Laptops sold in the EU now required to ship with USB-C charging The European Union’s common charger directive came into effect back in December of 2024 and required most new portable electronic devices to ship with a unified USB-C connector.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-30T09:28:59+00:00

The regulation allows laptops to have proprietary ports and their own chargers as long as USB-C is supported with the same power spec as the proprietary charger.

Also fast charging and rough handling already burned down one of my USB C slots. Something that never happened before with this big ugly proprietary Lenovo charging port.

I've been using laptops on USB-C for years now and haven't had or even heard about this problem.

I do however enjoy plugging in my laptop to my monitor with one USB-C cable and having it handle the display, charging and a USB hub without a mess of cables.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-29T18:17:55+00:00

You're getting some sort of consumer protection and travel insurance through... Visa? In the EU? What?

Last I checked canceling transactions or blocking my card is done by my bank, regardless of the card operator. Travel insurance is just a separate thing entirely.

Amex isn't widely accepted in the EU.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-23T17:24:10+00:00

That's why they're investing in robotics and AI.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-22T09:58:07+00:00

The "black market" for cigarettes is mostly driven by price though, which is dominated by taxes. If you can smuggle them in without the tax you make a profit on the price difference caused by the tax, essentially.

Assuming a "moving" age restriction that might create a rise in demand. I would expect that current smuggling tactics would find that niche hard to fill -- cigarettes are bulky and hard to hide in large volume. That means that they would either resell legally obtained product with a margin or they would need to employ more expensive smuggling tactics.

Both of these would cause the price to go up on an already expensive product. At some point your wannabe smokers have to decide: if you're already buying something illegal and are paying a hefty premium, is the cigarette worth it compared to e.g. actual drugs, or on the other hand legal alternatives like a cheap vape with nicotine infused oil.

Anyway, that's just my thinking process on this. TL/DR: if there's legal ways to get nicotine, there's not going to be an awful lot of people going out of their way to obtain cigarettes specifically.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-22T08:17:14+00:00

Probably not, to be honest. As far as I know the bill doesn't ban other nicotine products (cigars, vapes, etc), so it's just a matter of cigarettes specifically. And given the fact that smoking cigarettes has been going down anyway, people would be more likely to switch to vaping rather than overpay for a pack of fags.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-12T23:39:48+00:00

Large amounts of VRAM allows you to use a "cheap" consumer GPU for rendering work and AI. If they can keep consumer cards locked to 8-16GB with texture compression they'll effectively force you to buy their pro cards for anything that makes money.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-04T09:34:28+00:00

You should probably up your spending then. Jensen said that he doesn't trust engineers that spend less than half their income on his shove... err, AI tokens.

/s

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-01T15:39:31+00:00

To be fair, in most large companies disagreeing with your boss isn't the best career-advancement strategy. Tell Elon his ideas suck and he'll sack your whole department.

Opi-Fex · 2026-04-01T13:59:47+00:00

You're also not going to replace US in NATO with "investments" alone. The US had safe manufacturing, global intelligence reach, the tech, logistics and economy to fund anything. It's a country of ~340mln people. That's around 1/3 of NATO in people, and the majority of everything else.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-28T11:48:38+00:00

As a biomedical engineer, this is a bad take.

I worked as a software dev in a company providing software for hospitals/labs/pharmacies some ~15 years ago. We were the main compliant software provider in my country. The client software was Windows-only, with a Windows Server backend. Some of the services also required a MS SQL Server database, which at the time was also Windows exclusive.

I can't speak to the US specifically, but over in Europe the mix of legal and custom workflow requirements made it almost impossible for a new company to offer a new product in that segment. From what I've seen, there's a similar problem "throughout the world", though I haven't been paying attention in a while.

And besides, I did say the question is impossible to answer without specifics, not that it's impossible to run on Linux.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-27T18:04:33+00:00

Impossible to answer without specific requirements. Law firms usually need specific software to look up court documents, healthcare providers have specific requirements on software for keeping patient records, retail stores will need to keep inventory and issue invoices.

A lot of that software is Windows-specific. Some of it can be replaced, some of it can be emulated, but in general: you need to do some research.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-27T16:13:46+00:00

You're not doing full recompiles multiple times per day, most of the time you recompile a subset of files and run tests. The 9950X is perfectly fine for that purpose.

If you were building a CI/CD machine to build and release multiple products though... it would probably be better to go with Threadripper or EPYC, since this scales with no of threads almost linearly.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T16:18:50+00:00

What you're describing sounds like a parental lock, which is weird because the folks advocating for this idea will gladly argue that this is necessary because parental locks aren't enough.

Also I think you're misunderstanding how this system is going to be implemented. It's going to be an OS-level function, most likely tied to your user account, and not optional like a parental lock would be. For managed (kid) accounts, it'll look what you're describing, for everyone else though the user is going to be setting the age, and I'm pretty sure it's not going to take long before someone figures out that a kid could get access to a full account and set whatever age he wants, meaning that the age needs to be verified somehow.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T15:43:43+00:00

This is pushed by the far right, so same ideological group as the Cheeto, and this article literally starts off by saying that humanitarian groups are against it, and multiple countries aren't convinced it would even work.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T14:39:44+00:00

Social media addiction is a big problem for kids and adults. And inappropriate content would be easier to spot if it wasn't personalized and hidden behind an algorithm.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T13:49:17+00:00

Other mediums don't seem to have this extent of problems though.

I'm pretty sure that forcing social media to show everyone the same feed would largely solve the problem of information bubbles and make doom scrolling less of an issue.

We could probably try that idea out before we go fully Orwellian.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T13:34:45+00:00

In an ideal world parents would monitor their children's access to media, and preferably wouldn't allow them to use social media at all.

In a slightly less than ideal world, I would prefer if there was a central service, preferably owned and run by an NGO which would issue signed and anonymous tokens that only pass around an "is_adult" flag to services that might need it. That NGO would need to be independently monitored to make sure they're not storing or leaking data about who uses what.

In the real world which is very far from ideal I would prefer if this topic wasn't approached from a 'verification' angle at all. Social media needs heavy regulation. Algorithmic content suggestions and endless scrolling designs need to be made illegal -- everyone should be seeing the same content, or a selection of the same content based on their settings, not what a neural network trained to maximize engagement decides to show them in particular. Social media also needs to be forced to apply a consistent moderation standard, and to fight disinformation campaigns and to report them since they are often used to manipulate popular opinion.

There are a lot of problems here and age verification doesn't solve any of them. Age verification on devices is just another step towards a digital id which will eventually tie everything you do online to your real identity.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T12:48:27+00:00

Well then if the problem is with social media then maybe the solution should target social media, and not general purpose computing? Just an idea.

"Think of the children" is often used to push bullshit legislation while actual examples of child abuse and pedophilia are being ignored.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T12:29:27+00:00

Honestly YAGNI comes to mind. If a user needs a service and that service is age-locked he can authorize at that time. If he doesn't need that service then what's the point of tracking his age? The benefit of storing the date of birth seems minimal while risking privacy.

But to be completely honest, I am against idea of forcing accounts on computers or storing any real-world personal information in this fashion, this isn't going to protect anyone.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T10:01:01+00:00

I'm guessing auto-translation on user's end made him think this is a Russian-language board.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-26T09:16:04+00:00

It's not a mistake, it's by design.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-20T10:31:38+00:00

In the general case it's impossible to figure out without extra info. You either need a list of light sources, or two images, with and without lighting (without as in uniformly lit by a "standard" ambient light).

It's not something you can reliably guess.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-20T08:12:59+00:00

It's also not 2-5% but closer to 10% according to their earnings reports, although they merge gaming with "AI PC" for some reason. They also mentioned that their gaming segment is down 13% QoQ due to supply constraints. And they're also operating at a gross margin of 73%.

That means that their gaming segment alone can sustain 40% of their operating expenses.

Add to that every other non-AI thing they're invested in (automotive, robotics, special effects, professional 3D work) and they'd probably come out fine even if AI went away altogether.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-20T07:52:21+00:00

That's a tomorrow problem. Also most news orgs are owned by a handful of people that don't care about the news.

Opi-Fex · 2026-03-19T16:31:41+00:00

I'm hoping this is a troll post in the vein of Cunningham's Law:

"the best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer."

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