@britown I'm fairly sure you could in some dungeon master / eye of the beholder kind of game.

What's a programmer's weapon of choice?

@voxel Here's a sheet that popped up when cohost was shutting down: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1BCJ7PFpUEjaysOA4C77z9Ckdo0YbutPihTh7oimm2AA/edit?gid=0#gid=0

Okay, I got an ad suggesting I should install an "app" for a refurbished computer store.

How often DO people buy new (well, new to them) computers anyway?

@jonikorpi Yes, you just have to understand that the line you're underlining means "we find value by selling your privacy"

Very good points, a reply to a CEO who wondered why his engineers were resistant to using LLMs for coding:

@britown I bicycled ~40km on sunday. I expected to sleep well. Had real trouble falling asleep. My guess is that my body was on overdrive or something.

So my current plan is, after I've migrated to the new pc, is to upgrade the old one to win11 and make it a dedicated audio production box. Maybe it'll work better without literally THOUSANDS of programs installed on it.

Anyway. This leads to a kvm problem. Which is likely easiest solved via remote desktopping to the old pc. windows remote desktop needs win11pro, which not only is 99$, but I don't want pro anyway. It's worse for audio production.

Any other remote-desktopping ideas?

So I bought a refurbished laptop to be a gift (to replace a win10 one that said person had which would never upgrade to win11).

Guess what 50% of all the ads I get now are?

(the other 50% are NI's summer of sound)

@zinnschlag Sigh, everything is terrible.

@the_dot_matrix nope, still wifi hardware not found

I started from the assumption that I'd build another ryzen-based system, but the benchmarks for cheaper(!) intel cpu with 8+12 cores are neck and neck with ryzen's 12 cores.

And I've heard of stability issues with amd systems. On the other hand, I wonder about the efficiency cores on the intel cpu.

Decisions, decisions..

Thinking of buying/building a new pc. Everything's pretty expensive. I want to be a bit future proof, so for this generation I'm thinking "more than 8 cores" and "64 gigs of RAM". With some tolerable gpu, and 2T system drive. The result appears to be around 2k€, which is a bit more than I wanted.

Surprisingly, intel-based systems are slightly cheaper than amd-based. So the world has changed.

@the_dot_matrix Hm, I guess I could try reinstalling with the wired network plugged in. Can't possibly work worse.

The strangest thing is that apparently bluetooth works, and it's the same module.

Go figure.

Found some hints about getting backported wifi drivers, trying that out, even though I'm not expecting much. It's a 7 year old laptop, so I doubt the drivers have appeared in post-24 LTS ubuntu, but who knows.

It's not like I have anything better to do.

Got wired networking working. The ethernet port had never been used, and it was really tight. Never seen that before. Anyway, wifi is a bust, apparently there are no linux drivers for the particular wifi module. I think it's a separate part so if I was desperate enough, I could buy a more compatible module, but.. sigh. Maybe I'll get a cheap USB wifi dongle or something.

laptop 2 update: disabling some intel drive thingy in bios let linux find the system drive. Installing now. Still doesn't see wifi hardware. Doesn't recognize wired network either. I hope there's something in bios about that, or that it find the wired network after reboot.

I still think this is the best Birthday Massacre song.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ds73xDoP780

Context for the poll

Smell of horse poop