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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I have one of these, it’s a decent mini PC. It’s decently powerful - I used to play some steam games on it; a bit equivalent to steam deck or a bit more powerful. I used it for streaming on my home TV. I upgraded to a even better one as I liked it so much - and wanted to do more gaming.

    It’s a full PC basically. Whether it suits your purposes really depends on what you want to host? It could be overpowered and a bit redundant for a lot of self hosting uses.

    I have a Raspberry Pi 5 which is cheaper than this, and am hosting docker with Home Assistant, Sync thing, and fresh RSS running on it at the moment with plenty of spare memory and cpu resource.

    This mini PC is considerably more powerful and will have a higher power use at idle. You may struggle to use it at capacity so may be a bit wasteful?

    And even the rasp pi 5 is over powered and expensive for a lit of common home server users.

    So whether this PC is a good price and choice really depends on what you want to do with it. It’s at the end of the spectrum of being able to comfortably play 4k video. So it’d likely be a decent Jellyfin streaming host if that’s what you want?



  • I think you’re missing the stock market part of the dot-com bubble which is very similar to AI, and the core part of the collapse.

    The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble on the stock market with companies getting hugely over valued despite not being profitable on the hope they would make bank. Companies were getting huge amounts in venture capital investment, and floating on the markets to huge valuations all based on expected future earnings.

    Then companies started collapsing and not being protiable and eventually the stock market in the Internet companies collapsed. But the Internet didn’t collapse; lots of startups and companies disappeared but companies with solid business models surived, grew and prospered. Amazon, Google, Ebay etc survived the bubble and dominated their areas.

    The AI bubble is very similar in that companies with AI focus are getting over valued despite not being profitable. The drive int he market is the same - people want to get in at the ground floor and are not being discerning in what they invest in. Very similar to the docotm era, people don’t yet see exactly how money will be made with AI or which companies will be the ones to triumph. It’s all gambling on things people don’t really understand. The AI bubble will also pop, but again AI as a technology isn’t going anywhere - it is investors who will be harmed and a lot of companies will collapse leaving behind ones that have viable business models.

    The dot com bubble burst in March 2000 due to multiple factors - a Microsoft anti trust case loss, the AOL-Time Warner merger being increasingly questioned, and rising interest rates putting pressure on the debt-driven growth of dot-cons.

    Looking at AI, it’s clear there is speculative valuations going on with lots of AI companies. And established tech companies are all throwing money at AI. Meta - which has been in trouble for a while as it needs to keep growing due to the stock market but Facebook and Instagram have peaked and face more competition - first tried to pivot to VR (that’s gone very quiet suddenly!) and suddenly has pivoted to AI. Nvidia has been wildly over valued based on its chips being used in AI and other companies stockpiling them for future AI work. Companies are making expensive moves to stake a claim on future AI market share but at the moment there hasn’t been any profitability coming from these tools.

    AI will survive, but a lot of companies are very obviously going to get burnt. This feeling was also prevenalt during the dot com era - the difficulty was actually picking the winners not that people didn’t know there was a speculative market bubble during the dot com era. People knew it was going to burst just as we know the AI bubble will burst.


  • As a Brit, I’m not offended by the Proton CEO’s post. I don’t like Donald Trump BUT I do like that he has hired someone who should be tough on tech anti-trust moves. This is very important.

    Americans can be obsessed with their electoral system, but the rest of us don’t have to pretend to support the Democrats or Republicans. I don’t necessarily agree with all of Andy Yen’s take regarding the two parties, but I’m not offended enough by it to boycott Proton, certainly not based on one tweet. I can also see the pragmatic benefit to his position by massaging trumps well known fragile ego.


  • There is no way TikTok will be sold - China won’t allow it, and it’s also technically likely nigh on impossible to just sell the “American” portion of it.

    TikTok is a multinational success and highly profitable, so ByteDance aren’t going to sell it just to keep it going in the US for the benefit of Americans. They of course don’t want to shut it down as it’s hugely financially successful in the US, but a ban is the lesser evil for the company.

    But it’s all nonsense anyway - Trump wants to “do a deal” over this; I doubt he’ll get anything meaningful from China but he will blowhard about some bullshit to save face and TikTok will continue, even if there is a short ban before his inauguration.





  • I’d keep the headphones until they break and then replace. You can get a couple of USB-c adaptors and keep ithem with the headphones or in places you frequently charge. It’s still inconvenient but a bit more flexible than having one specific cable you have to fine and use all the time, and the adaptor can’t be confused for anything else so will make the whole charging process a little more straight forward (less fumbling with cables to check it’s the right one).

    I wouldn’t buy new headphones just for that.

    I have an Sony XM3 and I decided to get an XM5 as I wanted a headset permanently next to my PC and a set for travelling / commuting. Plus I wanted an upgrade because the reviews were so good. To be honest I still much prefer my XM3s, and wish I hadn’t bought the XM5s. They’re good but the build quality and design isn’t quite as good and the noise suppression isn’t that great really (I find sound from fans leak through a lot which is very annoying).

    My point is, if you have headphones you like and are comfortable with I wouldn’t rush to give them up as newer isn’t necessarily better. Wait until you need to ad then get something good.


  • Lots of good advice but one question - have you tried LED bulbs before and had flickering problems?

    Just worth checking a standard LED from your local super market before you go down the route of expensive brands or online purchases.

    The reason I say this is that there are a lot of shoddy cheap and counterfeit electronics sold on Amazon for example. A supermarket bought bulb meanwhile actually has some quality control and standards plus you have somewhere you can go back to should you need to return them.

    All my LEDs are from my local supermarket, own brand (Tesco, I’m in the UK, but Philips are also available for me) and I’ve had no issues. I’d also buy from local retailers where you can get good returns policies (Argos here, or your big box retailers in the US)

    Amazon meanwhile has a policy of mixing stock that it purchases with stock from small sellers that they place in their warehouses and sending any to a customer. So a “sold by amazon” item may actually be a counterfeit item supplied by a 3rd party. Basically do not buy anything of value or branded from Amazon. So don’t buy Phillips or other brands from Amazon.

    And definitely do not buy the cheap Chinese unknown brands on amaxpn or elsewhere. The supermarkets will of course be buying Chinese made bulbs for their own labels but they will be buying them in bulk from specific factories and under contracts with some quality expectations, unlike the shitty free for all small seller type sourcing that your get from Amazon. Small sellers are going to be buying cheap ass unbranded bulbs and the factories are going to sell their cheapest bulbs plus ones that’s do not meet bulk orders quality control thresholds via this route (cheaper to dump the bulbs by selling cheaply instead of having taking the financial hit and binning them). A large supermarket has leverage over the factories to maintain quality (or lose the contract) while small sellers have none.

    Personally the only time I had a flickering LED bulb was a dimmer-switch lamp; it was designed for LEDs but didn’t work with the bulb I bought but turned out I’d accidentally bought a non dimmable bulb. Otherwise I’ve not had a single bulb flicker in my house including all ceiling lights and numerous lamps. All my bulbs are supermarket own brand.



  • BananaTrifleViolin@lemmy.worldtoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    6 months ago

    You have so many options because your system has a lot of audio output options available. Presumably your mother board or your graphics card display outputs given the “Navi” label.

    As others have said, from that section of the settings you should be able to click on the “proaudio” drop downs on the right and disable any you don’t want to see.

    The Navi outputs are the audio available via your hdmi and display ports - you may want to keep those on if you ever want audio from the screens directly but if you don’t ever use audio from your displays you can disable the audio outputs. Most people don’t use screens with integrated audio output but some may plug headsets into their screens via 3.5mm cables so may want it. But that’s an usual use case - most would plug into the PC itself.

    The starship/matisse HD audio is your audio jack on the front of the PC (often USB provided) - I’d keep that one available if you ever plug in your headphones. Personally I have my noise cancelling headphones plugged in via audio jack - you get perfect uninterrupted audio and longer between recharges as the headset doesn’t have to use Bluetooth. However may not be desirable if you’re using a mic on your gaming headset too.

    You then have your Bluetooth device itself which is the gaming headset.

    The other devices below that are your microphones. Again you will have multiple inputs which you can disable if you don’t use them.

    Just remember in the future if you ever want to plug in something that you’ve disabled these devices here.





  • So for clarity:

    • Pseudoephedrine HCL is an effective medication, and can also be used to make Methamphetamines so is now more restricted although still over the counter. It is what is in the branded medicine Sudafed, but is basically a naturally occurring drug.
    • Phenylephrine HCL is not an effective medication in tablet form, and the US FDA has decided recently to remove it from sale after studies showed it performs no better than placebo. This is what had been in the branded medicine Sudafed PE, and was a patented drug in 1927.

    So one is an effective generic naturally discovered drug that cannot be patented, and the other is an ineffective drug that although off patent now has been pushed by the pharmaceutical industry for nearly 100 years. In fairness, nasal spray Phenylephrine is likely to be effective - it is the tablets that are ineffective.

    The packaging is likely the same to deliberately confuse consumers, in the same way the original major brands are Sudafed and Sudafed PE. Once medications have to be bought from a pharmacist behind the counter rather than just taken off a shelf it sells less well, so better for the Pharamceutical industry to ensure people think they’re the same thing even though one is useless.





  • It is just a buzz word in the industry and doesn’t have a tight definition. It’s basically any big budget full priced game from a big or medium sized publisher. They’re just communicating that they’ve made a big budget game with an expectations of hopefully big sales and profit.

    It does imply the game should be popular and high quality, but those are not a given. Plenty of AAA games end up being trash and flopping yet they’re still AAA games.

    It’s similar to the Blockbuster concept in the film industry.