Trying to sell consumers on “scaling solves everything” is going to be a hard sell.

If we look at general purpose computation, which had decades of actual scaling-solves-everything growth, you had two influences that made the message resonate with customers:

• Clear existing applications where more power made the experience straightforward better. Your spreadsheet took an hour to recalculate at 8MHz and 20 minutes at 25MHz. A lot of the “bigger model” stuff is plateauing with marginal or spotty gains. If I feed another 5 Internets of data to ChatGPT, will that summarized email be that much better?

• New applications that could be demoed on specialised low capacity hardware and scaled down to consumers as more power became available. Think of early CGI on hardware costing tens of millions, and now you can run Blender on a $149 laptop. Since most commercial AI plays are hosted services, there’s not much opportunity to tease that way anymore.

I figured SDF were the sort of people who would consider uptime a badge of honour.

I should probably be on Hexbear but I didn’t know of its existence at the time. Very problematic, my Xibuck direct deposits keep bouncing.

The difference was that Amazon knew how to make a profit, but was reinvesting into infrastructure plays and bigger fish.

If they had to, they could have been a modestly profitable bookshop in 2002. AWS and monster logistics might not have developed to put them in the 13-digit club though.

Does any AI-centric play have that fundamental fallback? The services that seem to be most effective at direct monetization, the coding tools, are typically running at huge losses. If they raised costs to cover, precious few firms will pay basically the salary of a senior dev for an emulation of an enthusiastic junior dev with an affinity for footguns.

The less enterprise-focused products-- parasocial toys, image and video gen, will likely try to dip into consumer subs and advertising, but can that generate the cash volumes these platforms demand?

All the best firms continvoucly morg these days.

There’s also an execution problem.

Truly knowing your customer might produce very different outcomes than the current compliance checkbox approach.

“I know Fred just sold his old car. The idea he suddenly has $12k in cash is not suspicious” or “Jane’s been talking about going to Montreal for momths. We should not block her card when it lights up there.”. That’s real KYC, but it requires human connection and human judgement, which doesn’t scale and doesn’t provide the right paperwork for demonstrating compliance with arbitrary mandates.

xbps-install -Su usually when a regular xbps-install <package> fails due to cert issues every few months

I hate that Qt6 dropped the Motif theme. You can get a Kvantum theme that’s vaguely close, but it’s different enough that you can tell the difference (the old one had deeper bevels) and I tend to prioritize Qt5 if I can use it.

Minotaurs have some potential for badass imagery. Reverse Centaur sounds intentionally clunky.

It smells more like Facebook than Steam to me. they can print money for now because they have established scale and customer base, but it feels a bit slimy to where it might not be that appealing to new users. Dating services in general have a bad vibe-- bot problems, low quality matches, dark patterns, so authenticity is a big selling point, something AI drives a huge stake into.

I’d expect that thr gay community, after decades of being a target for abuse, tends to be a bit more sensitive of red flags and looking for truly safe spaces. The Facebook comparison breaks down there, as it has 700 million Aunt Martha users whose most politically sensitive post is in defence of Miracle Whip on salads.

I wonder if the next generation of memory will only have a SO-DIMM pinout so they don’t have to split limited supply. Maybe larger “desktop or highend laptop” modules will be physically longer like 2230/2280/22110 SSDs

Microsoft was probably the only firm with the resources to keep a Chromium fork current while uneinding Google’s enshittifications. But their incentives are too similar for that.

They look like the press kit for one of those Million Dollar Skank-off romance-game-shows. I assume Thursdays at 9, next day on Paramount Plus?

Floats for currency in a payments platform.

The system will happily take a transaction for $121.765, and every so often there’s a dispute because one report ran it through round() and another through floor().

Aren’t most miners running ASICs that are pretty much only useful for mining specific coins? I was hoping we were past the last “people are buying off-the-shelves GPUs for crypto” bubble.

Thwn I’d expect higher figures for musicians, swayed by the top .01% that suck up all the fame and royalties.

Make something unmarketsble.

My big hobby project was software for 30-year-old computers, not a big market.

Carry slot limits annoy me more.

Weight makes sense from a story perspective. Even a top-spec fighter can’t carry four zweihanders and 500 food rations.

But even the 1-STR mage who might have a legitimate carry weight limit of 2kg, should not be told “you can only carry 3 different types of 10-gram herb.” Especially if he’s allowed to carry 200 units of any one of the types. Give me anything resembling a viable story-based reason for that.

But selling a solution to that is a very popular monetization paradigm for MMOs, so it stays.

Invite your friends for “bonus” resources, or even worse, to unlock progression.

If you want to incentivize me to growthhack your product, let’s talk dollars, not Mystic Sunshine Gems.

On a high level, you can get a cleaner like Deoxit D5 in a spray bottle. Most pots have a slit in them so you can spray into them, then turn the pot through its range a bunch of times. It’s worth a try as a start. Obviously do it while the unit is unplugged.

If you want to consider a more aggressive rebuild, like a capacitor replacement, maybe find a cheap old amplifier at the thrift shop to use as practice for desoldering/resoldering.

You might be able to connect the BT to one input on the amp, like the tape input, and the CD to another.

From what I understand, some modern drives effectively encrypt everything at rest, but have the key on file internally so it decrypts transparently. This allows for a fast “wipe” where it just destroys the key instead of having to overwrite terabytes.