I mean, there was a period about 15 years ago when he seemed to be the only rich person actually talking about climate change, doing something that might make some difference (investing in an electric vehicle startup, and later a rooftop solar startup) and seemed to actually be concerned about it. I now question if that was just an act or not.

On the other hand there is the theory that he fell down the right wing social media pipeline during the pandemic and that’s why he’s seemed to have such a sudden shift on political party affiliation. I like that theory because I think it’s kinda funny to imagine one of the richest men in the world being too cooped up and spending too long doomscrolling to the point that he became radicalized by social media algorithms

I always say “Trace RT” in my head so I remember how they truncated traceroute

oof that site is pretty bad even with ublock origin. It also hijacks copy/paste so you can’t copy/paste the article to spare others, and any attempt to bypass that gets passed along to extracting the paid article below it rather than giving you the actual text of the article. Oh and it pops up to sign in with google, pops up with a discounted subscription offer, and pops up other animated elements on every edge of the screen (which actually link to real site content!) further making it difficult to just read the damn article

Good news is it literally doesn’t provide any information other than quoting his tweet about laying off his entire dev team and then his linked post from a few weeks later he was looking for devs (and the article quotes random people on reddit to fill it out of course)

That’s relying on them having the political will to do more than half-ass it. Let’s be real, everyone loyal to trump is loyal for one (or more) of three reasons:

1. They directly profit from the loyalty
2. They believe it will help them realize their career ambitions
3. They believe they can use him to ultimately achieve their own private ideological ambitions

These are the same reasons people joined the first Trump administration and literally none of them are attempting to join his second administration meaning they were not able to realize any of their goals through Trump (or they were shown exactly how far they could go before they found the line they could not cross)

Simply put, it’s not an environment conducive to actually realizing policy goals in any incredibly complex interconnected web. The last trump administration tried to block China from international logistics and instead made logistics more robust (and helped the Mexican economy by accidentally encouraging significant investment in manufacturing and logistics there) and got completely deadlocked by infighting when they attempted to realize their wet dream of “repealing and replacing” Obamacare/The Affordable Care Act. I’ll be extremely impressed if a trump Administration manages to actually achieve a meaningful disruption of the Internet, especially with how the rest of the world largely refuses to support his policy goals

Heck a tiny regional bank I worked at with less than 2 dozen locations was constantly flinging data between its Primary and DR datacenters, and they were too small for any dedicated fiber so that was just over standard ISPs (with some locations technically on residential plans because the ISPs didn’t offer any better options than that in the small towns the bank supported)

Ah I thought I had remembered their hard drive division being aquired but I was wrong! Per Wikipedia:

At least 218 companies have manufactured hard disk drives (HDDs) since 1956. Most of that industry has vanished through bankruptcy or mergers and acquisitions. None of the first several entrants (including IBM, who invented the HDD) continue in the industry today. Only three manufacturers have survived—Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital

I doubt the high pitched whine that you’re hearing is the SSD failing. The sheer amount of writes to fully wear out an SSD is…honestly difficult to achieve in the real world. I’ve got decade old budget SSDs in some of my computers that are still going strong!

And oftentimes some or all of the metadata that helps the filesystem find the files on the drive is stored in memory (zfs is famous for its automatic memory caching) so seek times are further irrelevant in the context of media playback

SSDs won’t hold data for much longer compared to HDDs

Realistically this is not a good reason to select SSD over HDD. If your data is important it’s being backed up (and if it’s not backed up it’s not important. Yada yada 3.2.1 backups and all. I’ll happily give real backup advise if you need it)

In my anecdotal experience across both my family’s various computers and computers I’ve seen bite the dust at work, I’ve not observed any longevity difference between HDDs and SSDs (in fact I’ve only seen 2 fail and those were front desk PCs that were effectively always on 24/7 with heavy use during all lobby hours, and that was after multiple years of that usecase) and I’ve never observed bit rot in the real world on anything other than crappy flashdrives and SD cards (literally the lowest quality flash you can get)

Honestly best way to look at it is to select based on your usecase. Always have your boot device be an SSD, and if you don’t need more storage on that computer than you feel like buying an SSD to match, don’t even worry about a HDD for that device. HDDs have one usecase only these days: bulk storage for comparatively low cost per GB

Seagate had some bad luck with their 3TB drives about 15 years ago now if memory serves me correctly.

Since then Western Digital (the only other remaining HDD manufacturer) pulled some shenanigans with not correctly labeling different technologies in use on their NAS drives that directly impacted their practicality and performance in NAS applications (the performance issues were particularly agregious when used in a zfs pool)

So basically pick your poison. Hard to predict which of the duopoly will do something unworthy of trusting your data upon, so uh…check your backups I guess?

Realistically the difference is in how Linux mitigates the common vectors for attack that Windows doesn’t. Most malware targeting individual workstations gets in by either supply chain attack, vulnerable web renderer or by tricking the user into installing it.

Centralized repositories with centralized build tooling limits opportunities for supply chain attacks, plus helps prevent users from accidentally downloading a Trojan when trying to grab other software. Containerizing web applications helps limit browser exploits, and less “features” phoning home means a default incoming-deny firewall policy will largely prevent most vulnerabilities from being remotely serious.

So for an individual workstation, Linux is significantly safer from viruses. In the enterprise it’s a completely different story where the threat environment does require defense in depth regardless of your choices of vendors

XKCD did it long before you

The part that bothers me the most about OneDrive is that it redirects the users Documents/Downloads/etc folders to its own entirely breaking stuff (and making it painfully difficult to find where files went because either it’s in Documents or Documents which are entirely different directories on the hard drive of course. This is particularly agregious given Microsoft already has a really well-made shadowcopy/file history solution which lets you restore files or grab old versions of files straight from the right-click menu. So if OneDrive was simply an optional filehistory endpoint it would be far less reviled. Instead they do this ass backwards redirect that kinda works but makes a mess of things once software not made by companies named Microsoft enters the picture.

I think it’s more trying to win political favor by spending big with the company owned by a member of the incoming presidential administration.

Or it’s just wanting to market their ads on that platform and as you said, not having the balls to stick to their boycott

Good question! I can’t remember.

I think I read a Microsoft blog or something like a decade ago that said they shifted from a Hyper-V based solution to Linux to improve stability, but honestly it’s been so long I wouldn’t be shocked if I just saw it in a reddit comment on a related article that I didn’t yet have the technical knowhow to fully comprehend and took it as gospel.

At this point I think it’s most telling that even Azure runs on Linux. Microsoft’s twin flagship products somehow still only work well when Linux does the heavy lifting and works as the glue between

I feel similarly. I work in an office that’s heavily invested in Microsoft for everything and when you use Microsoft everything Teams fits in really nicely with great outlook integration, Microsoft Loop integration, etc. and the experience on Teams is fine

I just accepted a job with a small MSP starting early next year. I kept a close ear out during the interview for signs of the classic MSP hell stuff that would chew through techs but it does look like I got a good one (small 8 or so man shop) but check in in about 3 months and we’ll see how I’m feeling haha

My longer term plan is to use this as a stepping stone to then move onto being in-house then figuring out my exit strategy before burnout takes me, which I’m thinking I’ll either be aiming to move into IT management or possibly moving into a business analytics or cloud administration type role. Technical sales probably wouldn’t be too bad either.

Especially with how normal memory tiering is nowadays, especially in the datacenter (Intel’s bread and butter) now that you can stick a box of memory on a CXL network and put the memory from your last gen servers you just retired into said box for a third or fourth tier of memory before swapping. And the fun not tiered memory stuff the CXL enables. Really CXL just enables so much cool stuff that it’s going to be incredible once that starts hitting small single row datacenters

The main reason Intel can’t compete is the fact CUDA is both proprietary and the industry standard

Funnily enough this is actually changing because of the AI boom. Would-be buyers can’t get Nvidia AI cards so they’re buying AMD and Intel and reworking their stacks as needed. It helps that there’s also translation layers available now too which translate CUDA and other otherwise vebdor-specific stuff to the open protocols supported by Intel and AMD