Snakecharmed

Kickstarter-style vaporware product announcements are so 2015.

It appears that the RX 9070 XT is sold out at the two Micro Centers closest to me, with limited stock remaining of the RX 9070. They supposedly had hundreds in stock on launch, but I didn't bother to check yesterday since I wasn't planning on getting one. The 3080 Ti lives on due to me making no time to play games in the last two years. Even when I do get back into it, I've got a backlog of older games to go through that pose no challenge to the 3080 Ti at 4K. It's a lot less stressful not being on the cutting edge because it really sucks out there right now if you are.

Yes, Waterfox defaults to the same user agent string as the Firefox extended service release now.

There are several more privacy-conscious forks of Firefox that I trust more than main line Firefox since probably over a decade ago when whichever one of Mozilla's earlier privacy controversies came to light. Floorp - Most customizable UI LibreWolf - Most privacy conscious, rendering may break on some websites out-of-the-box because all privacy-focused settings are enabled by default Waterfox - My daily driver for over 7 years now, best balance of privacy and customization of the two above, has Widevine support

The fiber plans I've seen are typically symmetrical. There isn't really a good reason for them not to be. Have they published pricing in your area yet? AT&T recently finished laying fiber in my area. It's $65/month for 500 Mbps symmetrical and I think $85 for 1 Gbps. I'm not on it because I want my neighbors to be the guinea pigs, plus the installation of the fiber ONT would not be completely straightforward and clean because my network closet is on the second floor, although one wall of the closet is an exterior-facing one. Alternatively, I could have the ONT enter my network via my downstairs MoCA, but that will add a small amount of latency to the rest of the network. There are ways to make a second floor install clean, but I have no expectation that their techs would spend the time doing a bespoke installation. I also don't like AT&T, although it's hard to say whether I dislike them more than Comcast. Probably not at this point because at least AT&T isn't playing a bunch of BS games with their pricing. I had to figure out what was going on with my 1 Gbps Xfinity plan late last year because the price went from $65/month to $88. Apparently, they stripped away more of the auto-pay discount with credit card (and I refuse to switch to debit or ACH when dealing with them) and I must have forgot that I'm on a two-year contract with a reduced second-year discount compared to the first. Mid-split is available in my area which would give 100 Mbps upload on the 1 Gbps plan instead of 20, but I would have to buy a supported modem because they are stubbornly dragging their asses on certifying the Arris S33 for mid-split, if they ever do at all.

Siri Is Super Dumb and Getting Dumber DARINGFIREBALL.NET Siri with Apple Intelligence gives confident but embarrasingly wrong answers to sports trivia questions, both famous (Super Bowls) and... [...] It’s just incredible how stupid Siri is about a subject matter of such popularity. If you had guessed that Siri could get half the Super Bowls right, you lost, and it wasn’t even that close. I have a family member who demonstrated this in real-time with Siri giving two conflicting answers to the same question about a card game's rules just minutes apart. The scary thing is that he and his wife think they understand consumer AI and trust it blindly. No wonder the stories he tells are full of fabrications and lies. The article also looks at Google's AI overview search results, which are already infamous for being easily manipulated by trolls. To that end, I leave this gift for you guys to enter into your uBlock Origin custom filters:

Loosely related, I hate how insurance companies nowadays tie an optional tracking device to your auto insurance as a way to pitch savings on your premium. I tried one of those things once and the app that was on my phone was a battery killer. That was the official reason I stopped using it anyway. Either way, never again. The truth is, I'm not okay with being tracked and held hostage to driving in a manner that is more unsafe to my surrounding environment to satisfy the app/tracker's arbitrary definition of safe driving. For me to be a "safe" driver and get the maximum benefit, I would have to always drive at or below the speed limit, accelerate like a centenarian (assuming one would still have the fine motor skills to smoothly regulate the pressure applied through their right leg), and overwhelmingly rely on engine braking. Nobody with any street sense drives like that. If you drive like that, you will get run off the road by other drivers. They claimed my insurance wouldn't ever go up as a result of using the tracker, but I don't believe it, and either way, that data is getting stored on someone else's computer and probably shared with other insurance companies as well. I'm not super adamant about protecting every single piece of my data. It isn't always convenient, and I accept that giving up some of it will happen in modern society, but the insurance tracker was where I decided to draw the line as far as sacrificing my liberty for a monetary benefit. That garbage can only be used against me and screw me when I switch insurance companies, and it isn't worth $100 per 6 months. By extension, I refuse to own a newer car where such data is being collected without my enthusiastic consent. That hasn't made the driving experience better for anyone. There is no benefit to a purchasing consumer for their car to phone home to the manufacturer. This wasn't needed for a century of driving and it isn't needed now. Software-as-a-service was Pandora's box to individual liberties, and who benefits from that? Not you and not other people. It's corporations whose primary objective is to separate you from your money in the most insidious ways possible.

Similar tasks, different tools, related principles. I ended up getting the Project Farm recommended "knockoff" Milwaukee handheld vacuum which replaced an ancient Black & Decker Dustbuster with a weak battery that I hadn't used in years. It's also a much more portable alternative to my Miele canister vac, which is a much more portable alternative to my Kirby upright vac. Anyway, the handheld vac has taken on everything that was too cumbersome for the Miele, from my car interiors, to my furniture, to chunks of drywall and wood dust from doing some electrical work. I also used it to vacuum dust from my case when upgrading the RAM and CPU a couple of weeks ago. I rarely have a need for dusting with compressed air. The last time I needed it was when I was selling off my old GTX 1080 Ti and needed to reach the inner fins of the heatsink. For lighting up lump charcoal, I use a 1500W, 1150°F hot air gun and it works great. 45 seconds of direct heat gets them going without needing a chimney starter. I first tried the wood shaving and wax fire starter pellets, but those get too hot too fast. I would have tried a chimney starter next, but I was trying to not buy a single-purpose tool.

They did fix it shortly after those issues were making the rounds since that was where the first Asus warranty-related firestorm came from because they used boilerplate warranty language for flashing a beta BIOS. I think the fix may have been rolled into AGESA so no board manufacturers should be allowing excessive SoC voltages anymore with their latest BIOSes. Before all of this, my Auto SoC voltage was at something like 1.35. With the earliest BIOS updates containing the fix, Asus only got it down to 1.3 on the Auto setting with EXPO/XMP profiles enabled, which is still high but within AMD's spec. I manually tested it at different voltages between 1.15 to 1.23, and eventually settled on 1.19. With the latest BIOS and my new 1.35V XMP 96 GB kit, I left it on Auto which resolves to 1.28.

What's the current state of things, are we back or are we just waiting for expired/canceled services to be turned off at the end of their billing cycle? There seems to be enough community support to keep things running as is if nothing else, but I think a lot of us are looking for a sign that the lights will stay on first. Depending on what the plan is going forward regarding traffic and storage needs, dedicated hosting is most likely overkill, so that largest expense of $133/month could be mid to low double digits if you pick a reputable host for shared servers that isn't a fly-by-night operation. I was the victim of a fly-by-night host 20 years ago and I have plenty of hosting stories to tell. If needed, I can offer some advice and suggestions as well regarding some aspects of hosting a site and forum since I've been doing it for many years now (currently at a minimal level of effort), but I wouldn't seek to be involved in the administration or maintenance of EHW myself.

Well, who knows if we'll still be here by the time this is scheduled to be delivered. I also proudly came up with lyrics to celebrate my purchase. 96 gigs of RAM in the board 96 gigs of RAM Windows goes, “Gimme those” 95 gigs of RAM in the board

Interesting, I didn't even know about that CPU's existence, and now I'm sad that I missed the deal because a 7950X is exactly what I had in mind. My mind wasn't on PC components at all over Black Friday, but now I'm beginning to pivot back because of speculation about incoming tariffs. Anyone else foresee a spending spree for themselves over the holidays? 7950X and 96 GB DDR5-6000+ is what I'm currently planning.

Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger :: Intel Corporation (INTC) WWW.INTC.COM "Retired" Can't say I'm surprised. He talked a bigger game than what he could deliver (which feels like part of the job description for working at Intel nowadays), and he presided over some major blunders recently in both product and corporate, but Intel still remains lost without a clear direction. As for the immediate short term, interim co-CEOs with backgrounds in finance and marketing. Yeah, that will go over well.

So more mediocre-at-best parts will be flooding the market then. NZXT's reputation has taken a hit for some time now in the case market (in part because of how they handled the fire issue), and Corsair quality seemingly has taken a dip with their increasingly disappointing portfolio of cases, cooling solutions, and sloppy/overpriced/underperforming custom-built Origin PC systems. All I have from Corsair in my current build is their older 2018 version RM850x PSU which has a quieter fan than the newer version. Hardware-as-a-service is the worst consumer idea to come along since—and the obvious evolution of—Aaron's and Rent-A-Center in the retail world. I'm glad NZXT is getting called out for this garbage, as if car manufacturers locking mechanical features behind a subscription paywall wasn't bad enough on one end of the absurdity spectrum, and insane payday loan interest rates on the other.

Well then, it looks like by extension most of my criticism for FC1 would have been intended for Crytek, and what still holds are the gameplay experience quirks that knock down good-to-great visual design and generally good writing down a peg with mediocre mechanics and execution. By all standards, AC1 wasn't a bad game; I've played, stuck with, and regretted playing far worse. The problem was that I picked up MGS4 and then Red Dead Redemption before I had a chance to finish it, and after all that, diving into haystacks for the umpteenth time wasn't going to get me back into the game. I guess the series got better with subsequent games, but if you fail to nail it on the first attempt, retaining a player base becomes a far more difficult endeavor. I haven't played anything made by Ubisoft in a long time. What I don't find so easy to dismiss from afar are their anti-consumer business practices that have generated significant controversy in recent years, though I have similar if not stronger criticisms for ATVI—namely Blizzard, leader of my most hated game developers list—for the crap they actually do (or don't do) in their games.