Trainguyrom

I’d also argue the ‘GAMES MUST BE ULTRA AT 4K144 OR DONT BOTHER’ take is wrong.

Some of the best games I've played have graphics that'll run on a midrange GPU from a decade ago, if not just integrated graphics

Case in point, this is what I'm playing right now:

Sometimes I feel bad for scammers because I know how long it takes just to freaking reset a password on legitimate support calls at work (and usually that's someone who's put in a vague ticket saying "software isn't working" so I emailed them a "I'm not a psychic" email with a link to schedule a call which requires one to schedule on the next business day just to finally talk on the phone and identify what they couldn't write out in their ticket 2 days ago) but then I remember that they're fucking scammers and often fully aware of what they're doing

It sounds like in the above case the codes were real 2fa codes from his bank as the scammers were resetting their login credentials then adding an external account to initiate a transfer. Presumably they were simply reusing info from a breach to make the scam smoother

My wife had a forgotten bill get sent to small claims instead of actually contacting her. As soon as it hit the small claims court system she got inundated with ads from law firms offering to represent her

They say it doesn't but my real world experience is that you have to re-register every year or three. But it definitely makes a difference in the legal spam callers at least

That's honestly kinda funny but also very useful!

i noticed both of the ethernet lights were on and blinking

So usually one of the lights on the port indicates the link state (up/down and if its at full speed or a reduced speed) and the other light indicates data flow. Both lights blinking suggests either a really shoddy link state or an unusual implementation of status lights on the port. Do both lights blink while its booted and actively transferring a large file? Can you find documentation of how your device implements the indicator LEDs? (I can't tell if that's a dongle or a port on your computer)

If the power cord is plugged in but the computer is shutdown, and the light is still on, then that means the network adapter supports WoL or OOB management and must stay on for that reason

Also worth noting that Windows is especially bad about actually shutting down when you tell it to shut down because something something fastboot. I've seen similar inconsistently on Linux but I strongly suspect that to be more edgecases with specific hardware and my install.

The lights are blinking because broadcasts packets from other devices on your LAN are sent to every device. This is normal and expected behavior.

Just building off of this, modern computers are chatty as heck and there's just constantly little bits of chatter spamming out on LANs. This is normal and expected behavior

who on earth is listening to hi-res wireless audio and not a song off of Spotify, YouTube, etc?

I generally agree with you but as someone who can't hear the compression in a good quality mp3 I can definitely hear when Bluetooth is using an older audio encoding protocol because it compresses the music to hell and back

About 10 years ago I used headphones daily, now I do so just frequently enough that it's irritating to realize I need to purchase a dongle just to do so and go "well I guess I'm not listening to music/podcasts right now"

What I learned when working for a phone manufacturer is that the headphone jack usage varies by product segment. Cheaper phone users use the headphone jack far more frequently than premium phone users, so they'd keep it on the budget models but drop it on the higher end models. They also did similar with NFC and wireless charging which was interesting...

2020 kinda accelerated the existing trends and got a majority of people willing to watch films at home instead of in theaters. Before that enough people really enjoyed the theater experience that it wasn't too much of a threat to the business model