The one point I don’t completely understand is the tax debt: Wouldn’t a failed business, no matter how ridiculous, be a complete write-off?

Maybe the problem is that he has to tax each fiscal year independently, so a tax debt in 2023 from successful freelance work would not be diminished by a failed “business idea” in 2024.

wow, you are right! I didn’t bother to check this whole time of needless suffering, but for what I earn with it in less than an hour I could probably buy 2x8 GB DDR-3, lol!

It just seemed a fair assumption that it would be insanely expensive …

I bought a desktop PC for a little over 2k in late 2011, and still use it. I’m a back-end developer, and certainly I would like to be able to upgrade my 16 GB RAM to 32 GB in an affordable way.

Other than that, it’s perfectly fine. IDE, a few docker containers, works.

And modern gaming is a scam anyway. Realistic graphics do not increase fun, they just eat electricity and our money. Retro gaming or not at all.

Imagine how things were if they were built to be maintained for 15+ years.

I’m retro computing, retro everything tech, and I DO need my collection!

Just had to order a keyboard DIN connector (pre PS-2) adapter for a old 80386. Because I obviously still don’t hoard enough old stuff!

One of the few things I’m afraid I won’t be able to use anymore are UMTS (3G) sticks and routers. Although, the router still works a perfectly fine mobile Wifi router, hmmmmm …

This is a crazy use of AI!

What I have been considering, but haven’t found a readily available setup yet: Make a user with lots of read permissions (most of /etc, API keys & passwords in separate excluded files). That could be done with very restrictive sudo patterns. Let the AI run commands under that user directly (it can do sudo -l to get an idea of what it can do). Then, use it like in Star Trek “Computer - run a level 2 diagnostic”.

Not as the centre of attention when fixing a problem, but as additional input / modern rubber ducking.

Thanks! The whole PC had a time (when its age was ~20 years) where it still booted, but with reset BIOS settings, followed by a time where it doesn’t boot up anymore. So I believe the most likely thing is that it leaked and caused damage. Retro computing community things that the most likely cause is battery damage.

Here is the exact model from someone else: theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/msi-3121-v3

Battery (top-left) already removed, but it shows that this one has leaked before as well. When you look closely, you see battery residue on the nearby 8-bit ISA (?), so it must have leaked a lot at some point and been cleaned up. Unfortunately, it came with a notorious Ni-Cd Battery; even for its time not the best.

I have an old mainboard from 1990 with emotional value and a leaked BIOS battery. And advice for cleaning that?

Well, he should then have said: “Thanks for the offer, but my feet are disgusting right now after a day in these new boots.” or just “no, I’m good”.

But I think it would be far-fetched to assume that the masseuse is a minor (she turned 18 that year), or that a well-known billionaire relies on slave labour for a simple massage. My assumption would be that she probably landed a dreamjob with half the work and twice the pay.

So accepting that massage is at worst general scumbag behaviour as we witness it on an average day in the city. To be clear, I would absolutely not have accepted it.

lol, getting all displays working is indeed my biggest worry for my last Windows PC, migrating next month. It has both an NVIDIA and a Radeon GPU, and that works great on Windows. But a quick test boot from USB did not go so well on Ubuntu, so the truth will only come out after a real install with drivers.