1. Decide your budget
2. Go to logicalincrements.com
3. Find the tier that matches your budget
4. Buy that
5. Enjoy your PC

Once you get a feel for building and owning, then you can start making more informed choices about what you really need.

I replied to that thread.

OP was claiming to be working on a static HTML-serving search engine. They suggested that because it’s just HTML and CSS, and that interested parties can use Inspect Element to read the network requests, that it constituted “open source”.

Commenters then got on his case about not open sourcing the server backend. OP defended that choice saying they didn’t want a competitor taking their code and building a company off of it that would “drive [them] out of business”. Uh-huh. So, proprietary software, then. Bye.

mean: <2 eyes

median: 2 eyes

mode: 2 eyes

They use a fuser unit to cook the toner and bind it to the paper. It’s not exactly burning the paper itself per se, but high heat is definitely involved.

Source: repaired a laser printer with a damaged fuser unit that was actually burning paper.

In a rather unorthodox way, yes.

Android is one of those rare examples of a Linux kernel not being paired with GNU tools. I believe Android wrote their own versions of all the tools they wanted.

The kernel is also extremely locked down by default. They very intentionally designed the OS in such a way that every facet of the kernel is kept abstracted away from you. It’s about as black-boxed as you can get, to the point where the fact that it’s Linux underneath is almost meaningless.

Every edition that isn’t the Java edition has been merged into one edition that cross-plays with every other edition. Pocket Edition is the same edition as every console port as well as the Windows 10 native version.

I also have trouble crossing wires with the Balkans and the Baltics.

Radio?

Oh, you mean the app with the heart my mom uses?

If all characters are equally likely, it’s a fine password. It’s long and certainly immune to any dictionary attack.

But if the attacker knows it’s generated with this method, then it is probably a poor one. Bottoms tend to spam only homerow keys, either in all lowecase or all uppercase. The restricted character set vastly reduces the search space.

Private contractors also prefer building single family homes because they get paid way more to do 50 individual houses than put up an apartment that houses 50.

We aren’t here because people are stupid. We are here because this is where all the incentives align.

In theory, not voting is a protest strategy where you tie up a wealth of votes behind some set of issues, and thus incentivize politicians to platform those issues to court those votes.

In reality, next to none of the suits in power want anything to do with your issues, and they are tickled pink that they’ve managed to convince you to voluntarily self-select out of the process.

Thus gen alpha, who haven’t been around long enough to develop an identity resulting in a catchier nickname.

“iPad babies” seems to be the closest thing we have at the moment. Only time will tell if that sticks.

I have lived in a home with a ceiling fan for nearly 30 years and I cannot confidently answer this question off the top of my head.

Maybe that’s just tremendous skill issue on my part, but recognizing that all ceiling fans are standardized to spin only one way and knowing which way that is seems like a weird thing to ask of someone who also needs a mnemonic for which way to tighten screws.

Not to mention a rapidly growing segment of the population is unable to read analog 12 hour clocks, so the analogy is not that helpful.

Those are some really theoretical ways to observe a clock face.

How about we just start saying, “torque in, torque out”? When the torque vector points in, the screw goes in (tightening). When it points out, the screw comes out (loosening). As long as you are standing on the side of the screw you can actually work with while working with it (and why wouldn’t you be?) this is never ambiguous.

Of course, now we’re kicking the can down the road and relying on people wrapping their heads around the right hand rule… Hmm…

I believe your “checkup” and their “routine cleaning” are the same thing.

Lots of people (myself included) refer to it as a “cleaning” because, well, regardless of anything else, that’s what they actually do to you. I don’t know anyone who goes to a dentist just to have them look but they don’t touch. They clean you, too. That’s almost always the only physical takeaway effect of one of these visits.

Also, a dentist cleans your teeth in a way you almost certainly can’t. Their practiced hands know exactly what needs to be scraped away, and they can make informed decisions on what tool to do it with and how aggressively to not cause enamel damage. Not to mention they can, y’know, actually see what they’re doing in there. So a “simple cleaning” isn’t quite as pedestrian as it sounds. It’s not something you can fully replicate by scraping around blindly with a metal pick in your mouth.

I’d argue this is at the root of all fringe theories and why they all seem to attract the same archetypes of people.

We are living in an era of history where long traditional societal norms are in rapid turnover. The “old ways of doing things” are dying off, and the new ways that replaced them are often a revolving door. Very little in the world at any given time feels stable and secure.

Institutional trust is breaking down. Interacting with the world in good faith is increasingly leaving you open to abuse by bad actors. Why trust anything, then? Trust is for rubes. You’re an intelligent, free, and independent thinker. You should question anything and everything that is simply handed down to you. Especially if it is unintuitive. To not do so is to be railroaded.

And it’s that last part in particular that identifies the most fertile candidates for a good conspiracy theory. Like, is the Earth round? It looks flat to me. Essentially all evidence you can throw at the notion falls either into at least one of, “I witnessed it, trust me bro”, “hope you like letters in your math equations” (people who can’t intuit math won’t be impressed by any proofs), or “you can do this experiment at home, you just need <esoteric setup>/<rare equipment> so you can watch for <nearly imperceptible effect>”. A depressing sum of people in the world will remain unconvinced by any demonstration that isn’t simple, intuitive, and of an overwhelmingly obvious magnitude. Complex answers or answers that observe tiny effects are scams.

And just like that, we’ve abandoned rational thought and replaced it with trust-averse thought. We’ve invented the notion that the world is a hostile place where anyone trying to hand you something is an agenda-pusher trying to extract something of value from you. All of the world’s major institutions are shams designed to keep you complacent in some sort of world order that is merely using you. To participate in it is to further your enslavement.

In that hellish headspace, conspiracy theories almost feel like a haven. Finally! A group of real thinkers who share your frustrations about the world! The underground movement working to free us all from the hostile system!

Except, no. At best it’s just a bunch of people who are wrong indulging in a little harmless escapism. At worst it’s a mass of people getting Immanuel Goldstien’d by the very kind of well-spoken swindler they’re breaking their collective backs bending over to avoid in the first place. Regardless the form it takes, my hypothesis remains: proliferation of conspiracy theories is merely a symptom of a lack of trust.

“Uncanny fakes are worse than reality” is a hot take now?

Obviously it depends on the specific kind of support and the hotline I am calling, but if it’s a complex issue, and the support hotline is a national toll free number that’s clearly outsourced to whatever crummy T1 support call center, I don’t even bother with details. It just confuses them, and I know they have a script that management will fillet them over not following even if they know what to do. Just mash A through the script and save the effort for T2 and higher.

Who knows. Sometimes that T1 script catches things you missed. It’s designed to weed out the simple stuff, after all. When you directly leapt to more advanced troubleshooting, sometimes you leave an obvious step behind.

I always start off by telling them “I know what I’m talking about, I work in IT, let’s skip the basics, I’ve tried it all already.” but they sometimes still don’t listen.

They don’t listen because, unfortunately, for every one person telling the truth, there’s probably at least three people who don’t have an iota of a clue about their system but lie about it because they think claiming they’re an expert is a cheat code to getting better support. Ruins it for the rest of us.