I was once responsible for a student house (we don’t have dorms in the US sense, this is the closest we have) and I have similar experiences but less extreme. My favourite was when I had forgotten to configure DHCP filtering and someone plugged in a router the wrong way so it started offering DHCP (that didn’t work) to everyone in the building, in a race with our upstream ISP.
a solid email client: Thunderbird can’t search all my email for even things that are in the subject line
a calendar application with support for CalDAV and Exchange
an office suite matching the Microsoft or even Apple offerings of 2004
reasonable cloud sync
a decent vector graphics tool a lá Affinity Designer, a cheap tool developed by a small indie company
These are regular requirements for office work that I’ve had trouble with.
Oh and I also routinely have trouble turning off my computer, it just freezes at a black screen. This is a stationary computer with nothing weird in it.
The or part in that statement is really what kills you, as you sort of imply. You spend five hours almost getting your scanner to work, some times, unreliably.
That’s a worse outcome than the scanner refusing to work entirely in many cases.
I tried to read the linked Twitter thread from Ars and good god it’s terrible. Half of it is people complaining about the demo version without understanding that it’s the demo version. Even though people in the thread keep explaining it to them.
A lot of Americans supported the equally illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, I still don’t think they deserve even how shitty their non-occupation civil government is.
Given how war works I’m almost certain there will be war crimes against the civil population here. Not as bad as what the Russians are doing in their occupied territories I sure as fuck hope and expect, but worse than anyone deserves. I can see Ukrainians getting to be a bit vindictive etc about this, they’ve earned it, but as armchair commentators online at a safe distance we should fucking show some empathy for people in a shitty situation they have very little control over.
I can’t control my government and I live in a democracy. I don’t blame Russians for most of what their state does either.
My wife talked about how Grok apparently seemed promising in AI benchmarks for a while until everyone realised the way they’re winning is by absolutely blindly outspending everyone on GPUs and brute forcing the fuck out of the problem rather than having good anything.
This seems to match that approach (and, more generally, everything Musk is doing).
It’s almost a by the book buy off. You don’t get a salary that can afford anything like good food and clothes because we want salaries to be cheap in the west while we increase the profits from rents, fees etc. However, we will pay you off by externalising all the costs of getting you cheap crap on other people that you don’t have to see (and the environment in general).
It’s of course not an actual conspiracy, just a confluence of terrible impulses and motivations.
This is one of the hardest earned lessons I’ve ever learned, and I’ve had to learn it over and over again. I think it’s mostly stuck now but I still make the same mistake from time to time.
Also, the times rats got into the networking room and ate random cables. I should add the network was built by volunteer students in the ‘90s.