Apparently! I’d never heard of it either, and I’m pretty sure it’s primarily known for this meme now. Seems like a dumb name for a company, and it’s making for some pretty confusing headlines in this case. I wouldn’t be surprised if they change the company name in an attempt to remove the stain.

In case you’re not just messin’ around: know your meme link

People who are too cheap to refinish old stairs. Source: I bought a house that had carpet on the stairs, and when we pulled up the carpet we discovered a worn out eyesore that cost thousands to update. In our case the previous owners were a cash strapped family of two young kids with a third on the way. They needed a bigger place for their family so I don’t fault them for going cheap on the stairs. The all-white paintjob and industrial grey carpet in the photo scream “landlord special” to me, so I’m less inclined to be forgiving in my assessment of the stairs in the photo.

I think that’s a heavy duty banister bracket, like this one:

Some banister brackets have a swivel type arrangement so that the bracket can be vertical underneath the handrail, no matter the angle of the handrail. Basic heavy duty brackets like this one are completely fixed in orientation, so they’re installed with the vertical support at an angle to support the handrail. I suspect the bracket in the photo is at a 45ish degree angle and only looks vertical due to the perspective. The banister has been deliberately cropped out of the photo to make the perspective as confusing as possible.

Personally I think the photo was taken from the top of the stairs looking down, based on the wear in the carpet.

Except the car’s HVAC system passes air through a filter. How much of a difference that makes is going to depend on the type of filter and whether it’s been changed sufficiently often, but it’s definitely doing more than nothing.

Father David Michael? Never trust someone with two first names.

Oh I’m streets ahead, I never took him at his word in the first place.

OpenAI on that enshittification speedrun any% no-glitch!

Honestly though, they’re skipping right past the “be good to users to get them to lock in” step. They can’t even use the platform capitalism playbook because it costs too much to run AI platforms. Shit is egregiously expensive and doesn’t deliver sufficient return to justify the cost. At this point I’m ~80% certain that AI is going to be a dead tech fad by the end of this decade because the economics just don’t work now that the free money era has ended.

They smell like plastic, metal, complex hydrocarbons, and death.

Anything that pushes the CPUs significantly can cause instability in affected parts. I think there are at least two separate issues Intel is facing:

• Voltage irregularities causing instability. These could potentially be fixed by the microcode update Intel will be shipping in mid-August.
• Oxidation of CPU vias. This issue cannot be fixed by any update, any affected part has corrosion inside the CPU die and only replacement would resolve the issue.

Intel’s messaging around this problem has been very slanted towards talking as little as possible about the oxidation issue. Their initial Intel community post was very carefully worded to make it sound like voltage irregularity was the root cause, but careful reading of their statement reveals that it could be interpreted as only saying that instability is a root cause. They buried the admission that there is an oxidation issue in a Reddit comment, of all things. All they’ve said about oxidation is that the issue was resolved at the chip fab some time in 2023, and they’ve claimed it only affected 13th gen parts. There’s no word on which parts number, date ranges, processor code ranges etc. are affected. It seems pretty clear that they wanted the press talking about the microcode update and not the chips that will have the be RMA’d.

Oh for sure, those are a communal resource.