This was a huge own-goal for their brand image.

If I buy a FTDI based adapter, it might brick, and I lack the detection skill or supply chain control to be sure that it won't happen.

If I buy a CH340 or PLwhatever based adapter, that doesn't enter the calculus.

Unless I had some explicit "only FTDI can possibly do it" need, I'm going elsewhere.

Exactly - the FTDI drivers refusing to work would have been reasonable and emitting a log or error message that my device was counterfeit would have actually been helpful. Instead, they vandalized end user equipment by permanently bricking the devices which is arguably illegal.

I am not nearly sophisticated enough as an end user to spot a counterfeit FTDI usb-to-serial device so I am not going to risk buying that brand and end up with their drivers intentionally bricking the device.

It's fascinating how education has COMPLETELY fallen off the radar politically in the last 10-15 years.

Even before we introduced a WWE manager for the Secretary of Education, we stopped discussing educational competitiveness. I can recall a couple decades ago every year or two the news having nervous handwringing stories about "(originally Japanese, then Korean, then Chinese) 6th graders have the math skills to design a full lunar rocket launch system, while American high-school graduates are incapable of filling out a Lotto playslip correctly".

The only time anyone talks about schools now is "is one getting shot up" or "looking for an excuse to ban books or siphon the few remaining dollars the public school programs have left into private/charter/religious schools that aren't necessarily delivering better overall outcomes." Rather than fixing the affordability crisis in secondary education, we're seeing an awful lot of amplification on the "not everyone should go to college" narrative, which might be technically accurate but seems to undermine the Delta Force plan you mentioned even more. Nobody seems to make education a central campaign issue anymore (even before all issues were subsumed by "will there be a fair election next time?")

The only way it makes sense is if we gave up on the idea of education as an economic driver. What is our economic vision for 2050? Feels like the current administration has maybe two ideas left:

* Hope everyone else leaves the petrostate pool, either by supply collapse or market trend/long term economic vision shifts, and then we can be the world's leading supplier of goo, from a puppetized Venezuela and maybe by coaxing Alberta seperatism enough.

* Bully economics, no longer even trying to compete on legitimate product merits and just saying "You'll buy 70,000 Dodge Darts if you don't want us to start shooting up your fishing boats."

Crypto is arguably among the worst assets for that threat model though.

When they called in the physical gold, people could squirrel away their $10 and $20 coins in wallsafes and shoeboxes to trade with trusted partners later. Declaring the coins illegal didn't cause them to disappear from people's hands directly.

Crypto doesn't have that physical anchor. If a major world government declared it illegal tomorrow, how would you, as a resident of that country, access the value in your favourite blockchain wallet?

Law enforcement could monitor the remnants of the network and trying to trigger transactions is obvious probable cause. That assumes the remnants still function-- they aren't being blocked by DPI/filtering, or just the functional destabilization caused by a large number of participants being unplugged from the network.

At best, you'd have to go off-ledger and trade talismans (handing over a document with the private keys for an existing wallet like a bearer instrument and hoping they didn't run off multiple copies, or just trying to keep records of transactions and balances elsewhere and hoping to resynch eventually)

This is also why the paper dollar is so important to its reserve-currency status. An enterprising bank in the developing world might say "we offer USD-denominated accounts, all digital, it's 20xx" for customers who don't trust the local currency, but those are a lot easier for the local government to deactivate than a coffee can full of greenbacks buried in their backyard.

1. PHP and C. 2. I wish C had PHP's native "associative array as junk drawer" data structure. Conversely, I wish PHP had more support for a "long lifetime" task that wasn't expected to vanish at the end of a page load. 3. Am I trying to target the web? Then PHP.

There's also 4) Manufacturers could position the price of spares at a level that's intended to provide pressure to scrap salvagable devices and put the customer back into the market. The classic "it will be $150 to send the guy out, and the magic PCB is $250, while an entire new washer is $550, are you sure you want to throw money into an N-years-old unit? (Bear in mind this calculus applies to the people who are not even considering DIY repair)

5) Manufacturers are burdened with selling the entire spares catalog, while third parties may concentrate on the highest-turnover items that they can sell easily.

Years ago, I looked at the service manual for a 1980s stereo receiver, and the manufacturer literally starred the parts they mentioned as most commonly needed for replacements. (The part I needed was, unsurprisingly, on that list)

I wish we'd see more in the way of "open PCB" appliances. 90% of "white goods" appliances (washers/driers/dishwashers/fridges/stoves/microwaves) have a board somewhere that reads a membrane keypad and a few sense switches and activates some relays and displays a timer. You could probably design a master PCB that replaced hundreds of different models, with different cable harnesses and firmware configurations for each model.

This would dramatically reduce the number of SKUs to stock, but at the cost of the master PCB probably costing a few dollars more because they can't strip out every non-essential component for lower-end models.

For that kind of scam, all you really need the cooler, which are often parted out for legit reasons (watercooling, replacements, probably some specialized high-density and rackmount plays) and may be available as a spare or "second-shift" offering.

It would probably be easy to produce a PCB that's the right size to fit a 4090 cooler, but just contains 90 cents worth of random SMD parts. And you can produce them in quantity when you want them rather than relying on an erratic supply of stripped "real" PCBs.

Wayland should have been been a research project rather than a full replacement for X11. Build it as a proof of concept implementation with just enough functionality that enthusiasts can get it up and running and add to the conversation early on. Then when you build the real X11 killer you can say "we know people want media keys and screen sharing/capture to Just Work so they're table stakes" and "the hardware-support side of a compositor is a big lift, so maybe we delegate that away from the code that positions windows and draws menus on the screen"

For me the last one was Blade and Soul, and in the end, I dropped it rather than put up with it.

Even live-service games are less of a hassle than they used to be. BDO works well, Genshin works with occasionally having to update Proton, and the new shiny Where Winds Meet worked for me from the first day (never even tried it on Windows :P)

I think in the last 6 months, I've dual-booted for pretty much these things:

* To install a new motherboard's RGB-tweak utility because it doesn't work right in OpenRGB yet. Ran it once to pick settings, then it seemed to write to NVRAM since it's been stuck that way now.

* To use ham radio programming software that was clearly written by a single hobbyist and I didn't expect to work on anything but happy-path Windows systems.

* To try a weird specialty keyboard with a nonstandard card-reader (most of them just appear as normal HID keyboards, this one was a custom USB endpoint which apparently emulated a serial device with the right software. In the end, it didn't work well in Windows either-- the software was apparently mostly Win7-and-below.

* To deal with an old scanner that the vendor provides a Linux software package for, but only as a binary .deb that didn't seem to work well on Void. (Problem solved by picking up a used scanner explicitly supported by SANE for $10 at the Goodwill)

I guess I don't quite understand what the selling point of a "desktop environment" is. I use a grab-bag of random software but generally don't bother with the KDE and GNOME-specific stuff.

It reminds me of things like the pack-in software you get with Windows. It's convenient because it all comes in one place and more or less works together, but not much of it is particularly best-of-breed.

I guess they've sucked a lot of air out of some niches though-- I suspect a lot of utilities for things like system configuration and file management have turned into parts of the desktop environment rather than standalone tools.

It feels like the quality of our eccentric billionaires has gone downhill.

We've all seen the comic where the villian tells Spider-Man "I don't want to cure cancer, I want to turn people into dinosaurs." I would respect that a hell of a lot more than whatever Bezos/Musk/Zuckerberg/etc are doing with their money. Hell, I'd settle for Howard Hughes levels of madness-mixed-with-genius.

Everyone just buys the same Billionaire Starter Pack these days consisting of ugly yachts and mansions, and the obligatory rocket company. The change is just spent on aggressive hoard-management and political machinations. Is their heart even in any of those ventures? When they wake up, so they say "I spent the first 40 years of my life selling my soul so I can do this, and it was so worth it?"

I know if you dropped twelve figures in my lap, I'd be saying things like "who can I hire to help me engineer an army of superintelligent dragon creatures" or "let's level Peoria, Arizona and rebuild it as a car-free zone with the density of midtown Mahnattan", not "let's buy Yahoo, because all the other depressing media outlets are spoken for already."