That was the case on the old Motorola StarTac. One battery was attached to the top of the flip, and then there was a larger battery that could be clipped onto the back. Both would power the phone so as long as one had power you could swap the other.

Jesus fuck. Are these people absolutely help end on losing every election possible?

In my opinion, it should go absolutely without saying that if you lose to Donald Trump, you’re done. If the country picks Trump over you, you are obviously not what the country wants and you should go sit down and let somebody else give it a go.

Yeah I think if the DNC is asked to choose between their big donors and winning elections, they’ll pick the donors.

mentally [ill] man who needs help.

I agree with this. A while back he did an interview with Lex Fridman. For those not familiar with Lex, he does long-form interviews of an hour or more that get into great detail on various subjects, and he makes a point to educate himself on those subjects beforehand so it is an actual discussion, not the usual interview of a guy explaining his job to somebody who has never heard of it.

For anyone not convinced Ye needs help, please go listen to that interview.

Ye early on blames the ‘Jewish media’ for an awful lot of the world’s problems. Lex encourages him to call out specific members of that media for specific problems, rather than writing off an entire religion and an entire industry. Lex encourages him to use his platform to identify bad actors and directly oppose them. Ye refuses any specifics, talking only in broad general terms.

Ye then says with full conviction that we should stop teaching history in schools, that it is a waste of time and resources to relive the past and we should be teaching science and math and engineering instead as history offers us little or nothing of value. Lex of course brings up several parallels between history and modern society and similar problems happening under similar situations, once again Ye refuses to acknowledge and keeps restating his point in different words.

These are just two of the bigger issues. I got about halfway through the interview before I concluded that this man has no fundamental understanding of how the world works or of how human nature works, that he was either deluded or mentally ill or just very stupid, let his positions are almost entirely without merit and that he is a person and his ideas are probably unworthy of any consideration of mine. For me that’s a pretty big thing, I try to separate the person from the idea and give everybody equal consideration.

But after listening to Ye speak for half an hour, I concluded it was the same as going to a mental hospital and listening to one of the patients rant about how aliens ate their brain for half an hour- The only thing I get from the experience is half an hour older.

I don’t know what is wrong with Ye. Maybe he is just uneducated and ignorant and managed to fail upwards because he’s good at music. Maybe he is mentally ill. I don’t know. But I do know that he is not a smart or intelligent person that we should be listening to in any capacity.

This is absolutely right. We are getting to the point where the circuit pathway is hundreds or even dozens of electrons wide. The fact that we can even make circuits that small in quantity is fucking amazing. But we are rapidly approaching laws-of-physics type limits in how much smaller we can go.

Plus let’s not forget an awful lot of the super high-end production is being gobbled up by AI training farms and GPU clusters. Companies that will buy 10,000 chips at a time are absolutely the preferred customers.

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

At the risk of asking a dumb question, isn’t parading military units down public streets the sort of thing communist dictatorships do?

I know I’ve seen video of this sort of thing from places like North Korea and Soviet Russia, can’t say I’ve really seen it from the states.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

And I think that says more about everyone else than it does about Mr West.

The sad thing is, I think you are correct, without even joking. I think he literally needs some kind of help.

I try to keep an open mind always. So a while back he did a Lex Friedman interview, and I listened to it. For anyone not familiar, Lex does long form interviews of an hour or more and gets deep into various subjects.

I got about halfway through before concluding that there is something seriously wrong with West. Maybe he is just stupid (not as an insult, I mean like he lacks any sort of intelligence) or maybe he has brain damage or maybe he is just delusional. But you listen to the guy talk for more than 5 minutes at a time and you wonder what the hell is wrong with him.

For example, he spent a lot of time blaming the ‘Jewish media’ for a lot of America’s problems. Lex repeatedly asked him for specifics, challenged him to call out specific members or leaders of said media for specific actions, challenged him to use his platform to identify bad actors. He had few if any specifics and saw no particular benefit in any specific call outs, in his world it’s all a conspiracy and the whole ‘Jewish media’ and everyone part of it is all one and the same.

Furthermore, he spent a lot of time explaining why we should stop teaching history in schools. Said we should focus on science and technology classes and not waste time reliving the past. Lex tried hard to challenge that, even brought up specific non-partisan examples from history that presented useful lessons for today. It had no effect, West continued to double down on the position that teaching kids history is a waste of time and resources.

At this point I had wasted about half an hour listening to the guy, and decided he was simply not worth my time to listen any further, because he obviously fundamentally misunderstood how the world works, how human nature works, and had little or no facts or evidence to back up his positions. I concluded that any further ideas from West can probably be safely dismissed without much consideration, because his thought process shows no evidence of rational or scientific thought.

Honestly the best analogy I can think of is like going to a mental institution and listening to a crazy person. They will talk your head off for an hour about how aliens infected their brain or whatever, and the only thing you will get from it is an hour older.

Yeah I actually hadn’t seen that at all. There’s not many of those toaster style NAS cases, that one is fairly big as it needs a full size power supply. What I have in mind though is basically same size and form factor as a Synology DS9xx, 4-6 3.5" bays, main board under or off to the side, 1-2 NVMe slots, low power CPU. Basically clone a Synology DS9xx but put a standard UEFI BIOS on it as well as a video output. I think that would sell pretty well. Especially if you gave it 10 gig ethernet and a CPU that had an AI accelerator.

Could of course build the thing yourself, but it ends up bigger.

Yeah exactly. And from what I understand of this thing, it has a fairly easy to use auto update system. So every couple months just plug it into your router and hit the update button. I don’t think it’s a ripoff.

If you are asking this question, this product is probably not for you.
It’s for the non-technical prepper type, the guy who has 10,000 rounds of ammo and dried food for 10 years but still uses AOL.
The idea is just get this thing, plug it into a solar power bank, and then you can get information you might need to survive which wouldn’t be available online if there is no more internet. You could absolutely put the same thing together yourself without a problem. If you have the skill and the wherewithal to do that, you don’t need this. If you don’t have that skill, then you are the target market of this product.

Oh absolutely. Without a doubt. Broadcom / VMware have lost trust for good

Tons of alternatives from other NAS vendors, but I’m not sure anyone makes a Synology type box that is a generic x86 to run your own OS. Plenty of tower server type things but I’m not aware of any little toaster type boxes.

Oh tons of alternatives for sure. Where I’m at, at this point if I go somewhere else I’m going to want open source most likely.

Yeah exactly. I’m on vacation, if I wanted to do chores I would have stayed home. Plenty of choice to do right here.

Broadcom released a free VMware again, Synology is locking down their products,… Did Synology just hire some brain dead Broadcom executive?

This is seriously ‘how to kill your brand and customer good will in one easy step’ type nonsense.
Synology does not have the respect in Enterprise that someone like Dell or HPE does. They exist in Enterprise because of admins who use it at home and then bring the knowledge to work.

All this does is make sure nobody will buy one for the home anymore. There are too many other good options. And various open source NAS OS choices becoming more mature by the day.

If I was an OEM like Beelink or Servermicro I would be rushing to make an unbranded storage box, five or six 3.5 in SATA hot swap bays in front, 2-4 NVMe ports on the bottom, decent low power CPU, and an SODIMM socket or two. They’d sell a ton of them.

I also wouldn’t be surprised if a Synology ‘jailbreak’ to load a third party OS comes out.

This 100%.
AirBnB used to be cheaper than a hotel. Then it got so easy to tack on fees and ridiculous requirements that you’re basically paying more than a hotel to housekeep your own room. Mix in lots of shady hosts and most of the time I’d rather just stay at the Hilton for the same price.

It can still be useful as a novelty, like book a party house somewhere or as easily cheaper way to house an awful lot of people. But for the most part, I’ll pass.

Exactly. He has the right idea on this, but given his gun control background I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him. Gun control is, at this point, nothing more than a way to lose votes. To an anti-gun liberal, gun control is good policy that saves lives. To a pro gun person, gun control is an unconstitutional civil rights violation that makes a candidate unlectable. This turns away an awful lot of pro-gun moderates from rural areas- these are the voters who make a difference in elections.
And as for the anti-gun base, and anti-gun moderates, what are they going to do, vote Republican in protest? Let’s be real.

Gun control is a lose lose proposition

Gun control seems to mean ‘a little more’. This comic is popular among gun owners because it reflects the feeling of constantly ratcheting ‘compromise’.

A perfect example of that is background checks. The original bill was a compromise, All gun sales at gun stores are required to have a background check, but the compromise is that private sales between one person and another are exempted. That was a negotiated compromise between the pro gun and anti-gun side. I think for the most part it was a decent compromise. But now the anti-gun side is trying to roll it back calling it the ‘gun show loophole’ which is horribly named because a gun dealer at a gun show has to do a background check anyway, and most gun shows require background checks for all sales either from a dealer or a private citizen.

The problem with universal background checks is the concept of a transfer. For example, under some proposals, if you want to lend somebody your hunting rifle to go hunting with, that might count as a transfer, which means you have to go to a gun store and pay about $50 and fill out paperwork to legally transfer ownership of the gun to them. And then when they return they have to transfer it back to you.

You should also know that an awful lot of gun owners absolutely hate the NRA. They serve a useful purpose, but their constant deranged rabble rousing fundraising makes gun owners look like paranoid morons.
What I would much prefer to do is outreach and education. An awful lot of gun control laws are based on a total misunderstanding of what guns do and how they work and what makes them powerful or not, I think if more Democrats actually understood guns you would see fewer attempts at bad laws that do nothing to increase safety but just try to turn the screws on gun owners.