I guess the assumption is more that for me, a fresh install is often about decluttering as much as anything-- the five Wayland compositors, three music players, and six pseudo-IDEs I tried and didn’t like don’t need to follow me to the next build.

In a conventional install, that just means “don’t check the checkbox in the installer next time”. In a Nix-style system, this is a conscious process of actively deciding to remove things from the stored configuration, no?

I suppose the closest I’ve gotten was recently migrating my setup from a desktop to a new laptop. Mostly copying over some config from my home directory, but even then, I wanted enough different stuff-- removing tools I don’t use on the laptop, adding things like battery monitoring and Wi-Fi control-- that it involved some reconfiguration.

I suspect the tooling isn’t quite there yet for desktop use cases.

If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.

The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.

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.

Chromebooks maybe?

I always figured the browser part mostly falls out of doing the Electron-for-cross-platform thing.

Silly idea: computer vision for classtoom rollcall. Take a photo and it generates a list of absences.

OTOH, it is a very effective product distinguisher. They don’t have to deal with the “Apple makes the best touchpad” meme by offering something else.

It makes shopping for laptops either super-easy or super-hard.

I can either get a Thinkpad, or try to find the one or two HP and Dell business laptops with one… and we all know how it ends (looks at stack of X230t, E585, and new L13)

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

Cents since 1982 are mostly zinc with a thin shell of bronze. They’ll rot badly if compromised with a hole.

I wonder if part of the emotional risk is due to the general social stigma attached to porn. It becomes something that has to be explained and justified.

If done to grand excess, deepfakes could crash the market on that, so to speak. Yeah, everyone saw your face on an AI-generated video. They also saw Ruth Bader Ginsburg, their Aunt Matilda, and for good measure, Barry Bonds, and that was just a typical Thursday.

The shock value is burnt through, and “I got deepfaked” ends with a social stigma on the level of “I got in a shouting match with a cashier” or “I stumbled into work an hour late recently.”

Why can’t it be sold or released as a “private servers only client”

You could use like a 74181, or one of the vintage bitslice ALUs.

50 cent coins contained silver for a few years longer than dimes and quarters. So you have a slightly better chance of finding a silver coin worth a few dollars in a roll of halves. It’s free gambling for numismatists.

Source: I ask for the occasional roll of halves.

Maybe they saw it as an acqui-hire moment to get their staff, or at least keep them from going ro a conpetitor.

Of course, that assumes social media owners have clues and strategy; it seems like a lot of them were “we stumbled into vsast success, now what.”

The one that offends me is the belief in “infinite upside.” Like somehow we’d lose out on some great works of social progress if we made peoole’s bank accounts peg once they hit a certain number of zeroes.

Paimon has that obnoxious Elmo complex. Sing-songy PLUS can’t speak in the first person.

I always figured the markets that Google didn’t penetrate successfully (Russia with Yandex, China with Baidu, maybe Korea and Japan) probably ended up with their own circle of innovation just because there wasn’t a huge dominant player sucking all the talent and money out of the room. Thry might have gotten an edge through noncompetitive regulatory policy, but that bought them thr time to build domething more duited to local needs.

Back when it was socially permissible to acknowledge Russia did anything well, Yandex was doing some fairly innovative stuff.

Swords is one of the rare things I miss from Reddit.

That alarms me. The Fediverse is inherently self-selecting to nerds. You’d expect to see a higher standard for memecraft. It’s like going to an anime con, and the artist’s alley isn’t full of fanworks that violate every known principle of anatomy. Or to a Sportsball match where they don’t slam-dunk the touchdown bases.

Of course, we’ll never top that picture which I thought for years was a deep-fried image of Hank Hill with the caption “E”.

Moob mousepads exist. I use an Arataji Itto one :3