I didn’t. It just looks like the fair number of Cisco (and the occasional Dell) 10/100/sometimes Gigabit switches I’ve seen in junk shops.

I bought a nifty blue Netgear 24-port one mostly because I’m more willing to buy junk from the Humane Society shop, but then decided it was too loud (40mm fans) and went to 2.5G (with smaller fanless switches) instead.

Old Cisco gear shows up in the thrift shops here. I think you can’t even give 10/100 kit away.

American security guarantees are the only thing propping up that stupid narrative.

They’ve always made the claim “TSMC will blow up their own fabs in the event of an invasion”. So, they’re dependent on a lose/lose spite play. If an independent Taiwanese state survives, they’ve demolished one of its major economic engines. If, as far more likely, it falls, everyone involved gets locked up or worse for gross sabotage, and you bought, what, 5 years of global economic distress (oh, no, it might pop the AI bubble…) before everyone else gets back to par with your top-line process? Or maybe you successfully blackmailed bigger and more equipped militaries to fight WWIII for you, and even in the unlikely event Taiwan survives the carnage intact, irradiated corpses buy very few semiconductors.

If America washed their hands of the situation, they’d pretty quickly switch to angling for a deal, perhaps expecting that they’d go for a HK-style “one country/two systems” play, which continues to let them make out like bandits. HSBC doesn’t seemed to have suffered too badly after reunification…

The message was weak though. The policy was fairly limited-- like limits on gouging in emergencies-- and not expressed in terms of a tangible achievable metric. And it’s not like we have direct economic control that would allow for specific deliverables-- how exactly are you goung to get Kroger to bend the knee? A fine that’s 12 seconds of their turnover?

‘I’ll get the 99-cent Taco Supreme back’ (or the $2 gallon of milk/dozen eggs) would have helped-- a graspable specific rallying cry. “We’ll tax gougers back into the stone age” maybe too. ISTR there’s some rightwing scumball in Canada who achieved most of his political rise by literally campaigning on $1-per-can beer. Again, a tangible goal, and one more achievable because there’s direct state controlled alcohol sales in much of the country…

I hope this gives us more Chen Weihua-style snapbacks.

I resent wireless because I feel like we got led astray by the aesthetics crowd. It was never good-- contested bandwidth, poor penetration, paper-mache security, but it was so much more attractive than cables asunder that we’re throwing moonshot resources at it to try to make it good enough.

Meanwhile, consumer wired has stagnated. You can finally get 2.5GbE on a lot of new mainboards, but there are few affordable home router/AP devices, especially with multiple 2.5G ports. the local home centres still primarily stock spools of Cat5E, and even new-build developments treat networking as a low-priority line item, probably well below cable TV jacks, if they mention it at all.

If we had put the same emphasis on wired, there’d be 10/40Gb fibre NICs in commodity systems, and the Home Despot would sell all-inclusive fibre and Cat6A or 8 retrofit box kits.

Fundamentally, I’m not sure Qualcomm is the brand I’d trust to lead the world off of x86.

I understand nobody actually likes Qualcomm products in the cellular space, but they’re stuck with them due to patent minefields. That’s not really a great vibe to bring in when trying to compete against known-quantity x86 vendors.

I figured we’d see homogenous CPUs-- either in the same socket or as an addon module, so you can cast off some stuff to ARM or RISC-V but keep big x86 for games and heavy closed-source software, then flip to RISC-V main with x86 addon cards, and finally emulation.

Sort of thinking about a Pinetab-V, but even the flaky, doesn’t suspend right 20% of the time, wigi was weird on every OS except OpenBSD, Ryzen 2700U it would replace demolishes it. The Lichee Console looked neat with the EEE PC sizing and Trackpoint, but it’s way pricier.

As a Qiqi main, I support your life decisions.

People don’t even bother to ridicule me.

It reminds me of the old Gravatar concept, or how some blog systems used to generate a random image based on a hashed email address (maybe that was the fallback of the Gravatar scheme)

I actually took it apart hoping to find the AAAAs.

Frozen/thawed feeding is very common in modern reptile keeping.

It’s convenient to keep 3 months of rats in the freezer, pre-killed means they can’t injure the snake, and freezing them helps to kill off parasites.

Disapointingly, it came wrapped in a branded metal case that you have to pry apart to see the cool layers.

There’s a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.

Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.

I feel like there’s a missing explanation of why “assimilating the diversity” of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.

It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of “we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need” worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.

Aside from anything else, the cooler looks spiffy. Not an over-the-top RGB monstrosity, and it’s obviously designed to be compact.

Not really. Their menu is just permutations of seven ingredients. So only finite diversity and combinations.

The “Packard Bell” jokes are also right there if you want to tickle a large number of '90s kids.

Because the chip comes with a fat suit for comedy purposes

I’m surprised compression isn’t a thing, like Stacker/DoubleSpace back in the DOS PC days. Even with mostly efficient data, I could imagine eking out 5% more capacity at the cost of lowered performance on disc-intensive tasks

Try connectibg the drive through a seperate SATA card or USB-SATA adapter.

I had all sorts of issues with CD drives on my new X670E board using the onboard ports.

I know; I’m down almost 20kg over the last couple years by cutting out snacks and caloric drinks and portion control.