Oil burning was common in some regions. The Southern Pacific had a lot of oil-fired engines. Their famous “cab-forward” steam engines could only make sense as oil burners without fundamental redesign.

Part of it might be that the last holdouts for steam, who made the most technically advanced engines, were predominantly coal-carriers. They didn’t have the oil infrastructure, and didn’t want to burn relations eith their customers.

We’ve seen decentralized education and it tends to have problems with resourcing and economies of scale, and content policies get easily hijacked by loud people with personal vendettas.

That’s what baffles me with the DOGE fracas. How long will solidarity hold when there are some very clear winners and losers within their own class?

There are a lot of billionaires who have fat revenue streams coming out of the federal budget, and I don’t think they’re all eager to trigger some sort of Mad Max/Medieval social collapse just so they can be the Archduke of San Jose after America implodes. I doubt they all bought the Network State story.

A fair number of them, expecting to live for more than 10 years and wanting to remain rich, probably invested aggressively into “skate where the puck is going” businesses that are now being slaughtered in the name of doubling down on fossil fuels and uncompetitive domestic manufacturers. Will Elon eat their losses? Of course, he’s committing financial seppuku too.

In the end, insurers will be the harbingers of autonomous vehicles.

In 2050, the insurance will be twice as high if you insist on having a steering wheel, and it will have a major impact on buying decisions.

Fre:ac seems to run in a wine package.

I wonder what impact a truly high end CPU being open would have on the fab industry.

Right now, there’s a lot of manufacturing secret sauce; if you took an Intel design, it would require significant rework to perform well on Samsung or TSMC process.

Fab owners would have a vested competitive interest to customize the design to perform better on their tooling.

Conversely, buyers might develop a renewed interest in second-sourcing-- if you can take your chip to any fab, you have more control over your supply chain.

The TV is blocking the amplifier from venting. Does no good to either.

I’ve seen a lot of cheap little “appliance” machines-- fanless devices meant to be network routers, NAS devices, signage controllers advertised as running on like 4th and 5th generation laptop CPUs.

You could get a SDR dongle. The cheap ones probably won’t fo AM well, but they make excellent FM tuners, as well as aircraft, 2-metre and 70cm ham bands with a pretty basic antenna.

Our new defacto president is the avatar of bubble economics.

Even the other oligarchs, thry made something at dramatic scale to justify their wealth. Microsoft did sell a lot of software. Facebook got 176 billion people on board to blast adverts at. They’re trillion dollar firms that do correspondingly large run rates.

Tesla is still a minor player in its space, and SpaceX is inherently a narrow business. Even PayPal, where the horrors all came from, isn’t a major value add, it’s a thin mask atop the clunkiness of American payment rails that should have been replaced by something like FedNow by 2003.

But he’s taken these tiny fundamentals and convinced Wall Street to puff more air into them than a fresh bag of Lay’s.

Where? That sounds like a good price as internal SATA BD-RE drives tend to be $60+

I’m hoping for MacroSD. About the size of a 3.5" floppy so you won’t lose it easily.

Seriously, it’s interesting that now that we have the tech to make a useful-capacity storage device the size of a credit card, we don’t. Not like those crappy giveaway flash drives printed with a card design, where they had a captive USB head and were 4x as thick as a card, but something with just contacts like a chip card, so you might need to use an external reader but it really preserves the wallet-size concept.

I’d love to have a cheap 16GB card in my wallet with all my health records and a cryptographically signed copy of my will as a one-stop, no cloud required, emergency kit.

Old diesel locomotives have been repurposed similarly, since they’re literally a 3000hp generator and fuel tank on wheels.

If you have a LS-120, it will eject the floppy disc like you were on dome fancy-pants Macintosh!

Steam runs fine. I think I had to install some Vulkan packages manually because I was getting some hallucinogenic colours in Genshin Impact (installs fine via Lutris). I have a few minor issues with games not loving losing the mouse cursor if you move it onto another display, but I think you can tame most of them by running in Gamescope so it doesn’t realize there’s a second monitor the mouse can leave to.

Runit works well enough for me; I’ve only added one nonstandard service (launch a custom tool to drive an external stats display) and it works fine. My ,xsession has to load some polkit and pulseaudio stuff but that could be because I’m not using a full desktop like KDE/GNOME/XFCE that do those things for you.‘’

I don’t really try to do custom package recipes because I tend to ./configure;make;make install stuff I want at random.

EFI boot is no problem. I think my root is btrfs, but the /boot/efi is vfat. Refind is pretty first-class, but sometimes it has stupid conditions where it tries to default to the wrong kernel version if you have multiples installed (I think it sorts by timestamps or filenames in a way that sometimes work counterintuitively; discarding old kernels largely fixes it)

Haven’t really had too many showstopper problems with xbps. I probably sledgehammer it a bit-- occasionally when it says a repo certificate is out of date, I usually end up doing a full update rather than selectively upgrading packages.

I wonder if that’s a limit of storytelling. Grand social change is hard to film. Even team effort cohesion requires a lot of actors and writing to pull off.

No matter how sound the morals and story, if it’s not entertaining, it might fail as mass media.

I feel underrepresented as a Void user.

Although the absurd number of hours I’ve played a certain popular gacha under Lutris might not trigger the Steam metrics, I demand credit for dumping 45 hours into a poorly translated RPG Maker looking project!

Vampire’s Dawn 3. I suspect I’m exhausting my opportunities to powerlevel through the content, being that my party reached level 86 and never having seen any zone tagged at a level over 85. I might have to use gasp strategy to finish it.

Ooh, Monorail Cat is back in service!