Man, just don’t go to the US, full stop. At this point if my employer asked me to go to the US, I would straight up refuse.

Canadians have two moods. The first is “I’m sorry”, the second is “You’ll be sorry.”

Second mood activated.

Not the person you replied to, but I’m in agreement with them. I did tech hiring for some years for junior roles, and it was quite common to see applicants with a complete alphabet soup of certifications. More often than not, these cert-heavy applicants would show a complete lack of ability to apply that knowledge. For example they might have a network cert of some kind, yet were unable to competently answer a basic hypothetical like “what steps would you take to diagnose a network connection issue?” I suspect a lot of these applicants crammed for their many certifications, memorized known answers to typical questions, but never actually made any effort to put the knowledge to work. There’s nothing inherently wrong with certifications, but from past experience I’m always wary when I see a CV that’s heavy on certs but light on experience (which could be work experience or school or personal projects).

However, it’s worth mentioning that WireGuard is UDP only.

That’s a very good point, which I completely overlooked.

If you want something that “just works” under all conditions, then you’re looking at OpenVPN. Bonus, if you want to marginally improve the chance that everything just works, even in the most restrictive places (like hotel wifi), have your VPN used port 443 for TCP and 53 for UDP. These are the most heavily used ports for web and DNS. Meaning you VPN traffic will just “blend in” with normal internet noise (disclaimer: yes, deep packet inspection exists, but rustic hotel wifi’s aren’t going to be using it ;)

Also good advice. In my case the VPN runs on my home server, there are no UDP restrictions of any kind on my home network and WireGuard is great in that scenario. For a mobile VPN solution where the network is not under your control and could be locked down in any number of ways, you’re definitely right that OpenVPN will be much more reliable when configured as you suggest.

I use WireGuard personally. OpenVPN has been around a long time, and is very configurable. That can be a benefit if you need some specific configuration, but it can also mean more opportunities to configure your connection in a less-secure way (e.g. selecting on older, less strong encryption algorithm). WireGuard is much newer and supports fewer options. For example it only does one encryption algorithm, but it’s one of the latest and most secure. WireGuard also tends to have faster transfer speeds, I believe because many of OpenVPN’s design choices were made long ago. Those design choices made sense for the processors available at the time, but simply aren’t as performant on modern multi core CPUs. WireGuard’s more recent design does a better job of taking advantage of modern processors so it tends to win speed benchmarks by a significant margin. That’s the primary reason I went with WireGuard.

In terms of vulnerabilities, it’s tough to say which is better. OpenVPN has the longer track record of course, but its code base is an order of magnitude larger than WireGuard’s. More eyes have been looking at OpenVPN’s code for more time, but there’s more than 10x more OpenVPN code to look at. My personal feeling is that a leaner codebase is generally better for security, simply because there’s fewer lines of code in which vulnerabilities can lurk.

If you do opt for OpenVPN, I believe UDP is generally better for performance. TCP support is mainly there for scenarios where UDP is blocked, or on dodgy connections where TCP’s more proactive handling of dropped packets can reduce the time before a lost packet gets retransmitted.

The next tech bubble, IMO.

Market capitalization is just simple math, multiplying a company’s stock price by the number of shares that have been issued. Tesla has issued roughly 3.2 billion shares and is currently trading at around $550, which makes their current market cap about $1.75 trillion dollars.

I don’t understand how the value can be that high compared to all of the other companies, especially China.

On its face it seems utterly nonsensical that Tesla is worth as much as all other auto makers combined, when Tesla only accounts for something like 5% of total US car sales. There are two reasons I can think of why this is currently so:

• Tesla accounts for roughly half of all US electric vehicle sales, and electric vehicle sales are roughly 10% of all US vehicle sales. If electric vehicles largely replace ICE vehicles and if Tesla maintains that share of EV sales, then Tesla will be an extremely valuable company. Investors might be betting on a) electric vehicles and b) Tesla continuing to the win the lion’s share of electric vehicle sales.
• Tesla investors are irrational. Personally, my money is on this one. I think long-term Tesla is going to get crushed by cheaper and better-built EVs, probably from China but also possibly from other existing car manufacturers. Sometimes I’m tempted to short Tesla’s stock based on this belief, but to quote John Maynard Keynes: “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

I’d wait for independent reviews. The first wave of Intel GPUs had a lot of issues, mostly related to drivers. From what I understand Intel has come a long way on the driver front in the past year, but we don’t have a clear picture on their overall state with the new parts. Reviewers like GamersNexus will call out whether the current state of the drivers are good enough for a recommendation, or if Intel still has more ground to cover.

AMD crowns the Ryzen 7 9800X3D a ‘gaming legend’

Memes aside, I’m eager to see some independent benchmarks. Been a while since I did a hardware refresh and I got the itch.

The software subscription fee was an ongoing cost to whoever installed the equipment, now that fee has been replaced by a per-use fee that’s part of what drivers pay. It’s easier for businesses to justify installing chargers if they know that it’s a one-time purchase with no ongoing subscriptions, fees, or management hassles.

Off topic: how much would it cost to run a charger continuously?

Depends where you are and how much electricity costs there. Could also depend on time-of-day if electricity metering in that area has time-of-use rates. The biggest level 2 chargers put out 19kw, where I live it would cost about $60 per day to run one of those chargers at absolute maximum. Realistically speaking it would be hard to run one full-time though, since the average EV has ~80kw of battery and would be full after 4-ish hours.

Yeah, I don’t get it either. What I’ve seen doesn’t look anywhere close to an 8+ out of ten rating. Will be interesting to see the player ratings on this one…

I don’t dislike that art style in general, but to my mind it seems like a poor fit for a Dragon Age game. I guess they’re pivotinf strongly away from the series dark and gritty roots, which is unfortunate because I think that was one of its strong points.

Watching Skill Up’s review now, and oof. That art style… that writing. Don’t know who they made this game for, but it’s definitely not me.

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.

All known mineral reserves could power the world on exclusively nuclear energy for several thousand years at least.

You got a source for that? Because the one I linked says that we run out of known Uranium deposits by 2100 at current usage rates. Our known Uranium deposits run out mid-century if we use nuclear to follow the IEA Blue Map plan to reduce carbon emissions by 50%, and we run out of even speculated deposits by 2100 under that scenario. Where are you getting “several thousand years” from? Is Thorium part of the mineral reserves to which you’re referring?

It is somewhat unclear how much Uranium is available worldwide (for strategic reasons), but even at current production, supply issues have been known to happen.

Nuclear fission using Uranium is not sustainable. If we expand current nuclear technologies to tackle climate change then we’d likely run out of Uranium by 2100. Nuclear fusion using Thorium might be sustainable, but it’s not yet a proven, scalable technology. And all of this is ignoring the long lead times, high costs, regulatory hurdles and nuclear weapon proliferation concerns that nuclear typically presents. It’d be great if nuclear was the magic bullet for climate change, but it just ain’t.