ridgered4

IIRC people used to take advantage of free google photos by uploading segments of larger files pretending to be photos. I believe there were even front ends that handled everything. But eventually they figured out to re-encode the image on upload which ruined the game. They could probably use the same tool against text but it would be a lot easier to workaround.

IIRC the bitmap was saved as a .sys file to make it a secret for some reason.

My experience with Lowes has been they "carry" many items that can actually only be shipped to you or the store after being purchased online.

IIRC that lead law was spawned in response to Mattel selling lead painted toys and Mattel was made exempt!

This movie has everything, including Matthew Lillard!

You'll often see financial advice websites claim that one extra mortgage payment a year will reduce your loan term by 11-12 years on your 30 year mortgage. This was technically true for a brief period in the 1980s. Not sure why this ephemeral factoid made it's way on the the early web and survived as it became less and less true over the years, but I guess it dove tails nicely with the other nonsense about the "huge tax savings" from deducting your mortgage interest*

*Was still sort of true if you had a VERY expensive house.

My parents paid their house off after 7 years, but that is quite a lot easier to do with most of your payment is high interest rates and you have a much smaller principle to attack.

> A few days ago I made three accounts to try to test ways to get them off my back. One was made on a virtual machine on a VPS located a thousand miles away from me and had no connection to me. Although I did give vague hints to friends that it was me. They banned all three accounts, even the VM one. I had a nervous breakdown knowing I may never be able to participate on the platform again. I also felt like I was being watched.

Curious what the mechanism for identifying the VPS account was. Phone number? Some sort of client signature? I don't use discord.

The worst is when the application activates itself but isn't actually done loading or ready for user input. It's like the spam call I received once that immediately asked me to hold for the next available operator when I picked up the phone.

I've heard in the zeal to create unique DIY videos for ad views people are just making things up these days.

I had a similar experience, but a clerk at a gas station wiped the chip edge of the card down and it worked on reinsertion. No idea how not really visible dirty (maybe from my very old wallet) was contributing to chip read failures but I have a much higher success rate after copying this fix.

IIRC Visual Studio technically lets you install in a non-C location but 80% of the disk usage ends up on C: anyway.

Microsoft decided at some point people hard drive were plenty big so who cares? Unfortunately SSDs came along and for quite awhile space was quite tight on them!

Yes, my understanding of bitcoin is that it is not untraceable at all since the transactions can be followed back to their source, but it was widely perceived as such by dark markets for a number of years. I guess maybe if you mined it yourself (no longer really feasible for an individual?) or somehow purchased it with cash it might be.

I wasn't so much worried about death as I was about being crippled with long covid and having to deal with the medical system, that would probably not believe me for help.

Reminds me of COBOL programmer demand. There seems to be plenty of well paid work to do here, but what is left unsaid is no one is hiring junior COBALT programmers and training them up. The work is all of people with 30 years of experience so even if new developers want to enter the field there's nothing for them to do so they'll just end up exiting it for something else. So it seems like the field will have to die with the old programmers, no matter how much you pay them they'll eventually be gone if you don't create new ones.

This is true, it seems like the infinity fabric limits how low AMD cpus can idle. Intel invested pretty heavily in power saving tech during their 4 core

One other thing that hurts AMD here was the x570 chipset. It seems to be a hack job, basically installing the I/O from the CPU upside down and running it as a chipset. IIRC it uses like double the wattage of the x470 chipset it replaced.

I believe Microsoft or Sony actually has a patent on this. It was the inspiration for the increasingly prescient 4chan greentext "drink a verification can".

I recall when Windows 10 came out some company had demanded to know all of the things it sent back to Microsoft over the wire. Microsoft had some guy basically run wireshark and a bunch of network scans while using it and put that in a report. It blew my mind because it implied nobody at Microsoft actually knew what it was collecting and when anymore than your average security researcher, possibly because there are so many sub-entities in the company hoovering it up for different purposes.

In the northeast all my worst power outages happened during the winter. Usually from ice storms or even just an overabundance of wet snow causing tons of tree limbs to come down at once.

> If you use an Intel GPU, particularly one of their new Arc dedicated GPUs, it supports the functionality on the consumer grade hardware without any trickery and you just need Looking Glass to map the outputs.

Does this work yet? Last time I looked, my understanding was that SR-IOV is supposedly supported on Arc but the software doesn't exist yet, and might not for some time.

Last time I looked only the pinephone had hardware switches, and they were under the case making it kind of clunky to turn them on and off.

As mentioned, there is a wide variety of these available of different types. They were made popular and available enough by the mining boom that there are different styles (and different qualities).

This was the one I used: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07N38Y799

Can you create a new google account with only a yubikey? (And never have to provide one for verification purposes)

Genuinely asking as I don't know.

m.2 can get hot, installing them under a hot video card cooler is a judgement call, especially if there is more space elsewhere. The truth is most people probably don't use their 1x slots.

I found some ultra low profile pcie extensions (basically mining risers that use a USB3 cable) that allow me to relocate the cards elsewhere but still install them in slots that are under big GPU fans.

There may have been a stealthy power move going on back then to kill off the GPU by denying them anywhere to plug in. When Intel successfully killed off 3rd party chipset makers nvidia was clearly quite worried and successfully sued Intel with the result they were required to keep PCIe expansion available on their chipsets with enough bandwidth for GPUs. (This agreement expired some years ago, I think it was only for a decade)

This wasn't an unreasonable worry for nvidia to have. They'd just lost preferred chipset status on AMD platforms when AMD purchased ATi. Intel had released some lower end platforms with only 1x pcie connections (nvidia had responded with nvidia Ion which could work over such a tiny link) and AMD was talking big about their APUs.

It was a reasonable fear back then that Intel and AMD, with a tightened grip on their platforms and their own integrated solutions competing in the same space, might choose to just cut off nvidia's air supply by flooding the market with chipsets that didn't have the connectivity Nvidias cards needed.

It is mostly the weight and physical space the tube requires. They use a lot of desk space and require a decent quality desk to hold them. They also use somewhat more power than LCDs but I suspect LCDs more modern look and space saving qualities drove their adoption much more than the power usage. The way their refresh rate works also seems to cause a lot less eyestrain on LCDs, particular when comparing a low quality CRT to a low quality LCD.

I believe Autohotkey's image detection has a parameter to select the relative range inside the application window to actually perform a search. If you constrain it to a smaller area (because you know that the UI only appears in that area) this can greatly improve the performance versus searching the entire window.

Edit: I should mention I have no idea if this works on the linux versus of autohotkey.

You might just send all the expected commands in sequence and be fine, but that can be unreliable. Autohotkey can see the text contents of many dialogs and other windows components, which can be parsed and reacted too by the script. And it has functions for sending mouse clicks and keyboard commands, as well as directly editing controls, activating/minimizing/maximizing windows, etc. Unfortunately, I've found many more modern UI frameworks used in newer software have less that 'clues' that can be seen. But Autohotkey does have an image matching function that works well in a lot of cases when the traditional way fails.

> Plus, how many regular people have access to the machine with 12GB of VRAM?

Probably not many in general, but the RTX 3060 has 12GB or ram and it is around $350. And I saw a RTX 2060 12GB for $250 the other day. That's a pretty reasonable entry fee IMO.

For an extra challenge I play on hard mode: Spend all your money on grandfather clocks.

I read this book for the first time fairly recently, and enjoyed it. I'd seen quite a bit of media that was influenced by it so some parts felt a little more old hat to me than they otherwise would have.

Not sure how you see it as utopian cyberpunk though. It sure seemed like a dystopia to me!