I stood ready to pay and then the cashier said “now I just need your phone number and you can pay”. Hold up. What. I did not expect that, I honestly had a burst of anger inside me (never gonna take it on a cashier, they are just doing their job). I asked nicely why do I need to give my phone number and I was told that to register me as a member so I can get the discount.

“Sure thing, It’s +XX 111 222 3333” Just give them garbage.

I’ve had the idea for a while to use an LLM to gather metadata about books for me as well as generate tag lists for themes, plot, writing style, etc for everything in my ebook library. You could also generate non spoiler plot summaries and produce recommendations for similar books.

Wait for the popups insisting you connect and upgrade before you can use the TV

Over/under on the 4.0 release? 2045?

Edit: Gimp 2.0 was released in 2004

I recently had to explain to my boomer mom why a Ring doorbell was a bad idea. She didn’t seem to get that the system is cheap because it’s constantly feeding whatever it sees to both Ring and your local cops.

Glassholes was coined back when Google was working on Google Glass about 10-12y ago and people kept theirs on and recording while in public

Welp, guess it’s time for IR reflective tattoos to defeat facial recognition

That old man looks happy to have someone to care for him. Once he clears his FeLV and FIV tests and is dewormed I’m sure he’ll be thrilled to live inside.

I mean, that’s your path forward if you want a current graphics stack. Linux Mint is a Ubuntu derivative, there’s no supported frankendistro that updates everything on your current mint release to current versions of the kernel, drivers, mesa and all the rest of the libraries you want for up to date software support - you get that with a rolling release distro rather than a snapshot distro frozen 6-24mo ago when they cut your current release version.

That’s not really the case with current Nvidia GPUs (yet anyway) - the Nvidia provided dkms driver is the best option outside very limited use cases

There’s not really an upgrade path from Mint to a rolling release distro like Fedora or Arch. The simplest thing to do is rsync -axHAX your /home directory onto external storage and then install Fedora, Bazzite, Arch or EndeavourOS and copy data back as needed.

Honestly? I just fill the remaining weight in the grinder with whatever I’ve opened to brew next. Unless the old beans are getting stale, then I just bin the tiny remaining amount.

Look at MIT and UC Berkeley’s CS curricula and start tackling things that you haven’t covered. They’re both available freely online and you might still be able to find video recordings of Cal’s lectures somewhere (they recorded every class for students who weren’t present or had difficulty understanding in real time until 2015 or so but were hit with an ADA accessibility lawsuit because they weren’t captioned or something.)

OP you appear to be committed to (not) dying on this hill and I applaud you

Why are we tolerating this criminal behavior by corporations?

Because it’s done in the open and it’s accepted as part of the cost of the device. This is an expected consequence of our adtech surveillance economy where devices are now subsidized because they can harvest data about you, your usage and your behavior to sell on an ongoing basis. We’ve been screaming about these sorts of practices since the late 90s and consumers have just blithered right along with every new and creepy intrusion because they get cheap things and don’t think about the real costs or consequences. And so … Here we are.

I’m just waiting for them to add a sideband channel to some LoRa network so they can exfiltrate data even when their devices are “offline”

The neoliberals of the 13th and 14th century

Provided you paid your tribute and obeyed the Khan’s laws they were cool with just about everyone. Fail to do either of those things and you’re in for a bad time.

Interesting that the one has such large capacitors in it. I imagine that is as last-ditch effort to keep the board powered long enough to finish flushing all of its caches in the event of a power failure.

That’s exactly the point of power loss protection (aka PLP.) As a side effect of not needing to wait for a flush after a write synchronous write workloads are dramatically faster on enterprise drives with PLP.

Edit: To add a bit of detail - you don’t need to wait for a flush after a synchronous write with PLP because the drive firmware can lie and immediately return from a flush call because there’s enough backup power to complete that flush if the power were cut.

That’s kittens for you