It really was a great platformer. Detailed sprites for the platform, and the pogo-cane mechanic was actually pretty inspired. I still remember the music from the moon level.

Consumers turn to older DDR4 RAM since prices haven’t gone up as much as DDR5

In absolute dollars, sure, but hoo boy those percentage jumps are ROUGH! I bought 16GB of no-name DDR4 for my aging desktop 15 months ago for USD 22. That same listing is now USD 100, and still pretty close to the cheapest retail I see, though that’s only with an admittedly superficial search of Amazon and PC Part Picker.

Yup. Give 'em laptops or tablets if you like. Maybe you break their distance vision in exchange for saving their backs from the half a dozen hardback tomes and trapper-keeper we used to lug around. Textbooks can be updated quicker, incorporate video, and if there are public domain texts, they can be provided for free. Completing worksheets with a keyboard and trackpad also doesn’t worry me, and I actually wish we had class discussion boards when I was in school.

Leveraging tech because it provides some practical benefit is just common sense, but thinking the tech is the benefit is stupid, so of course that’s where we are, driven by the olds you mention, as well as a healthy ecosystem of ed-tech grifters.

Fair enough, I may have inferred a bit too much, so here is what the CEO said:

And so third parties, the reason you saw some of these really high numbers, is we’re like, ‘A Rivian? And what’s a Rivian?’ So they they don’t know the car, and they quote an enormously high number, the insurance company agrees to it, and then that happens.”

In used Bazzite for a bit on a desktop, which mostly worked great, until I tried to set up a small dev environment (for QMK keyboard firmware), and found that I fell into a rare doughnut hole where I’m advanced enough to want dev tools, but too dumb to readily work with the way immutable distros handle that, LOL.

For this machine, it may be an even better choice. I’ll certainly keep it in mind.

Awesome info. Thank you. I think I have some heat pads around for RPi passive sinks, so I might at least stick a couple of them on. Can’t hurt.

Without asking you to chase things down for an internet stranger, is undervolting one of these fairly straightforward?

Thanks. I’d skimmed over mentions of that a couple of times. I’ll keep it in mind if I hit any trouble.

Good to know. I actually didn’t have a bad time when I took a short trip with the upjumped Chrome-tab with a trackball and small mechanical keyboard, since I completely nuked ChromeOS and have Debian running native, but I’ve been told it’s a “sadness machine,” LOL.

The laser engraver in my garage runs via a battery-ectomied laptop with a Celeron and 4gb. I have Tuxedo on it, and it does struggle to do anything more than “copy gcode, hit send,” but by that same token its only other job is to avoid making me sad and not catch fire if it dies, so I haven’t put much effort into optimizing it. This one I have modest but non-zero expectations for, but good to know I’m above the floor.

TL:DR: Poor scale and awareness due to being a niche brand, overly large aluminum body panels requiring either massive replacements or complicated welding, small shops guessing that it must be even more exotic and expensive than the CEO claims, and insurers shrugging and moving on because the volumes aren’t hitting their financials hard enough for them to care.

“What transpired is not reflective of who I am, the values I hold, or the way I was raised,” [ADA CEO] Henderson said. “I will work hard to bring our community back together to build on the progress we have collectively made for those affected by diabetes.”

Jesus, he sounds like a pro athlete who got arrested for drunk driving.

I suppose to hear them say it, they’d say this is how they’re holding the line on the core use. Shrinkflation instead of inflation, so… Yay?

42 hours

it lives about twenty minutes away from me

nm 🤣

In small but statistically and financially significant numbers, yes, absolutely.

The bigger paradigm shift will be moving corporate users to per-token pricing, and that’s the one that will really kill Anthropic and OpenAI (and maybe Oracle) if it doesn’t go how they need, but there are way more actual people spending money on AI than one might think… or hope.

I like listening to Ed Zitron stuff, though admittedly part of it is AI Doomer comfort food, but one of the drums he beats is that the spend is absolutely obscene, and they’re going to have to start dramatically dialing up the prices, and soon, to have any chance at all of converting to profitability.

From what I’ve seen, even people who like AI won’t pay for anywhere near as much as they’re using now while it’s free or flat rate.

Fair enough, LOL. Just love that it’s “oh I pay TONS of taxes, but asking me to pay more in taxes won’t help anything.”

“The top 1% of taxpayers pay about 40% of all the tax revenue, and the bottom half pay 3%,” Bezos said. “I don’t think it should be 3%. I think it should be zero.”

“People sometimes say that, you know, I don’t pay taxes. Not true. I pay billions of dollars in taxes,”

“You could double the taxes I pay, and it’s not going to help that teacher in Queens. I promise you.”

WT-absolute-F? I think he got oxygen-deprived in space.

Not the main issue of course, but I found this fun:

Both YouTubers said the exposed database records indicated significantly lower customer interest than previously reported. According to Coffeezilla, internal order identifiers suggested roughly 30,000 total orders associated with around 10,000 unique customers, far below earlier public estimates claiming nearly 600,000 reservations.

So this grift will only net them ~$3M, not sixty. My heart weeps for them.

In the meantime, OnShape is cross platform cause it’s all in browser and I don’t care about my designs being public. I actually post them all free anyway.

The biggest issue with their license is that they went so hard on protecting themselves hosting it, that they basically give everyone BUT the creator the right to monetize a public design. It’s an offensively sloppy ToU, or at least it was the last time I checked it.

Some of it will depend on what your goals and OS are. OnShape is pretty good, and being in-browser it’s inherently cross-platform. BUT… their free tier has the single worst licensing setup imaginable: your designs are public, you can’t make a single cent off them, BUT any paying customer (and arguably any other user at all) can. They also jump straight from free to enterprise pricing.

Fusion you know. Licensewise, the free version gives you a small grace zone to make a couple of bucks without issues, and you can at elast keep your designs to yourself.

SolidWorks has an extremely heavy and unfriendly web interface, but their in-browser parametric 3D CAD is better than it used to be, and you can get a maker plan for $25-$50 a year that gives you a little wiggle room to sell a few trinkets and not get blasted if someone or something rats you out to Dassault. If you’re on Windows, you’ll also be able to install proper SolidWorks (though files will be watermarked to limit them to a hobbyist/maker install.

Solid Edge is a bit clunkier than (real) SolidWorks or Fusion, is windows only, and there’s also a doughnut hole for limited commercial use, but it’s the full software and it’s free as in beer.

Since they cleared up the worst of the toponaming issue, FreeCAD is way better than it used to be. I still feel like the moment you have to do anything more than draw/extrude/fillet, then all the clunkiness comes back, though. It’s a brilliant project in its way, but it remains a mixed bag, shall we say.

I paid for a permanent license for my version of Alibre Design, and that’s what I generally use. It’s somewhere between SolidEdge and Solidworks in user-friendliness, and more than powerful enough for my keyboards and random widgets. I also do like the simplicity of owning my license and therefore fully controlling my designs, but it wasn’t cheap, probably two years’ worth of monthly payments on the Shapr3D usable tier or the fancy Fusion tier, so I will probably keep plugging along for a while yet. They have a more basic product (Atom) that’s missing some fairly useful features, but is still parametric and is rather cheap. It’s also all Windows only, though I keep hearing the next version will play nice with Wine/Proton. For now, my investment with Alibre is pretty much THE reason I occasionally boot back into Windows.

TinkerCAD (opwned by Autodesk like Fusion is) is great for certain things, and the “make shape, set solid or hole” workflow is much more intuitive for the abject beginner, but if you’re on Fusion you’re already past the need for it, i’d think.

There are other players (Rhino, Plasticity, DesignSpark, SolveSpace, among others), but Fusion, Shapr3D (for single parts only, no assemblies),OnShape, SolidEdge, FreeCAD, Alibre, and Solidworks pretty much cover mechanical CAD that’s (1) full-featured, (2) 3D, (3) got parametric history and (4) available with usable free or maker versions.