Invested in a water cooler setup back when I had a Bulldozer chip, which was near essential. Now on a Ryzen, and getting it to exceed about 35 degrees is very difficult. Been very good for long-term stability of my desktop - all the niggling hard disk issues seem to just go away when they’ve not subjected to such thermal cycling any more.

Fantastic chips.

Original release was fantastic - super-smooth, high resolution, “how I remember it on the N64”, ie. not true to the original at all, but like the impression it made on me as a youngster. Super-dark storyline and minimal hand-holding makes it very unusual for a Zelda game, absolutely stunning bit of porting work. Everything you could possibly want in 2024.

And then I got to the down-the-well bit, and that can just fuck off. New release needs a dedicated keybinding to skip that time-wasting shit, could bind it to a mouse button just so that there’s no difficulty finding it when the time comes.

Just sing it! Couple of extra syllables in fee-ee-ling, you’re right back on the beat.

Absolutely no regard for the thoughts or desires of anyone other than WASPs? This is a picture from the 50s, right enough.

By the time you’ve paid for the game, a headset, a suitable graphics card, and about two dozen pairs of trousers to ruin for every hour of gameplay, then that sounds a pretty expensive hobby.

IVEBEENUSINGTHISKEYBORDFORWHOLEMONTHNDMMOREEFFICIENTTHNIVEEVERBEENBEFORE

No ‘a’, so it’s perfect for ordering some piss.

Clicking the ‘Activate’ link prompts you to enter your shoe size and postal address, so that you may receive a shark plush toy and your own pair of The Socks.

Amanda canonically gets back to earth to die of cancer as an older woman, so she does manage to return from the “floating in space” ending of Isolation, too.

Creative Assembly have confirmed Isolation 2, as well. Hype!

Impressive, since “network effects” are what keeps people on a platform. Why move off Xitter or FB when everyone’s on there, and not on the new place? Keep moving a significant fraction of a million people every week, and pretty soon, it’ll be where everyone is.

My partner, who is very non-technical, signed up for a BlueSky as well this week: “all the teacher blogs have declared that they are moving over”. Looks like everyone has had enough.

Most of the laptops I’ve had open lately have had about the top third be the motherboard and the bottom two-thirds be battery, with maybe some ports and speakers tucked down the side. So I’d expect that last of replacements to include the battery, too.

I might check whether the hard drive survived - a decent M.2 is small, expensive and reusable - and maybe the RAM if it’s not soldered in.

Writing this on a Tuxedo Pulse 14 gen 3 - great laptop, flawless Linux support and a coding workstation. Perfect for a bit of eg. Disco Elysium or Crusader Kings 3 on the go, but it’s no gaming machine; it has a lot of pixels for a Radeon 780M to push. They do have a list of gaming laptops, though, if you wanted a speciality machine?

I’d imagine that they’re unproductive because of the long hours that they spend in the office. It’s been a source of mystery to me (European) how our offices in America manage to put in 60 hour weeks every week, often with a crazy commute before and after, and yet never seem to make fuck all progress on anything. Better to concentrate on how to be as productive as possible for time that you are there, than to fetishise the total amount of time?

All the boys think she’s a star.

Having had one of the old Windows phones with a keyboard dumped on me at an old workplace, can confirm it’s completely possible for a phone to have a keyboard and be a complete piece of shit.

A good phone with a good keyboard may have some use cases. If you do a lot of writing but not any more computing power or screen space than a phone has, plus you want to be doing that on the move, then yeah. For me, can shitpost on forums using my phone in my spare time, and dealing with on-call work issues - having multiple tabs of Jira and Slack open, for instance - just isn’t really practical on a small screen.

If your job is very email-centric, then yeah, sure. Blackberry were very good for just having the stuff you need - email, vpn, ‘corporate’ office documents - in a form that worked.

Also interesting is the notion of ‘Kolmogorov Complexity’ - what is the shortest programme that could produce a given output? Worst case for a truly random sequence would just be to copy it out, but a programme that outputs eg. a million digits of pi can actually be quite short. As can a programme that outputs a particular block cypher for an empty input. In general, it is very difficult to decide how long a programme is needed to produce a given output, and what the upper limit of compression could be.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity

True. Although Calvin looks to be only rotating the paper by 90°, which would work as long as the original line is continuously increasing on both axes. Not so much “upside down” as “right-side up”, tho.

Nice art, too. I think that scrolling down might ruin the pacing? but that’s some beautiful spacing and colouring.

Assuming that these have fairly impressive 100 MB/s sustained write speed, then it’s going to take about 93 hours to write the whole contents of the disk - basically four days. That’s a long time to replace a failed drive in a RAID array; you’d need to consider multiple disks of redundancy just in case another one fails while you’re resilvering the first.

True. Although given how easy it is to cast void pointers to the wrong damn thing, it would be nice if you did, makes refactoring much easier. Makes me appreciate std::any all the more.