mctoasterson
@mctoasterson@reddthat.com
- Comment on From on high 1 day ago:
As the saying goes, the amount you like yourself is inversely proportional to the amount you like Evangelion.
- Comment on RAM Prices Got You Down? Try DDR3. Seriously! 1 day ago:
Can confirm, I recently maxed out the RAM on my decade-old rig at 32GB. At least the used DDR3 RAM was cheap. With motherboards that old you are limited to processors like Intel Haswell with 4 cores, pretty anemic by today’s standards.
It works just fine for me running Linux and doing minimal gaming. 90% of my gaming these days is on the SteamDeck anyway.
I thought as I got older I would have more money to buy current gen PC parts and build basically whatever I wanted. Turns out priorities just shifted and things got even more expensive.
- Comment on Real and True 2 days ago:
More importantly, do you like doing the work of a fullstack developer but getting paid and treated like a barely-tier 2 support desk person?
- Comment on Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them" 2 weeks ago:
What people don’t want is blackbox AI agents installed system-wide that use the carrot of “integration and efficiency” to justify bulk data collection, that the end user implicitly agrees to by logging into the OS.
God forbid people want the compute they are paying for to actually do what they want, and not work at cross purposes for the company and its various data sales clients.
- Comment on Este soy yo ahora 3 weeks ago:
Asuka is saucy enough that she is believable as a latina.
- Comment on Microsoft Office has been renamed to “Microsoft 365 Copilot app” 3 weeks ago:
Bring back the Zune, you fuckers. At least that had cool design language.
- Comment on Raspberry Pis are cheaper than Mini PCs again 3 weeks ago:
Still running PiHole on a 3B.
The Pi 4 is plenty robust for Docker and a few small things depending on how much RAM your model has etc. Mine runs Immich well, unless you give it huge videos to transcode, which crushes the CPU and takes forever.
- Comment on Humans May Be Able to Grow New Teeth Within Just 4 Years 3 weeks ago:
Doubt it. This is not the type of treatment that is just over the counter. Tooth regrowth would have to be administered and monitored by somebody like an orthodontist. More likely some will just become specialized in it.
- Comment on Is there any place on the internet where I can find this game's instruction booklet/game manual? 3 weeks ago:
- Comment on Regarding Gainax Co. Ltd (Studio Kharas Statement on Gainax Closure after 42 Years of Production) 1 month ago:
Japan has very effed up and convoluted laws concerning intellectual property, copyright and fair use.
I don’t envy the situation.
- Comment on Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff 2 months ago:
Yeah, what you described is how it should be.
Each person:
- What I did yesterday.
- What I’m working on today.
- Briefly describe obstacles or assistance I need.
That could be as little as 45 seconds per person if done properly.
- Comment on Bossware rises as employers keep closer tabs on remote staff 2 months ago:
Someone tell remote managers that daily status meetings for teams of 5-10 people should never be more than an hour long.
In person, they are “stand up” meetings to encourage them to be as uncomfortable and short as possible. Over web meeting, that convention tends to fly out the window.
- Comment on Microsoft detail 'agentic AI' plan for Windows 11, immediately admit it might install malware on your PC 2 months ago:
Even assuming the OS-integrated AI is 100% non-nefarious in what it is doing at a given moment, the fact that its a proprietary blackbox is still a problem for me.
Mega corp using my electricity and CPU cycles to perform “???” computational task with no transparency to the actual owner of the hardware and the individual paying the power bill. Fuck that.
- Comment on Peter Thiel dumps entire Nvidia stake, slashes Tesla holdings amid bubble fears 2 months ago:
Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, etc. all inking new partnerships to generate a headline and valuation increase. Meanwhile AI companies PE ratios creep upward.
The top few companies can only helicopter cash at eachother for so long before the bubble eventually busts. That’s not new income being generated, it’s more akin to check-kiting in a public trading context.
- Comment on Microsoft confirms Windows 11 is about to change massively, gets enormous backlash - Neowin 2 months ago:
I have some aging hardware (approaching 10 year old desktop PC) and I switched to Linux. I have to still use Windows at work but none of my personal computers are Windows anymore.
Microsoft can go kick rocks.
- Comment on Air Tag Alternative 2 months ago:
I mean, the bug and the feature of an Apple Airtag is the ubiquity of their devices and their ability to backchannel BLE over cellular networks using millions of end user devices with their pseudoconsent.
Just by the nature of how that expansive network functions, there is no similar alternative that you can control the privacy of.
The alternative would be a GPS transponder intended for vehicles, such as LoJack, or something similar. They are going to have power and subscription requirements, usually cost $1000 for the hardware etc. And in that scenario you still have to “trust” the vendor to a degree.
- Comment on Whatever happened to pickup artists? Did they evolve into alpha males or ascend to a higher plane? 2 months ago:
In the early 2000s there was seemingly infinite television studio budget to pick a random subculture or even individual sociopaths, and just give them a reality show. I just assumed as broadcast and cable viewership declined, these types of grifters also went away or were forced to get real jobs.
- Comment on Immich v2.2.0 adds OCR 2 months ago:
Finally it will be easier to search my vast catalog of memes.
- Comment on Where can I buy used computers, and are they on a discount now because of Windows 10 end of life? 2 months ago:
I would say this and also if you live in almost any medium sized place in the US, also try the local community college. You may have to bid on bulk lots but they sometimes sell individual PC hardware too, you may have to show up on a certain day that is usually advertised months in advance, online or on physical signage on campus. You might as well participate, since your county and local taxes likely subsidize the institution to begin with.
- Comment on As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity 2 months ago:
I didn’t “have to” but, a few reasons…
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Swapping the drive created a pretty easy rollback path that was just “put original drive back”
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The drive was ~10 years old, and was in the range of recommended replacement for an SSD with the amount of TBW and age it had.
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Original drive was kinda small and a new larger drive was available for not very much money.
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- Comment on As Microsoft Forces Users to Ditch Windows 10, It Announces That It’s Also Turning Windows 11 into an AI-Controlled Monstrosity 2 months ago:
Microsoft literally wanted me to convert my desktop to e-waste as it lacks the magical TPM chip that Win11 demands.
I said “fuck that” and pulled the Boot SSD, kept the existing non-boot drives for data, and put in a brand new SSD, encrypted it and installed Pop OS in one shot.
Not only was it easy, I lost literally zero critical functionality vs. what I had with Win 10. There is a Linux app equivalent for everything I had before. I had a few driver issues but most were auto-discovered including obscure ancient printers and scanners on my network.
- Comment on Immich 2.1 Released with Better Slideshow Shuffle, New Notifications 3 months ago:
Those who run immich, how have you been backing up your library?
My deployment isn’t anything fancy, it is currently a Raspberry Pi 4 with a 2TB external drive for the photo library. Been running for more than 6 months with minimal issues. Now that we are at a stable release I need to get some kinda backup going for the photos themselves.
- Comment on Nvidia sells tiny new computer that puts big AI on your desktop 3 months ago:
If I had to come up with a steelman argument for small “AI focused” systems like this, I’d say that the more development in this space, makes the cost of entry cheaper, and actually eventually starves out the big tech garbage like OpenAI/Google/Microsoft.
If everyone who wants to use AI can locally process queries to a locally hosted open-source model with “good enough” results, that cuts out the big tech douchebags, or at least gives an option to not participate in their data collection panopticon ecosystem.
- Comment on Built to last 3 months ago:
When it came out, Dreamcast legit felt like it was from 5-10 years in the future.
- Comment on Microsoft just changed where your Word documents live — here’s why it matters 3 months ago:
And they wonder why some of us are still using local installed and firewalled Office 2007.
- Comment on YSK: You should enable peak refresh rate in Android 3 months ago:
Depends on your device and a bunch of other factors. If you are trying to maximize battery life you are generally better sticking to 60.
If you are consuming 120fps content or doing some kind of mobile gaming that actually supports it, you may benefit from 120.
- Comment on YSK about Hiring.cafe - a free job scraping site that lets you filter out Workday and other nuisance ATS 3 months ago:
Nice. Bookmarked for future reference in case.
- Comment on New U.S. gov't rule says chipmakers have to make one chip in the US for each chip imported from another country to avoid 100% tariffs — Trump admin allegedly preps new 1:1 chip export rule under new t 3 months ago:
Tostitos 'bout to enter the silicon production sector y’all
- Comment on The right to anonymity is powerful, and America is destroying it 4 months ago:
Almost more concerning is the way big tech has consolidated on standards that hurt anonymity, even though they aren’t legally required to.
For example, have you tried to make a burner email account lately so you can register at some stupid app or site that you only intend to use once? It is surprisingly difficult now because all the “legit” email providers are moving towards requiring phone-based 2FA which inherently deanonymizes you in the US due to KYC laws.
Also the throwaway email sites like GuerillaMail are being blocked more often by various sites. Their domains are now frequently blacklisted so you can’t use a burner account as easily to register anonymous social media or other website accounts.
- Comment on A ‘demoralizing' trend has computer science grads out of work — even minimum wage jobs. Are 6-figure tech careers over? 4 months ago:
The secret of the CS and IT job is that it has always been the Neuveaux Blue Collar job.
For every IT exec and formerly-technical middle-management douchebag making really good money, there are 2 to 10 actually technical resources making “okay” money relative to their skill and the insane hours and scenarios they are expected to work.
Oh and let’s not forget they’re constantly trying to outsource as much of that support and engineering talent as possible.