Sandy Bridge

Desktop news? Notebook news? Depends on where you access your NAS from. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/clearly-predatory-western-digital-sparks-panic-anger-for-age-shaming-hdds/ So... this seems like a planned obsolescence strategy to me. If they can't make their hard drives poor enough quantity to drive replacements more quickly - if only because they'd fall way too far behind Seagate and Toshiba in Backblaze's statistics if they did - the next best things is telling users, "Your Western Digital hard drive is getting kind of old and might die soon, please buy another one." I checked the only Western Digital drive I have in my desktop, and it's power-on hours is a bit over 75,000, or 8.62 years. It's only just starting to show concerning signs that it might not be long for this world (suspiciously slow write speeds; the SMART stats are still okay). I've got a Toshiba at 7.78 years and a Seagate at 4.09 years, albeit more lightly used than the two older drives, and they seem to be doing fine. Even the spring chicken of the bunch, another Toshiba, is at 2.65 years. So, if these were new-ish Western Digital Red, Red Plus, or Purple drives, all but the youngest would be saying they'd too old, and the youngest would not be far behind. And if it were a Red, then like the Red that I use for external backup, it may have been a SMR drive that had been advertised as if it were a CMR drive. ---- Level of concern? I certainly find it annoying, and as I happen to be in the market to replace my 8.62-year-old Western Digital and perhaps that 7.78-year-old Toshiba, it makes me more likely to buy another brand, especially combined with SMR-gate. The drives will probably still work just fine till 6+ years of power-on time, but it seems scummy to be trying to scare people like that when there are no actual signs that the drive might fail.

It may not be setting any speed records, but I finally got NVME on my desktop and it's a lot faster than SATA: This is just putting my laptop's old SSD in the new PCIe NVME adapter I bought for $15 and running CrystalDiskMark on it. Obviously it ought to be a bit better when it's not 96% full, nothing like a 64 GB swap file on a 512 GB disk lol. Okay, so the random speeds are only about 50% faster than my SATA SSD, and the sequential ones 150-200% faster. MSI definitely saved a few bucks by shipping an entry-level SSD, and it doesn't even max out my ancient desktop's PCIe 2.0 x4 connection (it wasn't any faster in the laptop either, pretty much the same). But even an entry-level NVME is a nice boost, so I'll have to start putting my more performance-sensitive programs on it once I free up a bit more space. Interestingly, when it was 47% full and in the laptop, the write speeds were actually slower. Although I'm also mixing and matching versions of CrytalDiskMark so I may be comparing oranges to tangerines.

After searching for a while, I couldn't find a general, "share your upgrade" thread. Maybe there should be one for notebooks and one for desktops? I've been upgrading both this weekend, taking Weird Al's mantra of, "I upgrade my computer at least twice a day" to heart. Upgrading an Apple? Possible if it's old enough! The first computer to get an upgrade was the most difficult, my 2010 Mac Mini. It had a 320 GB HDD, I'm not even sure it was 7200 RPM, but it was slower than molasses in January. Put in a spare 80 GB SATA SSD that I bought in 2011, and it boots up in about 20% of the time it did previously. Massive improvement. Now the CPU is the main bottleneck, and sadly that isn't upgradeable, but the RAM is still a potential (and much easier) project. But Apple sure doesn't make it easy to upgrade! iFixit estimated 55 minutes, and it was at least that, and I broke a thermal sensor connector when trying to reconnect it (I felt like a giant trying to reconnect those miniature parts), so the fan thinks the hard drive is on fire and spins at its max speed. Thankfully software exists to override that behavior. Non-Apple laptops? A dream by comparison? Next was my newfangled laptop, 13 Philips-head screws and a spudger and you can upgrade storage and RAM to your heart's content, much better than an Apple. I went whole hog with 4 TB of TLC SSD, and 64 GB of RAM, because prices are crazy low right now. The Old Rig Gets NVME Finally, my desktop got the laptop's old 512 GB NVME SSD, plus a PCIe card to connect it, as well as an extra USB 3.0 port caused by swapping out its old PCIe x4 USB add-on card to a PCIe x1 add-on that is a bit slower, but has more ports. I call that a win. Add up the three machines, and I match Weird Al's specs, with 100 GB of RAM (64 + 32 + 4). Took a few decades to do it, and I don't have it all in one machine yet, but this is a milestone I've been looking forward to. ---- So, what have you upgraded recently? I know there must be RAM upgrades and new storage disks and GPU swaps happening all the time. And most of you are probably sensible enough to spread it out a bit.

My knowledge on this is a bit dated, but I believe that the answer is generally yes*. I was looking at the possibilities for this for my Sandy Bridge desktop, which predates native nVME support. My research found that it is still possible to boot from an nVME PCIe card on a Sandy Bridge chipset, but only if the SSD being used has an option ROM that enables proper communication between the system that doesn't know anything about NVME and that SSD. The Samsung 950 Pro being one such SSD (and generally regarded as the most recent). If your Acer is Haswell or newer, I believe it should work out of the box without any hassle. Disclaimer, I haven't tried it on a Haswell or newer desktop as all of my Haswell or newer systems are notebooks. Though as of tonight I can confirm that Sandy Bridge reads any old NVME SSD from a PCE-E adapter with no fancy tricks required, just install it, no driver install needed (with Win8.1, which might be the earliest to not need special drivers? Or maybe 7?), and it shows up in My Computer. It's just the "being able to boot" that needs Haswell or newer. Edit: Saw your other thread and realized your server actually is Sandy Bridge, or the server equivalent anyway. My "probably too dated" knowledge is just the right age. I saw you mentioned your ordered, or were planning to order, some kit in May, I'll be curious to hear how it turned out. The option ROM part is the part that's easy to miss, I know there were other SSDs with them, but other than "earlier Samsungs" I never found a great listing of them, and it's niche enough that it can be difficult to find reliable information. The other way-out-of-left-field option is finding an adapter that has an option ROM component built in. I don't know if those exist for desktops, but a couple people in the ThinkPad community have created ExpressCard NVME adapters that include option ROMs built-in, so they can boot from any NVME SSD of an appropriate physical size. But whether anyone's bothered with creating that for a desktop form factor? I don't know. The level of devotion of ThinkPad fans to their laptop exceeds that of the average computer enthusiast.

Mozilla has announced that Firefox 115 ESR will be the final version for 8.1 (and maybe 7 as well? I don't have 7 so I didn't pay as much attention to that). I can't complain too much, sure it would be nice for it to have been 122 or whatever the next ESR would be, but 115 ESR will get updated until September of 2024. Having used 52 ESR intermittently for several years after it was the last one for XP, it eventually became more obsolete but the last time I ran it, it was still pretty serviceable. 115 ESR will likely be "good enough" for a long time. Though I do hope they don't have illegible text bugs like that one in the final version. I doubt they will, the point of ESR is all the bugs get ironed out, and Mozilla's the best major browser vendor out there for legacy OS support. My Firefox is still on 113, so I can't confirm whether I also see that problem yet. --- I'm definitely using 8.1 much less than I was six months ago, this Win10 laptop has converted me, and a lot of what I've used 8.1 for recently is spreadsheets that I haven't migrated over yet. But I'm still using Vivaldi as much as Firefox on 8.1, and even though its last update for 8.1 was in December, I haven't seen anything not work.

Article: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/jpr-q1-2023-aib-report-jpr At 6.3 million units, GPU sales in Q1 were the lowest in decades. How many decades, I'm not entirely clear on, but more than 2 full decades at any rate. I can't say I'm surprised. Putting aside politically-motivated and thus differing interpretations of macroeconomic conditions, there are a lot of reasons: - Everyone already bought a GPU in 2020 or 2021 and they aren't obsolete yet - Unless you really care about the fanciest graphics, 4K gaming, or VR, the need for more graphics speed is not as great as it was in the '90s and 2000's. - Prices are still high for this time in the GPU lifecycle, if not as outrageous as they had been - AMD and nVIDIA may have Osbourned their midrange and high-volume cards by releasing the next-gen high end, while still dragging their feet on releasing the midrange. On the plus side, Intel had its highest number of sales in decades, at about 250,000 units. Anyone thinking of buying soon? Waiting for the next-gen to finally hit midrange in volume, or a target price to be reached? Or really just not care because what you have is already good enough? I'm in the "what I've got is good enough" category. Back when I thought I'd rebuild my desktop, I was likely not going to refresh my old RX 480 right away, it just wasn't as obsolete as I would expect for its age. Although I would've been more tempted at today's prices than I was by the prices last fall.

I recently discovered Luke Combs' cover of Fast Car on the radio: The 1988 original is really good too: Along with making me thankful I don't have the challenges described in the song, it also makes me want to have a fast car. Edit: And yet, there are still things I'd like to just drive away from...

2x32 GB DDR4-SO-DIMMs, 3200 MHz 2x2 TB TLC NVME SSD 2x2.5 Gbps USB 3.0 A Ethernet adapter PCIe x4 to NVME SSD adapter PCIx x1 to USB 3.0 Hub Yup, it's upgrade time! Going all-in on laptop hardware upgrades with 64 GB/4 TB, transferring its old SSD to ye olde desktop, and adding a direct connection 2.5 Gbps link between them. The prices are too good right now to go halfway. $100 for 64 GB of RAM is crazy low, and so is $200 for 4 TB of TLC. Micro Center is my retail therapy.

For between 4 and 4.5 years, a 15.4" (16:10) laptop was my only computer and gaming machine, no external monitor. 1280x800, although later on I upgraded its screen to 1680x1050, which has comparable DPI to a 17" 1080p laptop. I never had any issues gaming on it. As a laptop, I was sitting closer to its screen than I am to my desktop's monitor that's a bit farther back on my desk. Disclaimer, I was in college and just after college then, so young... although with corrective eyewear, so not perfect vision. Several years later, at 30, I used a medley of that same 15.4" laptop (with the upgraded 1680x1050 screen), a 17" 1920x1200 laptop, and a 15.6" 1080p laptop as my primary systems for 9 months while traveling for business, playing games on them some evenings. There was not an appreciable difference between the screen sizes in practice, sitting at a desk not very far for them. The 1200p laptop had a slight advantage for coding, but while in game that wasn't noticeable. In the college phase, I played strategy but also quite a bit of Call of Duty, Halo, and Trackmania. When I was 30, it was more focused on strategy although also a fast-paced co-op FPS shooter. Plenty of fun in all cases. What I don't have experience with is 4K gaming at native res on a laptop. But for your use case, 99% docked, I see no reason to spend any extra on a built-in greater-than-HD monitor. Avoid any potential scaling issues for that 1% of the time you are playing it on the native screen and stick with FHD. But, yes, I would recommend sticking with a DTR-class (17"+) for your use case as well. A smaller laptop would have advantages if you want to use it on an airplane, or if you have a long walk from the train station to the hotel and want to reduce weight. But if you're traveling by car as I was, I see no real advantage to the 15.6" class. I only have gone with that size recently because it's sometimes a better deal, and the laptops with the specific features I wanted happened to be in that size without a direct 17" equivalent. (Well, and I also use it undocked more like 15% of the time, and it's slightly less gigantic on a coffee shop table, but that isn't a concern in your use case)

Yeah, the W230ST design is the same as what my old Inspiron 1520 design used. Full-height arrow keys, Home/Page Up/Page Down/End right there. I don't know why that isn't much more common than the largely poor keyboards of today. SharpKeys is great for remapping, but my top advice is research the keyboards of laptops you are considering buying and don't buy one with a bad layout. In 2018, I bought a laptop with a GTX 1050 instead of a GTX 1060 at the same price because the GTX 1050 one had a better keyboard layout. You're going to be interacting with the keyboard all the time, it's important to have a key layout that won't drive you crazy. At work, where I have the laptop with the worst keyboard ever (MacBook Pro with a butterfly keyboard), I just take an external bluetooth keyboard to every meeting that I bring the laptop to, and have a Microsoft Natural 4000 at my desk so I never have to use its internal keyboard. Not ideal by any means but "portable keyboard with better keys/layout" is an option as well.

I've been on a Gareth Emery kick recently. My all-time-favorite EDM artist, and one I can listen to over and over without getting tired of his songs. Most recently I've had three of his albums on repeat, but this set has also been prominent lately: Right now though, I'm listening to the latest set from Texoh: The last set isn't my fave, but a lot of the older ones I'm a big fan of. And half a lifetime ago I knew the guy behind Texoh. Of all the people I know who've done something musical, he's the one whose music I like the most. I don't think it'll wind up being a career for him, but he's done live shows with decently large audiences for half a decade so he's had a decent run of it.

Oh man, darts. I have no natural talent. I think the last time I played was in a bar in Philly a few years ago. I was not an asset to my team. Yes, I occasionally did score some points for us, but it might as well have been random chance that led to those points. On the other hand, the most legendary darts player I know is my mother, who once hit a bulls-eye, and then on the very next dart threw it so that the second dart became stuck in the back of the first bulls-eye dart - an exact duplication of the previous bullseye, with enough force to lodge in that dart. Sadly she did not decide to switch life focuses and become a professional darts player after that point, but my father was so astounded that he called her parents down to see the aftermath of that amazing feat. And as that was during the time when my parents were dating but not yet married, if we'd like to make legends one could argue that darts game may have been what convinced my father to marry her. I might not be here today if it were not for darts!

I suppose my last purchase belongs in this thread as much as the "last purchase" thread... went out with some friends tonight and had a couple good wheats, the watermelon wheat beat the hefe, which is unusual, and an excellent stout, the Brew Dog Jet Black Heart. The latter being the one I had tried previously and knew was one of my favorites. It's amazingly smooth, I wish it were easier to find at the stores. Also had a sour, but it didn't match up to the key lime sour at my favorite local place. Which is unfortunately nearly kegged out, but the rumor is the cucumber sour is next on tap and I missed that last year so I'm curious to try it.

A yeah later, still a Dell UltraSharp 2412M. This monitor has been a great value. 11 years, soon to be 11.5, and it just keeps working reliably day after day, with a lot of use. I don't know if I'm more pleased that it's so reliable or disappointed that so little has tempted me as an upgrade. We've got ultrawides at work, Dell I think, and they're nice. But I still spend a lot of time arranging windows on them, and they're actually too wide for my peripheral vision. If a notification comes in on the left or right side, I often don't notice it, which is both good (it doesn't break my focus) and bad (I might miss something relevant). Objectively I think it is still a net improvement over one monitor for productivity, but is it better than a two-monitor setup where Windows+Left/Right moves windows across four half-monitors? I'm not convinced. I rarely use my laptop monitor as a second monitor. One in a while it is useful to have a database up next to an IDE or something like that. But usually a quick alt-tab between two windows is more than adequate. I guess I'm concluding that there are diminishing returns in screen real estate. 27 would be better than 24, but the gains are less than 24 was over 21, or 21 over 17. My home setup has not quite maximized my field of vision, but my work setup has more than done that, so I can see that there is a point of overkill approaching, and I'd rather spend the money on a weekend trip than buying a fancier monitor. (Also the amount of time I spend playing reflex-dependent games is approaching zero, so the benefit of high-refresh-rate options is declining as well. Yeah, my 75 Hz CRT has a better refresh rate than my 60 Hz LCD, and I can notice that in some applications, like racing games. But do I care? A lot less than I might have when I was 15 years younger)

I'm all about the Microsoft Natural Keyboard 4000. Split ergonomic layout (though IIRC not as split as the Kinesis Freestyle, still enough to throw off visitors though), and despite being a membrane keyboard I really like the key feel and travel. The only downside is it's been discontinued for a while, so my source of keyboards is eBay. I currently have two working, one for home, one for the office. I also like the MX Browns, used those for a while at a previous job that had Das Keyboard 4, and I liked that keyboard enough to not mind the fact that it's a traditional layout. For a while I worked at a place with a significant keyboard enthusiasts (build your own keyboard style) among the populace. It's an interesting niche. I never got that into it, but I suppose it's like the typing equivalent of being a car person. Bring in a keyboard you'd build, use it for a short time, come up with some new ideas, have a prototype of a new one the next week. I don't think there's ever a perfect, "this is the one I'm sticking with forever."

So yeah, this is not great. I'm still not entirely sure of the practical impact, assuming that MSI's web site credentials were in fact not stolen. As one commentator elsewhere said, you'd have to be a lunatic to be downloading firmware updates from random third-party sites. (Although I could also see a use case if you have an HP laptop and are trying to get around their WiFi card whitelisting practices) If the hackers had the ability to publish updates that not only were signed by MSI but were available for distribution through official channels, the problem would be much worse. According to a security firm cited by PC Magazine, the list of affected models is at https://github.com/binarly-io/SupplyChainAttacks/blob/main/MSI/MsiImpactedDevices.md . Neither of my MSI laptops is listed as affected, so I'll keep them for now. But even if they were, I'm not sure I'd be super-concerned? It certainly raises general questions about security practices (how'd this get stolen in the first place? Back door wide open? Spear phishing?), but there's a good chance I'm not ever going to upgrade my firmware, and if I do it will be from the official site.

This is exciting. I am not a Rustacean, only having read about half of The Book and unsuccessfully attempted to port one of my old applications to Rust. But my understanding is one of the big benefits of Rust is improved memory safety. In C and C++, it's all too easy to reason incorrectly and not bounds check or double free or something of that sort, resulting in bugs such as buffer overflows that are one of the leading causes of security holes in software in general, including but certainly not limited to Windows. As more of Windows is converted to Rust, its security should improve. Put another way, C and C++ have a bit of a reputation of being "footguns" - they make it easy to shoot yourself in the foot. Even experienced developers may make mistakes, and put a developer who doesn't have a solid understanding of pointers on a C or C++ project, and they are going to make mistakes. When those aren't caught before release, they eventually wind up being covered by Patch Tuesday. The downsides of Rust? One of the main ways it improves memory safety is with its "borrow checker" concept that is unique to Rust (at least among major languages), and tends to take some time to wrap one's head around even as an experienced developer in other languages. An incomplete understanding of the "borrow checker" concept is why my port of an old application to Rust failed; if I'd ported it to C++ I probably would have had security flaws, whereas in Rust I didn't, but it simply didn't work, giving some error about the borrow checker not being happy even though I thought based on reading The Book that it would be, and I didn't invest the time to figure out why. I've talked with some other developers who picked up Rust on the side and also gave up around the same place; when I attended a Rust talk a few years ago the speaker (who is a well-known Rustacean) admitted that "borrow checking" took a bigger chunk of Rust's "unique features to learn" budget than they had expected. So, Microsoft will have to invest more in training. At least as of a few years ago, Rust also was really slow to compile, like an order of magnitude or two slower than C++. Once it is compiled, its speed is comparable to C++, but that compilation process is slower, so Microsoft may need more big iron to compile Windows than they have before. I'm sure this has improved somewhat since I looked at it, but how much is an open question. I actually wound up writing a bunch of C code for fun the month after I failed to pick up Rust. Yes, it felt dirty writing all that C after dabbling with oh-so-pure Rust. And I likely committed some pointer crimes in the process.

Looking for some recommendations here. I've historically used Windows first, Linux second, Mac when required too. But I have been assigned a Mac at work, a partner on a side project (who is not technical) is on a Mac, and I'll be developing an iPhone application soon. So, for an SCP client. I use WinSCP on Windows, and it's awesome. I've started using muCommander on my work Mac and it's okay. Not as intuitive for selecting multiple files, and seems to need an extra click if you switch to it from another program, but functional for the basic "drag files from one folder to a remote one" task. Are there better ones I'm not aware of? Free is ideal but a low cost is not necessarily a dealbreaker, a subscription probably is. Must be easy for a non-technical person to use for uploading files to a server. For a JSON editor, similar case, I've shown my side project partner JSON in Notepad++ and he said that's fine and easy enough to understand, but what's a good program for it on Mac? I know VSCode exists on Mac and that's the best option I know of now, but is there anything more text-editor-y than IDE-light-y? Preferably with syntax validation, I know missing commas are going to be the bane of our existence if that functionality doesn't exist.

Perhaps my favorite song on the radio right now. A great one to sing when it comes around and it's been an exhausting/frustrating day. "For the record, throwing in the towel takes some effort, I'd rather ride it out for better weather, together" is the lyric that really hooks me. That cover of Separate Ways is pretty rockin', too. I don't know if it beats the original, but it's at least in the same ballpark. Edit: Okay, that Sound of Silence cover is great, too. Simon and Garfunkel wins on clarity of lyrics but I think Disturbed might win on overall sonic impact. Fantastic.

Indeed, you can. I've stacked together some WebPositive windows and some Tracker windows in this screenshot: You can also "tile" them, which is the locking one window to the side of another, and again they can be of different types. I can accomplish the former with a third-party program (Groupy) on Windows, but am not aware of anywhere else that I can do the latter. And Haiku's integration and smoothness is better for stacking since it is native. I should try out the (relatively) new Beta 4. Along with USB WiFi drivers and improved HiDPI support, compatibility layers for X11, Wayland, and WINE appear to be the major features - trying to make it easier to run more software on Haiku. I suppose Haiku wants to be a little bit more mainstream.

It's been 8+ years, so I'm not sure anymore... but I don't remember it not supporting calendars. I think I would have noticed if it didn't support calendar appointments, but that was a small team where we mostly communicated via HipChat, so maybe not. I've never used Outlook tasks so no idea about that one. Interesting, that is very noticeable. Attempting the same workflow on my old (2011) desktop, I think it does have one frame (at 60 FPS) where things aren't in the right place yet, but without Dark Mode it's not nearly as jarring so I've never really noticed it - and that's more than one frame in your video. Microsoft could benefit from some focus on performance. I agree that it seems like GDI should not be such a limiting factor now as it was in the '90s (and I guess you can bump the limit higher now, but still), and every time I use Teams I'm reminded of its poor performance (click the toggle to customize notifications on a channel, wait 10 seconds while watching a spinner for it to load the UI). But that mediocrity is good for Linux.

I'm mostly just lurking in the thread, thinking about whether I should try to go Linux when I do my desktop rebuild, but this is the one area where I have some experience. Several years ago at work my Outlook got completely borked, I think it wound up being hardware acceleration got turned on in an update and it didn't play well with my Intel GPU, but at any rate I couldn't sort it out, so I tried alternative e-mail programs. What I wound up settling on was Evolution running on an Ubuntu VM. It played perfectly fine with the corporate Exchange server. This has been a number of years so I can't say how it will work with a 2023 Exchange Server (and I'm not familiar with Exchange ActiveSync), but IIRC I did try Thunderbird first, and couldn't get it configured easily, and Evolution played nice. Although Thunderbird development has picked up again in recent years so it may play nice nowadays too. That 1000-based file size counting would bug me, too. 1024 is where it's at. I'm surprised this isn't easily configurable in file managers; it seems like a silly thing to have to switch file managers over. ---- Edit: Read through the most recent post. Definitely interesting that the takeaway is that it's fun again, it wasn't entirely clear from the first page, although maybe that's the "black screen on boot after installing drivers, and having trouble finding a distro that just works" bringing back memories. But it's good that that's the dominant takeaway. We definitely have some overlaps in preferences and Linux/GNU usage; I always use the GNU Utils for Windows, even without WSL or Cygwin, and eventually ran back to XP from Vista, but only after concluding I wasn't going to get Ubuntu to play my must-have games back in 2007. The performance issues you mention on Windows are curious. I've long complained that 10 isn't as snappy as 8.1 or XP, but I can't see it painting the Open dialog in Notepad with Dark Mode, and TBH in my experience the Ryzen 5800 is pretty much powerful enough to make up the difference in snappiness between 8.1 and 10 (it only took 11 years of processor evolution to make that happen). And while the Calculator doesn't start as quickly as it does in XP (thanks, sandboxing), the buttons are fully rendered when the window appears, which... well maybe it is the better part of a second, but at least the window as a whole is rendered once the sandbox gets going. I would not expect those issues with the specs on your laptop. Do you just keep way more applications open at once than I do? I suppose with 128 GB of RAM you easily could. Ironically the program in my life whose slow UI I am continually bemoaning is also a Microsoft program, but is Teams for Mac. It's giving Electron apps everywhere a bad name. Someone sends me a new message, I get the toaster notification, I go over to Teams to see the full message, and sometimes it takes 10 seconds to load their message while I can see the they sent an hour and a half ago. That was instant with AIM! Though I believe the problem, and GDI may well be culpable. I once worked on a corporate-scale Visual Basic application, which had its own theming and everything, you wouldn't know it was a VB6 application from looking at it. GDI limits were one of the major pain points of writing a highly complex VB6 application in the early 2010s. I wouldn't say it was the reason that application was being gradually migrated to newer technologies, but it was a contributing factor.

"Resistance is futile, AI cannot be stopped" - straight out of a Terminator-style movie about AIs. I think this "AI is an existential threat" is inspired by those movies, and over-hyped as a result. And one of the data sets being fed into this AI is sci-fi movies and literature. Once we have self-replicating giant death robots I'd bump the threat level up a few notches, but for now I'm not sure how a knowledge bot could cause societal collapse, other than perhaps contributing to the problem of misinformation on the Internet causing political crises, due to its woeful lack of regard for factual accuracy. There are some product-level concerns about not being able to understand exactly how neural network software works, but at this point my "someone might die from this" concerns around that are largely around not understanding edge cases in Tesla Self Driving or similar systems. So I'd order it: 1. Nuclear war. Notably, the AI chat bot says they have localized impact, but that's only true if there are only one or a handful of nuclear devices used. If Russia and NATO fire all of their nukes at each other, that will cause societal collapse, and will cause enough fallout to have significant repercussions in Asia as well. Maybe the Aussies would be okay, but most of the world won't be. And that possibility is a lot more likely than it was 15 years ago. 2. Climate change. We're already almost certain to fail the 1.5ºC target, and could fail it by quite a bit. How bad that looks is not entirely known, but until carbon capture and sequestration is proven, the worst case scenario is pretty bad, especially if we look past the traditional 2050 or 2100 targets at, say, 2200 or 2300. 3. Global Economic Collapse. Can be a great destabilizer, and can cause wars. Look at the 1930s. 4. Pandemics. Obviously can be pretty bad, and if we get a 1348-style plague or if ebola finds a way to spread through the air, this could rapidly rise to the top spot. 5. AI. Really, this is "the impacts of AI we don't fully understand." 6. Natural Disasters (other than climate-changed induced ones). Localized impact. And again, those AI scenarios are largely "over-delegating" issues. Say the U.S. or China builds an army of Boston Dynamics-style autonomous combat robots, hundreds of thousands of them, and they misidentify their own country as the enemy. Probably not the end of humanity (thanks, oceans), but could be bad. Or, worse, a nuclear-connected AI system falsely detects incoming enemy nukes and decides to fire the missiles. The latter is not a purely theoretical concern; in the mid-1980s Soviet radar systems at one of their nuclear-monitoring sites detected an incoming American missile and alerted the employees that they should retaliate. Fortunately, the employee who was on duty applied some common sense, asked, "why would the Americans fire a single missile at us? That makes no sense as a nuclear first strike", and didn't order a retaliatory strike, or report the incident to superiors who might order a retaliatory strike. Obviously the incoming missile never arrived, and later investigation showed it was a software bug in the incoming-missile radar system, where it was erroneously categorizing atmospheric conditions as an incoming nuclear missile. If you make that system fully autonomous, and the same thing happens, goodbye humanity. But that could have happened in the 1980s, and also still counts for the "nuclear war" category.

This Beeper sounds pretty interesting. I miss the days of AIM, texting on a phone just doesn't capture the magic of multi-hour AIM chats with friends at odd hours. There's GChat and Facebook Chat, but then you're involved with the big advertising enterprises, and for the latter with the never-ending hamster wheel of social media that will likely pull you in. AIM was more or less perfect. Beeper could be the next-best thing to AIM. So I looked into this because I'm always suspicious of services that look like they're too good to be true. And they say they have a team of 20, which usually doesn't come free. One of Beeper's co-founders is the founder of Pebble (the smart watch company), and after that (and a gap year) became a partner at YCombinator, which according to LinkedIn is a position he still has. So, he's probably minted. The other co-founder has a long software career at a variety of places and probably doesn't need short-term income either. Not sure who all else is working there, but it looks like it is likely a situation of, "a bunch of us have been in the industry 15+ years and want to build our dream application, and one of the co-founders is minted and can float those who actually need income in the short term." Which is better than the alternative of, "they're selling your messages to the highest bidder." They'll still need to figure out if that eventual Premium option is actually going to cover expenses over the long haul though. OpenCore Legacy also looks interesting. I also have a 2010 Mac Mini that is currently on Sierra (or is it High Sierra?), and did not know it could be updated past High Sierra. Even if I don't enlist it for Beeper duty, that is good to know about. For the "broken USB 1.1 support", does that mean you can't plug in 1.1 devices directly? Apple lists all of its ports as being USB 2.0 ports, rather than 1.1; at first I had thought it meant USB 1.1 ports didn't work but there aren't any. Not a big deal though, I accidentally bought a USB 2.0 hub a couple years ago when I thought I was buying a USB 3.0 hub so that's an easy work-around.

Finished up the TV series tonight, I think the entire series clocked in at about half an hour less than it would take to build the shaders on the PC version. Definitely worth watching, probably especially if you haven't played the game. Thoughts on how it ended.