I would say this is definitely not a red flag.

But I’m also not saying it’s green. Probably more green than anything… Maybe a nice seafoam.

The Good is that she wasn’t angry and was being patient. Letting you figure it out. The not great but not bad part of this is that she did nothing to help.

I would have just stepped outside for “some fresh air” and wait for the person to notice me standing next to the entrance. That way I’m helping them, but only a little, they still have to find me. Finding me may be easier than finding the establishment that we agreed to meet at.

The key here is to not go out and call them over. Let them find you. If you call them, it’s kinda difficult to walk the line of, “oh hey, I’m over here” and not cross over into “get over here stupid. I had to come get you because you’re to dumb to find things yourself”… Best play is just to make yourself more obvious.

I wouldn’t say this is a green flag as it is, but it’s definitely not a red one.

The people in the video media industry…

I thought that would have been obvious.

Thanks! I hate it!

For years and years they convinced us we need bigger, better TVs with surround sound and all the add-ons. That every person should build their own home theatre

Then they get mad that we stop going to their theatre.

I’ve been meaning to donate to those guys.

I use their site frequently. I love it, and it can’t be cheap to keep that stuff online.

From a neutral viewpoint, the world is more divided than ever, no matter what values you have, there’s someone who opposes them with few, if any exceptions. Those opposing viewpoints have only grown in strength and number on the Internet, for years.

Additionally, the “us vs them” mentality of everyone is blinding them to even understanding why someone would disagree with their viewpoint. Of course that’s not everyone, but it’s a growing and very loud group.

Political violence is also starting to run rampant. Escalation after escalation. It keeps building.

So in this time of having a global voice, that can reach hundreds of millions of people with a single tweet or comment or thread or post or whatever, and with so much growing hatred among different political groups, it’s unsurprising to me that conflict is rising.

Additionally, Lemmy is growing. Not everyone that joins Lemmy will be the same type of person that joined Lemmy after the Reddit API incident. That influx of people had a very similar value set, because they almost all came here from Reddit for the same reason. So there’s at least a good amount of overlap in everyone’s values.

Over time, more and more diverse people have been joining Lemmy, and it’s not surprising that they have differing opinions on a lot of things.

This outcome was pretty much inevitable.

As far as I’m concerned, as long as it’s done respectfully and civilly, then disagree. Debate. Try to understand the opposing viewpoint, even if you don’t agree with it.

This is a completely valid concern. I recently moved my homelab from core 2 era xeons (not second Gen core i-series… Core2), over to Xeon E5 v4 processors. I looked today and the systems take about the same amount of power, but now instead of six cores, I have 10, and they’re newer, faster in every way…

Power draw didn’t change but now I can run something like 3-4x the workloads, which means I can cut the size by 1/3rd and I would drop power consumption and gain more computing power.

There is absolutely a limit to what’s useful. You won’t find anyone running a Pentium 3 anymore, even with Linux. It’s just not sensible.

I’d argue that anything core i-series 4th Gen or older, probably needs to be decommissioned soon, if not already. Most of the workloads that you could use that stuff for can easily be handled by a raspberry Pi, which will use less than 1/10th the power to do it.

Basically, if what you’re doing can be 100% completed in whole on a pi, either you need to upgrade, or simply move it to a pi. Simple as that. Anything else is just burning power and heating your home with little benefit.

A combination of warranty expiry, the tenancy to replace instead of repair/upgrade, Windows 10 being the go to, even after W11 launched, and the W10 end of life, all combine into a neat pile of ewaste from enterprises that’s flooding the market.

It’s a great time for those of us that use enterprise company discards as computers.

I’ve seen worse deals. The platform itself is probably worth that much (meaning the mainboard, chassis, and all the accompanying stuff like heatsinks and power supplies)… 6th gen CPUs are probably dirt cheap, assuming those systems use a socketed CPU, and you wanted to upgrade to something more than an i3. I can’t imagine RAM would be much more.

You can probably turn these into very decent little machines for under $100 each and a bit of effort.

It really depends on whether you need the extra capability for a bit of effort or you’re fine with the i3 with 4G RAM.

I usually want to replace the storage on a used system with something new or refurbished because of wear and tear, but that’s me. Still, that’s not a bad deal. Free would be a great deal, but I’m not sure you could ask for better.

My go to for reliable Linux platforms is anything off-lease. Workstation class systems are extremely robust most of the time. I have some that have been in 24/7 operation since I bought them years ago and they’re showing zero signs of slowing down. I love it.

Ewaste is also a good place to look for still good but deemed unworthy of use by a faceless, soulless corporation stuff. Usually tends to be a bit older, but it’s usually fine.

Have fun friends, there’s no wrong answers.

Big thumbs up from me on the no iPhone/iPad policy.

That crap is ewaste as soon as Apple inc, decides it’s not worth supporting anymore with no option to load a different OS on it. Arguably, it’s ewaste before that, but I digress.

It just sucks that the hardware is made specifically to be incapable of running anything but the OS it was built for, which is entirely controlled by a profit-driven company by way of closed source software.

Say all the bad things you want about them (I certainly do), but it’s hard to say that their hardware isn’t good. It’s just sabotaged at the factory by their firmware and OS, condemning it to a mediocre and finite existence.

The puddle has felt a bit drained since the incident.

As someone who works in tech, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened already.

Part of my job is to oversee and arrange in some capacity for licensing of digital products, especially office 365, and I can count the number of people who have a copilot subscription on one hand, out of nearly, if not more than 1000 users across various clients.

I know some are using competing products, mainly chat GPT, and I don’t always have visibility to that, but still… The rate of adoption and the speed at which all of this is being developed and invested into… Does not bode well.

I see what side you land on for the ship of Theseus debate…

Oh. I have no doubt that a lot of people are vulnerable to the exploit, but I’m entertained by the fact that you can stop the exploit by simply removing a chat app.

Amateurs fly balloons up all the time, all over the place. I know some ham radio guys that do it for fun.

Is it the “random fun night”, “college friends”, “bar”, or 2003 that no longer exists?

Like machine learning?

I can imagine all of the AI pron, VR porn, and 3D rendered/video game porn would all combine so you can get freaky with anyone, and give them any personality you want.

I would also think that any 3D Video game would be able to be made compatible with it, similar to VR.

But porn would be there first.

Not to mention all the shift workers. My SO is a nurse on an afternoon shift, they rarely wake up before noon.

But apparently, to your “friend”, my SO is a worthless sack.

Neat.