ORANGE CAT BAD

Oh shit, it’s a giant enemy lobster, just like at the battle of Wuzhang Plains

His main schtick would be whipping up posts that look bizarre out of context, and are still a slight leap even with context, and he’d get banned every couple of weeks for sectarianism and have to create a new account while the mods just sort of look the other way on the ban evasion offenses because his posts are too entertaining.

With that hair? My first instinct was to go looking for a sonnenrad patch. Keith Stürmer, etc.

Edit:

🗝️

> pee tape

This is your daily reminder that the “S” in “IOT” stands for “Security.”

Trump was never this cool, or hot dog-like

Kamala Harris’s unlikely edge

Also just a quick PSA that artists on Spotify can see your (public) playlist names that use their songs, so just slap “Good Luck Babe” and “Hot To Go” on a playlist, set it to public visibility, and name it, “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains” or some such. If enough people do this, those playlists will eventually bubble their way onto the artists’ dashboards.

Probably have better luck starting with salacious Rosa Luxemburg quotes, tbh

Ehhh, I managed to rope myself into a position that I absolutely 100% regret taking. The pay is a step up from what I was making before at what was essentially run like a tiny mom-and-pop operation in spite of being a regional medium enterprise (meaning lots and lots of direct interference from nepotist “managers” all through the org), but it’s still low for the sector. It’s stable, but none of my duties really match what was in the job description, and I feel like I’ve genuinely stagnated since starting at this place roughly 6 years ago.

We’re stuck doing development on this shitty proprietary platform, and experience on it is useless in the outside world because 1.) we’re doing things in the most fucked-up, ass-backwards way possible (because reasons), and 2.) whatever community there used to be around this product died off around 2019-2020 when the vendor decided to close-source most of it, break backwards compatibility with their own software, and start ushering everyone over to SaaS/PaaS offerings so they can herd them into a rent-seeking scheme. The vendor also keeps churning through developer staff, so it’s like being in the fucking wilderness whenever we run across core/platform bugs. None of it fucking matters to the higher-ups because our company is balls-deep into vendor lock-in with these absolute clowns.

Even doing basic dev tasks on this platform takes an absurd amount of extra mental load just to remember all of the quirky shit that breaks when you try to use things like basic IDE features. And if it isn’t a problem with the IDE itself, our corpo remote desktop environment has so many security/antivirus/binary execution/network traffic nanny background processes that the IDE runs like absolute shit. I love clicking on a UI element and waiting two and a half minutes for the program to respond. Doing a debugger run? Grab a cup of coffee and come back in 8 minutes, and your simple Hello World program might finally be running. (If you’ve ever used any of the “weird” IDEs that were built on top of Eclipse, e.g., Eclipse PDT, this is a similar animal. It makes Electron look minimalist.)

It’s pretty incredible, and it makes me long for goddamned fucking PHP. So yeah, I used to be a big software dev enthusiast. I have a physical bookshelf that is overflowing with everything from game development books to Web framework stuff to software engineering, design, and QA works, and a handful of “learn X programming language” textbooks that I like to use as desk references. I have a massive collection of tech ebooks. I run a VMware ESXi homelab with a second server running a FreeNAS instance as both a filer and a block-storage SAN. I have forgotten more about Red Hat Linux command line than most of my counterparts will ever learn in their careers… And I am done with this shit. I am beaten. Broken. I want to move to a fucking cabin in the woods and live off the grid so I never get roped into another 25-person Zoom meeting full of incompetent middle managers ever again. The only reason I haven’t quit is because my self-confidence is completely shot after all of this, and I don’t know that I can make it through an interview without having a breakdown.

TL;DR: You probably made the right call.

How is Asus these days?

Somewhere between “dog shit” and “fire hazard.” Their enthusiast-grade boards have been burning holes in CPU dies at “safe” default settings, and they released a string of faulty BIOS updates that made the issue worse. Gigabyte had some similar problems last year.

Strangely enough, Asrock Taichi [including Taichi-lite] boards are probably the best you can get for AM5 right now. I have a pair of older Asrock Velocita boards that I used for AM4 builds for my family last year, and those worked out pretty well as a budget-ish option. Either way, “Asrock” and “reliable” in the same sentence is still a little jarring when I think back to stuff I built in the 00s.

I love the smell of molten plastic in the morning.

Seconding the “don’t buy a prebuilt, and definitely don’t buy an Alienware” sentiment, if you can avoid it. Otherwise, err on the side of a higher-wattage PSU. The AC filter capacitors in the power supply lose their efficiency over time, which will reduce the PSU’s maximum output below the manufacturer’s rated wattage and thus introduce potential for other component failures, if not an outright fire hazard when the magic smoke escapes. This takes longer on a higher-wattage PSU because there are beefier filter capacitors in there; loss of capacitance matters a lot less if your usage patterns are well below peak capacity. The tradeoff being that if it’s not an 80 Plus certified PSU (preferably Gold or higher), you’re using more electricity to do the same amount of “work.” With Dell/Alienware parts? I’d be shocked if it’s even 80 Plus Bronze. Pun not intended

Regarding the specs list, Intel has some serious quality control issues on the 12th, 13th, and 14th generation CPUs, but I can’t remember if that was strictly the i9 or K-series SKUs – even setting aside BDS, I don’t recommend them because of this.

Finally, with AMD bowing out of the higher-end GPU market, NVidia may be a necessary evil… That being said, you can probably score a hell of a deal on a Radeon 7900 XT or XTX nowadays. Failing that, a 7800 XT should be comparable to the 4070 Super.

Nuclear? I hardly know 'er HAR HAR HAR