If you have old parts, use those, it’ll probably overkill. Most server stuff isn’t very resource intensive, so a little goes a long way.

If you’re buying something new, I’d recommend something small, like a Mini PC or an N100 rig. 16GB RAM is probably enough, and anything with more than 4 cores is probably overkill. A dedicated GPU is unnecessary, something with a modern-ish iGPU will be plenty to transcode video.

Hmm, openSUSE Tumbleweed has been the best OS I’ve ever used, and it’s still available. Windows 7 was marginally better than Vista because they fixed the broken stuff, but it still had all the problems of a Windows OS.

They’re the same browser though. They use the same rendering engine, same JavaScript engine, etc. There are more similarities than differences.

And here I am, seeing both as equivalent. I honestly don’t see a meaningful difference between Edge and Chrome…

I don’t think that’s necessarily true. If the market is sufficiently free, you only need a handful of experts to look past the BS and inform the public. In the past, we called those people journalists, and they would hold bad actors to task.

The issue seems to be that government has given in to moneyed interests and allowed them to shut down critics. If we had actual consequences, like jail time or confiscation of personal wealth for illegal behaviour, I think it would self-correct.

When most people refer to capitalism, they mean free market or laissez-faire capitalism. Many (most?) of the issues you mentioned require government to step in to occur. For example:

• trusts - government structure to protect wealth
• oligopoly - failure of government to prevent collusion (price fixing and whatnot are expressly anti-competitive)
• regulatory capture - government must be complicit since regulations are typically a government thing

I think government has a place in protecting the free market, but it needs to be restrained so it doesn’t get manipulated into destroying the free market. For example, a regulation could protect consumers, but it could also raise the barrier to entry and prevent competition from correcting the underlying problem.

A lot of the issues stem from corporate welfare, where wealthy people are able to manipulate corporate structures to build their own wealth and protect themselves from liability. I think it’s largely those liability protections that encourage anti-competitive behavior. End the protections and courts can meaningfully punish corporations when they break the law.

Idk, their population is pretty brain rotted…

That, and doing all they can to eliminate romance in their population. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had the highest incel rate per capita in the world.

A few dozen people don’t make a product viable, tens or hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people do.

It’s a natural byproduct though. Assuming a free enough market, you should have several people all supplying the same good. Some will compete on price, some on quality, and some on overall service.

The problems happen when competition evaporates, either from regulations raising the barrier to entry, acquisitions, or resource scarcity. Capitalism assumes people are greedy and pits them against each other to provide better services to everyone. A lack of competition isn’t “capitalism functioning as intended,” but instead the opposite, it means something is preventing capitalism from working as intended.

Well, it does cost less and less every year. I bought two 8TB drives for $300 each or so, and today a 24TB drive is about that much.

And they do have more Seagate failures than other brands, but that’s because they have more Seagates than other brands. Seagate is generally pretty good value for the money.

Honestly, when I first got into forums, I thought they were literally talking about Linux distros, because at the time, that’s literally all I was seeding since that’s what I was into.

bstix’s mom, has got it going on.

I bought 8TB for something like $300. 36TB seems quite attractive.

And those candidates are usually trash, especially in a company like mine where there are maybe a few dozen software roles and many hundreds of other roles. They just don’t know how to recruit devs, they usually recruit marketing or domain specific people.

I know what a Smith’s chart is, but I never needed to actually use one. I’m a software guy who knows some random details about RF, and that sometimes helps with random things like identifying issues with WiFi or whatever.

I see no problem in people buying what they want over what they need.

Neither do I, I just don’t like it when people excuse their choices by using terms like “need.” People make a lot of silly choices because they claim to “need” something.

I just want people to be more honest with themselves and others about needs vs wants. If we classify things properly, I think people will naturally be more efficient with their resources and we’d have less consumer debt and whatnot.

I guess my point is that it’s harder to suss out the actually competent people if they’re able to build a good portfolio using tools. AI makes this harder, since they can sound more competent than they are, and them a few months down the line we need to discuss them leaving the org.

Exactly! If you know enough foundational principles, you can quickly rule things out and develop ways to narrow down what remains. If you rely too much on diagnostic tools, you’ll miss out when the tools fail to catch something odd.

I’m a software engineer and we had a problem where our corporate laptop wouldn’t allow us to install our dev tools (needed to debug a windows specific integration and we dev on macos). Instead of waiting a week for IT to come fix it, I realized we just needed it to look like a service was running locally, and we had ssh through the git bash shell, so I set up an SSH tunnel between the windows system and the dev machine and they were able to keep working while waiting for IT to get time to help us. We rarely use SSH at work, but I understand enough about how networks and sockets work so I was able to quickly help them solve the problem.

You don’t get that type of intuition if you don’t understand how the underlying tech works, and that’s true regardless of your field.