Lol. Some galaxy brains were ‘Oh my Apple would never roll over and simply do what they’re told! They’ll keep our data safe!’ and mad at me for saying exactly this was going to happen.

Well, huh, look at that. A corporation that rolled over faster than a well-trained golden retriever. Who would have guessed it.

Do you have a credit card?

If you do, Oracle offers a shockingly generous free tier of stuff. 2 little baby EPYC VPSes, a 4-core 24gb ARM instance, and a bunch of other sundries including 10TB/month of data transfer.

You can run a LOT of fediverse services on those free Ampere instances, and even something like GoToSocial will run on the little baby EPYCs.

And to just cut off the incoming dudes: yes, Oracle is a shitty awful company with shitty awful policies run by a shitty awful billionaire, but that’s no reason to not take free shit from them.

(And to the next group of people: I’m closing in on 4 years of free Oracle shit and they haven’t banned me, so I’m inclined to think all those stories are incomplete and they were doing something - mining, portscanning, hosting questionable shit, torrenting stuff, running a vpn that was abused - more than “nothing”.)

Oh good, just what I always wanted: some techbros able to SSH into my bed and tell how horrible my sleep is.

Do love the exposed AWS creds though. That’s some premium high-quality software engineering.

No joke.

I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t really play anything anymore because of it.

You go ‘boy I’d like to see what new games are coming soon’ and you immediately land in a cesspool of people throwing a fit that there’s a black guy, or a trans girl, or a white chick that doesn’t make their little peepee hard, as well as any other awful sexist, racist, ableist swill you can possibly imagine all over every inch of anything that remotely looks like gaming media or discussion forums.

I just kind of have quit looking, and just playing old games for the 2nd or 3rd time, despite the fact I would happily have bought anything that seems remotely fun a couple of years ago because I don’t want to subject myself to those morons, end up playing games with them, or like, having anyone confuse me as being one of them as you said.

No no, you don’t understand!

He’s one of the good billionaires!

(/s for some of you, and for others perhaps you should reconsider why you feel the need to defend a billionaire, regardless of your opinion on video game platforms)

Now now, they’re not just inconsiderate assholes and leeches.

They’re inconsiderate nazi oligarch assholes and leeches.

Well, that’d certainly be a novel solution to the trolley problem. Just make sure FSD always defaults to hitting the non-nazis first.

For what they’re charging, you’re not going to get elite private security, you’re going to get mall cops on their day off.

This is not for the actual rich, it’s for tiktok influencers to show off.

But I was assured it would be the equivalent of a 4090! Surely someone with an ugly jacket wouldn’t lie about their products?

(/s, etc.)

Why is every CEO’s brain turning to sludge all of a sudden? I mean I get sucking on the toadstool of the king to ensure you get your share of the public coffers as they’re looted, but uh, this dude sells plastic toys and video games t-shirts for twice the price of everyone else.

And he wants to sell parts of his company which are in countries that aren’t absolute shitholes, and his sales pitch is that you get… free woke?

Ah cool, the one time I read the article it’s wrong and saying that there hadn’t been someone who had stepped up yet.

Well, I’ll go back to making uninformed comments based solely on the headline, because clearly the articles are not adding any value. (/s, etc.)

Make H5N5 great kill everyone again!

Well, “maintainer” is usually a single person job. They didn’t write all the code or whatever, just were the gatekeeper to what got added and making sure shit works.

So I mean, it’s not great nobody is stepping up, but it’s also not like they magiced up the entirety of linux’s wifi support single handed, either.

The only way you could make that worse is if Palantir bought them all first.

There’s no such thing as too much seeding.

Well, maybe the 85tb of Ubuntu 24.04 I’ve done is too much, but I mean, whatever.

(I’ve got basically everything I’ve downloaded in the last 7 years seeding, some 6000 torrents. qBittorrent isn’t the most happy with this, but it’s still working, if using a shit-ton of RAM at this point.)

10940X

“They say”, but they’re right. Ryzen chips do have worse idle power usage, but you’re talking about 10w or so, at most.

And uh, if you were looking at an X-series CPU, I can’t see how that 10w is a dealbreaker, because you were already looking at a shockingly inefficient chip.

I mean, eBay exists. You can get a Commodore 64, a Mac II-era mac, or a 486 for not that much money.

I have a giant pile of retro stuff including those, and an absurdly expensive Pentium 1ghz box with a proper Vortex 2 and 3dfx voodoo 5 card, sitting around for retro gaming.

Which uh, mostly is all I do anymore. There’s also a TON of modern improvements to emulate floppy drives, replace hard drives with SD cards, and even new video and sound cards that are waaaaay better than what you had to deal with when the hardware was new.

It’s not as cheap as it was 5 years ago, but it’s still reasonable if you have an era you’re after and kinda stay focused on one or two retro computers and don’t, say, decide you want to own one of every G3 and G4 tower that was made or anything insane like that.

…stop looking at me like that.

There’s also a ton of Youtubers that are touching all sorts of rare and expensive hardware that’s a good watch, too. (8 Bit Guy, LGR, Adrian’s Digital Basement, Necroware)

I’m not quite THAT old, but I certainly remember the early 90s.

Tech was all new and cool, and I remember very much reading computer shopper or going to various computer stores looking at all the new cool shit I desperately wanted but could in no way afford.

And, of course, the BBS lists that were in the back of computer shopper and various other things like that: I spent uh, more time than I should admit arguing about stupid shit online via local BBSes and Fidonet and a couple of other networks. But, even then, you’re right: the absolute hostility was very high, but it was about who had the “right” computer, or my dumb 13 year old opinion of which games were fun, and the level of absolute grumpiness was way lower.

(As an aside, those FTN-style networks do still exist, and still have people having conversations on them, and it’s still pretty great.)

Now even the hardware is boring: oh gee, the new CPUs are 5% faster for $600! Oh yay! New video cards which are 10% faster for $1800! Like who gives a shit anymore. The days of there being generational or even every-other-generational improvements sufficient to justify prices of buying it are quite dead, and I don’t know if that’s just physics being a pain or if it’s straight up engineering design choices. Both, probably.

Anyway I’ll stop internet Boomering and go take my metamucil and watch the wheel.

They were NiCad batteries, which would leak, and then completely eat and destroy the charging/temperature board.

Source: I have one and uh, they did and it’s completely useless because it won’t power on without the batteries attached, and I’m at a total loss as to how to or where even I could get/fix that charging board.

Shame since you’re right, it’s super cool, but must-have-a-battery was a horrible design choice that’s made repairing it seem like it’s probably not possible - I’d have to buy another one to get a working charger board at which point, well, I have a 2nd one so why fix the first?

Debian stable is great: it’s, well, stable. It’s well supported, has an extremely long support window, and the distro has a pretty stellar track record of not doing anything stupid.

It’s very much in the install-once-and-forget-it category, just gotta do updates.

I run everything in containers for management (but I’m also running something like 90 containers, so a little more complex than your setup) and am firmly of the opinion that, unless you have a compelling reason to NOT run something in a container, just use the containerized version.