This was literally the model of YCombinator initially. Get a bunch of inspired young graduates, give them the tools and resources to build a successful business in exchange for a stake in the business then roll in the dough in a decade when they own 10% of Google for example.

I suppose you could argue it’s the model of venture capital as well, invest in a company with a lot of potential when it’s in its infancy, then rake it in when they happen to own 30% of Uber 10 years later

It is funny though that the games industry seems to not see this and adapt this model because it seems like the big studios would love it

Some “DLC happy” games seem to work in niches while mostly avoiding the micro-transaction trap

Dude you should see the hardcore simulation scene, such as Dovetail’s Train Sim or Auran’s Trainz you buy the base, then you buy whatever maps and trains fit your niche interests within the niche of people interested in these simulators to begin with.

Auran literally has a subscription option for around $100/year that gives you access to everything and that’s actually a pretty decent price given the cost of the base game and whatever routes you may want!

My point was less “do nothing” but rather “do things other than stare at screens for entertainment” with a touch of “be mindful of what you’re doing when you do stare at your screen for entertainment”

I think part of the problem is we’ve really perfected computers to where they’re overly-effective entertainment machines. You can play games that suck you in for hours on end, you can watch videos and movies on any topic. Hour long video essays on isoteric and ultimately unimportant topics. 2-10 second videos each delivering laughs, cultural experiences and information, all queued up to watch one after another so you’ve watched 10 unrelated videos in a minute. And if that’s not enough stimulation now it’s becoming common practice put an unrelated video on part of all of the screen so you don’t have to get worried about being bored for a few seconds. Pepper the video with split second clips from popular shows or movies for an added laugh and remembering the reference fondly and you’ve got a recipe to never be bored for a single second.

We’ve defeated boredom and it shows. Now we as a society have to learn why being bored is good again, why our brains need some boredom so that everything else can have meaning.

People need to relearn how to go make stuff. Read books, read magazines, play instruments, ride bikes and skateboards and run and jump and have fun away from screens. I think this is a growing trend as people realize how bad for us these dopamine drips that are fed to us on our phones, computers, game consoles, etc. the rise of products and services to add friction to accessing our computing devices, the resurrection of feature phones, phones with intentionally boring screens to discourage use, etc.

When I was car shopping at the end of 2024, I quickly realized the best bang for the buck was around $10-12k because at that price you could get a low-mid range vehicle that was around 6 years old with around 100k miles. Obviously some vehicles in that price range would be older with fewer miles, some would be newer with more miles, but that seemed to be about the price range where you’d get a vehicle which you could reasonably expect to be mechanically sound for at least another 2-3 years. Less than that and you got into vehicles that were far more worn either by age or by mileage, so you’d be trading upfront payment for additional maintenance costs.

$10k is a lot of money to save up. That’s about my entire emergency fund right now. That’s almost 3 years of socking away $300 a month, or 2 years at $500 a month. Simply put vehicle ownership is horrendously expensive especially for folks making close to minimum wage

My wife and I use that one pretty regularly

And then the DM closes his screen and says "yup that was all I had prepared for tonight so I’ll see you next week

Oh that’s a very good question! I’ve seen the comic shared around the internet so much I don’t know myself

How does it been in the cloud make it any worse. User management is user management I don’t really care if it’s hosted locally or not. I’d prefer it to be hosted locally but I’d take Entra over not having it at all.

The big difference is the gaping Grand Canyon sized feature gap between M365 and on-prem AD. Sure you can enforce some desktop policies via Entra but rarely the specific one you’re after. And if all you’re really using AD for is central authentication and you’re not using group policy much anymore, alternative options start actually being options

I’ll be the first Linux fan to say it’s better to manage windows from windows, and that includes using the Windows Server stack to manage your Windows clients, but Microsoft’s really making that less and less compelling as they move everything into the cloud and off of local software and instead into less featureful web apps. At some point it makes far more sense to just kick them to the curb and instead deal with the wonkiness of Linux where at least you get control over changes and updates

because we can’t remote into a Citrix box

Citrix literally makes a tool for doing exactly that! Its called Citrix Director and while yes it’s just as slightly-not-quite-wonky as everything else Citrix, it works quite well for remoting into a thin client’s session among other management features

They said they it’s a Citrix thing.

Pretty sure it’s more of a redirected folder thing with Windows, but Windows has been pretty wonky recently about redirected folders and profiles. By memory of my last Citrix environment redirecting the recycle bin is completely possible but bad practice since it’s just more profile data to fling around and slow down login times

Its really funny, I’ve noticed in organizations where they only purchase based on support availability they tend to have a lot of random broken stuff because vendors never sorted it out and tons of technical debt from 3/4 configured stuff that nobody took the time to dig into and finish cleaning up after the vendor completed the initial setup, meanwhile organizations which actually take an active role in their infrastructure and focus more on using the right tool for the job tend to have much more robust systems, but more outages where they can only blame themselves

I mean the original source would be the Hogfather by Terry Pratchett. This comic is a rendition of a humorous interaction that goes down in the book.

In short, there’s a plot to eliminate the Hogfather (Santa) by controlling children into not believing in him, so Death (the Grim Reaper) fills in for the Hogfather while others work to the plotters and save not just Hogswatch (Christmas) but also the entire disc (the world)

I honestly could be misremembering. I swear I remember seeing somewhere that fake redacted stuff for flavoring/humor

I find it funny that it took a few days for this to come out. That’s the very first thing I try if I see a big black box censoring something in a PDF or webpage is highlight to see if there’s text under there (practice from reading SCP Wiki and various forums with fun formatting options). Heck I randomly highlight as I read enough I’d probably even find that it was incorrectly redacted without even trying

Some of the bits of the Epstein emails I’ve seen made it clear that some of his friends were really just people who turned to him for validation and occasionally favors. Almost gets me to feel a little bad for the guy

Hey if you were thinking live-transcode I can definitely see why you’d think around 20 clients per server for CPU transcode and I can also see where such a high wattage would come from!

Edit: fun bonus fact! Netflix offers caching servers to ISPs that they can place on their side of the interconnect to mutually reduce bandwidth costs. By memory from a teardown I saw on reddit like a decade ago, it was a pretty standard 1U single socket server (probably a supermicro whitebox if we’re being real)with 4-6 HDDs to serve the media files

And over 36,000 vehicles crash into buildings every year in the US (that’s roughly 100 per day!)

My understanding is that it’s related to the frameless glass on the doors, it needs to roll the windows down a smidgen to clear the water seal on the door frame, so you press the button which tells the computer to roll the window down a couple of mm then actuate the door.

The more Red Dwarf references I see the more I realize I badly need to go back and actually watch more than a few episodes of it

Clearly his pull out game is weak then…