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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • My knowledge is specific to TVA, but I was privy to such an agreement that a Cryptominer I worked for had.

    The Local Utility Provider would bill the company for their usage, but they did not provide the rate. TVA did because of the amount of electricity. This rate is much cheaper than the Utility Provider offers residential customers; economies of scale as well as the inability to store this amount of power meaning it’s “wasted” otherwise. Whenever there is a period of intense usage TVA would provide a 30 minute notice. After the 30 minutes were up the rate provided to us (industry) would more than quadruple, and was actually quite a bit above the residential rate. Residential customers are entirely exempt from this. Your rate, is your rate, is your rate.

    The effect of the above meant that it was a mad scramble to shut everything offline whenever we got notice. Otherwise we were losing money. Regular industry trudged along because their bottom line doesn’t care if their power rate quadrupled for 3 hours a dozen days out of the year. It’s not that big a deal.

    I definitely got to see the sausage being made, and it’s opened up my mind to some of the ignorance around crypto mining. If anything it drove me further away from being interested in it as anything more than a neat tech demonstration that people figured they could trade.




  • Hopefully that becomes more nuanced with time. Did you hack your school? Or an unrelated entity? What color hat, grey or black? Last known activity? Age of the person at the time?

    All questions that need answers presented alongside any history of misuse.

    Honestly I can’t imagine that’s a tenable position to take long term. We’ve seen the U.S. govt rethink it’s approach to IT after it was pointed out their failure to intice applicants was a result of stupidly strict Drug Policy and Dress Code. Who knew that a large segment of the IT field don’t like Business Casual and like to smoke weed? Who knew that people drawn to CyberSecurity are likely to have dabbled on the other side of the line prior to making a career out of it?


  • You’re telling me in 2023, kids are using “Droid” again to refer to Android?

    I hadn’t heard that since they literally first came out.

    Also, this isn’t surprising. It was assumed that younger generations, those growing up with PCs, Tablets, Smartphones, etc, would become inherently skilled with their use. Turns out that was entirely false because it also turns out people don’t want to learn what they aren’t interested in. So if you don’t care about anything more than TikTok, Insta, and Snapchat, then you don’t learn anything more than what is necessary to operate them. And Apple makes this very easy in terms of not needing to relearn even an iota between their models. Android cannot say the same.







  • My desktop has a Sapphire RX 480 with 8 GB of VRAM and plug and play replaceable fans. I paid $260 for it at the end of 2016. For what that card was capable of (fuck, still is capable of) for us to be at 8 GB 4060s and 7600s is disgusting. I mean three years prior to that I paid $299 for a fucking 7950 with 3 GB of VRAM.

    If you wanna buy a pre-built, get a laptop instead. I laid this out in another comment on the subject. $100 each for RAM, PSU, Storage. $200 2k 165hz monitor. $300 CPU, $300 GPU. Not a bad rig? Add $200 for portability and you have a $1300 gaming laptop with a 5800x and 6700xt. $200 to be able to easily carry it with you is definitely worth it. Cause if you want a SFF desktop for portability you’re gonna struggle to get it done for the same price point.

    Could I have thrown down $2k instead of $1.3k to get a stronger desktop? You bet, but it’d be sitting in the corner used as much as my desktop is now because it’s just not convenient for me at this stage in my life. The device I can carry with me to work, my living room, my bedroom, and everywhere in between is the device I’m going to use. I’d much rather it be a laptop than just my phone.