I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

Why can’t we subsidize American carmakers more?

I did exactly that in February.

The thing didn’t scan right anyway, likely due to my phone being a filthy potato with a gradually failing protective screen.

I have a similar one, different seller and possibly submodel, but also a refurb HGST 12T enterprise drive. It sounds like I left a soda on my desk most of the time, subtly popping and ticking.

This is the firmware I’ve been working on. Basically I wrote it because at the time (early 2023) there wasn’t a “good” keyboard firmware like QMK or ZMK for the CH32V305. Now it supports keyboards, joysticks, and a rudimentary pointing device made out of a PS2-style analogue stick.

https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch32v-keyboard/-/tree/fightstick?ref_type=heads

That branch has the mapping I used. Note this firmware has a keyboard-centric assumption that switches are wired as a matrix (between two sense lines), even if that matrix is 1x24, rather than just grounding a sense line individually.

The stick portion was one of those “Pandora Box” devices that was built into a cabinet and pre-wired to a crappy Android TV box.

I bought it because I figured it was probably cheaper than cutting a decent looking cabinet and buying the buttons off AliExpress. That also meant it came with a predefined cable harness to fit the Android box. In the hopes of making it tidy, and reversible, I ordered a little throwaway PCB that accepted the existing 40-pin plug and bridged it to a nanoCH32V305 breakout board. Of course, I made a design mistake, so the PCB had bodge wires, so not much was saved.

If you’re starting from scratch, you could direct-wire to the MCU breakout board.

I’m thinking it might be my 2.5G router when it drops. Or worst case, maybe retire the Atom I’m using for a NAS.

I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.

And the demolition plans are in a disused washroom in the basement behind a sign that says “beware of the leopard.” That’s an absurd justification.

Normal users are not going to root around in the registry and twiddle things to mske the OS treat them with respect. Most of them won’t search for it, and many of those that do won’t have the skills to deploy a registry hack or identify legit info instead of malware or pranks.

The right answer is a third button-- “No, forever.” We all know it’s the right answer; I’m sure even Microsoft has focus group data. It doesn’t exist because someone in Redmond’s bonus is tied to how many people are cowed into signing up for OneDtive.

I’ve got a CS degree and 15 years of dev experience, and have come to the conclusion that you can’t negotiate in good faith with Windows anymore. It is going to take you down whichever hellpath their biz-dev team demands, and any attempts to fight it are going to be undermined and replaced with a new set of hacks or a differeny gauntlet of dark patterns for a few months later.

Maybe LTSC and Enterprise versions are a bit better, where they might have to preserve the goodwill of big dollar corporate customers instead of chasing some trifling revenue hack, but do we as ordinary users on home/pro licenses not deserve the same respect? And even there, don’t those business customers have to spend undue effort crafting and deploying policies to cram the endless stream of spam back in the box?

I’m more concerned that they reanimated a 30-years-dead Rear Admiral, a founding mother of computer science, and assigned her to help your job search.

B-movie premise: the dead rise and the capitalists realize that they’re cheaper labour than the current precariat.

Sometimes the publisher changes the logo in ways that break the look too.

Really old Tokyopop releases had a small logo, and newer printings have a big red bar at the top-- even within the same series.

I wonder if we’ll see a lot of special purpose models-- we start with a vast model and gradually cut it out to fit on smaller hardware but only do one thing well.

Or if we’ll just end up collapsing them into more recognizable code.

There’s a case to be made for dueling what is essentially a post-scarcity socialist Federation against the embodiment of capitalism-as-cult.

Conversely, the Borg are in a way aspirational-- growing and assimilating knowledge and improvements seems a bit higher of a goal, but their presentation comes off ham-fisted.

I feel like there’s a missing explanation of why “assimilating the diversity” of a civilization needs to be a total stripmine rather than taking a few (potentially willing) representatives and regularly coming back in case anything new evolved, like binge-watching a civilization every few years. The stripmining aspect seems necessary to make them recognizabily villianous-- the enemy of sacred individuality rather than just data hoarders whose homelabs turned into giant cubes.

It does feel like Latinum is very much a MacGuffin for undermining a huge amount of “we have virtually infinite free energy and can replicate anything we need” worldbuilding; they needed a way to make 24th century capitalism seem remotely plausible.

Not really. Their menu is just permutations of seven ingredients. So only finite diversity and combinations.

The “Packard Bell” jokes are also right there if you want to tickle a large number of '90s kids.

TBH, I could see a viable angle in livestream-style QVC… with the proviso that the presenters are usefully interactive.

“Can you turn to the side so I can see how the shirt you’re selling shirt looks from that angle” or “what do those four buttons on the doodad do?” It’s approaching the experience of a store with helpful salespeople, only delivered remotely a la peak pandemic.

But that wouldn’t scale to a huge audience, likely filled with trolls trying to convince the streamer to do something lewd or destructive.

If done right, it could be a positive curator. Rules like “any drivers you get off of Windows update met certain tests, are not padded with unrelated crapware, etc.”

But I suspect that won’t fly. My main experience with WU drivers is a tendency to replace new drivers with old, broken ones. And I doubt printer makers-- the guys who made a 600MB driver to do the same tasks that a LaserJet 4 did with a 30k driver 30 years ago-- would play ball.