There is a much more obvious country that has a vested interest in dividing western democracies, and weakening organizations that unite them, such as NATO and the EU, a country that’s currently in a proxy and hybrid war with Europe, and a country that has long understood the importance of information warfare: Russia.

Of course with the Trump administration, you never know, but then you could also ask yourself: if Trump was a Russian agent, how different would his actions be? Not very different I think.

I have no idea, and I don’t particularly care either, it’s not like it was some wildly expensive cable (though I don’t remember the price) … I just know that I saved myself a whole lot of inconvenience.

Gold doesn’t tarnish so much and is also often used on computer edge connectors.

Yes, Gold is a noble metal, so it doesn’t like to oxidize.

So regardless of the fact that it’s about an optical connector here, and hence completely nonsensical, gold is actually a worse conductor of electricity than copper or silver. The point of gold plated connectors is not so much to improve the immediate audio quality, but to prevent oxidation of the connector over time, which can degrade quality and lead to bad contact. Gold is a noble metal, so doesn’t oxidize. I would think most audiophiles know this?

I used to have to replace the cable of my electric guitar every few years because the sound would get crackly or drop out intermittently, I eventually got one with gold plated 6.35mm plug and I’m still using that same cable 15 years later.

Would be nice to see the gaming industry pivot back to making innovative games within the constraints of hardware, instead of just expecting customers to throw ever more powerful (and power consuming) hardware at it.

Winget is such a half-assed effort

And most of the time it just downloads the msi package or the installer exe and runs that, and you have to click through that. It doesn’t actually keep track of what gets installed.

To be fair half the world seems to forget Belgium is not all french sometimes

It’s annoying as fuck.

Microsoft/Xbox store used to be almost entirely French when visiting from a Belgian IP, even if you set your profile language to Dutch or English. Not sure how it is nowadays, I don’t come there anymore, but it was like that for at least a decade.

Amazon Prime and Netflix still have many movies and series in dubbed French only for Belgian customers, and not the original version with Dutch or even just English subtitles.

Many sites serve you a French language page by default if you visit from a Belgian IP, and then you have to hunt in the header or footer of the page for the language toggle. You usually can’t even read the cookie permission popup in a language you understand.

Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it?

Because selling is always a hassle, dealing with choosing beggars and scammers, and it may not be worth much anymore for general use.

For example, my old PC is a i7 4770k… it can’t run Windows 11 or play remotely recent games. I don’t know anyone who could use this thing, so to save a few watts I took out the GPU, put it in eco mode and have been using it as my Linux server.

My NUC uses 6-7W idle.

I have played around with some mini PC’s (minisforum and beelink brand), they’re neat but they turned out to be not very reliable, two have already died prematurely, and unfortunately they are not end-user serviceable. Lack of storage expansion options is an issue as well, if you don’t just want to stack a bunch of external USB drives on top of each other.

something has to be the rule for processing it

Well the rule is: any order goes. Summation is commutative.

If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right is correct

If you have a bunch of unparenthesized addition and subtraction, left to right doesn’t matter.

1 + 2 + 3 = 3 + 2 + 1

Preventing conception would be a genetic trait that evolution selects against.

A woman with your theoretical anti-conception genetic mutation would not reproduce, so this mutation dies out immediately.

Doing your part in a relationship’s reproductive planning is good partner behavior. This shouldn’t be a game where just one person is on the hook and the other is just along for the ride. Male and Female birth control do not exist as a one or the other dichotomy.

Except what the meme is saying is not that both partners should work together on birth control. It suggests that it should be on the man instead.

Meme also suggests that no work is being done on a male contraception pill, when in reality this is being worked on and has been worked on for decades, but there are good biological reasons why this is anything but trivial and certainly much harder than a female contraception pill.

Counterpoint: a woman taking birthcontrol is empowered because she is taking charge of her own reproduction. She doesn’t have to rely on or trust the man to take his pill. After all, she would be the one bearing most of the burden in case of an unwanted pregnancy.

Additionally, purely biologically it is much easier to reliably stop conception on the female side than on the male side. A woman only produces one egg cell per month, whereas a man produces millions of sperm cells per day.

I liked working from home at first, but after so long it becomes harder and harder to leave your work at “work” when your workplace is also your home

That sounds like a “you” problem. I just hit the shutdown button on my laptop at 17:00 and close the lid, and boom I’ve left work and magically instantaneously transported to my home.

the flexibility to work from home on weekends

Work … on … weekends?

I think your problem is that you’re a workaholic.

Our brains are not wired to do such a dramatic difference in mental activity in the same location.

Sounds made up bro.

It’s bad enough having to hear my colleagues in teams meetings, I don’t see why I have to smell them too.

Write speeds on SMR drives start to stagnate after mere gigabytes written, not after terabytes. As soon as the CMR cache is full, you’re fucked, and it stagnates to utterly unusable speeds as it’s desperately trying to balance writing out blocks to the persistent area of the disk and accepting new incoming writes. I have 25 year old consumer level IDE drives that perform better than an SMR drive in this thrashing state.

Also, I often use hard drives as a temporary holding area for stuff that I’m transferring around for one reason or another and that absolutely sucks if an operation that normally takes an hour or two is suddenly becoming a multi-day endeavour tying up my computing resources. I was burned once when Seagate submarined SMR drives into the Barracuda line, and I got a drive that was absolutely unfit for purpose. Never again.

That depends entirely on your usecase.

It matters to me. I got stuff to back up regularly, and I ain’t got all weekend.

The first copy of anything big will suck ass… and why else would you get a 36TB drive if not to copy a lot of data to it?