Holy shit.

I managed to get into an M4 Max Mac Studio Pro with 128Gb back in December because I could see where the wind was blowing and needed a new Mac for the next 6-8 years (for reference, my last one was a fully plumped out 2018 Mac Mini).

Now you can’t get my config for any amount of money. Literally - the option for the M4 now tops out at 64Gb, and even moving to 96Gb forces you to the M3 Ultra. That is a drop of 50% in terms of the M4 Max provisioning ceiling, which is notable because you can’t add more later.

Plus, even with just 64Gb, the current M4 Max is now more expensive than what I paid for mine.

The M3 Ultra is even more severely nerfed… its original provisioning ceiling was 512Gb, now it’s only 96Gb, which is a drop of over 80%.

Like, holy shit.

I think I should have been a librarian.

Not in America, you don’t. Librarians are getting doxxed, harassed, and getting death threats for protecting everyone’s right to read.

Some are even being arrested over the right to read.

It’s an ugly time to be a defender of truth and rights in today’s America.

The WiFi alone is enough to keep me employed.

30+ years in the IT industry, 44 using computers.

I will go through extraordinary lengths to hardline a system with an Ethernet port just to avoid using wireless.

It’s not that I don’t know wireless - I do. And that’s the problem. Even after three decades of using it, I still consider it to be by far the most unreliable and downright skanky networking method possible.

Damn, I could use some of that hardware.

The issue came down to ease of usability. PGP simply wasn’t plug-and-play, hell it wasn’t even easy to set up. And most importantly, it absolutely depended on the other person having the same configuration.

As messaging platforms like Signal has shown, security and encryption needs to be transparent and unnoticeable. It needs to be totally frictionless and thinking-free in order for the average Joe to want to use it.

And that is even before other issues such as platform stickiness, which Signal has issues with.

Just a few years older, in IT as a career, and absolutely the same.

And alcohol!

Really? And here I thought it was still in those really confusing Florida ounces. Even up here in Canada, where we do have millilitres marked on our cans, I still see “Fl oz” on many products.

It took me until the early 2020s to realize that men even have body washes in the first place.

Keep in mind that I abandoned broadcast TV around 2001 or 2002, so I completely cut all commercials out of my life.

Then when the first adblocker became available for Phoenix (later Firebird, then Firefox) around 2004, I was all over that like white on rice. So since 2004 the only ads I have had to suffer were when I set up a new system whose browsers needed configuring, and later once my browser protections became too strict and I needed a “naked” web browser for user-hostile sites that tied spyware and near-malware into site-critical functionality.

So I have been “out of the advertising loop” for a very long time, and always saw bodywash as a female thing. I quite literally never “got the memo” that body washes came for men.

And I’m not likely to get any, either. And not for any stupidly sexist reasons - after five decades on this rock, I am just habituated on bars of soap. I just don’t like the showering/soaping-up experience without bar soap.

When I was in my 20s, I would ask for two whole hands of jalapeños on a sub. Well, my catcher’s-mitt-sized hands, that is. Along with all the normal fixin’s. Like, the jalapeños would make up more than half of each sub’s non-bread contents.

And I would frequently eat two of these monstrosities in a single sitting.

I would often have the staff put more and more on because as Filipino ladies, their hands were tiny AF, and they couldn’t imagine eating subs like that. So they were always starting out with 10-20 slices scattered along the entire sub and I was like, “NO. Grab an entire fistful. As much as you can grab. Put that on one end. Then repeat three more times along the sub.”

I mean, I could likely still have that amount of jalapeños on a sub. But I would be stuffed after just one sub, these days. The hollow leg of my youth vanished during my fifth decade, and I’ve been inconsolable ever since.

I find this so confusing… it’s like the old saying, “if you don’t want to be called a fascist, don’t be a fascist!”

Conservatives have the strangest contradictions. They want to be all these socially and morally odious things, then get upset when we call them out on those very things.

I see four downvotes.

Would love to know the position those people have. Are they threatened by their own ignorance being called out? Or are they just conservative?