• 6 Posts
  • 57 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I was always disappointed that celebrity and character voice packs weren’t a thing for the voice-assistant platforms. I’d pay literal ones of dollars for a voice assistant with a Sebastian Michaelis intonation and theming.

    Cortana for Windows Phone came closest, I think they did use the same voice actress as the game character.


  • I doubt they enjoy having their balls in TSMC’s vice.

    Intel is the only option remotely available to leverage against them.

    • Starting from zero will cost bajillions and take decades to get competitive
    • Samsung’s probably not divisible in a way that makes their fabs buyable
    • They can’t buy into any of the 7nm/5nm level players in the PRC and fund their modernization due to sanctions
    • Does anyone else have sub-10nm at anything buy lab scales?




  • I always figured BSD should lean into the daemon imagery with a full heavy-metal branding: a suite of wallpapers with decidedly less cuddly daemons, a succubus OS-tan character… make it the go-to Edgelord Desktop.

    Then FreeBSD introduced that stupid sphere logo. No sense of branding. :P






  • No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They’ll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same “password123” that’s been set since 2004.

    I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you’ve jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it’s trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.

    Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.







  • Back in the Windows 8 era, I bought a little 8" tablet PC from Dell. It was flaky from basically day 1, and after ~2 weeks it bricked entirely.

    I go to RMA and they ask “If we refund you $50, would you be willing to keep the unit? How about $75?”

    Admittedly, they did give me a refund, but that was so the wrong branch to follow on the chat script, honey. If I’m going to be out over three hundred dollars for a paperweight it better at least be made of something cool like meteorite.



  • I started with some UMSDOS-based “full X11 desktop in 5 floppies” distro on a 486, then went through Slackware, RedHat 5 with glibc breakage, actually bought a SuSE boxed set in the 7.x era, mostly stuck with Slackware unril I realized I wanted stuff like Steam and perhaps some degree of dependency resolution is nice. Bounced off of Arch (the AUR is a terrible concept IMO) and ended up on Void, which gives me Slackware-like vibes, but a little more built for broadband instead of CD images. Been trying Debian Sid latrly, just because I put it on my new laptop and I figured I’d go consistent, but I’m not sure I’m sold. Everything works, but even for an “unstable”, the packages are dated and I dislike systemd on principle.