But getting some closet case computer with unknown hardware and turning it into a server, at scale, is an impossible scheme.

The only way to make it work would be to buy hundreds of laptops at once and refurb, new storage, and standardize with custom power delivery. Because who wants hundreds of laptop PSU's plugged into power strips. And those do in fact die.

And then there's the horror of manually removing wifi hardware and batteries. Battery disposal is an issue. And having worked on hundreds of laptops, some of them are major pains in the neck to get to the battery. Consumer HP's come to mind. The bottom cover can be difficult to remove without breaking any of the clips.

Point of Reference: 27 years in web hosting

I well remember the 486SX/2-66's and how terrible they were. I liked to say that Compaq put the "sorry" in Presario.

In the late 90's, between around 96 and 98, I made good money building AMD 486 DX/4 133's. Those things were blindingly fast for the price. As I recall there was even a 150MHz variant.

Still, my favorite CPU of all time remains the AMD K6/2-450. It wasn't until the Phenom II BE950, a dual core that I unlocked to quad core , that I felt I had a CPU that matched the K6/2-450 in value. Since then I've had a couple of Ryzen's for my daily driver/work machine, and couldn't be happier. AMD has done a fantastic job keeping price and performance in tune. But, it goes even further if you shop smartly.

Overall, this was an excellent read, and brought back a lot of memories. The 6x86 for example- too much promise for what they actually delivered. And, thanks to this article I now know why so many cheap motherboards had their CPU's soldered. It wasn't a technology decision, but a legal one. I had no idea of that at the time.

Modern systems like Canon’s Dual Pixel AF in bodies such as the EOS R5 are very direct descendants of that idea, just implemented on‑sensor with far more processing power.

Every time I see an article such as this, I beam with pride. (Pun intended).

Either way, not being afraid to look dumb keeps the juices flowing. And keeps the conversation going. Or sometimes it starts the conversation that nobody else is willing to start.

I tried :D

But now even when in a car, I retain that "I'm invisible" mentality, which makes me much more aware of what other drivers are doing, and much more skeptical of their ability to make good decisions. This has saved me several times.

   The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.

My pager noise: https://www.soundjay.com/transportation/sounds/train-crossin...

That will not only wake the dead, it'll wake me no matter how asleep I am.

Or do they get their parts from some vendor at a swap meet who spends most of his time fiddling with his Ender 3?

If you use LLM's to understand things that are poorly understood in general, you're going to get poor information because the source was poor. Garbage in, Garbage out.

They are also terrible at understanding context unless you specify everything quite explicitly. In the tech support world, we get people arguing about a recommended course of action because ChatGPT said it should be something else. And it should, in the context for which the answer was originally given. But in proprietary systems that are largely undocumented (publicly) they fall apart fast.

But ask me to do subtraction? Forget it.

Thankfully that level of toxicity did not follow into the workplace, but I did have a car vandalized by a coworker.

Truth be told I was a bit of a punk, and had a knack for pissing off the wrong people. We all have our flaws, but nobody deserved what I went through. I'm a man now, not the insecure boy who tried to act like he was better than others to compensate, and I reject toxicity immediately. No room for it. Hard lessons to learn when you grew up with abuse.