It's the Christmas season. Everybody loves a two-for-one deal.

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

Yeah, and none of those or even the sub-$400 new laptops are worth buying when $150 5yo business laptops are available.

It's doubtful that Apple will create anything worth buying in the ~$500 market given the ~250GB storage on their $900 macbook air

Yeah they're whining here about this but they throw captchas relentlessly at those of us on standard net configs too. I would say its even more likely to get a robot accusation on desktop than a doublenat mobile session.

Oregon isn't Nigeria. All of the worker creature comforts aren't being flown in at great expense because local infrastructure and services are shit. Houses and restaurants are being built. Stores are being built. That means employing the locals for the most part, raising their wages and improving their infrastructure.

There are downsides to big companies coming into small towns. I live in one, and the increased traffic and general hassle of more people annoys the fuck out of me. But our standard of living has most definitely gone up, not down.

This is heavily dependent upon what the major is. Huge numbers of college grads get degrees that do them absolutely no good in the workplace. There are legions of grads working in jobs that don't require college.

A chemical engineering major is going to make so much bank that he can pay off his loans in a very short time and have a high amount of disposable income. The Sociology grad working a telemarketer job, not so much. He's sitting at a table with co-workers that in many cases didn't even graduate high school.

That's amazing, frankly.

I wrote a simple bash script the other day to handle a video encoding queue, with this line:

if [[ $(date +%s -r "$file") -lt $(date +%s --date="1 min ago") ]]

It's running on Debian 12 but to imagine that if it were running on Ubuntu it would have failed?

Wild that this wasn't caught as soon as the dud utility shipped in a distro. I would have expected somebody's scripts to have failed, they ran it under bash -x and thought, "Oh, boy," then off to file a bug.

I like the idea of using Rust and the idea of Software Engineering. But together.

We heard a while back about Google making a nondestructive book scanner that used puffs of air to turn pages and multiple cameras with stitching algorithms.

Is there a home version that people can recommend, product or build plans?

I have at least a hundred out-of-print books, some on taboo subjects, that I'd love to be able to scan and lend out privately.

Frankly this would be a good item to lend around; I'd only need one for a few days a year.

To be fair there's a common way to compile Lua to JVM bytecode so it's likely just a Java front-end, not using the basic interpreter.

Back in the day there was a craze to port Lua, Ruby, Perl, Groovy(!), to run as Java front-ends. Not many got put into production outside of Lua.

However the real point here is that it's now "tell me why I shouldn't use Rust" time.

Moving ABI might be a reasonable objection for a small team but Cloudflare has over a hundred engineers on this so it's not a problem.

They get speed and memory safety in exchange for learning "The Rust Way". Seems like a good engineering tradeoff.

IMO Rust is still for the top 20% of engineers so Java's "solid middle" is still quite safe.

I thought that until I learned that they need weekly maintenance tending.

Somebody would need to build an automated battery watering system for homeowners who go away for a long vacation and forget to water their houseplants.

At some point it's too Rube Goldberg to be usable. Now, a few square miles of grid-scale ... somebody could make a business case where land is cheap and sun and water are plentiful.

An actual game changer (literally) would be native Steam and GOG clients for Linux and BSD. Windows would still be, percentage-wise, the king of desktop gaming, but you'd see a mighty river of players move over to Unix systems if those two things came to fruition.

You can still get them, they just tend to be expensive because they're "commercial grade" by default if it's a Samsung. Sceptre still makes low end affordable non-smart TV's for a pretty good price. A 50' is under $250 at Wal Mart. We have a Sceptre 55' in our living room. All smart stuff is through HDMI Roku sticks. The sound on Sceptres tend to suck, but we picked up a nice Sony sound bar for under $99, and it's slim enough to fit under it. So, tax and all, you're still getting everything you want for under $400.

Do I have to put out a hit on a whistleblower who exposes my illegal business scheme?

if your PC meets the Windows 11 Hardware Spec.