Windows isn’t scary. It’s weird and kind of pathetic. Always has been.

RAM has always gone through huge price cycles as long as I can remember. You buy when it is good value then don’t when it goes up. The industry always responded to high prices by building too much capacity so after a few years the prices all crashed.

This time it feels different. We don’t have the huge diversity of producers we once did. The 3 big remaining players clearly operate as something like a cartel. I doubt they are responding to current shortages with huge new fab investments.

Lots of PC part manufacturers and retailers aren’t going to make it through to the over side of this. I think it could lead to massive long term changes for the DIY market.

The worst thing about vulture capital targeting young manipulable tech bros for their get rich schemes is that has created a self perpetuating mono culture of spoiled rich grifters with stunted emotional maturity that never progressed beyond teenage boy. The have been allowed to dominate everything and are shaping the rage baited, meme ridden, dumbarse, ignorant dystopia. Lets just pull the plug on them and stop giving them money. Then they will all fuck off back to their mum’s basement to play video games and jerk off to their ai.

I love tech. My brain loves soaking up new things. Currently writing my first ever game engine in my 50s in c with my kid based on books and include files. Better late than never.

The technology was never the problem. It’s the money people. Always was. The Marxists got that bit right. Some of the tech bros are from a tech background but their culture and motivations aren’t like mine.

The money person these days follows the drug pusher/pimp model. They want to control you and have you on a hook. Everything has gaming machine mechanisms built in to keep you coming back. You can’t walk away. They have all your data, all your connections. You are helpless. A victim, but you walked right into it. Final victory for them is to lobotomise all your higher order thinking skills. Your just a body to lie there and be fucked.

Clearly you know of lot about this.

Nah, that is the problem. It all got so dynamic and easy I don’t really know how the hundreds of active modules on my desktop are loaded, why or in what order anymore. The days when I could list a handful of modules to load at boot are long gone I think unless its an embedded device or perhaps a simple server.

Setting modules_disabled might be viable for a relatively static system. I have seen that one when looking at hardening servers in the past but thought it was a bit extreme. Perhaps not.

Who knew cartels were bad for markets? I am sure economists and regulators were screaming at legislators for years but I guess they couldn’t hear them over the sound of the bags of dirty lobbyist money landing on their desks.

And then there are the financial “irregularities” funding the AI boom which are also not getting any attention.

In the 90s I compiled all my kernels at home from source with just the drivers I needed. Only installed the packages I needed. Only enabled the services I needed. The Unix way. When the kernel added modules I was still only compiling a subset and generally loading them manually.

Obviously that doesn’t work for most users and distros sensibly started shipping with modules compiled for practically every need. Usually when I view distro security alerts they are for packages I don’t install. But I have all these damn kernel modules just waiting to automatically load. I know I can blacklist them individually but I wonder if there is a way to profile the modules I use and use a deny all/whitelist approach instead?

I would take the old ones back from for profits, put them in the hands of a non-profit and keep them at a sensible price. All this land speculation is bullshit and contributes no value to domain users - its all a get rich scheme for a small number of insiders.

I always used my retired PCs and parts but then my kids all wanted gaming rigs so spare PCs and parts do not exist in my world anymore and they tended to be too big, noisy and inefficient.

I would go for used ex-corporate desktop mini PCs from the likes of Dell, HP, Lenovo. Perhaps don’t go for the smallest ones if you want to be able to get into them and add stuff. They tend to have reasonably good idle power and noise and its common to find ones supporting two nvme ssds. Intel cpu with quicksync for jellyfin video decode if you aren’t adding discrete gpu - check supported codecs. Codec support varies across generations I think.

I would stay well away from laptops: bad thermals, power limits, limited expandability and SBCs like RPi which have poor io for servers.

I picked up an old HP Elitedesk off ebay a few years ago. I added a few TB of SSD and another stick of DDR4 when that stuff was cheap. It supports two nvme ssds as well as space for sata drives. Apart from media storage I can’t see any compelling reason to want to upgrade it.

The sad thing is they aren’t really equipped to live in any world but the one being created for them. All the education indicators are trending down. They can’t do much without an internet connection and apps

Meta management are evil but kind of clueless. I would guess the usual suspects including Palantir are whispering in their ears.

How long do you stay on a platform before the outreach to new people is outweighed by implicit support of the platform?

It’s a tough call. It is difficult to reach out to outsiders and talk to them but it’s the only way to have a conversation with them.