For what it’s worth, I have a system with first-gen Zen cores (Threadripper 1900X). 8 cores at 3.8GHz. Not too shabby even now. It’s just got a higher power draw than the newer chips. Got a fairly decent price on it on Black Friday of 2017. (Never ran Windows on it, though.)

anonymity enables greater levels of toxicity

No. No, it doesn’t. Various fora that have required real names and IDs over the years have proven this—people are quite willing to be extremely toxic even if their real names are attached to every post.

Feeding machines to get a pat on the head from the bosses is seriously fucked.

If the tokens are the company’s property and not yours, I guess it’s no different from paying for things with play money. (Or maybe the fake money they burn for the dead in China would be a better analogy.)

Pretty sure they’ve been doing fine without the US market for years.

(It’s going to be interesting to see what happens when BYD sets up dealerships just north of the border, since Canada has given them the okay to import a certain number of vehicles per year.)

Inertia. Mental inertia, that is.

Point is, people are using the wrong tools to look for stuff. So it’s a social problem more than a technical one. Those are always the most difficult type to solve.

Hmm. Using the search term “small website discoverability crisis” . . .

On duckduckgo: original website is the third result (after what looks like a SEO firm’s longform ad and ycombinator) without quotes and the first result with.

On startpage: original is the first result even without quotes

On mojeek: original is the first result even without quotes

I do not have accounts with any of these search engines and do not allow them to run Javascript or set cookies, although it’s possible that duckduckgo may have noticed that someone with my ip often makes highly specific searches and looks at the long-tail results.

My conclusion from that, combined with other people’s searches surfacing large sites first, is that the results you receive can be significantly distorted by the search engine’s algorithm. Google in particular is likely trying to direct traffic to its advertising customers and should be avoided for that reason.

Lithium is pretty much the best possible chemical to build batteries out of.

Depends on how you define “best”. Likely the highest possible short-term energy density, yes, but that isn’t the only thing we might want out of a battery. “Doesn’t catch fire” is one of the areas where the highest-energy lithium battery chemistries are far from the best, for instance.

Since I’m sure it has no authority, why would anyone want to talk to it? About the only reason anyone ever approaches their boss is to get said boss to do something. (That can be something as nebulous as “put more faith in what I say in the future than what this other guy says,” but there always is something.)

Or do a little more research and find somewhere that the infrastructure was so trashed by war or natural disaster that some records are completely gone. Happened a lot in WWII, and it must have happened in other places since.

If you use Windows, you agreed to the TOS.

If your employer is forcing it on you, chances are you never even saw the TOS.

Depends on what you’re doing. If you’re okay with very limited Web use, even 2GB is viable (or was about a year ago when I retired that machine). More normal levels of Web use, you’re going to need more RAM. Not sure about GPU-constrained loads like 3D modeling, as I never tried them on that machine. But other than those and some games, nothing on Linux should require even 8GB. Server systems can make do with even less.

Exactly. Justice is not fast food. It takes more than a few weeks or even months to go through the steps.

I’m in Ohio. I wonder how hard it’d be to drive to Canada, pick up a router, and drive back?

You jest, but I suspect this is going to be a Thing. I mean, people were willing to do it for eggs (and getting caught at the border), and a router’s a rather larger purchase.

Time and energy to prep meals is also a cost. I don’t know how it is in Europe, but in North America, the poor-but-employed segment of the population is often working multiple minimum wage jobs to stay afloat. Even if they know how to cook and have the tools to do so, they may be too tired when they get home to do more than pop a pizza in the oven.

Why do I still have a 32" TV? Because that’s the largest size that’s still readily available as an ordinary, cheap, flat dumb panel with a tuner. (Well, that and I don’t especially need a larger one.)

Is it terrible that I’d like to see an LLM trained exclusively on translated shoujo manga trying to give teen boys advice about this?

Yes, there are parts of Canada that remote that still have roads. I grew up in one of them. Let’s posit an urgent but not-likely-to-be-fatal medical emergency, like the torn and detached retina I had a few years ago. That required an urgent trip to a major city in particularly foul winter weather. Nearest major city to where I grew up was 800+km, and there are other towns further out than that one. Add to that battery loss in the cold, plus loss of battery capacity over time if you’ve had the car for a while, plus the vehicle having maybe already been driven that day without time to recharge completely . . . I can think of places up in that neck of the woods where I would be seriously worried that 1000km of rated range wouldn’t be enough, although it would be more than sufficient for where I’m now living.

So I’m talking about shit that, in my experience, actually happens to actual people. The segment of the population involved is, admittedly, not all that large, but it’s of nonzero size—probably on the order of a few million, worldwide, spread through a number of countries that have large areas of empty nothing.

1000km range is fucking stupid. No one should be driving that far at once

I take it you’ve never had an emergency while living in a remote area. Especially not one with cold winters that will tank your EV’s range.

Only in the US. Other countries will be able to push the prices down.