Discord is less a messaging platform these days as just like an open source data aggregation service for cyber criminals. It’s like they have a huge data leak every 6 months or so.

Also something new people don’t realize is that Mint is based on Ubuntu which is based on Debian. If you can’t solve your issue by searching for mint you can usually find a solution meant for Ubuntu or Debian that will work.

So what does “1.5mil$ in CPU/GPU time” mean then? It doesn’t make sense. That’s not a standardized unit of time. Are we talking tokens like with AI? Whatever SpaceX’s going rate is to use their servers? Some other commercial service? That’s why I don’t like it being used like this. It would be like me saying I am donating 1.5 million dollars of “food” to the homless. Like that’s great right, but what the fuck do I mean by food? I could be giving them rice and beans, caviar, or anything in between. Meal vouchers to mcdonalds, or working with soup kitchens. It’s just vague.

I hate the phrase “X$ in compute” so much. What does that even mean? It could mean a 1.5 million dollar value worth of donated time on one of their servers, or it could mean a hardware donation, or it could be a cash donation that is earmarked for server upgrades/chip purchases. Ever since AI took off it’s become such a common turn of phrase to use “compute” like this. As if the amount of money spent tells you anything useful about the amount of things they can “compute” now. Costs are so variable and spread out across many different areas that it changes day by day, and by which vendor you use, or what part of the world you are in, or all kinds of other things.

Maybe I’m just behind the times and it has some specific meaning now I’m not aware of. Either way it annoys me.

I’ve used Newegg but never heard of B&H what is that? Newegg is good for PC parts but not really for other things. Like RV electronics for example. Altho you can find some of that on other sites too. I do try to diversify when I can and not support the monopoly. One of the main issues I’ve found is just shipping. Even if you can find something somewhere else sometimes it’ll take a month to get there, or it’s out of stock, or something like that. Especially more recently. I even had something happen one time where I tried to buy from LattePanda on their site and my bank BLOCKED the transaction and wouldn’t let me buy from them directly because they were an “untrusted” vendor lol. But I was allowed to buy the exact same thing 2nd hand from Amazon.

Well there’s a walmart that has electronics stuff but at that point you may as well just buy from Amazon anyway lmao

Mine said “has 2 adults” and I was trying to figure out why because I’m very much by myself, and I realized it is because my mother sends things to my address with her amazon account sometimes. So it thinks she lives here.

Honestly I wish I didn’t. I don’t have a google account. Don’t have any Meta accounts. Don’t have accounts for basically anything I’m not functionally REQUIRED to have (banking for example). But Amazon is hard to avoid. I do a lot of buying in person, but in person shopping is just horrible these days. You need to find something specific and you are screwed. I do try to find other places online to get something when I can but a lot of times I just have to fall back to amazon. Maybe part of it is just the area I’m in though. Tons of the more specialty stores here have closed down. We don’t even have an electronics store anymore after Best Buy closed.

The Latitude 7400 (Non 2-in-one version) is genuinely an amazing laptop if you underclock the CPU a bit so it doesn’t sound like a jet engine. I run Debian on it and the thing gets 12 hours of battery life, and does everything I need. Build quality is pretty good too. I got it for like 200$ refurbished.

Red Star OS

Finally! I can download more RAM!