It’s not a scam, it’s a link from FedEx (or in my case UPS) to pay tariff and duty charges. Believe you me, I triple checked the whole thing and made sure it was legit before I even considered paying for it. If you are shipping an item directly from outside the US, a lot of times those charges are left for you to deal with (resellers on eBay or Amazon for stuff from China would pay for those in advance, which is why it’s not always normal). It’s a bigger thing than it used to be, because it used to be that if the value of an item was less than $800 (I believe, it’s been a min), there wouldn’t be duties on it unless it was a big item or some other unusual circumstances. However, Trump screwed that up with the tariff changes, so extra charges are collected by the shipping company directly. The problem is that I wasn’t warned ahead of time (I thought it was coming from the Philippines so the charges wouldn’t be a thing), and that seems to be increasingly the norm for ordering directly from the manufacturer, given soo many are in China or countries we have decided it is a “good” idea to impose tariffs on (which the customer has to pay).

Yep. Accidentally imported some parts for my car (thought they were in the states, but no, China), got a random message about duty fees. I initially thought it was a scam, but got another, so I followed the link on a safe device (laptop running Linux). It gave a valid address from the shipping company with details that verified my order, so I had to pay or it wouldn’t be delivered. Very annoying, should have been told earlier that I needed to pay duties/tariffs so I could plan accordingly.

My point is that while it’s a pc, it’s more positioned to be a console. If steam limited sales to one per customer and only for established steam accounts for the first runs (like they are already beginning to do for the steam deck and controllers), then they could force it to be more of a console. I do think it’ll still be a bad launch, as the goal of the steam machine clearly is to put them in Xbox territory for regular consumers, and the current price and any other changes probably won’t help that for new customers.

Not particularly. Steam gets 30% back on all game sales, so if they can make sure the steam machine gets only to people with established steam accounts, then they’re probably coming out ahead.

Oh, I agree, I just found it rather funny that a random person was able to bring down teams ram usage without much trouble, something that Microsoft doesn’t seem to care about. Teams really needs just to be paired back to messaging and video/audio calls, all of the other stuff just aren’t used.

Yep, not to mention it’s a basic messaging program, but it regularly uses 1-2gb of ram on a lot of machines at my workplace. Had a coworker vibe code a lightweight version (terminal based), he pretty easily got it down to 80ish mb, and it mostly worked (the whole thing was mostly for shits and giggles, but surprisingly usable).

Yeah. You show me a Linux user, I’ll show you someone who has worked in tech support with primarily windows machines.

For the printer side, sure. But if they start declaring slicers that aren’t phoning to a govt server illegal… they’ll be slightly harder to find and install. Which is just why this is soo stupid. Not only is it very hard to enforce, phoning models into a central server and expecting it to know what models contain parts for a gun or the like isn’t really possible (you could maybe make some AI to intuit a bit, but it would probably suck at actually figuring out if a print is dangerous or not).

They’re probably gonna try making the slicer send the print to a central server (based on what I was hearing about the California law), so while making a printer from a kit (like a Voron) isn’t a bad idea, they’re probably gonna try to aim for the software side. The whole thing is so dumb.

Not only that, but if there are chemicals in that water that can’t be filtered, that’s just in the well water now. As someone who grew up on well water in the country, that’s terrifying, as you aren’t gonna get water pumped in at a price that is viable. Especially when you realize most of rural Georgia is like that (same with a lot of southern states).

It’s a mixed bag, most of the time the desktop cards work fine, but mobile gpus are a little more wonky. Had a desktop rtx 2070 super under endeavoros as well until the last 6 months (even on the sway community edition, which is wayland based), but I have to admit the rx 9070xt that replaced it was much easier to setup and get going with no fuss thus far (plus really easy to undervolt, so I don’t use a ton of power as well).

True, which surprisingly in a first world country actually can be an issue. A lot of the people that I see recommending stuff like ivermectin for human use mostly kinda remind me of my great grandmother, who grew up during the depression, when you just had to make due with stuff that probably wasn’t the best, but so long as it somewhat worked, they’d use it (even if it absolutely boiled down to placebo effect). The common thread in my mind is basically just that in both cases, they and their families were broke and healthcare wasn’t necessarily an option (unless the problem was immediate and completely necessary, like a broken arm or profuse bleeding that was going to require a ton of stitches).

Honestly, my suspicion is that you can easily get the stuff. I’ve gotten it for my dog once or twice (it’s a lot cheaper than dog dewormer, despite basically being the same thing), and all you have to do is go into a Tractor supply or the like and it’s right on the shelf, no restrictions or anything. This is in contrast to actual medicine, where I have to go to a CVS or the like to pay an overpriced amount for something that is more regulated, and might even be a bit of a placebo effect in the first place (look at flu meds for an example of that).

All of this mostly seems to speak more to the degrading of the American healthcare system due to costs ballooning beyond what some of the poorer in society can afford, so they are more willing to try folk remedies that may or may not work. And in the case of your grandmother, is she gonna risk paying a lot of her life savings to cure her tumors if they aren’t benign (without a guarantee that it will work), or is she just gonna hope that the $10 treatment might make her feel better? If they’re benign, then the $10 treatment “worked”, and if they’re not, then she’ll get expensive treatment anyway, just probably be in a worse position to get it.

Uh, no it’s not. Quite literally the opposite actually. You can get apks for your apps outside of the play store currently, just have to install them yourself (yeah, you need to check a box to install third party apps once, but that’s it). The proposed change from google is mostly to make that harder, and make most users locked more into the play store ecosystem so that Google gets their cut from everything.

If that’s the case, then Google really needs to fix the play store because you can absolutely get malware from there. This change is mostly to start locking down the ecosystem to force users to only be able to pay Google a cut of all revenue on the platform (apple already does this). It’s bullshit, and it hopefully backfires for Google.

“What do you mean, ‘Why do I need that stack of old ThinkPads?’. They were free!”