Just as a folo, consider the difference between fast food and a full-service restaurant. People will head to Taco Bell for a known quantity and pay before the food is served. In a restaurant setting, being expected to pay before your meal arrives will make customers leave.

Amazon (and other companies) want you to think of entertainment like going to a movie, where you could waste $30 on a shitty production. I don’t care to do that at home.

Oh, I’ve got more than I know what to do with. Thing is, as with all USB cables, just because it plugs in doesn’t mean it will accomplish the desired goal.

Oh, AI companies still have the budget to take things they don’t like to the Supreme Court. This will be a lot of wasted time and money, which could have been spent on, say, housing the unhoused.

I’m not a betting man, but my guess is it was bullshit from the beginning.

With the right cable! The world has long since moved onto USB-C.

Ebooks are to me like music and movies/TV shows. I pirate first, and if I like it, I go back and pay. But the critical thing to remember is that discovery is the gateway. They want to act like it’s the '90s, and you have to pay $20 for a CD to find out if anything but the one track played on the radio was any good.

Must suck that people know how to try something on for size before making a purchase. That used to be common at things called “shopping malls.”

That’s where we’ve gotten, yes. The bottom line matters more than quality. Not that Indians are terrible coders, it’s just naked offshoring.

I was once a die-hard Asus fan. Then, well, they kept fucking up. I used to have motherboards and routers from them, without feeling shortchanged.

This latest news is of scarce interest. Of course they priced ahead of the rise in memory and storage costs.

Hey, tech companies: How about you go back to making shit we actually want instead of circular financing and enshittification? It seemed to work pretty well for decades, and you built goodwill.

I remember thinking Amazon, like Tom, was my friend.

Wait … this is your first recession indicator?

First off, the story doesn’t back up the hed. All we know for certain is that these “hacking tools” are being offered. Apparently, some of these channels charge for entry …

Often, the group’s report says, access to Telegram channels would cost between €20 ($23) and €50 or have subscriptions starting at €5 per month.

I’m not excusing the exploitative nature of these groups, but this sounds more like grifting than hacking. I expect better from Wired. Also, we’ve known for years now that Telegram is leaky as fuck.

The whole situation is a bit baffling. “Here’s something everyone knows has been going on for a while” ain’t exactly stop-press.

All I hear from that context is “slow news day.”

We’ve already had a third and fourth time. Anyway, the baselines on just about everything have dramatically changed since the divorce. She’s now the one making six figures while I’m a dirty hippie in a van.

Pick one. You can’t have both.

I’m in my 40s. I never converted to PowerShell from the command line. I can use a Linux terminal, but I’d really rather not. I was never a pure-play coder, so I just want shit to work while also having full control when need be. Like, totally hypothetically, putting two news sources at each others’ throats to make sure my ex-wife’s water wasn’t shut off.

Anything you still need a 486 for outside of hardware edge cases is handled far better and faster by a Pi Zero W, at a fraction of the power envelope. Thing is, they won’t be running Linux in that case, given vendor lock-in.

'Twas the Bard that gave it away.

I mean, at least I’m talking with my ex-wife again, so that’s less irritating than it had been.

(These are separate people.)

What are you running on a 486 these days that needs to be online? A pihole? Like, even if this is a CNC controller or vinyl cutter (if you need a dongle to run your output, this is a valid concern; not a lot of parallel ports hanging out on mobos these days), the internet is not required.

(You can say “fucking” here.)