But you can tune the specifications of the yarn to theoretically make the socks up to 2% more comfy. In practice your tuning efforts will make the socks less comfortable and tear more easily.

I’d argue that unfun design elements can be useful in games if used with care and purpose. For instance, “suddenly all of the characters you’re attached to are dead” is not exactly fun but one of the Fire Emblem games used it to great dramatic effect at the midway point.

Of course the line between an event or mechanic that players love to hate and one they just hate is thin.

Hoo boy, you weren’t kidding. I find it amazing how quickly this went from “the kernel team is enforcing sanctions” to an an unfriendly abstract debate about the definition of liberalism. I shouldn’t, really, but I still am.

Aw, c’mon! Who doesn’t enjoy piping ten megabytes of JavaScript through Webpack to achieve those crucial on-scroll effects on an otherwise static page?

Oh yeah, the equation completely changes for the cloud. I’m only familiar with local usage where you can’t easily scale out of your resource constraints (and into budgetary ones). It’s certainly easier to pivot to a different vendor/ecosystem locally.

By the way, AMD does have one additional edge locally: They tend to put more RAM into consumer GPUs at a comparable price point – for example, the 7900 XTX competes with the 4080 on price but has as much memory as a 4090. In systems with one or few GPUs (like a hobbyist mixed-use machine) those few extra gigabytes can make a real difference. Of course this leads to a trade-off between Nvidia’s superior speed and AMD’s superior capacity.

These days ROCm support is more common than a few years ago so you’re no longer entirely dependent on CUDA for machine learning. (Although I wish fewer tools required non-CUDA users to manually install Torch in their venv because the auto-installer assumes CUDA. At least take a parameter or something if you don’t want to implement autodetection.)

Nvidia’s Linux drivers generally are a bit behind AMD’s; e.g. driver versions before 555 tended not to play well with Wayland.

Also, Nvidia’s drivers tend not to give any meaningful information in case of a problem. There’s typically just an error code for “the driver has crashed”, no matter what reason it crashed for.

Personal anecdote for the last one: I had a wonky 4080 and tracing the problem to the card took months because the log (both on Linux and Windows) didn’t contain error information beyond “something bad happened” and the behavior had dozens of possible causes, ranging from “the 4080 is unstable if you use XMP on some mainboards” over “some BIOS setting might need to be changed” and “sometimes the card doesn’t like a specific CPU/PSU/RAM/mainboard” to “it’s a manufacturing defect”.

Sure, manufacturing defects can happen to anyone; I can’t fault Nvidia for that. But the combination of useless logs and 4000-series cards having so many things they can possibly (but rarely) get hung up on made error diagnosis incredibly painful. I finally just bought a 7900 XTX instead. It’s slower but I like the driver better.

I also only used v2 but it’s the extra stuff in it that slightly annoys me. Like how turbo mode (brighter than the usual maximum but usually time-limited to avoid overheating) is only available when the full UI is unlocked. Or how there’s a stepped ramp mode that I have to remember to disable whenever I swap out the battery. Or how I can accidentally enter one of the more exotic modes of for some reason I press the button too often.

Anduril is way overengineered. I like this UI that some of my lights have:

While off:

• One push: Turn on at the last used brightness.
• Two pushes: Turn on at maximum brightness.
• Three pushes: That strobe mode that you don’t need but seems to be obligatory.
• Hold: Turn on at the lowest brightness (or moonlight mode if the light has one).

While on:

• One push to turn off.
• Two pushes to toggle between maximum brightness and the last used “regular” brightness.
• Three: That strobe mode that someone has to have some use for.
• Hold: Alternately increase or decrease the brightness.

That’s pretty easy to learn and gives you all the functions you’d reasonably need (plus that strobe) without a lot of clutter.

We used to have one: “Solang das deutsche Reich besteht wird jede Schraube rechts gedreht.” (“As long as the German Empire persists every screw is turned right.”)

Given that the German Empire failed spectacularly, this sentence isn’t very popular anymore.

And this is why stuff should be defined in terms of day’s earnings to provide scaling. If an ultra-rich person gets jailed and has to post 20 billion dollars in bail, they can’t treat jail as a minor inconvenience.

Or the dock randomly decides it doesn’t like one specific computer anymore and falls back to being a USB3 hub. Thunderbolt docks are really cool but I’ve had tons of reliability issues with them over the years.

I still use one but it’s been relieved from display duty because it didn’t always play nice.

You forgot the degaussing sound for those screens that had that feature. Like turning them on but louder.

*KLONK*

Depends. On Linux or older macOS where light mode typically means a comfortable light gray? Light mode is the way to go. On Windows where light mode means an eye-searing onslaught of #FFFFFF? Dark mode is the only sensible choice.

And that’s why copyright infringement is a crime, just not the same crime as theft.

Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.

But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.

NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.

As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.

I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.

I’m not sure about the SSD. Has QLC substantially improved since hitting the market? If not I’d recommend going with something TLC-based.

Useful stereotypes can help a person avoid danger.

Unknown mushrooms don’t have to be poisonous but being careless with them can lead to a grisly death. Drivers don’t have to be unaware of me but it takes just one who is to put me in mortal danger if I’m not careful. A man following a lone woman at night where nobody else is around doesn’t have to have ill intent but she’s still better off being prepared for the case that he does.

Does this discriminate against mushrooms, drivers, and men? Yes, but that’s the point. It’s essentially an informal safety guideline and it deliberately overreaches just like real safety guidelines. The 999 times someone doesn’t need that handrail don’t outweigh the one time they do; not in OSHA’s eyes. Because someone might die if the handrail fails that one time.

This whole thing becomes problematic when it gets over-applied. Avoiding canned mushrooms in the supermarket won’t protect me from poisoning. Assuming that all drivers are blind and irresponsible will not improve my behavior on the road. Being afraid of all men in all situations will not make that woman’s life better.

Like always, Paracelsus is right: The dose makes the poison. (And like with poison, some stereotypes are so toxic that any dose of then is bad for you.)

• “You can’t pass through here. We’re waiting for the inquisition.” - “We are the inquisition.” sets fire to the stakes and immediately moves on (No, they weren’t the inquisition.)
• “What is this summoning circle supposed to be? It’s all smudged! Did you tip over that candle and just put it up again without fixing the circle? Did you reuse this circle? Is that a lump of unsecured unmetal over there on the table? Have you idiots ever heard anything of elementary workplace safety?!” (Said after a demon summoning by the demon the PCs summoned. For reference, unmetal has the bad habit of going nuclear if exposed to too much magic.)
• “You haven’t lived until you’ve done a jumping puzzle in a non-Euclidean space.”
• “What is your opinion on trees?” - “Trees… are.”
• “Talk to the hand.” (A demonologist trying to banish one of the most powerful entities in the setting with a low-end banishment spell and a pentagram scrawled into his palm.)

That’s all I can think of right now because also tired. But yeah, that campaign was wild.

Thanks. The pain is very moderate for me but yeah, there’s layers to how uncomfortable it is. Still totally worth it.