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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • It’s an engineering sample that was produced before the final product was available. They use the really early ones to figure out if what they got back from the fab actually runs and how fast it will go safely. Later ones end up at motherboard partners so they can test their new board designs.

    It is pretty common for them to leak out onto the second hand market after the final release. I’ve never heard of one that had any real problems, but in theory you might be buying something that has some issue that they hadn’t discovered at that point.


  • I’m not sure. They could have been describing that to me, but because the local body funding mechanism we have here is called rates rather than property taxes I could have easily got that confused in with the state tax discussion.

    I was kind of astounded that a spreadsheet of tax rates would play a significant part in a decision of where you were going to live.


  • I have heard folks distantly related to me talk like the state tax rate was pretty damn important when selecting which part of the United States to move to.

    They were the sort of people that would sit ( in their living room in New Zealand ) and watch fox news and go on the engineered logical and emotional weirdcoaster that sort of media offers up. This is some pretty niche viewing for folks in my country.








  • Not sure a short summary will cut it.

    They had no competition for a long period and ended up with an accountant CEO that caused their R&D to stagnate massively. They had a ton of struggling and failing to deliver all in most areas, and they wombled about releasing CPU generations with ~4% performance uplifts, probably saving a few bucks in the process.

    AMD turned back up again with Ryzen and Epyc models that were pretty good and and an impressive pace of improvement ( like ~14% generational uplifts ) that caused them such a fright that they figured out they had to ditch the accountant.

    Pat Gelsinger was asked to step up as CEO and fix that mess. They axed some obvious defective folks in their structure and rushed about to release 12th generation products with decent gains by cranking the power levels of the CPUs to absurd levels, this was risky and it kind of looks like they are being bit with it now.

    Server CPU sales are way down because they are just plain uncompetitive. They have missed out on the chunk of money they could have got from the AI bubble because they never had a good GPU architecture they could leverage over to use. They have been shutting down unprofitable and troublesome divisions like the Optane storage and NUC divisions to try and save money, but they are in a bad way.

    The class actions mentioned elsewhere in the thread are probably coming because the rush to make incremental improvements to 13th generation and 14th generation CPU’s resulted in issues with power levels and other problems that seem to be causing those CPU’s to crash and sometimes fail altogether.


  • I replaced mythtv with tvheadend on the backend and kodi on the frontend like 5 or 6 years ago.

    The setup and configuration at the time on mythtv was slanted towards old ( obsolete ) analog tuners and static setup and tvheadend was like a breath of fresh air in comparison where you could point it at a DVB mux or two and it would mostly do what you want without having to fight it.

    I’m not sure how much longer I’ll want something that can tune DVB-S2 and DVB-T though. Jellyfin and friends handle everything other than legacy TV better than kodi these days.



  • The most impressed I’ve been with hardware encoding and decoding is with the built in graphics on my little NUC.

    I’m using a NUC10i5FNH which was only barely able to transcode one vaguely decent bitrate stream in software. It looked like passing the hardware transcoding through to a VM was too messy for me so I decided to reinstall linux straight on the hardware.

    The hardware encoding and decoding performance was absolutely amazing. I must have opened up about 20 jellyfin windows that were transcoding before I gave up trying and called it good enough. I only really need about 4 maximum.

    The graphics on the 10th generation NUC’s is the same sort of thing that is on the 9th gen and 10th gen desktop cpu’s, so if you have and intel cpu with onboard graphics give it a try.

    It’s way less trouble than the last time I built a similar setup with NVidia. I haven’t tried a Radeon card yet, but the jellyfin docs are a bit more negative about AMD.




  • 1988 Nissan Skyline GT with an RB20DET.

    It was abandoned by my uncle at our place when he moved overseas and subsequently my sister drove it around a bit. Eventually it leaked coolant from the water pump, overheated and blew a head gasket because she wasn’t paying attention.

    I was unemployed and bored and I decided to pull it apart and bought all the bits to fix it. I didn’t really know anything about mechanical stuff at the time, but I am good at logic and try not to be useless at practical stuff even though I’m really a computer geek. I drove it around for a bunch of years after that until I was earning enough money that I could buy something I wanted which was a Mitsubshi EVO 1.

    So to answer the question, favorite thing was that I rescued it from oblivion even though I didn’t know much about cars or engines at the time.




  • deadbeef@lemmy.nztoTechnology@lemmy.worldUnsmart a smart TV
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    1 year ago

    The samsung TV that I bought for my son had this annoying overlay thing that pops up when you turn it on that shows all the different inputs and nags about various things it thinks are wrong with the world. It is plugged into an Nvidia shield that we do most things on, but you can’t use the shield until the overlay calms the fuck down and disappears.

    It’d be great if you could just have the thing turn on and display an input like our older TVs do.