gets used once a year at tax time.

As a unix sysadmin in the early 90s, I liked to understand as much as I could about the tech that supported the systems I supported. All my clients used NFS so I dug into the guts of RPC until I could write my own services and publish them via portmap.

Weirdly that nerd snipe landed me two different jobs! People wanted to build network-based services and that was one of the quickest ways to do it.

My wife was a wedding coordinator for many years and we were both aghast at how anything dubbed "wedding" was magically 10x normal cost. I used to joke that wedding water would be next. Then some crafty bastard ran with the idea and started selling bottled water labeled for the events! I can't complain my joke turned into someone's side hustle but on the other hand we eloped and I don't regret it.

A colleague rejected a candidate this week after said candidate posted ten lines of code into a clipboard all at once and then claimed to have written it one line at a time. When challenged, he further claimed my colleague's zoom session lagged which is why he missed it.

I recently had to argue a junior into leaving the health check frequency alone on an ECS container: the regular log entries annoyed her and she didn't know how to filter logs, so her solution was to take healthchecks down to every five minutes, as just one example of trying to talk to people about the unhappy path.

For a joke between friends I had it take my selfie and make me a bald Catholic priest and then add hair to a friend who is bald. No refusals, although those are pretty tame. In contrast to the quality images nano-banana produced, Copilot removed my glasses and made my eyes brown.

You do have to wonder how that kind of interview would go. Hopefully it would be actual engineers that created what she reverse engineered instead of some gatekeeper trying to one up her somehow.

I do not.

My personal experience using virtual desktops vs a MacBook aligns with your analysis. This despite the desktop virtual machines having better network connections. A VM with 16 GB of memory and 8 VCPUs can't compete with an M1 Max laptop.