rndmize

This is excellent work. I like everything about this project - user assembly and repair (repair is much easier not only if the item is designed to be repaired, but if the user assembles it in the first place); flat pack for efficient shipping/storage; the overall focus on reuse and waste reduction. Perhaps, with more projects like this for a wider range of items, it'll be possible to pull manufacturers to a more right-to-repair, cradle-to-grave kind of world.

There's really nothing surprising about this - I remember similar articles at the start of the first Trump administration about how one of the nuclear weapon departments (might have been the same one) had its top people retiring, and multiple Republican senators had to make noise before Trump got around to appointing a replacement. In the same vein, Rick Perry ran on the idea of getting rid of the Department of Energy during the campaign and was picked by Trump to be its secretary. It was explained to Perry at some point that the DOE is not, in fact, just about energy; that someone has to manage, manufacture, design and test the nuclear weapons we have; and that the national labs might be fairly important components of our scientific and technological advantages as a nation. I don't expect any better this time around.

About six months ago I bought an Anker set - a portable battery pack and some folding panels. A buddy of mine got basically the same thing, but Ecoflow. He lives in a condo, has a balcony, and can hang his panels there to charge the pack; my options are a little more constrained (3 story house with a couple hundred sq ft concrete "yard", with light blocked most hours of the day by the next house.)

I haven't gotten much use out of my set, but his plan was to run his desktop off it, which sounded very doable. All in all probably not quite the same as Germany (I guess their kits don't need a battery or plug into the wall or something).

These clips feels like watching someone dream in real time. Particularly the door ones, where the environment changes in wild fashion, or the middle NPC one, where you see a character walk into shadow and mostly disappear and a different character walks out.

He's being sarcastic because the standing theme on the internet for most of the last decade is that Musk is an idiot who only got where he is because his parents are rich or he stole from other smarter/harder working people. SpaceX tends to put a hole in this idea since he founded and funded it himself, and they've made more progress in space travel in the last two decades than all existing government organizations and contractors have since the 70s.

Huh? I don't see how MS has any blame in any of this. Client chooses not to upgrade systems. Client chooses to use crowdstrike as a vendor. Client chooses not to accept free support. At what point was MS supposed to do something here? There are loads of things to complain about or take issue with when it comes to MS, but I don't see how this is one of them.

Similar story here. 13700KF, no OC, had the machine put together 18 months ago at a respectable shop (Central Computers for those in the bay). I had regular stability issues and blue screens to the point I took it back to the shop after three months - they couldn't find anything wrong. Took it in again at nine months with increasing frustration - nothing. Probably should have taken it again three months ago when I was playing the new Helldivers and that would crash the machine every other time I joined a game, but by that point I was pretty exhausted by the whole thing (and the game had other, unrelated bugs that had me looking elsewhere).

Odds are good I won't be bothering with Intel hardware or recommending it to others for the next decade or more - this has been a flatly terrible experience (and I'll note the irony of finally deciding to spend on a "dream build" and this being the result).

I think there's another point to be made here that isn't often discussed. Even in a system where people that work hardest/smartest directly translates to the most successful - doesn't mean you have a good system.

Consider an environment where a million engineers are all working on their own startups. 99% of them fail and reward the work put into them with nothing. Some subset of the remainder makes barely enough to survive; a smaller subset makes enough to have a successful business; a smaller subset makes millions, and a smaller subset makes the vast majority of the money available. If the effort put into the thing follows a mostly linear line, but the reward is exponential, is this really a good system? Do the people at the top of this structure deserve the wealth they gain, even if they genuinely the best at what they do?

More and more systems today are winner-take-all. Entertainment is notorious for a tiny number of multi-millionaire artists/actors/comedians/etc., while the vast majority of people that try to make it end up with a succession of part-time jobs that never ends. Even if there's no nepotism or corruption, is a system where the people at the top get everything and the bottom gets nothing a good one?

There's something disturbing about PG's take to me - as if only the most successful are deserving, or worthy - that this warped reward structure isn't inherently unjust. It feels like the kind of justifications nobility and royalty relied on, but for modern times - "I worked hard, I found the market, I did everything right, so naturally I deserve more wealth than a human can use in a thousand lifetimes."

So to be honest, I find almost every single one of PG's points worthless. I don't care how easy it is to start a startup if the chance of real money from it is one in a million. I don't care about how much faster growth is when its billions of dollars for a few dozen people. I don't care if the new wealth is genuinely new instead of inherited, if all we get from it is yet another tiny group of obscenely wealthy people - meet the new boss, same as the old boss. And I especially dislike the idea that the "far left" should be happy that "labor has won". Having a system that picks a few hundred of the "most worthy" each year and adds them to the capital class is by no means what I could consider labor winning.