Oh yeah, the bit where SSDs move sectors around for wear evening is important. Because of that, it’s possible to completely fill up an SSD after deleting files and still have those files recoverable from the flash chips themselves. Without that secure erase, as I understand it, if a sector gets marked “bad”, whatever data is there might stay there forever (or at least as long as the cells hold a charge).

So there’s no benefit to writing multiple passes over deleted data on SSDs as far as the flash is concerned, but multiple passes might make it more likely for the controler to actually direct those extra writes to a sector actually storing the data (though the odds might be low unless you’re overwriting all free space, though even that depends on how much space is free vs how many “spare” sectors there are, and even then it might be impossible to get it to write to a sector marked “bad”).

Is that still the case with SSDs? I understood it to be a property of magnetic disks, and only possible because the drives can be disassembled and then read with a more sensitive reading head. I can’t think of a way to do that with flash circuitry unless it’s already designed to do that.

Yeah, I’ve got a logitech mouse but didn’t want logitech’s software on my machine, so I just used the mouse by plugging it in. Which worked, but I had no way of knowing the battery level until the mouse itself started blinking low power.

When I installed fedora, I was confused a bit because it had a system tray icon saying the battery was charging. I was thinking it thought it was a laptop until I realize it had just picked up the battery information from my mouse. A feature I had written off under windows just worked without me even considering it or needing to install software that was partly about using my hardware and partially about advertising more ways to get my money.

Considering all of the comments saying that a big part of this is people not wanting to buy new computers and choosing linux because it will run on their old machine, I’d like to add insult to injury and say I built a new PC before Oct and windows was never even a consideration.

And despite it being my first Linux install I planned to play games on, everything went smoothly and I’d even say the “setting up the PC to my preference instead of the defaults” step was better because there wasn’t a “figure out how to disable the shit ms really wants you to run for them” substep, or a “figure out what new shit ms added that I’ll want to disable” discovery mode that, with win 10, lasted most of the time I was using it and included “figure out if a recent update reset settings to annoying defaults”.

I bet this is why people are so vocal about switching to linux whenever there’s another complaint about ms. It went way better than expected, like I was about to do something that would cause ongoing pain and frustration to get away from something even worse, but there’s been nothing at all that has made me miss windows.

Is that site just an ads disguised as articles site now? Like it’s not just news about the sale, it’s actively trying to sell win 11 (and not doing a great job with its list of “I thought it already did that”, “underwhelming feature”, “no, I still don’t fucking want onedrive; I no longer trust you with my own files on my computer, let alone saving everything on yours”.)

Ah too late lol, ended up grabbing a 990 pro 2tb for $200 CAD. Looking around online, there seems to be a bunch of retailers at that price, though mostly the brick and mortar ones. I kinda thought they might be slower to react to quickly moving prices than the more specialist places (I got it from Staples).

In the readme: if you want this program to be usable, press the turbo button until the turbo light is OFF.

I gave him a dollar so he’d go away.

On the other hand, we’re currently in the midst of what many people already consider to be an AI bubble, so investing in new DRAM factories might be considered too risky, since the bubble might have popped before it even gets production going.

I’m glad I opted to start at 64GB ram on the PC I built about a year ago. Compared to the other parts like CPU and GPU, it felt relatively cheap to bump it up from 32GB.

Wondering if I should pull the trigger on more storage though… Don’t really need it right now but eventually I’ll probably need some.

About once every few weeks, I’ll go visit my local blacksmith and he’ll nail a new pair of pair of shoes right on to my giant toenail. Or maybe he repairs the old ones. I’m not too sure, he doesn’t really tell me much. He just stands in places that make it really hard to kick him, and I only really wanted to do that the first time because I thought he was trying to steal my feet.

To elaborate on the “go for the fit, not the name”, there’s a common belief that shoes need some time to break in before they feel comfortable. This is only true if you get shoes that don’t really fit your foot. There’s more to feet variations than just the length. I learned that the first time I got lucky and one of the few shoes I was trying on in my mad dash to get shoes and go do something else asap fit my foot properly. It immediately made me realize that I need patience when getting shoes and to never buy a shoe that doesn’t feel great right away.

If you’re going for a designer shoe, I bet the odds of it perfectly fitting your foot are low, unless maybe you have the same foot type as Michael Jordan or whichever athlete’s name they are putting on the shoe, assuming that athlete’s foot was even part of the design at all. For all we know, they rip those shoes off as soon as the cameras aren’t watching because it was purely a marketing thing.

Yeah, who the hell associates macs with higher competence? Before the 00s, I associated mac users with stumbling on the worse option but not realizing it, after the 00s, wanting to follow trends and/or overpay for hardware to seem rich. They’ve always been form over function, and simplicity over power, which are things that novice uses look for, not more experienced ones.

Or maybe more experienced ones when most of those experiences went badly and little was learned.

The title comes from the north literally fighting to keep the Union together, not that “the union” means “good guys”. They were good in this case because the reason the south was trying to leave was to keep slavery going.

Given who is in control of the “union” right now, I’m not sure that will be the good side.