I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.

Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.

• Starting from zero will cost bajillions and take decades to get competitive
• Samsung’s probably not divisible in a way that makes their fabs buyable
• They can’t buy into any of the 7nm/5nm level players in the PRC and fund their modernization due to sanctions
• Does anyone else have sub-10nm at anything buy lab scales?

“Ten Bits” seems viable, although nobody cares much about the Spanish real anymore.

Not even an isekai.

Arguably, one of the best possible worlds.

Legit multipolarization?

NATO, in particular, is highly coupled to the American/anti-Russian agenda. How much chance did Europe get to discuss the pros and cons of bankrolling a long-term conflict in Ukraine vs getting railroaded into it with the insinuations of being the next Chamberlain?

Even Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin don’t wake up every morning asking “how can I be evil today?” They may have a different agenda than the West, but it still comes from a place of caring for their country, legacy, and position. These are not wholesale foreign concepts. They can be understood and worked with. But I suspect the sort of organizations that would get the best out of them would require certain countries to acknowledge their place among equals and be willing to comptomise their sphere of influence.

I never realized the tattoos were photoshopped.

I assumed they used a random stock photo that had a convenient pose to add the shirt onto, that happened to have a tattoo.

Of course, I also figured using a photo with too much ink would 1) distract from the merchandise and 2) make the stock photo model too recognizable. (Oh, they clearly used Getty #8675309, “Fat White Guy With Mediocre Barbed Wire Tattoo”), but plenty of the pics are identifiable enough to use for a police report.

Also on modern firebreathers.

I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.

I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.

I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.

We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.

I actually said to one “We’re a Linux household. Not interested in Windows” and slammed the door on them.

I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.

I think you’re thinking of the Socket A Athlon/Duron/Sempron. A lot of coolers used shitty mounting designs so it was possible to get it off alignment or over-pressure it and crack the die, and no heatspreader + poor thermal controls allowed for a meltdown if the mountng was bad.

The K6-2 was pretty solid aside from not quite holding performance crowns.

I wonder now about the social norms of the “default” versions of things in replicators.

Would you go on one ship and “soft drink” is Pepsi and another Coke, like venues today? How is it negotiated?

Or do you spend your life building and refining a profile? How is that carried around?

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

There are some recent $1 notes where the same serial was issued twice.

https://www.mycurrencycollection.com/blog/1-2013-new-york-duplicate-serial-number-mistake

MTP is awfully slow on my Nokia G20 at least. OTOH, it has a uSD slot so I could just pop it out and transfer that way.

$150 phones are better than $1500 ones.

With American comics, it’s not even the shattered continuity, it’s that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.

If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I’m missing without a huge fracas.

If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I’d better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.

I’m amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that’s “Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans” just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.

After wrecking some JIS screws on a vintage reciever, I bought a nice Vessel-brand JIS driver set, and use it for all my crosshead needs.

Imposed multipkayer content can be toxic.

I played Revelation Online for a while and one feature of it was that you needed to play some 5/10 man raids for desirable upgrades. These were timegated to once a week, so if you weren’t there at 00:00 server time on Sunday, everyone else had already done the run and the place was dead.Hard to stsy committed when you couldn’t progress effectively.

I wonder if it might be an unreproducible moment in history.

I suspect the Cambrian explosion of X11 window managers came from two things:

• Propriatery and former-propriatery systems with unique look and feel (see, for example, Open Look/olvwm) There was also a tendency to copy any style you could (WindowMaker copied NeXTStep, IceWM mocked OS/2, and when those cute QNX demo discs came out, within days there were lookalike themes). It feels like the last major outside inspirations, MacOS and Win1,1 are converging on almost intrrchangeable insipidness.

• The 1990s/2000s customization era. Machines were finally powerful enough to do mildly nifty things, but still attainable by hobbyists gluing together pixmaps and this bred stuff like Enlightnment E16 or Afterstep

Do these forces still exist in 2024? It seems like Unix Porn today is a bunch of neokvetch windows without even a titlebar to provide a personal statement.

No wonder DEC went broke. My VT220 didn’t come with any hunks crawling out of the screen Ringu style.

I think I’d be a lot more excited about Wayland if I felt like I can get a compositor that matches my tastes.

I want to iconify things to the desktop, not relying on a taskbar-alike. Nothing seems to offer that. Hell, the taskbar is often a third party program.

I want to double-click to shade. Labwc just added this, a feature that X11 window managers have been offering since the 90s.

I want an aesthetic that’s got real depth and skeumorphism, rather that flat and featureless. Maybe something offers that, but there are plenty of X11 choices that have beveled buttons out of the box.

The charm of Unix systems used to be flexibility, buy Wayland seems to be an extinction-level event for traditional window management. Nothing fills the gap of FVWM or WindowMaker. But gosh, I can get 92 flavours of tiling compositor and windows that ripple when dragged.

I had a similar positive experience with Gamescope, which tamed a game that freaked out every time I moved the moude onto the other monitor.

Maybe Wayland’s healthy place is as a secondary window system you launch inside your normal X11 session.

If they’re so awful, why do we need aggressive tarrifs to keep them off of American streets? I don’t think anyone was making people buy them over domestic alternatives…

(muffled sounds of discord)

WTF?! Xi Jinping himself busted down my front door, grabbed my debit card, and put down a deposit on a new BYD. And what’s worse, he picked one in that really insipid grey that you can never find in a parking lot.