If I’ve learned anything from GTA… just drive the news van around and hit pedestrians until you make budget.

I think there would be more sympathy if Cloudflare pointed to a specific limit breached and proposed ways to get into compliance at their current price plan.

“Service XYZ is now consuming 500% of expected quota. Shut it down or we need to get you on a bigger plan.” is actionable and meaningful, and feels a little less like a shakedown.

I’m sick of “unlimited” services that really mean “there’s a limit but we aren’t going to say what it is.” By that standard, freaking mobile telecoms are far more transparent and good-faith players!

Perhaps this also represents a failing in Cloudflare’s product matrix. Everyone loves the “contact sales for a bespoke enterprise plan” model, but you should be creating a clear road to it, and faux-unlimited isn’t it. Not everyone needs $random_enterprise_feature, so there’s value in a disclosed quota and pay-as-you-scale approach: the customer should be eager to reach out to your sales team because the enterprise plan should offer better value than off-the-rack options at high scale.

I think the appeal is that you probably don’t need a huge CPU for a lot of workloads-- just something to run an OS, handle talking to the outside world, and configure the GPU/NPU complexes.

I could imagine a something like a Quadro card that had a small RISC-V core built in as a freestanding device, no motherboard needed. Even if the CPU ran like a Core 2 Duo, that would be sufficient for purpose, but it will be a lot easier to license an appropriate RISC-V core than an x86 one.

I feel like the Atmega range asks an awful lot for what you get in 2024.

Of course, that could be because I designed a project around the Teensy++ which was always pricey and promptly disappeared from stock. I redesigned to use a CH32V305 breakout instead- 1/3 the price and probably way more performance which my terrible code is just busy-waiting into the ether.

I like WCH’s product line in general; it’s full of zany stuff.

ARM was designed because the 6502 was approaching end of viability, and Acorn (the maker of the BBC Microcomputer) needed a next-gen product. At the time, RISC was the trendy thing, and I suspect the 286 and 68000 were too expensive to adapt for their products; they weren’t pushing £5000+ workstations like IBM or Unix vendors.

It was light and small because they had a small team; low power was a happy accident.

No wonder DEC went broke. My VT220 didn’t come with any hunks crawling out of the screen Ringu style.

If they’re so awful, why do we need aggressive tarrifs to keep them off of American streets? I don’t think anyone was making people buy them over domestic alternatives…

(muffled sounds of discord)

WTF?! Xi Jinping himself busted down my front door, grabbed my debit card, and put down a deposit on a new BYD. And what’s worse, he picked one in that really insipid grey that you can never find in a parking lot.

I think they’re plenty at fault. Mandating an online platform up front rather than seeing how the market breaks down is tail-wags-the-dog stupid.

I could marginally see if it were a console title and they wanted the PS Plus revenue or to be consistent with other online games on the platforn, but to throw away the biggest hit of the year to demand free accounts, it screams desperate data thirst.

Hey, isn’t this exactly how Microsoft torpedoed Win11 by mandating accounts too? I guess nobody even looked over at their taskbar for precedent.

And before that, a bad firmware flash could garble the MAC.

And before that, a bad firmware flash could garble the MAC.

So next they’ll use AI-generated infantry?

I liked ASrock when they were in the ECS tier of quirky and weird. Got a Socket 939 board with the ULi M1695 chipset that was really nifty.

Then I had an awful experience with an AM3 board that claimed to run a FX-8350, until they edited their support list.

I grudgingly chose them for AM5 because it was $50 cheaper for the featured I wanted, and it’s been okay, aside from me breaking the x16 slot clip due to hamfistedly removing a shipping-container sized GPU.

I believe “headpats” is the only valid answer.

She may also need an elecyrical socket.

The titular character of the anime/manga Black Butler is named Sebastian Michaelis.

Maybe they left a parcel with your butler. 6’6", 130lb, weird tattoo he always covers with gloves- does that ring a bell?

Or deliver the UBI as a basket of subsidized services and goods.

If, for example, we chose socialized medicine instead of a $5000/year UBI, a landlord can’t very well say “Your rent is going up 30 tablets of lisinopril this month.”

Some of them have poor stability. I gave up on a Sound Blaster Audigy RX after it caused random crashes on two different Socket AM4 mainboards. I just got a 10 metre optical cable and a cheap DAC next to my reciever.

I suspect the industry is in a tailspin; the last players standing really don’t have to give a **** because the alternatives are onboard sudio or $$$$ pro cards.

50 cent coins contained silver for a few years longer than dimes and quarters. So you have a slightly better chance of finding a silver coin worth a few dollars in a roll of halves. It’s free gambling for numismatists.

Source: I ask for the occasional roll of halves.

Okay, so we’ve got an entire new range of Family Guy skins for Guild Wars 2. I can sort of see Stewie as an Asura… and then we realize it’s a Meg episone. A 175kg, 210cm Nord Meg episode.

This isn’t as absurd as it looks.

If we assume the loans will implode either way, the Chinese model at least funnels some of the money back to their own contractors, and ends with some goodwill and infrastructure. It’s an aid programme with extra steps.

I wonder if the western model optimizes for loans doomed to fail to use them as a lever to extract structural and political concessions, or if it’s just a happy accident.