Yeah, I’ve never seen a multi-bay enclosure that doesn’t just randomly decide it’s done with this bullshit and have random dropouts or just plain fucking off entirely.

I don’t know WHY they’re so bad, but they are :/

I just converted part of a closet to a network closet and added some shelves and stuffed everything in there, though I know that’s not an option everyone has.

Should ask what platform here, IMO: virt-manager is Linux-only. (Or, I suppose, doing remote X stuff to run it elsewhere but that’s probably not what OP is after.)

There’s some command line stuff you can run on Windows, but then at that point, you can just use virsh on the host itself.

I’m of the opinion that virsh to manage and then a spice or vnc client to access the VMs is the “best” way to go so you’re not tied down to having to have a specific OS running a specific tool in order to do any admin stuff, since I mean, after you deploy how often are you screwing with the VM settings?

IME, they’re all the same chipset/set of chipsets and are all pretty awful.

That said, the most reliable ones I’ve found actually come from drives that have been shucked. Western Digital or whomever aren’t going to do the absolute lowest price piece of shit enclosure for something they’re going to warranty for 3 or 5 years, so those have been what I try to find and have had reasonable luck with them in terms of reliability and not-catching-shit-on-fire.

Usually cheap as shit on eBay or whatever, since they’re basically the packaging trash around something that was purchased for the gooey insides.

Hell, Intel has lost my confidence they can even fucking fab a CPU correctly at this point, never mind anything else.

I’m almost exclusively AMD based at this point despite them being less than uh, reliable (see: the year long fight I’ve had with my 7700x being unstable which was only resolved, amusingly, by jacking up the voltage). Also, my 1700x was hilariously awful, but I’m willing to shrug and call that new architecture woes and not be too judgy about that one.

I’m reservedly enthusiastic for Qualcomm’s entry (for like the 4th time) into desktop processors, and hope that this time they can keep improving performance, and actaully support things for more than five damn minutes before going ‘welp only supporting new cpu!’ like they do with their mobile ones. Also if they actually live up to their promises to provide full driver support and support parity to the Linux kernel so you can get rid of Windows on them.

Fair points on VR games being fairly social. I was more thinking of the in-person social experience, which is still involving some portion of people sitting around stuffing their face into a headset and wandering off into their own world.

IMO, this is something that AR/MR stuff could do a great job of making more social by adding the game to the world, rather than taking the person out of the world to the game but, of course, this also restricts what kind of games you can do so is probably only a partial solution and/or improvement on the current state of affairs.

I also agree that it’s way too expensive still, and probably always will be because the market is, as you mentioned, small.

PCVR is pretty much dead despite its proponents running around declaring that it’s just fine like it’s a Monty Python skit. And the tech for truly untethered headsets is really only owned by a single (awful) company and only because the god-CEO thinks it’s a fun thing to dump money on which means it’s subject to sudden death if he retires/dies/is ousted/has to take time off to molt/has enough shareholder pressure put on him.

Even then, it’s only on a second generation (the original Quest was… beta, at best) and is expensive enough that you have to really have a reason to be interested rather than it being something you could just add to your gaming options.

I’d like VR to take off and the experiences to more resemble some of the sci-fi worlds that have a or take place in a virtual reality world, but honestly, I’ve thought that would be cool for like 20 years now and we’re only very slightly closer than we were then, we just have smaller headsets and somewhat improved graphics.

Train to Busan, Parasite, Unlocked, Wonderland, Anatomy of a Fall and Close have been ones I’ve seen recently that I liked.

I think some of those are available on Netflix, but as I don’t use Netflix I can’t say which ones and for certain, though.

Edit: I just realized some of those are vague and will lead to a billion other movies lol. The first 4 are S. Korean, the last two are French and they’re all from 2020 or newer so anything not from there or older isn’t the right one.

You’re not wrong (and those are freaking enormous dies that have to cost apple a goddamn fortune to make at scale), but like, it also isn’t an Apples-to-Apples comparison.

nVidia/Intel/AMD have gone for the maximum performance and fuck any heat/noise/power usage path. They haven’t given a shit about low-power optimizations or investing in designs that are more suited to low-power usage (a M3 max will pull ~80w if you flog the crap out of it, so let’s use that number) implementations. IMO the wrong choice, but I’m just a computer janitor that uses the things, I don’t design them.

Apple picked a uarch that was already low power (fun fact: ARM was so low power that the first test chips would run off the board’s standby power and would boot BEFORE they were actually turned on) and then focused in on making it as fast as possible with the least power as possible: the compute cores have come from the mobile side prior to being turned into desktop chips.

I’m rambling but: until nVidia and x86 vendors prioritize power usage over raw performance (which they did with zen5 and you saw how that shit spiraled into a fucking PR shit mess) then you’re going to get next year’s die shrink, but with more transistors using the same power with slightly better performance. It’s entirely down to design decisions, and frankly, x86 (and to some degree so has nVidia) have painted themselves into a corner by relying on process node improvements (which are very rapidly going to stop happening) and modest IPC uplifts to stay ahead of everyone else.

I’m hoping Qualcomm does a good job staying competitive with their ARM stuff, but it’s also Qualcomm and rooting for them feels like cheering on cancer.

Power consumption numbers like that are expected, though.

One thing to keep in mind is how big the die is and how many transistors are in a GPU.

As a direct-ish comparison, there’s about 25 billion transistors in a 14900k, and 76 billion in a 4090.

Big die + lots and lots of transistors = bigly power usage.

I wouldn’t imagine that the 5000-series GPUs are going to be smaller or have less transistors, so I’d expect this to be in the die shrink lowers power usage, but more transistors increase power usage zone.

Videos are unfortunately the way a LOT of quality content is delivered now and banning any and all videos (relevant or not) is probably not the way to go.

GN, L1T, HUB and so on are super high-quality stuff that’re tech related and that’s basically how they deliver their content. A blanket ban would kill way too much good shit, imo.

movie industry that’s been complete trash for a while now.

This is not a callout of you in particular so don’t get offended, but that’s really only true if you look at the trash coming out of Hollywood.

There’s some spectacularly good shit coming out of like France and South Korea (depending on what genres you’re a fan of, anyways), as well as like, everywhere else.

Shitty movies that are just shitty sequels to something that wasn’t very good (or yet another fucking Marvel movie) is a self-inflicted wound, and not really a sign that you can’t possibly do better.

Well, that’s the doomer take.

The rumors are that the 80 series card is 10% faster than the 90 series card from last gen: that’s not a ‘10%’ improvement, assuming the prices are the same, that’s more like a 40% improvement. I think a LOT of people don’t realize how shitty the 4080 was compared to the 4090 and are vastly mis-valuing that rumor.

I’d also argue the ‘GAMES MUST BE ULTRA AT 4K144 OR DONT BOTHER’ take is wrong. My gaming has moved almost entirely to my Rog Ally and you know what? Shit is just as fun and way more convenient than the 7700x/3080 12gb desktop even if it’s 1080p low and not 1440p120. If the only thing the game has going for it is ‘ooh it’s pretty’ then it’s unlikely to be one of those games people care about in six months.

And anyways, who gives a crap about AAAAAAAAAAAAA games? Indie games are rocking it in every genre you could care to mention, and the higher budget stuff like BG 3 is, well, probably the best RPG since FO:NV (fight me!).

And yes, VR is in a shitty place because nobody gives a crap about it. I’ve got a Rift, Rift S, Quest, and a Quest 2 and you know what? It’s not interesting. It’s a fun toy that, but it has zero sticking power and that’s frankly due to two things:

1. It’s not a social experience at all.
2. There’s no budget for the kind of games that would drive adoption, because there’s no adoption to justify spending money on a VR version.

If you could justify spending the kind of money that would lead to having a cool VR experience, then yeah, it might be more compelling but that’s been tried and nobody bought anything. Will say that Beat Saber is great, but one stellar experience will not sell anyone on anything.

And AI is this year’s crypto which was last year’s whatever and it’s bubbles and VC scams all the way down and pretty much always has been. Tech hops from thing to thing that they go all in on because they can hype it and cash out. Good for them, and be skeptical of shit, but if it sticks it sticks, and if it doesn’t it doesn’t.

Politely, but no.

It’s a compression tool that is also used to mask malware, and you’re proposing to expand it’s use in a use case that’s ALREADY coated in enough malware to give you herpes just by walking past your average tracker.

It’s a bad idea from a security perspective, and it’s not going to outperform a LZMA-based compression tool using a large dictionary (7zip, etc.) which also isn’t fucking with binaries in a way that makes detecting and preventing malicious software more complicated for the average user, who typically knows absolutely zero about what’s going on.

As someone who’s been buying (though not intentionally) exclusively AMD laptops for the past 9 years or so, yeah, this resonates pretty well with the user experience.

I mean, none of the laptops are bad or defective or whatever, but the quality of support and feature support and just the general amount of time it takes to get things pushed out has always been shit compared to Intel stuff.

AMD can’t manage firmware and software fixes for shit, regardless of product line and if I were an OEM, I’d probably be pissed at their stupid slow bullshit too.

Example: 2022 G14 was totally getting USB4. Got a beta for it, and then Asus went ‘Fucking AMD isn’t helping or providing stuff we need, so this beta is all you’re getting, go yell at them.’ Is that the whole story? Maybe not, but it certainly feels perfectly reasonable based on how AMD has supported everything prior to that as well, so I tend to think it’s enough of the story to be true.

Good hardware (mostly), and it’s reliable enough and it does the job, but it’s very much a dont-expect-support kind of experience past the first couple of months after release. (And yes, I know the OEM carries a good portion of responsibility there, but if there’s not a new firmware/microcode/etc from AMD to fix an issue, then what are they supposed to ship to you?)

Sorry, I meant antivirus. (Corpo IT calls it endpoint, since it’s, well, the endpoint.)

Pack what executables exactly?

Like take a copy of Nodobe Notoshop and repack it?

If that’s what you mean, uh, politely, but fuck no. Malware is enough of a problem that there’s no way I’d want to start downloading crap that’s been UPXed since that’s going to make it impossible to determine if it’s legitimate or not by (most) endpoint tools, or they’ll just see UPX and go ‘bad shit!’ on everything.

This here. The most important thing on your computer are all your session cookies, which are, well, accessible with permissions your user account already has.

Dudes don’t care about making your shit into a botnet, or putting a rootkit in your firmware, or whatever other technically complex thing you care to think about: they’re there to steal your shit, and the most valuable shit you have is sitting there out in the open for the taking for anyone who makes it past a very very low bar of ‘make the user do something stupid’.

Either is fine: the question is what happens when something breaks and if you care about issues and such.

If your docker host depends on the pihole it’s running, there can be some weirditry if it’s not available during boot and whatnot (or if it crashes, etc.).

…I ended up with a docker container of pihole and an actual pi as the secondary so that it’s nice and redundant.

Yeah, I tried to use music and audiobooks in Jellyfin and even with apps focused on that it was just… rough.

Pity, since I’d love to have been able to scope down how much shit I’m running, but alas, that’s not going to be the way to do it.

Good news, I guess?

https://github.com/kuba2k2/firefox-webserial

I’ve only used it to do some esp32 stuff with homeassistant, but it does work.

Wait you’re saying 30 year old drives are all dying or dead?

I, for one, am COMPLETELY shocked at this totally unexpected and impossible to plan for eventuality.

Who could possibly have known that hard drives might fail after decades?