It’s because of microwave ovens. These were designed to work at 2.45ghz, because water absorbs energy efficiently at that frequency. Thus when the laws were written about what parts of the spectrum could be used for what and what sort of licenses were required a band around 2.45ghz was cleared for all use. The idea was anything in that band would be microwave ovens and having to license your oven would be a bit annoying. But then when consumer electronics wanted to do extremely short range radio, they all flocked to that band because they wouldn’t need to license it. So it saved on costs and regulations they would need to follow. So wifi became 2.4ghz and many other things as well.

A similar thing happend to the 433mhz band, except that one was specifically deregulated to encourage innovation and usage. So that band is also used a lot.

And I still wonder if there even is any demand at all. Sure it’s used a lot, but most of that is free or highly subsidized services. And from startups that throw money at the wall and have no chance at all of ever becoming profitable. But there is demand from enterprise tho! Is there? The era of tokenmaxxing is over and enterprise is cutting down on AI costs after seeing spending balloon and no real increase in profits or revenue or even productivity. Some people claim to be more productive, but it’s not by a wide margin and the ROI is hard to see.

All AI is used for is filling the internet with slop. If generating an image of AI lobster Jesus would actually cost what it should cost, I wonder if they would still be generated as much. So these AI companies see high usage, more than they can handle, and claim high demand. They buy all the hardware, hardware producing capacity and force the construction of all these datacenters. Often by bribing officials, speed building, cutting corners and not caring about anything sensible like the environment. Instead of also investing in renewable energy, they just plop down gas turbines, because it’s cheaper and faster. And for what? So we can generate more slop?

But no worries guys, we’ll ask Grok how to solve climate change, not a problem! A little more fucking up the environment now doesn’t matter, we’ll get our magical genie to create a magical solution to all our problems. Which is so fucking dumb, it’s doubtful anyone actually believes that.

We already know how to solve climate change, we just choose not to because it would mean giving up some luxuries.

Yeah it took some doing on the part of IT. It was only possible using a separate drive and special settings on their part. That way it could be fully managed, but still allow for the dual boot.

Alas the AMD can’t be disabled and the Nvidia card can’t do display output. It’s one of those RTX Pro things that are purely used for compute, not driving a display.

All engineers have those cards in their laptops, it’s very common. Those aren’t for gaming, they are required to run a lot of the more advanced engineering software.

Nvidia itself is fine, as long as you don’t also have an AMD gpu. My main rig runs a Nvidia card and it’s just fine. I use Arch btw

I have a laptop from work that runs Windows 11 and have the same experience with the unusable start menu. I wasn’t allowed to install Linux on the machine. I run Linux on every other machine I have and have used Linux since the 90s.

However after complaining and begging with IT I was allowed to try running Linux on it. It’s a managed machine, so I had to do a dual boot from a second drive IT installed for me. If it worked out and IT was happy, I could run Linux.

Unfortunately it was a total failure. The big issue is the CPU is AMD and has on-board graphics that are normally used for everything. However there is also a Nvidia GPU, I think an RTX Pro, which is used for acceleration stuff. In Windows this works well enough, the AMD handles most of the regular display stuff and is plenty powerful for that. The Nvidia gets used to offload certain workloads, to make sure the laptop is usable for certain kinds of software. On Linux this is a configuration that simply isn’t supported or working at all. Either it just won’t boot or do graphics at all or it’s extremely slow and/or unstable or with some effort the Nvidia chip can be completely disabled and just the AMD is used. Basically turning a $2500 laptop into a $1000 one and unable to run certain workloads. Now getting some of that software to run would be hard anyways, as it’s not typical software and only supported on certain versions of Windows. But I hadn’t even gotten to that stage.

The whole experience reminded me of getting Linux to run on my laptop back in 2002. An unstable mess with half the features missing. Back then I loved the challenge and when I finally got the thing to ping over the PCMCIA wifi card I was super happy. Never did get the sound working on that laptop tho.

Obviously I aborted the experiment and have just accepted Windows 11. It’s fucking awful and I bitch about it every time I need to use that machine. But for now, there doesn’t seem to be a better option.

Nah I tried, the bot is super limited. It gives correct links and references, but gets stuck in a loop a lot. It states all Epstein files have been released with the legally required redactions made, with a link. It states members of congress can view unredacted files, except in cases where the documents were already redacted by the FBI prior to release. It also stated the FBI made a statement no current investigations into any person related to the Epstein files was ongoing and no further indictments were planned. It linked all of this, including that statement from the FBI made in 2025.

If you push further or try to get anything out of it, it just says it can’t and repeats the same information again. So as far as the bot and the FBI is concerned, the whole Epstein thing is wrapped up. Thousands of victims, tons of data collected, but it was all Epstein and Maxwell in isolation. Epstein is dead, Maxwell convicted, case closed. This makes no sense, but if you ask the bot how this can be, it states it can’t express opinions and just repeats the same spiel again.