duffyjp

I lived in rural Japan for two years, and there were a number of akiya in my town and this was 20 years ago. I wasn't aware property taxes are higher on vacant lots but that explains things. The akiya I saw were 100% beyond repair, they looked like something out of a dystopian movie.

I don't know the motive behind that tax law, but if they reversed it I bet a lot of those eyesores would be torn down and replaced with a little much needed green space. In my wife's neighborhood in suburban Tokyo there were several lots used as mini farms or fruit tree orchards. An infinitely better use of the space IMO.

You're giving me ideas-- My oldest is nine and that's probably around the age when I first got my own computer (a 286) and dove into QBasic. There's no way he'd choose to spend time in BASIC unless it was his only option. I have an ancient Thinkpad gathering dust, maybe I'll install DOS 6.22 on that sucker and have it boot straight into QBasic from autoexec.bat.

At bedtime we're a "you don't have to sleep, but you have to be quiet" household so if he had it in his room it might see some use.

In elementary school my uncle gave me his old LASER 286S. It was too old for all the games my friends played so I mostly just farted around in QBasic all day.

I really wish I still had that system and all my BASIC scripts but those are long gone.

I went to UW Madison and now work there and know someone who did a rotation at IceCube (doing tech support). It would be a really neat life experience but Wisconsin is already too cold for my taste.

What they do it totally out of my field, but I love hearing about it. It's a big source of pride in the university.

We switched from MySQL at work probably ~5 years ago. Half following the hype, and half because we had a couple instances of DB corruption on MySQL and weren't ever able to determine the cause.

Postgres has been great, and it's free, so we roll it for almost everything now. I say almost everything because sometimes SQLite is a better fit-- when a DB is only a few MB on an internal app etc.

That was a fun read. I fired up a Valheim server for my kids (and me, let's be honest) and it censored part of the word "Basement" in my server name. :)

False memories are incredibly easy to induce in kids, but the opposite is also true. I've found with my kids if I periodically and repeatedly ask about events that occured before they could even talk it cements those memories more completely than you'd think. They'll bring up aspects of the event that I didn't lead them into, sometimes things I myself had all but forgotten.

It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that given the perfect storm of reinforcement that a person could remember certain events from what would normally fall into the infantile amnesia period.

You mean you didn't want 400 info windows that have to be closed individually?

I've been seeing a lot of buzz around the BYD Seagull. I'm doubtful Chinese cars will be allowed in the US market at all, since a $11,500 EV with a 200+ mile range would destroy domestic sales.

If Tesla ever actually releases their long rumored Model 1 with it a sub $20,000 sticker price that would sell like crazy. Car prices are insane and not everybody wants or can afford a $40,000 car to commute to work and back.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izvdO-zdlKg

Is it a 2012-2016 model? Those have the PowerShift transmission (known as the PowerShit on forums) that had a class action settlement, though I think it's too late to cash in on that.

I think my chair does this, but only when I'm not sitting in it. Maybe my body absorbs the ESD? If I'm doing anything nearby and bump the chair there's a good chance my monitor will lose signal for a second. It happens with both HDMI and Displayport with a number of different GPUs and different computers. The USB-C connection has never had a problem.

I'm in an older home with questionable wiring which I'm sure is also a factor.

I'd replace the chair but it's so dang comfy.

Ours was from Google Fi. They had a promotion where you could buy the Moto for $50 on the condition of using it with them for 90 days. So we did and then she just popped her SIM back in her Pixel and I took the Moto.

It has an unremovable Google Fi app, but it doesn't interfere with anything. I have it on a cheapo Verizon Red Pocket SIM which works great.

I use both an iPhone and a Motorola G Power 2020. My Moto came with absolutely zero bloat. It’s annoying they’ve tapped into that revenue stream but as long as it’s uninstallable I wouldn’t get too upset. The first thing I do on any phone is uninstall everything I don’t need. Even the iPhone had a bunch of Apple apps I have no use for.

I unfortunately have the exact kit of ram you mentioned to avoid, it came with the Microcenter bundle.

I live ~2.5 hours from Microcenter, so I took a gamble-- reviews were very mixed but the price was insane. If I had bought this setup from my local BestBuy or online, I'd have returned it.

What's your plan if you can get that 256GB RAM config? Run some full-fat LLM's on your iGPU?

I built a 7700X system as an upgrade to my previous i9-9900K system. Performance and efficiency wise it's fantastic, but I've had TONS of problems. Memory unable to run at its rated speed, GPU not initializing at boot, glacially slow boot times even with MCR enabled, janky BIOS releases...

My old-old system is a Haswell Xeon E3 in a Dell and that sucker can boot from power button to the Windows 11 login screen before the monitor even wakes up on the Ryzen.

I really, really hope Intel can release something competitive with AMD in the efficiency space. I feel guilty using more electricity than absolutely necessary, but I also don't want to spend my evenings troubleshooting.

Our kitchen countertops are MDF covered in some sort of laminate. The laminate is great, but the MDF is swelling over our dishwasher and looks hideous. I'd be careful near moisture even if it's covered.

We were able to get a 3% commission when we bought our house ~10 years ago since the listing agent and our realtor were with the same firm. They were doing us a favor for sure and it was at a time when the market wasn't completely crazy as it is now so making the sale actually mattered.

A 6% commission today is like adding $30,000 to the price of a modest house (in my area anyway) which is bonkers. Time for a shake up.

> Standard of 100Mbps down and 20Mbps up

Still only 20 up? Moving from 300/10 on cable to 300/300 on fiber has been huge. You can’t realistically use offsite backup on 10 or 20mbps up. Uploading a YouTube video can take an hour. I once sent a dataset to a coworker and it was embarrassing when they’re receiving at 10mbps. Being a tech worker with a stone-age connection…

Oof, $80 is encroaching on Aliexpress N100 Mini PCs and used "Tiny/Mini/Micro" territory.

I have the original and updated Pi Zero W-- unbelievable bargains at ~$15 but if I needed any horsepower I think I'd rather have an x86_64 so I can run whatever.

Too risky for my taste! What I ended up doing is lowering the TDP in the BIOS from it's default 105 to 85 watts and now temps are great. I have a 7700X.

Before doing that I tried lowering the max temp instead but I think 100+ watts is just too much for the cooler I have and I couldn't tolerate the noise. I'm sure I've lost some performance but I can't tell the difference.

Off topic, but other than the goofy green touchpad I gotta say I love the aesthetics. I'd totally rock a transparent laptop.

Ryzen 7000 series all have a TjMax of 95C. I was quite surprised to observe this getting one recently. The motherboard's fan controller seemed unconcerned until the chip hit 100 and even then didn't throttle the CPU, it just cranked the hell out of the fan.

I guess if they've determined it's not detrimental it's fine, but on a MacBook Air with no fan, I can't imagine you've left much performance on the table by heat-soaking those extra ~20 degrees. The way these chips heat up that's gotta be just a few more seconds at full speed.

I don't think I could give a concrete count of how many times I've "bought" that game.

My wife lost her account due to ignoring the migration. Then we end up buying it again, and then again on iOS and then again on Android, and then Bedrock for our oldest kid, and then he wanted Java so we bought that version for him, then our youngest wanted to play... etc etc.

Even web browsers can’t do FTP anymore which is crazy.

Your Lexus is presumably an SUV? A bone stock 2024 Prius gets 57 mpg and has almost 200HP. I'm in a 2013 Prius C that gets nearly 50.

My previous car was a 2000 Lexus ES that got 17 mpg. I basically paid for the Prius' loan with gas savings.

I'm also in the market as 10 years is about the max in Wisconsin before everything goes to hell, and I'll probably get another hybrid. My wife had a PHEV for a while but we didn't save any money on fuel as electricity is expensive here.

Redwood is amazing. My dad has a picnic table with redwood boards he bought in the 1980s which is in basically perfect condition today despite living outside in Wisconsin the entire time.

Madison WI checking in. We get two passes in March then monthly until winter. I checked our city website and the volume of debris was pretty surprising to me:

> In 2023, 6,633.46 tons of debris was swept from the roads and hauled to the Dane County Landfill.

> I successfully turned a 7KB image into a 9MB video!

I'm having flashbacks to owning a Matrox Millenium as a kid. I never did get that 4MB vram upgrade.

https://www.512bit.net/matrox/matrox_millenium.html