I think it’s more trying to win political favor by spending big with the company owned by a member of the incoming presidential administration.

Or it’s just wanting to market their ads on that platform and as you said, not having the balls to stick to their boycott

Credit balances don’t negatively impact credit scores as much as one would think. It’s ultimately a combination of factors that go into an overall credit score with the heaviest hitter being payment history. If one makes all of their payments they can have a decent credit score despite carrying a 10k balance. Carrying a balance of greater than 30% of the limit will detract significantly from the overall score, but it won’t knock it below “decent” range on its own.

I’m honestly not even sure how one actually gets their score below 500. My wife got a head injury and physically could not remember whether or not she’d paid her credit cards a couple of years ago, so they ended up becoming delinquent and going to collections. Ultimately it dropped her credit score to about 500 but then it started climbing back up from the car loan and mortgage that are in both of our names and is almost up to 700 again. I seriously want to know how people manage to get their scores down to the 300s (the floor is 300) because you basically have to try in order to get your score that low. A friend of a colleague managed such a feet and then had some identity theft which actually improved his credit score because it looked more like normal credit activity than his real credit activity

I feel similarly. I work in an office that’s heavily invested in Microsoft for everything and when you use Microsoft everything Teams fits in really nicely with great outlook integration, Microsoft Loop integration, etc. and the experience on Teams is fine

Clearly gotta start listening to truecrime podcasts and let some young kids muck up your YouTube algorithm and they won’t know anymore what your gender is

This is particularly American sensibility about not drinking alcohol casually around children

Shockingly this will vary by family. Some families take their kids bar hopping while they drink to excess, some drink casually and not in excess, and some are sober around their kids, and some remain sober all the time. My wife grew up hanging out in bars with her parents biker friends and their kids. She learned to watch some of them and save the good homemade wine when someone was about to topple. I grew up with parents who would have a single drink with dinner one to two times a week and would avoid getting drunk (at least that I know of).

Personally, as a parent and living in an area with a strong alcohol culture and with alcoholic family members, I drink very rarely (the alcoholic family members really kill my desire to drink), and when I do I make sure we have more than enough adults available to parent and drive if needed. I also am very much a lightweight so there is no drinking without getting noticeably giggly and sloppy. My wife feels and acts similarly but is not a lightweight and can realistically drink one drink and be visibly unaffected.

I honestly think the OP is less about the presence of alcohol around children but more just calling out a wine mom as such

My wife’s family will 100% get drunk around their kids, and drunk drive with the kids in the car. Seeing that first hand makes us really reluctant to drink at all.

I’ve only seen the ocean when visiting family in LA, so I do genuinely wonder if the waves are especially loud and violent there compared to, say the Gulf of Mexico or the US East Coast. But importantly, that is the exact same conditions Hollywood people would be used to too, so they should be very aware of how loud the ocean is (I’d say its comparable to cruising altitude in a standard commercial passenger aircraft)

Hyce, who works at the Colorado Railroad Museum in Golden (which is a heritage railroad with restored steam locomotives) got to drive on of them while visiting family in Bosnia

There are uncommon instances of revenue freight being hauled by steam such as during a recent dispute between different agencies in Germany or the Everett railroad in Pennsylvania apparently does have some revenue service despite primarily being a tourist railroad and has on occasion used steam to switch out it’s revenue customers

Or for a similar but entirely different example, the Iowa Traction Railroad uses almost exclusively century old electric locomotives all built in the 1910s and 1920s. You can see here one of their electric locomotives posing with a much newer locomotive:

Don’t forget the universally established upward direction so all ships are magically oriented exactly the same when they meet

At beaches too. Hollywood is based so close to the beach they should know how hard it is to hold a conversation at a normal tone of voice near the ocean

I read an interesting article about historical armor fights. Basically some researchers got special forces members to wear replica historical armor and simulate battle as described in various surviving epics and identified the armor to be surprisingly effective

Duels did happen from time to time in the 19th century. For example, California Senator David Broderick in 1859 became the only US Senator to die in a duel, and there’s a difficult to validate tale of two French men in 1808 holding a gun duel in hot air balloons!

Actually I have a history book about the history of ballooning called Aeronauts that I found at a thrift store. If I remember I’ll see what that has to say about this tale because it does call out other largely fabricated tales as such

But like most fictions, the fiction of Wild West duels contains some kernels of truth and certainly makes for great drama

Honestly the original effects also had me going:

So I suppose it’s not that much worse with the ring

Edit: meant to reply one comment up. Too late now

There’s a Christmas movie called Holiday in Handcuffs where a woman abducts a dude to play her boyfriend so her family gets off of her back, and naturally they actually fall in love by the end but also HOLY SHIT HOW IS THAT A THING

I just accepted a job with a small MSP starting early next year. I kept a close ear out during the interview for signs of the classic MSP hell stuff that would chew through techs but it does look like I got a good one (small 8 or so man shop) but check in in about 3 months and we’ll see how I’m feeling haha

My longer term plan is to use this as a stepping stone to then move onto being in-house then figuring out my exit strategy before burnout takes me, which I’m thinking I’ll either be aiming to move into IT management or possibly moving into a business analytics or cloud administration type role. Technical sales probably wouldn’t be too bad either.

Especially with how normal memory tiering is nowadays, especially in the datacenter (Intel’s bread and butter) now that you can stick a box of memory on a CXL network and put the memory from your last gen servers you just retired into said box for a third or fourth tier of memory before swapping. And the fun not tiered memory stuff the CXL enables. Really CXL just enables so much cool stuff that it’s going to be incredible once that starts hitting small single row datacenters

The main reason Intel can’t compete is the fact CUDA is both proprietary and the industry standard

Funnily enough this is actually changing because of the AI boom. Would-be buyers can’t get Nvidia AI cards so they’re buying AMD and Intel and reworking their stacks as needed. It helps that there’s also translation layers available now too which translate CUDA and other otherwise vebdor-specific stuff to the open protocols supported by Intel and AMD

He’s not wrong that GPUs in the desktop space are going away because SoCs are inevitably going to be the future. This isn’t because the market has demanded it or some sort of conspiracy, but literally we can’t get faster without chips getting smaller and closer together.

While I agree with you on a technical level, I read it as Pat Gelsinger intends to stop development of discrete graphics cards after Battlemage, which is disappointing but not surprising. Intel’s GPUs while incredibly impressive simply have an uphill battle for desktop users and particularly gamers to ensure every game a user wishes to run can generally run without compatibility problems.

Ideally Intel would keep their GPU department going because they have a fighting chance at holding a significant market share now that they’re past the hardest hurdles, but they’re in a hard spot financially so I can’t be surprised if they’re forced to divest from discrete GPUs entirely

Seriously putting a couple gigs of on-package graphics memory would completely change the game, especially if it does some intelligent caching and uses RAM for additional memory as needed.

I want to see what happens if Intel or AMD seriously let a generation rip with on package graphics memory for the iGPU. The only real drawback I could see is if the power/thermal budget just isn’t sufficient and it ends up with wonky performance (which I have seen on an overly thin and light laptop I have in my personal fleet. It’s got a Ryzen 2600 by memory that’s horribly thermally limited and because of that it leaves so much performance on the table)

To be fair, the arm SOCs on phones use BigLittle cores, where it will enable/disable cores on the fly and move software around so it’s either running on the Big high performance cores or the Little low power cores based on power budget needs at that second. So effectively not all of those 6+ cores would be available and in use at the same time on phones