I think you’re massively downplaying how much of a hit this will be.

Let’s say you make $100k/year. Think about the lifestyle it allows. You’ve just been informed that it’s now going part time, and you’ll only be making $15k/year. How far does that get you?

Now, you’re expecting someone else to pay for that advertising spot, so it won’t be that bad. But who is even eligible? Microsoft’s Bing is the obvious answer, and probably DDG. The rest of the default search engines aren’t even general web searches.

Do you really think that either of them are going to pay any significant amount to be the default? Especially when most people are going to change it back to Google anyway, since these are automatically people willing to change to a different browser?

Sure, they might be willing to pay something. But it won’t be anything close to what they had before.

That might have been a reference to a very old Slashdot meme, ca. 2002. Sometimes those words were combined; there was a movie with the words + “from outer space”; and there was a trolling group GNAA.

Now, is that what they were going for? Only you can answer that. It’s a pretty deep cut into a pretty nerdy corner of the Internet.

You are comparing it to a hash, following some extra rules on what the data could be. You have exactly the length of hash before you can reliably count on duplicates (and collisions happen much sooner). In torrent v1, this is SHA-1, which has a 160-bit (or 20 byte) hash. Which means for every single additional random bit, you have doubled the number of possible matches.

If your torrent has an uncommonly small chunk size of 256KiB, that’s 261,144 bytes. Minus the 20 from above, and you have a likely 256^261124 chunks that match your hash. That’s a number so large that Google calls it infinity. It would take you forever just to generate these chunks by brute force, since each would need to be created, then hashed, then the results stored somewhere. Many years ago, I remember someone doing this on CRC32 (32 bits/4 bytes) and 6 byte files. It took all night, and produced dozens of hash-matching files. You’re talking many orders of magnitude bigger.

But then what? You’d still need to apply the other rules on what the data could be. Rules that are probably more CPU-intensive than the hash algorithm.

The one trick that AI might be able to use to save the day is that it may contain in its corpus the original file. In effect, that would make the AI an unlikely seeder.

All of the consumer lines are pretty bad these days. Acer has a reputation for being unreliable (backed by some data from SquareTrade ~10 years ago). HP is just as bad, in mostly the same ways, but has avoided the reputation.

Reliable laptops are the enterprise lines - Dell Latitude/Precision, HP Elite Book, and Lenovo Thinkpad. But they are significantly more expensive when buying new.

Shrinkflation is smaller quantities and/or higher prices. This is actually tracked in a variety of places.

Changing to a cheaper recipe/supplier is very hard to put metrics on, and isn’t tracked anywhere that I know of

How close are these surrounding towns? What’s the population, particularly for the demographics you would appeal to?

Often, it’s not worthwhile to bring your favorite culture to your home. Just go to the culture where it already exists. Often, these quiet, boring places are populated by people that WANT to live in a place that’s quiet and boring. It doesn’t make much sense for anyone to move there if they don’t.

To extend this, consider your own safety throughout. Unless the police arrest them and they remain in custody, you have a potential serious threat. Avoid situations where you/others could be vulnerable, such as alone or at night. You may want to setup visible surveillance cameras, alter your routines, etc.

The police will be there after anything happens, but that may be too late for you.

“Hackers” (rather, malicious actors) rarely look to take down IT resources as their goal. Instead, they want to access it for their own purposes. The closest example would be ransomware, where it gets taken down as part of the threat/punishment. But if the victim pays, their resources must be restored.

Plus, I would be surprised if Crowd Strike doesn’t have any protections on its own files. I also expect there will be additional verification checks (hash/etc) on their updates going forward.

Most people are on multiple platforms. Find them now, while you still can. Save whatever contact info you can for them. You don’t know when you’ll need it, nor why.

Oh I agree about that part. I even agree in the schadenfreude about his (direct) suffering, and he absolutely deserves it (and more).

Please be better than this. It’s the mirrored version of ‘owning the libs’, and it hurts us all in the end.

That said, I am very pleased that justice has been served. We need to hold more politicians accountable, both at the polls and in the courts.

In the US, completely unpaid internships are rare. Most are paid, but fairly poorly. There are a few major reasons for this:

You have to meet a lot of requirements for unpaid to be legal, and it all has to be documented.

Internships are a “farm” program- many interns are offered and accept a full time position afterwards. If they were unpaid, they are unlikely to accept.

Minimum wage is an absolute joke everywhere in the country. Why bother fighting it when you can pay as little as $7.25/hour? Even doubling or tripling that makes it appealing to poor college students and the farm program, and won’t cost much.

(Your example would be illegal in the US, and possibly even enforced)

My point was, where do you draw the line? Any answer is equally arbitrary. MS drew it at 8th Gen Intel Core. Would 6th Gen have been the right answer? 3rd? Core 2 Duo? All of them can run Win 10 just fine, and can (at least technically, and for today) run Win11.

I’m only addressing that last line, but really think it through. Should you really expect, or even want, an OS that runs on a 386? It wasn’t that long ago that most Linux distros could. But they all moved away from it because that limited performance on anything more modern.

The newer instruction sets are created for a reason, and that reason is typically higher performance. If the OS (or any code, really) can use them, it will work better. But if you can’t or don’t, the code will be more compatible.

There also isn’t “any” computer; it’s simply not a thing. The question becomes how old (more technically, what minimum specs) do you want to support, and performance you want to be limited by?

While I agree that Microsoft has leaned too heavily into newer hardware as an expectation, there’s definitely a line to be drawn.

It’s possible in the US, but generally not at common gas stations. You have to find marine or airport gas stations. The only other place I’ve ever seen it is a place called Sheetz.

Your description isn’t very clear on what exactly you have, or what you need.

It sounds like you have wired NICs in both server and laptop, which will be physically close to each other, but your only connection to the Internet will be WiFi that you don’t control. How accurate is that?

Next question is how do you want them to connect to each other? You can do a P2P wired connection, which is more complicated but fully isolates your traffic. It also means that, unless each device has a separate connection and an appropriate routing config, it won’t be online to the Internet (unless you set up some form of connection sharing). You can also connect them to a router that has no Internet. Simpler than the above, but the same limitations.

You could easily and cheaply get a USB Wi-Fi NIC. The major downside is that all traffic will be going across the wireless connection, both ways. This makes it slow and unreliable.

You can also connect them to a modified router configured as a wireless bridge. DD-WRT and others can be configured in a different way than usual. The wireless router will provide wired LAN ports to your local network, but then use the wireless connection to connect to an upstream WiFi.

None of this has anything to do with Linux, BTW. Once you choose a path, you should be able to implement it in whatever OS (or multiple OSes) you would like. None of it is new or special. You might get more options if you post in the Homelab, Data Hoarder, or Self Hosted communities.

To anyone else reading this, there’s something you should know:

Memory errors don’t always mean the memory itself (hardware RAM stick) is bad. It can also be a power issue (bad PSU, incorrect voltage set in the UEFI), compatibility, defective memory controller (CPU or motherboard), and more.

OP almost certainly has a bad stick, but it’s worthwhile for anyone building a PC to run a slew of stress tests and diagnostics before using it for anything that matters.

“Thigh gap” doesn’t typically happen at a healthy weight. That’s usually a sign of being underweight.

Do people still talk about thigh gaps? I know there’s still an unhealthy obsession with being underweight, but I thought that went out of style with Kony 2012.

Conversely, ask any stripper, and they’ll tell you it’s the girls with more common body types that get the most tips. The explanation is usually that these girls look more attainable.

It actually sounds like you’re agreeing with me- they cancel the show to avoid paying out. The contracts are written in a way that it can be used to screw them.

Season 6 is more common, since that’s when contracts typically come up for renegotiation. Friends famously almost ended because the actors demanded what they were worth. The studios launched a smear campaign by “leaking” how overpaid the actors were.

TV shows do have a fundamental difference from most movies in that it’s an ongoing operation. With movies, nearly everything has to be completed before release. There is more of an element of risk, since you don’t know how popular it will actually be. Once it’s been released, or you’re 6 seasons into a show, that’s pretty well known. Everyone wants their cut, and they know exactly the pie is.