was there iconic scratchy rapid frenetic drum electronic scraping noises before Bowie?

You can find elements of that in earlier 90s industrial, like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson. Bowie collaborated with Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails on the Outside Tour, which supported Bowie’s prior album Outside, before the release of Earthling. They also collaborated on remixes of I’m Afraid of Americans. You can probably also find some elements Earthling’s sound in earlier drum and bass, techno and jungle music.

Skrillex’ influences include 90s industrial acts like Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson, plus 90s electronica acts like Aphex Twin and Squarepusher. Bowie’s Earthling reminds you of Skrillex because the two share many musical roots.

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

Tl;Dr the protocol requires there to be trusted token providers that issue the tokens. Who do you suppose are the trusted providers in the Google and Apple implementations? Google and Apple respectively, of course. Maybe eventually there would be some other large incumbents that these implementers choose to bless with token granting right. By its nature the protocol centralizes power on the web, which would disadvantage startups and smaller players.

Private State Tokens are Google’s implementation of the IETF Privacy Pass protocol. Apple has another implementation of the same protocol named Private Access Tokens. Mozilla has taken a negative position against this protocol in its current form, and its existing implementations in their current forms. See here for their blog post on the subject, and here for their more in-depth analysis.

It’s likely CentOS 7.9, which was released in Nov. 2020 and shipped with kernel version 3.10.0-1160. It’s not completely ridiculous for a one year old POS systems to have a four year old OS. Design for those systems probably started a few years ago, when CentOS 7.9 was relatively recent. For an embedded system the bias would have been toward an established and mature OS, and CentOS 8.x was likely considered “too new” at the time they were speccing these systems. Remotely upgrading between major releases would not be advisable in an embedded system. The RHEL/CentOS in-place upgrade story is… not great. There was zero support for in-place upgrade until RHEL/CentOS 7, and it’s still considered “at your own risk” (source).

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

I’m sure there would be a way to do this with Debian, but I have to confess I don’t know it. I have successfully done this in the past with Clover Bootloader. You have to enable an NVMe driver, but once that’s done you should see an option to boot from your NVMe device. After you’ve booted from it once, Clover should remember and boot from that device automatically going forward. I used this method for years in a home theatre PC with an old motherboard and an NVMe drive on a PCIe adapter.

Elon broke the seal on firing huge swaths of a tech workforce to make your numbers look better.

Don’t give him too much credit, it’s hardly the first time the tech sector has gone through this cycle. Elon had to do it because he massively overpaid for Twitter. The fact that his layoffs came at the front of this wave is probably just coincidence.

People here seem partial to Jellyfin

I recently switched to Jellyfin and I’ve been pretty impressed with it. Previously I was using some DLNA server software (not Plex) with my TV’s built-in DLNA client. That worked well for several years but I started having problems with new media items not appearing on the TV, so I decided to try some alternatives. Jellyfin was the first one I tried, and it’s working so well that I haven’t felt compelled to search any further.

the internet seems to feel it doesn’t work smoothly with xbox (buggy app/integration).

Why not try it and see how it works for you? Jellyfin is free and open source, so all it would cost you is a little time.

I have a TCL tv with (with google smart TV software)

Can you install apps from Google Play on this TV? If so, there’s a Jellyfin app for Google TVs. I can’t say how well the Google TV Jellyfin app works as I have an LG TV myself, so currently I’m using the Jellyfin LG TV app.

If you can’t install apps on that TV, does it have a DLNA client built in? Many TVs do, and that’s how I streamed media to my TV for years. On my LG TV the DLNA server shows up as another source when I press the button to bring up the list of inputs. The custom app is definitely a lot more feature-rich, but a DLNA client can be quite functional and Jellyfin can be configured to work as a DLNA server.

Containourboros!

You can do this with custom formats. You’d want to create a custom format that gives a score if the file is below a certain size threshold (say 1.5GB per hour), then add minimum custom scores to the release profiles you use (e.g. Bluray 1080p). You can also add custom filters for release groups that prioritise file size. YTS for example keeps their releases as small as possible.

Definitely looks to be that way. In this video at the linked timestamp you can see the refresh rate being scaled automatically as the FPS cap is scaled. Looks like the Deck is automatically setting the refresh rate to a multiple of the framerate cap so that frame times and refresh times are kept in sync. E.g. with a 30 FPS cap it sets refresh to 90hz (triple), with a 40fps cap it sets refresh rate to 80hz (double), etc.

Digital Foundry launch review sounds extremely positive: https://piped.video/watch?v=Z1KLj06fn2s

When I took welding shop class in high school, our shop teacher literally called it “sand eye” when he explained why wearing a welding mask was not optional in his shop or in general while welding. Sure enough, there was that one kid who thought he could get by with his squints while teach wasn’t looking… He was out for days with sand eye and had quite the cautionary tale to share when he returned. Everyone got downright religious about the welding masks after that.

They aren’t, they’re launching satellites for the Galileo satnav system.

ATVI’s stock performance only looks impressive if you don’t compare it to anything. Here’s a graph comparing ATVI to ONEQ, which is an ETF that tracks the NASDAQ composite index. If anything, ATVI has been slightly underperforming the market average for most of Kotick’s tenure as CEO.

To see what “outperforming the market” looks like, compare ATVI to NVDA. NVDA’s stock has increased 16,000% in the 15 years that Kotick has been CEO of ATVI.

Or to see some video game company stocks that have outperformed the market, compare ATVI to TTWO (Take Two) or CCOEY (Capcom).

From a purely financial perspective, Kotick was middling at best. He deserves no plaudits. There were plenty of other NASDAQ companies that outperformed the market during the time he was CEO of ActiBlizz, including other video game companies.

The total install was $12k. I also did another 1k in retrofits under the Greener Homes program, but I did the Greener Homes loan as well. I had to outlay the $13k up front, but then I got all of that back in a 10-year, 0% interest loan, plus $5600 in rebates on top ($5k for the heat pump, $600 for the furnace). The loan processing company debits my account $110 a month, which is low enough that it doesn’t really sting.

I debated doing solar as well, since the Greener Homes loan goes up to $40k. Solar would gave easily soaked up the remaining $25k available in the loan. My roof isn’t ideal for solar though, and I didn’t want to triple the loan’s monthly payments for a solar install that wouldn’t have paid for itself over time.

Was there any specifig brand/seer rating restriction with the GHGrant?

It’s more complicated than that. The major components of the system all have to be qualified for the rebate, down to the component model numbers. There’s a lookup tool to see which model numbers qualify. For a hybrid setup like mine, there are three parts:

• Outside model number: this is the actual heat pump component that gets installed outside
• Inside model number: this is the condenser coil that gets installed on top of the furnace
• Furnace model number: this is the model number of the furnace itself

A ductless system would only have two part numbers involved, the outside heat pump unit and the inside wall unit (though a ductless install can have multiple inside units in multiple rooms). No furnace for a ductless system of course. Edit to add: and all of the major components you get have to be certified with each other by the GH program. They don’t want you mixing and matching.

Every HVAC company I talked to was pretty knowledgeable about the GH program, so if you tell them you’re an applicant then they should put together a quote that qualifies. Multiple HVAC reps advised me to make sure that all rebate-covered part numbers were listed clearly on the invoice. Apparently if that info is missing it can derail the rebate until the invoice is updated with full info.

a journalist saying that a COP above 1 means the heat pump “creates energy”

But what’s great is that this COP of 2, while bad, is not catastrophic. That’s still in territory where gas boilers are more cost efficient that a heat pump, but unless you are living in a place that is consistently under -10C for several months, then a heat pump has overall lower running costs than a gas boiler. And you are starting to hit pretty northern territories with this.

I actually have a hybrid furnace/heat pump system, and I live in southern Ontario, Canada. The furnace is the auxiliary heat source and it only kicks in when the outdoor temp is below -6C. I’ve only had this system through one winter so far, but I think I could count the number of days the furnace ran without running out of fingers. My electricity bill went up some of course, but my winter gas bill went down a lot.

Edit to add: I wasn’t shopping for a hybrid system in particular, but I got this upgrade through the Canada Greener Homes Grant and there were limitations on which units qualified for rebates. For my install (forced-air with existing duct-work), the hybrid systems were the ones that qualified.