I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?
Adelaide used to have a shit 1970s style football stadium in the burbs. It wasn’t serviced by rail because it was in one of our first huge lifeless US style suburban developments. Cheap reclaimed swamp land, car-centric, no mixed zoning, no character, no local services. The stadium only appeared to have a green surround because they were too cheap to seal the car park.
Special bus routes ran on game days but busses suck compared with trains for moving high volumes. I think most people drove. I went to a few games and concerts there. Crowds were notorious for leaving the football games in the middle of the last quarter because it took so long to get out of the car parks and surrounding roads. Crowds generally maxed out at 55k. Adelaide oval is only a couple of thousand less capacity and surrounded by parklands in the middle of the city, with a foot bridge to the train station across the river. I don’t know why that took decades to figure out.
This is a lot easier to manage than the old library sharing where I was always going between machines, changing accounts and sharing libraries with people with multiple desktop logins on multiple machines. Changed the family over today. I am concerned this new system will get abused by groups of independent adults like Netflix was and publishers will withdraw games or prices will increase. Just pirate please and don’t ruin a good thing because for parents with dependent kids at home the cost of living is rough.
Being able to remotely manage parental controls from my login for younger kids is also awesome. It feels like it was made by an actual parent instead of a single 20 something tech bro like some other parental control systems. It is fucking abysmal that so many streaming apps make it hard to find age appropriate content or set sensible access controls. Like seriously Crunchyroll - you are owned by a fucking filthy rich media megacorp Sony and you cant provide search by age, content ratings or helpful labeling.
Evolution currently. Previously Thunderbird. I wouldn’t mind a newer client but I am only interested in native apps talking to my email server over open standards.
Adding rust to a massive mature C project that targets lots of architectures and has many contributors is a difficult process. If it succeeds it is going to take a lot more time and patience.
You want the most common things available in a Settings app(s) as they generally are on Gnome, KDE, Windows and Mac. If we cram too much stuff in there regular people struggle. Finding a good balance is a dilemma for most platforms. You want the less obvious stuff to be available in additional specialist “tweak” apps for more experienced users as they often are on all these platforms but sometimes less so on Linux. Then the really esoteric stuff you have to edit registry settings, conf files and plists as you do on all of them. Linux tends to provide more power and flexibility but requires reading documentation due to the diversity of config methods and locations.
A Mac user very sensibly contacted me worried about pasting a command to edit a plist into the terminal from a website they found trying to fix an issue. Nobody should be pasting commands they don’t understand into terminals. A quick search and I found the GUI toggle to do the same thing. It isn’t exclusively a Linux issue. Windows and Mac have complex operating systems underneath and equivalently powerful command line tools.
GUI config isn’t practical for hardcore linux users. It isn’t scriptable, we can’t store it in version control, it is harder to document, it is harder to use remotely. We have to appreciate that we have a growing number of users where it is worth taking a bit more time and sharing an alternative if one exists. However nobody wants to configure services in a GUI as we want to version, document and distribute this stuff and managing services in a GUI is unprofessional because you lose these things.
Reviewers like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed serve the Windows gamer market first. If you game on Windows you want to know the best price/performance for your purposes. Benchmarking kernel compiles and database transactions on Linux has zero relevance to a Windows gamer, particularly if Microsoft bugs cause the performance not to translate.
If we only looked at raw hardware performance and ignored platform support we might evaluate Nvidia only on Windows and determine they are the best graphics cards for Linux users which would be insane. Platform support matters to an audience.
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
I purchased in December 2022. I have not needed to buy any replacement parts but availability appears good.
At the same time I bought one of my kids the cheapest MSI laptop I could find for school. I just learned some of the keys on the MSI have been working intermittently. I have no idea what to do with it. We didn’t value a laptop for running Microsoft Word very highly and spent the savings on linux desktop upgrades. I can’t say it was the wrong choice. With the Framework it is trivial to check the connector or order a replacement but there was a substantial price difference.
Out of selfishness I would like people to keep buying Framework so they keep their replacement parts stocked but blind brand loyalty is stupid. People don’t need remuneration to engage in a hobby but if they are working for a company then unpaid labour is generally an abuse.
I have a Framework 13" DIY running Linux. It is functional. I am reasonably confident I will be able to buy replacements for anything that breaks which is important to me. It is well designed for repair and upgrade but other devices offer better price/performance/features. If you are on a tight budget and care about the environment buy used.
Windows usage isn’t the cause of dysfunction in corporate IT but a symptom of it. All you would get is badly managed Linux systems compromised by bloated insecure commercial security/management software.
I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.
I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.
Same here. Ext4 is an excellent general purpose file systems and a sensible default. It lacks features that are useful, even critical, for some use cases which sometimes rules it out but it certainly isn’t obsolete.
In the mid 90s the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo cult were producing chemical weapons which were used in a deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway. Prior to the attack Aum briefly owned a million acre cattle ranch in Australia where they tested sarin and may have tried to mine uranium ore.
Several nuclear powers are run by autocratic theocracies/cults and the US could be heading in that direction.
A camera in every pocket isn’t so good for the ASD kid being mainstreamed into high school with a severe phobia of having his picture taken.
Got several kids at regular public schools (not in US) and their policy never allowed phones during school hours from the start. It is pragmatic and doesn’t cause any drama. The kids get messages home if needed and can collect phones when they leave. It is a relatively normal society where kids walk and ride to school by themselves and parents aren’t obsessed with stalking kids or bubble wrapping them.
Schools have a duty of care and sadly are as much baby sitters for working parents as they are places of learning and phones create more problems than they introduce opportunities.
The social aspect might be underappreciated. My guess is people are mainly introduced by family and friends and it becomes a big part of their identity. It becomes difficult to separate the individual elements.
I like silent laptops but sometimes I want to max out the power budget and get work done without worrying about thermal throttling. Having a fan and customizable power settings gives users a choice. Apple takes that choice away.
I don’t think about Microsoft at all mostly. I supported their stuff professionally in the past and friends/family but otherwise total avoidance. They own some big game studios so I probably use some of their products like Minecraft but I haven’t used their operating systems or applications for decades and I dislike and distrust cloud services and theirs is no exception. All big companies tend to be the same. Try not to depend on any of them.
Proton is a patched Wine with a translation layer from DirectX to Vulkan. Wine will run a lot of Windows cad software with varying success, particularly older versions and I am not sure how much general desktop applications benefit from the Valve sponsored improvements to gaming. It is a shame these CAD programs weren’t all built on game engines like Unity or Unreal instead of a bunch of Windows APIs with varied levels of implementation.