Since when does Microsoft care about (consumer) Windows?

They haven’t. Not for a long time. Probably not since pre-XP and the convergence on the NT kernel. (Don’t get me wrong, moving to the NT kernel was absolutely needed…but now, desktop functionality is “secondary”)

As long as they sell Windows Server and Windows Pro/Enterprise, nothing of value is lost.

And the added GamePass subs probably also boosts Azures value, because I assume a lot of it runs on that infra.

You’re really dismissing the reality that the biggest reason dems didn’t show was because the troll farms and their disinformation/amplofication worked.

Or do you just not understand? Because that’s fine too. That just means it worked on you.

Let me clarify. They didn’t just hype up the red guy. They also drowned out the blue gal. A lot of the “both sides” talk, all of the “but muh genocide” abstaining voters…some, sure, were real, but most of those that were, were pushed there by the bot farms.

Propaganda isn’t just glorifying the leader. The other real important part is inhibiting the opposition.

They all knew, and continue to know, that they didn’t have to get people to vote for Trump. That’s a fools errand. Most everybodies mind was made up about him well the elections.

But keeping people from voting for Harris is just as effective. Because ultimately the winner has to be one of the two parties. We can hem and haw all we want about the need for third parties (and that’s totally true), but the fact is that it will always be a two party system until the voting system get fixed, and it will always be the same two parties until one inevitably implodes on itself and re-brands. Republicans are very much aware that the easiest way to win isn’t to attract voters, but to disuade people who vote against them.

They gave up the honey a long time ago, and they’ve gone all-in on vinegar.

Let’s stick to reality tho…neither did Republicans. Troll farms did, and people bought it hook, line, and sinker.

I don’t disagree.

The genie is out of the bag with AI. I don’t think there’s any “going back” to a pre-AI world. It cannot get back into the tube.

It’s a bubble, for sure, but we aren’t going back to pre-dotcom, either.

In the meantime, though, it’s an arms race. Especially when it comes to things like offensive and defensive cyber security. LLM is especially well-suited for throwing shit against the wall and seeing what sticks, and that’s a perfect use-case for offensive cybersec.

FOSS has its own set of issues to deal with with regards to LLM code…even beyond the vibe-coding aspects of it, the ultimate problem of licensing and attribution is incredibly complicated.

That is more of a philosophical issue than anything else. Not to be dismissive if it, it’s quite important…I had a conversation recently with a major FOSS group’s sysadmins about their defenses from web scraping. They have outright blocked a major cloud proxy platform’s ASN because of abuses frok their IP blocks.

(What follows is my interpretation of what he said, not his wording)

A lot of that probably isn’t even “offense”, but poorly coded tools run by the platforms customers performing excessive web-scraping…but it exposes the bigger issue that’s more philosophical than anything, because from his perspective, this looks, smells, and has the same outcome, as a DDoS attack. And the only ways to really, truly mitigate such an attack is with CDNs and such, and usually with SSL Decryption on a cloud provider.

These types of methods are diametrically opposed to something like their mission, putting them into a position where they have to outright block a lot of legitimate use to stop a handful of bad actors who are probably more ignorant than maligned.

I kinda see AI as the same. Shaming it, in FOSS projects particularly, isn’t a matter of code quality…it’s a philosophical matter, and the problem-users are usually more ignorant than maligned.

Nah that can’t be it, capitalism requires infinite resources and infinite growth. We can’t be close to infinite already can we?

You see what happens, Larry?

You see what happens?

This is what happens, Larry. This is what happens when you find a stranger in the Alps. This is what happens when you feed a stoner scrambled eggs.

You are probably fortunate enough to live in an area with not a lot of wireless interference, or don’t have a lot of wireless devices on your network, or all your devices are rather modern.

You can have good wireless…it won’t be as good as wired, never will or can be. By it’s very nature it has to be a shared medium, which by it’s very nature must be half duplex. Then there is the matter of sharing time with other stations on the same channel (and not necessarily on your network or under your control).

But for most things it can easily be “good enough”. Certainly wouldn’t run a server on wireless. Generally worse performance for realtime voice/video/gaming as well, because latency and jitter matter, and by having to share the channel with other stations, jitter is a fact of life.

And unsteady wireless is the #1 cause of VPN complaints in my office. By a very wide margin. Miraculously the problem always goes away as soon as they plug in.

But for casual web browsing, occasional large downloads (there’s a reason mobile apps don’t really show you how many B/s your transferring), streaming media…yeah, wireless can easily be good enough.

Not to mention still absolute crap support from commercial software.

Looking at you, VMware Broadcom Omnissa.

Please most of these fuckers were playing tomb raider to jerk off to laras pyramid titties on the psx.

Yeah the SFFs and uSFFs are great for consuming low power.

I’ve got a couple m910q’s that I bought for htpc purposes but honestly I might be better off putting the thick ones on htpc duty. Just gotta work out some kinks with how they handle suspend when hooked up to a TV.

They’ve really shot up in price…I bought two for 130 shipped (total) with i5-7500T and 16gb back around last Halloween. I’m seeing singles not specced as well for the same price

The tough thing about uSFF is that they usually don’t have any PCIe slots…so if you need a second NIC, or want to upgrade to mGig, you can’t, or they have to be over USB 3.

This.

I look for corporate desktops that are off-lease or EoL. Big fan of Lenovo M series. 6th/7th gen still have lots of life left in them and plenty of power for most homelab tasks.

Anything much newer than that will consume less power per core (usually) but will cost more up front and probably be more expensive to put upgrades into (i.e. DDR5). Anything much older than that won’t be worth the performance per watt. By the time you put a 7th gen through its paces, you’ll be ready to upgrade and have a much clearer look at what you want/need.

Right now I’ve got 3x M710s forming a kubernetes cluster, and another running opnsense only.

Kubernetes was built on top of VMs in proxmox, but I’m thinking I will move them to metal.

I also have what was my PC down in the basement, with proxmox, running a TrueNAS VM and a Bazzite VM for GPU passthrough and Sunshine, but I’m gonna reclaim those guts, put a spare 6th gen with DDR3 and run TrueNAS on metal. Then I’ll have my PC back.

In OpenWRT, I believe it’s in the settings for the “primary” ssid on each radio, which is usually the first one in the list (per radio) on the wireless settings page.

Openwrt also has options to block multicast or convert to unicast. Also make sure you are disabling lower speeds on the radio. That will reduce your max range, but devices that communicate slowly are another killer.

Broadcast and multicast both have to go at the ssid basic rate…the slowest speed supported by the AP. That could be 1Mbps. And then the AP has to repeat it. And depending on the type of traffic, this may also initiate more broadcasts from other devices on the network.

So if you can reduce broadcast/multicast, or increase the minimum speed, you’ll have significantly more time. Since wireless is a shared medium, “time” is really the most critical resource.

Other people’s wifi can affect yours, and vice versa, if they are occupying the same channel(s).

Most likely something on that channel is spamming multicast. That kills most consumer wifi routers (in default settings). Usually something like a sonos or Google home broadcast group.

Could also be a camera that’s constantly transmitting, also occupying the channel for a long time.

But really, it could be anything.

Use an app like PingTools (Android) that can graph what is on each wifi channel. Check to find the cleanest channels in your area and configure your router to use that channel.

Failing that, if it’s on your network and you don’t know what it is…change your Wi-Fi password to kick everything off, then slowly re-add devices with the new password until you find the culprit.

If you’re curious and technically-minded, I highly recommend this write up: https://www.wiisfi.com/

Also, you may be able to get better speeds by using narrower channels. Especially in busy areas. Easier to find 40-80MHz of clean spectrum than it is to find 160MHz. And even easier if you are open to using DFS channels (but these should generally be avoided). Doubling channel-width also doubles the noise, adding 3dB to the bad side of your SNR.

What causes speed drops and packet loss is almost always interference/weak signal. Getting high packet loss on an 80 or 160Mhz channel will be slower than a solid, clean signal on a 40MHz channel.

If you are closing your laptop, don’t. The antennas are usually located in the monitor bezel and are intended to be vertically-oriented, like they would if you were using the laptop. Having it shut means a lot of the signal is directed into the laptop chassis and your desk, which would especially impact upload from the device.

AI is in the tool chain now whether you want it or not.

People who don’t use new tools get stuck behind.

If you find a carpenter who is bashing his nails in with a rock because he doesn’t trust hammers, or because blacksmithing is bad for the environment, you are going to be dealing with a shitty carpenter who is a lot slower and less effective than one who learned how to use a hammer.

The genie is out of the bottle. That much is not changing. Accept it, or be a Luddite. Quite literally, because that term comes from people who refused to accept that machines were taking over textile work.

Denial is the most predictable of all human responses.

'member needing Xbox Live Gold to watch Netflix on your Xbox?

Isn’t this what hostnamectl is supposed to handle?

Lol nobody Rs TFM anymore. I’m in the middle of having ChatGPT teach me terraform lol.

I’ve been quite happy with moonlight/sunshine on Wayland. Is that an option?

Reminds me of when I was getting pissed off that Windows would randomly close Teams Windows and browser tabs, exactly every 59 seconds.

Till I found out that the windows version of caffeine hits the F15 key every 59 seconds by default. I had previously set up PowerToys to map an “extra” key on my keyboard to do Ctrl+W. That “extra” key actually turned out to be F15.

PIA has OpenVPN or IPsec profiles (I forget which) that can be imported into NetworkManager. You just have to put in your account info.

I don’t think every location has one…but a lot do.