It's worth nothing if it hasn't been graded and placed in a sealed plastic box by a grading company that asserts that grading is awesome and things are worth nothing if they aren't graded.
Later versions of windows recognise that the device is removable and don't cache writes. From the users point of view the copy dialog box only closes when writes are complete.
I've been working on updating all my old software projects lately, and as part of that process I feed the source code into a LLM for review.
The amount of simple security errors, logic flaws, and code smells that it reveals is quite embarrassing.
This was all "good functional code" that's been used internally for years. Clearly it worked well enough, but a simple pass through a LLM reviewer made it a lot more robust and secure.
Well, from a technical standpoint they now routinely do weekly what was never ever done before by anyone. Both in launch cadence of their booster fleet and the recovery of them, and they've pretty much fully transitioned to only making their Stage 2's and just using their existing fleet of boosters. So from a rocket company perspective, SpaceX is a legitimate company, and they've made legitimate advances in the field of rocketry, and now they outpace the rest of the global market combined in tons to orbit.
Then you fold in Starlink, which needs those weekly launches to maintain the constellation.... and then you fold in Starship, which is the next generation launch platform, and it's like "Ok... that's still rocket-y, that's cool".
And then along comes xAI tacked onto the side like a 100 billion dollar dead weight and that is where things get a bit wobbly.
Is because they are essentially unregulated. They are only 'disruptive' in the sense that they can get away with shit that the industry cannot by rule of law. Don't try and frame this as Yet Another Way The Shadowy Cabal Keeps The Common Man Down.
Every large AI startup is racing to be the last one standing. They are all gobbling up compute resources to ensure that they have the best competitive advantage when others go broke. That includes soaking up all the future supply they can to restrict their competitors ability to do the same. In < 5 years time there is only going to be one commercial AI company left, and all the rest will just be skeletons picked clean of all their resources.
Be prepared to live with whatever hardware you have now for about 10 years. If you're lucky things will be back on an even keel by then.
I work on heavy mining equipment and I tell the techs who are looking for a laptop to just buy something cheap because when you drop it off the top of a machine it's still just as broken.
Statistically your weird internal corpo program that was made bespoke over a decade several decades ago .....
Won't work at all because it lives on a shared drive that needs your windows login and your PC to be joined to the domain to reach it, and IT just said "lol no" to your request to join your home made windows VM to the domain.
Because the heatwaves are only gradually getting worse, and they can spin that as "1 in 100 year events are now 1 in 50/40/30/25 year events" and weasel away a few more years of raking in the cash, and then they can disappear to a fortified acreage in New Zealand somewhere to live a quiet life while the world burns.
Neil's been a bit angry lately, it could have been them.