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Joined 7 days ago
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Cake day: October 29th, 2026

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  • For a while there, second hand mini desktops like the Lenovo/Optiplex’s could be picked up for about half the price of a new Pi5. Typically had equal RAM, loads of SSD storage and desktop class(ish) CPU perfomance, plus all the other benefits (Secureboot, x86 compatibility so you could run Windows if you wished). Only major thing missing was the GPIO connection.

    But looking now the prices are increasing rapidly as they have been discovered. The cheap ones are typically striped of RAM and storage.



  • That is because to be the most efficient they have to constantly adjust the deadzone temperature. Its not just monitoring but active control. This is based on local air temperature, humidity and stock levels. To be even more efficient they put a thousand fridges online so that a small team can do the work of a much larger local team.

    So the real reason is that to increase profit margins, they consolidated lots of workers behind a few and did this via the internet. A common story the world over.






  • I have softened very VERY slightly on AI code. If it can identify genuine issues than that is fine. It is when folks just trust it blindly and just send 50 commits without understanding a thing or even remotely testing it, that is just crazy. But then on the flip side, yeah all the other issues probably aren’t worth it.

    It is complicated at times but then things like this always are. The most successful evil always has some claim to virtue.

    Alas, occasionally you have to walk with the devil to achieve some good. One just has to weigh up if it is worth it.

    I once asked Stallman about how he used to build and run GNU tools before having the Linux kernel. He was using a proprietary Minix system as a means to get work done until there was a better alternative. I mean running a proprietary system is one thing, burning through the amazon with 100 quintillion tokens is very different.