Interesting, but misguided, I think.

If you’ve selected Python as your programming language, then your problem is likely either to do some text processing, a server-side lambda, or to provide a quick user interface. If you’re using it for eg. Numpy, then you’re really using Python to load and format some data before handing it to a dedicated maths library for evaluation.

If you’ve selected Go as your programming language, then your problem is likely to be either networking related - perhaps to provide a microservice that mediates between network and database - or orchestration of some kind. Kubernetes is the famous one, but a lot of system configuration tools use it to manipulate a variety of other services.

What these uses have in common is that they’re usually disk- or network- limited and spend most of their time waiting, so it doesn’t matter so much if they’re not super efficient. If you are planning to peg the CPU at 100% for hours on end, you wouldn’t choose them - you’d reach for C / C++ / Rust. Although Swift does remarkably well, too.

Seeing how quickly you can solve Fannkuch-Redux using Python is a bit like seeing how quickly you can drive nails into a wall using a screwdriver. Interesting in its way, but you’d be better picking up the correct tool in the first place.

Back when I owned an XPS, one of the driver options was ‘compressed screen updates’, which only updated the part that had changed. As far as I could tell, made no difference to battery life whatsoever - turning down the screen brightness even a notch did much more.

Daily driver laptop for nearly ten years, and the part that finally failed was the CPU fan, which wasn’t easy to obtain replacement parts for, so treated myself to a new laptop entirely. Mind you, the power connection was a PoS, would have been as well keeping that on an annual reorder for how often it failed. Pretty good laptop otherwise.

A controversial take. Every new feature added to Github has made it more unpleasant to use, and a lot of that is down to Copilot, for me. Only way to get rid of it is to wait for Github to go down again, which is the only thing it does reliably at the moment.

Oh, that’s obnoxious. I thought it was another ‘button along the bottom’, but it takes up the space that should be ‘right control’? Bastards. Hopefully you can rebind it to something useful, even if the keycap symbol sucks.

Mind you, I’ve already got caps-lock rebound as ‘control’ and alt-gr rebound as ‘compose’. My laptop has the ‘penguin’ key (it’s a Tuxedo laptop, no Windows key here) used for Sway. (My desktop keyboard is a Model M from before the days of Windows keys, have had to bind ctrl+alt as the ‘Sway Key’.) I’ve already got some ‘useless keys’ that I could rebind to other things - looking at you, print screen - but one you could press with your thumb while chording would always be nice.

Those ZBooks look like fine laptops. If you installed Arch on them, obviously ;-)

The problem is that the volume of slop available completely overwhelms all efforts at quality control. Zealotry only goes so far at turning back the tsunami of shite.

Considering the random branches of science that have gone into making better hard drives, I’d be willing to put money on ‘understanding dark energy’ => ‘higher density data storage’ as one benefit of the tech.

But yeah, we understand more things, we’re in a better position to understand even more things, and some have applications you benefit from every day.

Indeed.

In some ways, this kind of thing is ideal for Rust. It’s at it best when you’ve a good idea of what your data looks like, and you know where it’s coming from and going to, and what you really want is a clean implementation that you know has no mistakes. Reimplementing ‘core code’ that hasn’t changed much in twenty years to get rid of any foolish overflows or use-after-free bugs is perfect for it.

Using Rust for exploratory coding, or when the requirements keep changing? I think you’ve picked the wrong tool for the job. Invalidate a major assumption and have to rewrite the whole damn thing. And like you say; an important choice for big projects as choosing a tool that a lot of people will be able to use. And Window is very big.

They’re smoking crack, anyway. A million lines per dev per month? When I’m doing major refactoring, a couple thousand lines per week in the same language, mostly moving existing stuff into a new home, is a substantial change. Three orders of magnitude more with a major language conversion? Get out of here.

The Centos “eight pointed star”?

Menu bar at the top at least makes some sense - it’s easier to mouse to it, since you can’t go too far. Having menus per-window like Linux, or like Windows used to before big ugly ribbons became the thing, is easier to overshoot. (Which is why I always open my menu bars by pressing ‘alt’ with my left thumb, and then using the keyboard shortcuts that are helpfully underlined. Window likes to hide those from you now since they’re ‘ugly’, and also makes you mouse over the pretty icons to get the tooltip that tells you what they are, which is just a PITA. Pretty != usable.)

Mac OS has had the menu at the top since before it was a multitasking OS. They had them there on the first Mac I ever used, a Mac Classic 2 back in 1991 or so, and it was probably like that before then too. It’s not like they’ve been ‘innovating’ that particular feature and annoying their users.

The actual fix is probably ‘enable mixed ASCII / Windows-1252 calls to Windows UTF-16 functions’, when some strings have different codepages to others’, or something silly. But that fix sounds better.

A rising tide lifts all boats - every improvement is welcome

Data centre GPUs tend not to have video outputs, and have power (and active cooling!) requirements in the “several kW” range. You might be able to snag one for work, if you work at a university or at somewhere that does a lot of 3D rendering - I’m thinking someone like Pixar. They are not the most convenient or useful things for a home build.

When the bubble bursts, they will mostly be used for creating a small mountain of e-waste, since the infrastructure to even switch them on costs more than the value they could ever bring.

There’s times when I want to find “exact matches and nothing but” - searching for error messages, for instance - and that’s made much harder than it should be by AI bullshit search engines that don’t want you to switch off their “helpful” features. Considering moving to Kagi instead.

Mine was my local Forgejo server, NAS server, DHCP -> DNS server for ad blocking on devices connected to the network, torrent server, syncthing server for mobile phone backup, and Arch Linux proxy, since I’ve a couple of machines that basically pull the same updates as each other.

I’ve retired it in favour of a mini PC, so it’s back to being a RetroPie server, have loads of old games available in the spare room for when we have a party, amuses children of all ages.

They’re quite capable machines. If they weren’t so I/O limited, they’d be amazing. They tend to max out at 10 megabyte/second on SD card or over USB / ethernet. If you don’t need a faster disk than that, they’re likely to be ideal in the role.

“Mostly perfectly unless they’ve got anti-cheat, and you’ll be limited to 30 fps for most of the fancy-graphics titles.”

Actually pretty damn good. Considering the difficulty I had getting frames out of E33 on desktop, having it play reasonably on the go is impressive. 60 fps @ 4K made my PC sound like a vacuum cleaner and was warming up the whole house; really needs some of the upscaling trickery to be comfortable to play.

Especially since any version of Git from the last view years has a passionate hatred of symlinks for this reason, which is a bit annoying if you’ve a legit usecase. They’re either very out-of-date, or have done some very foolish customisation…

Python tkinter interfaces might be inefficient, slow and require labyrinthine code to set-up and use, but they make up for it by being breathtakingly ugly.

True. Was thinking of indie games, of the kind I might develop myself., which would be limited to the languages I speak myself.

If you’re developing something where you’d expect enough international sales to hire a translation team, then Chinese would be a sensible first choice, followed by Spanish.

Closing in on 8% if you filter it by “English language only”. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly (almost exclusively) use Windows and make up about 30% of all Steam users, which skews the rest-of-world results. And I wouldn’t consider 8% of all prospective sales to be a joke, especially since that number only keeps on rising and by the time you’ve spent a few years writing a game it’s likely to be quite a bit more.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/steam-tracker/

Yeah, indeed. Steam language breakdown is about 40% English, 30% Chinese, 10% Russian, 5% Spanish, 15% other. Chinese speakers overwhelmingly use Windows rather than Linux, so choosing ‘English only’ basically doubles the Linux percentage.

I’d be interested to know why Linux has such bad update in Chinese-speaking regions. (It’s the lingua franca for much of Asia, so not just China, just largely China.) Obviously, inertia plays a part - easier to move to Linux if you know someone else that can help you, which if there’s no-one then you might be a bit stuck. Are the fonts crappy? Are the input methods greatly superior in Windows?

Sorry, putting the two things together, my mistake. My router doesn’t let you specify the DNS server directly, but it does allow you to specify a different DHCP server, which can then hand out new IPs with a different DNS server specified, as you say. Bit of a house of cards. DHCP server in order to be the DNS server too.