Powderhorn

Powderhorn , 8 days ago

Chants of Sennaar is on sale. Found out about it here.

I suspect there’s a limited target demographic, but I was a linguistics major for a time.

Powderhorn , 11 days ago

If they can already double the energy density of LiFePO4 in the lab and a 25kWh prototype is already in use and rated for 250km, while getting rid of cobalt and removing all the explosive hazards with a cathode base material one-tenth the price that can be made on existing lines, why is research into lithium ion even continuing for this application?

Either the story is connecting lots of dots that actually have yet to be drawn, or Big Lithium is up to shenanigans.

Powderhorn , 11 days ago

Oh, I’m not saying switch production until there’s maturity, but if that’s the starting point with sodium-ion, clearly the research is better suited there.

Powderhorn , 11 days ago

I think we’re trying to make different points. I’m not in manufacturing but get that lab to product for batteries is glacial; what I was pointing out was the way the story is written – all strengths, zero drawbacks – would leave a credulous reader with that conclusion.

Powderhorn , 10 days ago

There may be an ARM “takeover” of x86 at some point, but that day is very much not today unless you believe the PC market consists solely of Macs.

The hydrogen issue seems to continue being storage. Even if you have all the green electricity you want for electrolysis, the product cannot just go in a tank at anywhere near sea-level pressure and temperature.

Powderhorn , 14 days ago

So, IBM walks into a Nazi bar, and after six drinks, slurrs to the bartender, “What’s with all the swastikas?”

Powderhorn , 14 days ago

Bold of you to assume the same person works at the same outlet long enough to run both stories.

Powderhorn , 14 days ago

This result honestly sounds like their best-case outcome. I don’t like much of what Google does, but I’m certain a lot of discussion went into what would be viewed as a “win” on this call, and my guess is “some number of people stop using ad-blocking software” actually beats out “some people are converted to subscribers” (an effect not measured here and somewhat necessary to get any context for one data point) by virtue of Google being an advertising company.

Regardless, they’re targeting only low-hanging fruit: people who use ad blockers to block ads. Sounds tautological, but this excludes anyone concerned about privacy. Nobody using an ad blocker in concert with other add-ons is going to be converted here. And I sort of wonder whether media coverage from when the crackdown started inflated ad-block installs among people who’d never used one, thus making this win less substantial on a longer timeline.

Powderhorn , 14 days ago

The delicious irony here is that U.S. corporations want the government out of regulating worker rights and company obligations, and having actually encountered that, Tesla said, “no, we don’t like how that turned out, either.”

Powderhorn , 14 days ago

Interesting choice to omit “idiolect” as a replacement on any subsequent references to “mental dictionary.”

Powderhorn OP , 17 days ago

This looks promising. Just the fact that it autopings the list of servers on demand solves much of my Invidious frustration.

Powderhorn OP , 17 days ago

I’m on FF. Forgot that detail. Also forgot I can edit the title. Which I have done, so the message above this made sense at the time it was written (for anyone who came in late).

Powderhorn OP , 17 days ago

That worked last round but not this time, unfortunately. I’m kicking the tires on LibRedirect currently.

Powderhorn , 17 days ago

Sounds like a beertle to me …

Powderhorn OP , 20 days ago (edited 20 days ago)

I switched in May on my main rig precisely because of OneDrive nags after shopping distros for a couple months on my HTPC. The Surface had been dual-boot from the get go, as I bought it for a bootcamp, but I’d not used it for over a year because of other available computers. Without a functioning AC outlet at home (inverter install is awaiting solar install), the Surface is the only viable option, and I thought I’d be back on my desktop within a month … two months ago.

Windows is more of a telemetry platform than an OS at this point, and Proton’s evolution means my Steam library functions just as well on KDE Neon. I have a few legacy Win-only apps, but my expectations about use frequency from years ago no longer matched actual usage by the time I was willing to revisit my assumptions in spring.

And I’m glad I did, as Plasma is fucking amazing in terms of customizability compared to “you will have your taskbar at the bottom of the screen, and you will like it.”

Powderhorn , 20 days ago

Friendly reminder that Thunderbird is a great way to handle multiple email accounts on the desktop.

Powderhorn , 20 days ago

I moved away from a desktop client for several years because of Thunderbird staying stuck in the 2010s, but the redesign brought me back into the fold. It’s certainly overkill for scanning through subject lines, but compared to having five tabs open …

Powderhorn , 26 days ago

YouTube algorithm: Yo, dawg, I heard you like spigots! Check out the latest spigot content from these awesome creators! Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss out on the freshest spigot uploads!

Powderhorn , 26 days ago

Ad blocking is always going to be a game of Whac-a-Mole, with YT’s latest efforts likely converting some users to turning it off or subscribing while pushing others away.

Thing is, converting a nonzero number is, in a vacuum, all that’s needed to make the line go up.

When YT insinuated its way around uBO, I tried Piped and Invidious, both of which had such severe drawbacks that I was relieved to find instructions on how to update uBO to once again get around it.

But I’m one of those people who simply cannot handle the audio of advertising. That overexcited tone announcing grandiose solutions to invented problems makes my blood boil to the point that I’ve not listened to the radio outside of NPR since the '90s, have never had a cable subscription and never bought rabbit ears. I do not stream anything on my phone for the same reason. If advertising is part of the package, well, that’s what VPNs and torrents are for … unless I can purchase the content without it for a reasonable price (my Beatport collection confirms this).

But there’s no fucking way I will pay for a service that includes advertising. And on YT, even though that’s nominally what happens if you pay, well … there’s a reason SponsorBlock is also a thing. Spotify absolutely baffles me. I have no problem spending $10 (or whatever it’s up to now) a month on music, but I damn well better own that music in perpetuity if I’m paying for it.

It’s impossible to avoid being manipulated in life, but it’s not particularly difficult to excise voices telling you how much happier you’ll be if you buy something.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

Not exactly a high bar. I’d like to see some of these moves go somewhere, but I don’t have high hopes.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

Unsurprising on the whole, but the dissection of the absurdity of the promotional output is a delight to read.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

It’s already painful to stay out of Facebook’s clutches.

How so? NoScript and a pihole make it pretty darn easy.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

I’ve just seen the actions Meta’s taken, and as such I believe nothing they say. I was on my family’s WhatsApp group chat until the buyout.

SMS is fine for most things domestically. Signal’s there for international and edge cases. Most of my family are on Signal; there’s just not a group there, and I view this as a feature.

Powderhorn , 1 month ago

I have suspenders and a belt for sharing links: Firefox has “send tab to device” for anything you’re signed into … wait a few seconds, continue reading; Signal’s Note to Self conversation is my other method, which has the added benefit of being a secure cross-device de facto life clipboard.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

Short-throw 4K is certainly the stretch goal; my two 32" 4K60 HDR LGs are coming along in the meanwhile. Sometimes, you just can’t beat a shitton of pixels a couple of feet from your face.

I’ve been going toward more control this year, having switched to KDE after one too many Win11 nags about OneDrive. It floors me that they really could have upped the telemetry without me jumping ship, but instead they toasted themselves off my desktop. I will not be participating in any sort of thin-client/VDI dystopia anytime soon for the reasons you enumerated, which is what makes the idea of that photo being my entire internet connection/VPN/pihole/gaming PC/display sometime soon so appealing even without the van situation.

Yeah, there’s been a lot of progress on a lot of fronts, but SoCs coming to replace gaming towers that are essentially unchanged since the adoption of ATX as a form factor is to me bigger than the cores on a chip themselves. And the power envelope for a single-package CPU/GPU (RAM notwithstanding) with that level of performance would to me, as an enthusiast, obliterate everything up to the 80/800 GPU level. I’m sure people would still build towers because they like building towers, but I’m happy to let PSUs and power connectors sail quietly into the night.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

I had a slew of desktop-cum-servers (you know what, I’m leaving it … y’all know what I meant) back in the day, and what broke the chain was realizing that my server files fit on an SSD. I’m not doing anything on the server end that would necessitate an i7, so that little $99 computer works fine outside of Jellyfin attempting to transcode 4K, at which point switching to VLC gets the job done with far less than 99% dropped frames.

I’m dicey on being locked into a GPU for years, but my 580 was fine at 4K until Satisfactory, and I don’t see myself suddenly discovering an interest in AAA gaming in my 40s, so a beefy iGPU could be sufficient.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

I guess I’m a bit confused about a lot of reactions here, because at no point did I say towers are going to die, just that for a system for gaming without the need for a high-end GPU, things are looking like miniaturization is finally coming for the desktop.

“I play a lot of games, including new ones, but none of them needs high-end hardware” seems to be a weird place few people will admit to being in on online fora. I don’t care about performance past 60Hz, and my current hardware is more than sufficient to do so. I do not understand the appeal of combat in games and did not buy Satisfactory until the update that had a passive-enemy mode.

But that’s where I’m at. I’m not attempting to extrapolate anything beyond my use case, though I’m aware my needs already far exceed content consumption, which has been covered by iGPUs for a decade at this point.

Heat being brought up as though I’m unfamiliar with thermodynamics is also baffling. I have an AIO for my current rig and wouldn’t dream of trying to do everything on air at current dissipation levels.

But I also have an HTPC that handles everything I need it to and draws 11W during content consumption. Yes, the top end will always need beefy cooling solutions; I feel like what’s being missed is top end has been overkill for me when aspirational future use cases run into the boots-on-the-ground experience as the system ages. Nothing else on the market could rival the performance of an 8086K at $0, so that’s what I have, but I’m willing to admit it’s more than what I needed.

Intel has done a very good job of convincing people that if they needed an i7 years ago, nothing less will suffice in the future (and until AMD finally forced i7s above four cores, that was pretty true). I’ve built a completely new system to gain 34MHz (in the '90s, obviously), so I get the drive to always go for faster and better and bigger … and if people want to keep doing that for bragging rights, more power to them, but I look at people asking if an i9-13900K will suffice with RPL-R on the horizon and can’t help but wonder what the use case is where a 13th gen would crawl while a 14th flies.

The other thing about physical space is we’ve come a long way since the days of the I/O plate being a couple of PS/2 ports, a parallel port and an RS-232 port. I’ve needed six add-in cards before, including a PCI-SCSI card, but I can’t imagine the consumer use cases for full ATX in 2023. Sound and networking are onboard, and insufficient USB ports is to me more a failing on mobo selection than needing a full echelon of x1-x4 slots to rectify that failing. I’ve also had media servers that made a mid-tower feel cramped, but those data now fit on a 2280 SSD.

I went ITX with this build since the HDDs were already offloaded to a server in 2018, bypassing mATX completely.

So my questions are: What peripherals are people using that necessitate so many add-in cards for non-HPC needs that ATX is a must, and why is it assumed that anything less than an i9 will freeze opening Notepad and thus the only power envelope worth validly addressing is that of an i9? Yes, heat needs to be mitigated, but using vastly more power than needed in the first place causes that mitigation need.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

Can you point out where I extrapolated about all use cases for all towers? A lot of people seem to have read that, and I’d really like to understand where my post went so wildly off the rails that this was the predominant takeaway. For someone with a heavy background in communications, I’m apparently terrible with words.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

I’m honestly not trying to be combative here … I’m just surprised by the sorts of responses, so I appreciate the explanation, even if it’s to a certain extent more confusing.

Very well, I’ll bite. From your OP:

Not quite there yet … […] When a computer that size (actually smaller, since I don’t need a SATA bay) can outperform my tower, though … all signs point to gaming 4x4 PCs with a wall wart in the next two years

From one of your other posts:

at no point did I say towers are going to die, just that for a system for gaming without the need for a high-end GPU

These comments imply that compact computers will start to outperform full-sized computers, and that GPUs will become useless due to the performance of APUs.

There’s the disconnect. How are you getting from A to B? “Can outperform my tower” from five years ago is not “compact computers will start to outperform full-sized computers” and certainly not “GPUs will become useless due to the performance of APUs.” This is the extrapolation that’s confusing me.

What peripherals are people using that necessitate so many add-in cards for non-HPC needs that ATX is a must, and why is it assumed that anything less than an i9 will freeze opening Notepad and thus the only power envelope worth validly addressing is that of an i9?

You’re creating a strawman. Nobody except you is saying that an i9 will freeze opening Notepad. It’s also very hostile in implying that “I’m fine with therefore most of the world must also be fine with it.” Some folks play CPU-intensive games and prefer having a powerful PC. That’s their money to spend how they want.

In context, I was referring to the sorts of things that transpire on Reddit when it comes to CPU recommendations if gaming is mentioned at all, where it’s often i9 or nothing, and if it came out two weeks ago, it’s already too slow by orders of magnitude. The middle ground is all but ignored, which is what I’m referring to.

I guess I’m a bit confused about a lot of reactions here, because at no point did I say towers are going to die Yes you did. You’ve been saying it repeatedly in different forms throughout your various replies. I think you’re wrong, and it seems so do several other commenters.

Please provide examples of this since I’m doing it all over the place. I can’t find one where I talk about how towers are an endangered species.

Powderhorn OP , 2 months ago

Not as good of a Gerald Ford reference that way, though.

Powderhorn , 2 months ago

I’d be shocked if they weren’t already harvesting publicly available data “in preparation for” federating. But bluntly, they’re going to be scraping publicly available data. As in, they’d be doing this without Threads if there was advertising money to be made, and it’s publicly available data.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

If latency isn’t a top-tier issue, a 5G hotspot is a viable alternative in good coverage areas. I switched from Charter to T-Mobile by selling myself as a sole proprietor seeking a business account. Immediate $35/month savings to $50 for unlimited (I used 150GB in my first month without hearing a peep) and ready to go into my van in a few weeks. Speeds are generally 250-300Mbit, dropping to 80Mbit during brief congested periods.

Oh, and no bullshit fees. It’s actually $50 on the nose.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

Which, in the case of Oregon, means income tax rivaling federal, and you’re paying that on rent. The money always comes from somewhere, and I despised it far more than I worried about coming up with $1.07 for a 99-cent burger.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

Just responded above about the downside of all income being taxed at far higher rates than sales tax. That said, my god the amount of ink we spilled on the Ashland UGB.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

The problem is at the advertising level.

Could your local Safeway put tax-inclusive prices in the circular? Sure, although there are actually laws that prohibit such local pricing (YMMV; I’ve lived in a lot of states) specifically so that people in the sticks aren’t shouldering the entire transportation bill to their IGA. This is why grocery circulars are regional, but that’s an aside. Still, different cities in the region will have different tax rates, so they can’t do tax-inclusive, and they certainly can’t have a different price on the shelf than in the circular, and here we are.

But these are small potatoes.

Now, can Tim Cook release a new iPhone and list the price in every municipality in the U.S. in the keynote? The patchwork of devolved taxing authority makes the U.S. a poor candidate for tax-inclusive pricing.

States universally abandoning income tax for VAT (ain’t never gonna happen, since VAT inconveniently hits even billionaires’ consumption [and even less likely would be pushing through VAT while retaining income tax]) could get things closer to what Europeans have come to expect, where each state would have a universal rate and consistently applied carveouts and then distribute that to lower tiers of government as some states currently do with sales tax, but the closest advertising could get to that would be “state VAT excluded,” at which point nothing has been fixed in terms of walking out the door paying the advertised price at the cost of unpopular economic upheaval.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

I mean, if you perform it enough times, you tend to retain it. But then, I have some Carmina Burana and Palestrina memorized for the same reason.

Powderhorn OP , 3 months ago

My college roommate was from Washougal. He taught me the even finer art of retaining all deposit items in Seattle for my next visit, at which time I’d pop over the 5 bridge first and then show up with an empty car.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

As to conspiracies, it’s not really the businesses, it’s the property.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

If we’ve learned anything from recent real estate crises, it’s that once again, the losses will be socialized, with golden parachutes aplenty.

Powderhorn , 3 months ago

FWIW, Proton has handled everything I’ve tried in my Steam library except Cities: Skylines. I spent eight hours just yesterday playing Factorio at 4K on KDE.

That said, I don’t play GPU-melting games in favour of $20-$30 indie games, so YMMV. I wasn’t even aware of Proton when Windows finally gave me one too many OneDrive entreaties, and I was pleasantly surprised by the state of affairs on Linux.