The Centos “eight pointed star”?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.

Generally, companies are trying to maximise profit, which means that the price will be reduced only when it’s stopped selling at the previous and they want to make sales the next, more price-conscious, segment of the market. They might want some quick bucks if the company is in financial trouble, or to ‘make the news’ with a sale if they need some publicity.

BG3 sold shedloads, is still selling shedloads, was on multiple games-of-the-year list and generally ranks amongst the best games of all time, often at the top; and Larian seem sufficiently flush with cash from the success of it. So like you say, don’t hold your breath waiting for a big sale, it doesn’t make sense for them to do that.

Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.

Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…

Criminal waste of elotes, though. I’ll have them if they don’t want them.

Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.

On account of Dan Ek’s bullshit, have cancelled Spotify this year in favour of Qobuz, and am much happier all round.

Last year’s ‘wrapped’ was just AI generated slop. After a year of listening to metal and electronica, got a top five of stuff that I’m not sure I’d listened to at all. Who would have thought the great plagiarism machine, trained to produce the most average output from any given input, would not do well on input that diverges from the mean?

I’d probably have preferred a completely random K-Pop selection; might have been an interesting listen, try out something new.

He did shake things up with a lot of new ideas. I’d like to think that proving him wrong has gotten us to a better place; it’s the fin de siecle version of being wrong on the internet, everyone writes to correct you. Kind of sucks for everyone that got the bad advice in the meantime, tho.

True. Was thinking of indie games, of the kind I might develop myself., which would be limited to the languages I speak myself.

If you’re developing something where you’d expect enough international sales to hire a translation team, then Chinese would be a sensible first choice, followed by Spanish.

Closing in on 8% if you filter it by “English language only”. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) use Windows and make up about 30% of all Steam users, which skews the rest-of-world results. And I wouldn’t consider 8% of all prospective sales to be a joke, especially since that number only keeps on rising and by the time you’ve spent a few years writing a game it’s likely to be quite a bit more.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Sorry, putting the two things together, my mistake. My router doesn’t let you specify the DNS server directly, but it does allow you to specify a different DHCP server, which can then hand out new IPs with a different DNS server specified, as you say. Bit of a house of cards. DHCP server in order to be the DNS server too.

The router provided with our internet contract doesn’t allow you to run your own firmware, so we don’t have anything so flexible as what OpenWRT would provide.

Short answer; in order to Pi-hole all of the advertising servers that we’d be connecting to otherwise. Our mobile phones don’t normally allow us to choose a DNS server, but they will use the network-provided one, so it sorts things out for the whole house in one go.

Long, UK answer: because our internet is being messed with by the government at the moment, and I’d prefer to be confident that the DNS look-ups we receive haven’t been altered. That doesn’t fix everything - it’s a VPN job - but little steps.

The DHCP server provided with the router is so very slow in comparison to running our own locally, as well. Websites we use often are cached, but connecting to something new takes several seconds. Nothing as infuriating as slow internet.

Big shout out to Windows 11 and their TPM bullshit.

Was thinking that my wee “Raspberry PI home server” was starting to feel the load a bit too much, and wanted a bit of an upgrade. Local business was throwing out some cute little mini PCs since they couldn’t run Win11. Slap in a spare 16 GB memory module and a much better SSD that I had lying about, and it runs Arch (btw) like an absolute beast. Runs Forgejo, Postgres, DHCP, torrent and file server, active mobile phone backup etc. while sipping 4W of power. Perfect; much better fit than an old desktop keeping the house warm.

Have to think that if you’ve been given a work desktop machine with a ten-year old laptop CPU and 4GB of RAM to run Win10 on, then you’re probably not the most valued person at the company. Ran Ubuntu / GNOME just fine when I checked it at its original specs, tho. Shocking, the amount of e-waste that Microsoft is creating.

The amount of fuel required to launch them into the sun is more than is required to eject the from the solar system completely, it’s not very efficient.

Although putrid, they remain a valuable source of protein and nutrients. As a more carbon-efficient alternative, I suggest tying some waste stone around their feet and chucking them into the sea. Something in the depths will eat them.

Reasonable for a lightly-loaded home server, however. I’ve got Arch Linux ARM (btw) running as my home Forgejo / Transmission / DHCP / NAS, and it just sits and sips power while providing all those services 24/7 like a champ.

Shout out to ALARM for having basically the entire Arch ecosystem (including 99% of AUR) all working and ready-to-go.

Oh, the greybeard stereotype, for sure. Carrying the weight required for the ‘classic RMS’ look isn’t good for your health. Cute twinks in knee-high socks carrying a blahaj are much better, everyone loves them.

Now, the fully-actuated fursuit for if you want to be taken seriously as a sysadmin? That’s an expensive hobby.

especially if you have the infrastructure in place

I thought Bitcoin mining made no sense at all on GPUs any more? Unless you were running ASICs then the power costs just weren’t worth it, and application-specific is part of the acronym, there. Why would these things even be able to run an LLM?

In any case, Bitcoin just needs to iterate as fast as possible in order to find a match, doesn’t really need a lot of RAM. Whereas LLMs need really large amounts - NVIDIA’s latest data centre racks have about a terabyte for a reason. Even if you had cornered the market on GPUs five years ago for Bitcoin, what use are those cards for this?