The great thing about not being a sports fan is, ditching cable/YouTubeTV and picking up individual networks' streaming services (without ads!) is far cheaper now. Thanks to F1 coverage moving to Apple+TVwhatever, goodbye YTTV after January 1.

Article about how AI will be indistinguishable from real people written by AI. JFC.
My wife took a short course from her university, how to use Google Gemini, she entered a research paper into it, it generated a video and narration that was completely human-sounding - word choice, tone and cadence all completely natural. It took this research paper and created illustrations and exposition that worked at a level the general public could understand, too. With a bit of editing of the pictures and outline it would be a complete replacement for a human work, done in a fraction of the time. It's come a LONG way in the last 3 years. It might even get my winning lottery numbers right.

I guess that explains my VDI issues, too bad I cannot run any of those fixes as a poor underprivileged user at work.

"Good job!!" thumbs-up vibe coders!

My 401k provider was affected, I couldn't go in to change my allocations. Fortunately, I could still get into my other accounts, and invest in Cloudflare.

The Indianapolis Colts faced a similar problem, we overcame it with a regime change - owner's death - and a new, better (former Giants) quarterback. There's hope!

Google: <something something Metadata isn't Data> laughs in oligarch

We were planning on canceling YouTubeTV at the end of the year anyway, as we only wanted ESPN and only for the Sky1 Formula 1 coverage.. which is going away in the US in 2026. AppleTV(?) has bought the rights for all F1 broadcasting in the US for 2026, which has made things interesting in our household. I am loath to give Apple any money, and their subscription is more expensive than the F1 Pro tier level, but less expensive than trying to get it on VPN from elsewhere.

Ant wrote on Oct 26, 2025, 18:53:

Madoc Owain wrote on Oct 22, 2025, 10:46:
My IBM keyboard from 1994 works great with a 9-pin to USB adapter. Loud as hell but I don't have co-workers.

My former employer's co(lleague/worker)s hated my typings on Dell PC104 clicky keyboards.

In college dorm, one of my friends said I typed like a machine gun.

Back in 1990, my university computer labs were MOSTLY VT100 or VT240 dumb terminals for a VAX system. But, the business school had a computer lab with nothing but IBMs and the appropriate loud clacky keyboards. Imagine your clacky keyboard with 50 others just like it all resounding across a large open room. Headphones were a necessity!

PHJF wrote on Oct 23, 2025, 20:00:
What planet are you on where your hands are remotely near insert/delete/home while playing a video game?

Planet Quake?

Back when I was competitive, I used the arrow keys, 10-key (for macros like callouts for teammates), right ctrl-shift-alt.

F1-F12 at the moment, followed by Scroll Lock and Pause.

My IBM keyboard from 1994 works great with a 9-pin to USB adapter. Loud as hell but I don't have co-workers.

I have a media 'server' with 5 spinning-rust drives going 24x7x365 .. My first drive starting to fail on me has a "Power On Hours" count of 128,201 (nearly 15 years!), a Hitachi "DeskStar" from 2007, 1TB 7200 RPM. Two more Hitachi 2TB drives clock in at 13 years followed by a Toshiba 3TB at 10 years. The "yute" of the group is a 3TB Seagate with a power-on time of 3 1/2 years. The usage is mainly read-only and occasional, with daily checks by the server to see if any new files have been added. I have backups of course, and am very happy with the longevity of these drives.

Duel-booting Linux and Windows 10, just about everything I ever did on Windows I can do in Linux. For some favored apps like Notepad++, I can run those in Wine. Windows 10 gets booted for Civ VI, which for some reason won't work through the Epic Store on Linux any longer. And, the recent updates to No Mans Sky keeps me too occupied to bother to play Civ VI anyway.

Win 11 could also be booted into from Linux via a VM, so sandboxed, not great for twitch gaming but useful for those edge cases where Linux just can't do what you want.

This makes paternity tests a little more interesting. An enterprising scientist could be fully funded forever with just a few scrapings of skin from handshakes with potential billionaire donors. Go science!

Agreed, I was sad for the reviewers but mostly for myself for finishing reading the story.

I would have appreciated there being a control of some sort put in there - either wired headphones, or a non-headphone experience, and noise-canceling turned off.

I wonder.. are today's headphones engineered to make today's music sound best? Sound engineering has, anecdotally, veered sharply away from "being great" to "I hear it over road noise in my car". Damn kids ruined music, get off my lawn, etc.

When graphic card drivers change, and when games are patched, the shaders have to be recompiled. It's probably possible to put every possible combination of driver and game version required shaders on some site someplace but that costs money, so non-starter.

I'm on Linux, so waiting for shaders to compile is my life now.

This makes me crazy. It's a software issue, the darn CCDs aren't "landscape" or "portrait" mode, they're square, right? So why must I have to turn my goddamn phone sideways to take a properly-oriented picture?

Burrito of Peace wrote on Sep 1, 2025, 16:03:

I can't tell you if it is a problem with the CPU or Windows 11, but I can tell you that it is happening and it is annoying a shit ton of my users. We're still actively trying to bisect the issue with Dell, Intel, and Microsoft. I personally suspect that it is a problem with the OS because my users that are running Linux do not experience the same issue.

So, AMD all day, every day.

My 12th-gen i7 Lenovo laptop has this issue with Win11. Frustrating as hell when the cores you're using for your VM suddenly decide to check out into parked or are stuck in E-Core land. I did manage to find a BIOS setting to force it to stop being power-efficient, that seems to be doing the trick for me, but at cost of more laptop fan noise than I'd like. Windows just can't manage the cores properly so can't be trusted with the task. My next desktop will be an AMD because of this.

I didn't realize the Bluetooth speaker thing was so prevalent until I went to a hotel pool and Security was searching everyone's bags thoroughly for the things. They had no prohibition about phones, which have speakers that can be quite loud as well, but the speaker searches seemed to instill enough fear in the populace that phones weren't a problem during the trip.

Firefox on desktop. I was using Google Chrome or whatever Samsung's phone browser is. Firefox on Android was painfully awful in the early 2010s, now it's just 'not great', which is good enough. uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger extensions are available, which is a huge improvement over what was offered in Chrome. It does seem to chew through more of my battery than can be explained by my doomscrolling but it's manageable.