Not sure a short summary will cut it.

They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.

AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.

Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.

Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.

The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU's resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU's to crash and sometimes fail altogether.

It's an engineering sample that was produced before the final product was available. They use the really early ones to figure out if what they got back from the fab actually runs and how fast it will go safely. Later ones end up at motherboard partners so they can test their new board designs.

It is pretty common for them to leak out onto the second hand market after the final release. I've never heard of one that had any real problems, but in theory you might be buying something that has some issue that they hadn't discovered at that point.

There's no way of knowing what happened there.

But back in the mid to late 2000's we had a whole bunch of residential internet customers and every so often one would blow their traffic cap by a bunch and would ring up and say "Your billing system is wrong!".

Then whoever could be bothered in the office would do some modest analysis on their netflow data and come up with something like "18% of your traffic this month was redtube.com, 33% was pornhub.com and 9% was xhamster.com.

We never knew if whoever was on the phone was the raging porn addict or it was one of their associates. Either way they would say "Oh well, I guess we will never know then. Thanks for your help. Bye.". Followed by them quietly paying the bill.

I got a pretty nice Yamaha bluray player that was an appropriate match to my home theatre amp.

Put a bluray in it, got a piracy warning, a few unskippable ads for other movies, an obnoxious excessively drawn out animated menu screen that stuttered like hell and was laggy to use.

Pulled the bluray back out of it, stuck it back in the DVD drawer and proceeded to download a copy of the movie to watch. Been doing that ever since.

I would have figured the three Linuses would have been like:

1. Enthusiastic loud mouthed young Linus arguing with Tannenbaum.

2. Aggressive Linus with no filter at all slapping maintainers upside the head.

3. Aggressive Elder Linus with a personal insult filter applied still slapping maintainers upside the head.

Had a similar experience in what I think must have been my second year of primary school.

I was asked to go through a math problem that was written out, something like "4 + 7 = ?".

I said "Four plus seven equals eleven".

The teacher said that was wrong and said "Four add seven is eleven".

I'm like, what is the difference? She says, we aren't onto "plus" and "equals" yet

Six year old me spent an unreasonable amount of time trying to figure out how their was some difference between plus and add. She just could have said "they are the same, but please use these words to describe them in our lessons".

Solve for feef.

1988 Nissan Skyline GT with an RB20DET.

It was abandoned by my uncle at our place when he moved overseas and subsequently my sister drove it around a bit. Eventually it leaked coolant from the water pump, overheated and blew a head gasket because she wasn't paying attention.

I was unemployed and bored and I decided to pull it apart and bought all the bits to fix it. I didn't really know anything about mechanical stuff at the time, but I am good at logic and try not to be useless at practical stuff even though I'm really a computer geek. I drove it around for a bunch of years after that until I was earning enough money that I could buy something I wanted which was a Mitsubshi EVO 1.

So to answer the question, favorite thing was that I rescued it from oblivion even though I didn't know much about cars or engines at the time.

Two of the things in their list of "Hardware and Driver Issues" look way false from my experience.

Nvidia compatibility had been getting steadily worse on x.org for the four or five years prior to the switch to wayland. It is getting steadily better on wayland now and I would pick wayland from a stability point of view right now.

Multi GPU setups are night and day so much better on wayland. I look after a few different wacky multi monitor setups and the support for them is so much better on wayland, particularly 7+ monitors across multiple different physical GPUs, mismatched refresh rates, mismatched sizes, weirdo physical layouts and monitors that are being turned on and off during a session work considerably better.

The situation is mostly reversed on Linux. Nvidia has fewer features, more bugs and stuff that plain won't work at all. Even onboard intel graphics is going to be less buggy than a pretty expensive Nvidia card.

I mention that because language model work is pretty niche and so is Linux ( maybe similar sized niches? ).

I build ISP and private data networks for a living.

A contention ratio for residential circuits of 3 to 1 isn't bad at all. You'd have to get pretty unlucky with your neighbors being raging pirates to be able to tell that was contended at all. Any data cap should scare the worst of the pirates away, so you probably won't be in that situation.

If you can feel the circuit getting worse at different times of the day then the effective contention ( taking into account further upstream ) is probably more like 30 to 1 than 3 to 1.

I'm one of the parents of a child that qualifies us for this funding. It was fairly challenging for us to find an angle to use it prior to the changes, and after them it is very close to useless.

The kids covered by it often can't leave their homes without a huge amount of distress ( think of the worst meltdown your neurotypical kid has ever had ). Parents of kids at the higher end of the autism spectrum are often being hit and bit every day. Finding anyone who will deal with this for the $80 a day respite funding is often incredibly unrealistic.

The single brain celled analysis of the minister complaining about pedicures being paid for with respite money annoys the hell out of me. Having a kid at the extremes of disability is a life sentence. It is a marathon rather than a sprint. Your kid might never smile at you or thank you ever for a life time of care. If a pedicure is what will fit in the hour and a half window that you can arrange for the your kid to be safe, and it keeps you going for the next couple of weeks I think is an absolute bargain.

Stuff that might seem frivolous on its face like buying lego or games might be the only option for some parents to get a couple of hours without needing to wrangle their kids.

We have a great kid that is towards the more high functioning end of the autism spectrum and are in a financial position where it doesn't matter that much to us. I feel horribly bad for anyone who was making good use of this funding and now are facing having to go it alone again.

I got banned from Reddit while I was on a work trip to the USA. Hadn't posted in over a year at the time. I'm absolutely mystified as to why.

They refer you to the content policy but they won't tell you which post might violate it. I asked a few times what it was that caused the ban, but they either just referred to the content policy or once they said "Repeated violations". I actually requested my user data so I could stick up my complete post history publicly and see if anyone else could figure it out. My username was / is sirdeadbeef on reddit.

I haven't put any work into displaying them nicely, this is the format you get them in if you request your data:

https://db.osoal.org.nz/reddit/

It isn't something that is in the distro vendors control. Nvidia do not disclose programming info for their chipsets. They distribute an unreliable proprietry driver that is obfuscated to hell so that noone can help out fixing their problems.

If you use an AMD card it will probably work fine in Windows and Linux. If you use an Nvidia card you are choosing to run windows or have a bad time in Linux.

Please drink a verification can to continue.

Razer mice and keyboards can be managed with openrazer under Linux. I still use deathadders on a few Linux machines ( and one Windows games PC ) but I've ditched my razer keyboards for keychron which don't really need any software. You can configure the RGB components of them all with openrgb if you want in Linux and Windows.

A couple of seagulls made their nest in the cooling vent for the radiator of one of our backup generators. I caught it on our security cameras and mentioned it to management which resulted in folks being dispatched to evict them and clean up the giant pile of sticks and other junk they had dragged in.

Not sure what would have happened next time the thing started, so it was probably for the best. I still felt bad.

I've changed distro's a bunch of times personally and for business I have influence in a bunch of times in the last 30 odd years.

Slackware -> Redhat -> Suse -> Ubuntu -> Debian.

The reasons for each were ( as best I can recall ).

Slackware to Redhat was just because a proper package manager made sense at the time. I think the Redhat releases were a bit more up to date too.

Redhat to Suse was because Redhat stopped doing the free long term releases, the short term ones were too short to be workable.

Suse to Ubuntu was a similar thing to Redhat with Suse trying to push you into the enterprise version.

Ubuntu to Debian most recently was due to the Ubuntu releases coming with more and more unwanted crap, we had been running mint on desktops to avoid whatever their mutant gnome reskin was called and then their regular gnome releases, but we were still running regular Ubuntu on servers. Eventually when they started putting pretty core stuff in snaps we decided to move to Debian.

Hopefully that is the last migration we have to do for a while.

Dune 2. It was the gateway drug that turned me playing computer games into a full blown addiction for a bunch of my family.

Relations camped out waiting for a slot to satisfy the urge for months until they could scrape together the cash to fund an appropriate PC to run it themselves at home.

The samsung TV that I bought for my son had this annoying overlay thing that pops up when you turn it on that shows all the different inputs and nags about various things it thinks are wrong with the world. It is plugged into an Nvidia shield that we do most things on, but you can't use the shield until the overlay calms the fuck down and disappears.

It'd be great if you could just have the thing turn on and display an input like our older TVs do.