I’ve worked too many places where “b” is absolutely the answer. Even small companies that you’ve probably never heard of where management is drinking the koolaid. They usually don’t like being asked why someone would actually pay for whatever bullshit they’re selling. The answer, almost without exception, is because one of their CEO buddies told them it was a good idea.

Windows 7 was peak Windows, at least from a usability standpoint.

I’ve found LLM’s to be pretty decent at writing one-off scripts for boring tasks. “Baby wipe scripts.” Use them to clean up the shit and throw them away.

Large commercial HVAC package units often have an option called an “economizer”. It’s just one or more dampers that allow the unit to exchange inside air with outside air. A typical use case is when the unit gets a call from the thermostat for AC and outside air temp is lower than the room temp.

It’s more for heating and cooling efficiency than air quality. Its also very rare for homes to have this kind of setup due the added cost and the fact that, at least in the US, package units are much rarer in residential installs. Fresh air circulation systems are a custom job which means $$$.

There are. They are just not currently traded on any stock exchange. That doesn’t means you can’t buy them.

I’ve been using Porkbun for years. No complaints.

TIL PhotoBucket is still around.

You can’t explain that!

I have to use Outlook for work. It’s difficult or impossible to find the features that were actually useful in the new Outlook.

I still use old Outlook because at least it actually works.

“Experts say power plants ‘burn coal to convert water into steam.’”

I mean, does anyone really know how these things operate?

If you build a factory someplace, the factory consumes a lot of resources and can be a nuisance. But in return, it provides jobs; at the very minimum. Going beyond that, usually someone in the corporate heirarchy is smart enough to realize that building good will with the neighbors is important and they encourage the employees to give back to the community to that end.

The actual impact may vary but if nothing else, symbolic gestures that say, “we know our presence here has an impact and we want to make sure it’s a positive impact as much as possible.” tend to go a long way in terms of winning support and acceptance from the community.

Data centers consume lots of resources and can be a nuisance. Unlike other operations, they provide very few long term jobs and give basically nothing back to their host community beyond that. They take far more than they give back. If the “geniuses” who run these tech firms spent less money lobbying politicians and instead offered to pay for the college tuition of every student who successfully graduated from the local high school, they would probably get a very different reaction from the public.

Some of the users definitely like to pontificate a bit much and there’s still gaps in reliable clients for some platforms (e.g. Apple TV). That said, Jellyfin, as a service, is solid.

If you willingly gave money to a two-bit con-artist who is widely known for robbing or defrauding nearly everyone he has ever done business with, then you got what you had coming.

“AI” coding tools can offer some value. The problem is that they often generate tech debt with pay day loan level interest rates. What’s made the interest rate so high is that now, not only do you have the actual code base tech debt. You also have a bunch of code that no one understands and the barrier to entry for software engineering has become so high that fewer younger people are actually learning how to be good programmers. Lots of organizations don’t give a shit about their rapidly growing mountain of tech debt today but they’re sure going to at the end of the week when the payment comes due.

What their “leadership” fails to understand is that any idiot can shell out code. I’ve seen lots of terrible programmers generate millions of lines of really shitty code that somehow, by the power of the dark Lord himself, manages to compile. That’s not what a software engineer actually does though. Software engineers design operational systems with software. Writing code is a secondary function of that. There are currently no AI agents that can successfully design a software system with any degree of complexity because LLM’s don’t actually understand anything.

They would have to stop wasting so much money on LLM’s first.

Some interested buyers have gotten more creative, offering to sell their home in exchange for Anthropic shares at a valuation above $800 billion.

No way this could possibly go badly.

Damn. I wish I could waste over a million dollars and have my employer see it as a good thing.

Walmart acquired Vizio with the express purpose of using TV’s to serve ads. In fact, that is exactly what they said they were going to do.

No surprises here.

To a point. I completely revamped the off site backups when I ditched Veeam. Four (out of probably ten) VM’s were able to be backed up off-site successfully in PBS. I think I restored two of those because they were newer than what I had locally. The rest never made it off-site, probably due to the local PBS VM choking on disk write conflicts.

Second Protectli. They are solid little x86 boxes with no moving parts.