Years, sadly.

I have a Tuxedo Pulse 14 gen 3 as my personal laptop, was looking for something with a bit more display resolution than my old 1080p machine, but did not like the price of 4K laptops.

It has been superb for over a year now. Came with Tuxedo’s own Linux, which looked pretty but wasn’t for me. Installed Arch on it, has been rock solid. Is a great machine for coding on, makes a great job of running Dwarf Fortress and less stressful 3D games - Crusader Kings 3 and Disco Elysium run great, for instance. Battery life impressive too.

Been quite robust, too - heard complaints that the lid can get a bit loose but mine’s fine. All the rubber feet have come off the bottom, but that’s probably because I use mine on my lap. They prefer that you install their own fan control app rather than eg. just providing drivers so that you can set it up in CoolerControl, but it works fine.

All in all, good machine. Better than the ThinkBook that it replaced, and those are fine laptops.

“Double it and add thirty” is accurate enough for ambient temperatures, and easier to do in your head. If you need scientific accuracy then you wouldn’t be using Fahrenheit anyway.

Yeah - been talking about doing so for quite a long time, and then signing up to a Qobuz family plan, downloading all their apps, and cancelling everything Spotify has taken all of five minutes. Hardly even interrupted the album we were listening to via Chromecast. There’s a lesson to be learned somewhere.

Qobuz’ recommendations and albums-of-the-week actually look good, too. Like an actual music enthusiast has picked things out, rather than Spotify’s slop.

So all of the mainstream porn will be blocked, leaving all of the niche and special-interest stuff available? Excellent, excellent…

I quite liked how the original Linux fix for the Spectre-style speculative execution bug on Intel processors was called “Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines”, but alas, in the interest of diplomacy it was renamed to “Kernel Page Table Isolation” (KPTI) rather than “FUCKWIT”.

Doesn’t feel like it was that long ago, but of course, all search results are dogshit in this new age: https://wccftech.com/intel-kernel-memory-leak-bug-speculative-execution-performance-hit/

You are not joking. Comparing a $2000 Purism Liberty with eg. a $200 HMD Fusion. The Fusion has somewhat better screen and battery; much better processor and camera. More RAM, the option of more storage, has NFC. It’s also designed to be easy-to-maintain, but is somewhat thinner and lighter despite having a larger screen area. Are ‘made in USA’ and ‘open-source drivers’ worth paying 10x as much for a noticeably worse phone? (It’s not really ‘made in USA’ either - it’s a mix of US, Chinese and Indian parts assembled in the USA.)

I think that the people who believe a US-made iPhone will also cost $2k are kidding themselves - economy of scale and all that, but it must be substantially more.

Yeah, mine was similar. Had some old Win95 machines from work that were getting thrown away; scavenged as much RAM as possible into one case and left Red Hat Linux downloading overnight on the company modem. Needed two boxes of floppy disks for the installer, and I joined up a 60 MB and an 80MB hard drive using LVM to create the installation drive. It was a surprisingly functional machine - much better at networking than it was as a Win95 computer - but yeah, those days are long gone.

The plural of faux pas is also faux pas, because you know, French. But this is less one false step in the dance, than doing entirely the wrong dance altogether.

Broke my first one on the final boss of Sekiro, which can be quite intense in places. Bought another one immediately when they announced they weren’t making them any more.

Hesitation is defeat. Although, wish I’d got three as well…

CMake, which is kind of the universal standard build system for C++ now, has “fetch content” since v3.11. Put the URL of a repository (which can be remote, but also local, which is handy) and optionally the branch / commit ID that you’d like, and it will pull it into your build directory automatically. So yeah, you can pull anything nefarious that you’d like. I don’t think most people would question pulling and building a library from Github as part of the build, especially if it had a sensible name for the task at hand.

You’ve got that a bit backwards. Integrated memory on a desktop computer is more “partitioned” than shared - there’s a chunk for the CPU and a chunk for the GPU, and it’s usually quite slow memory by the standards of graphics cards. The integrated memory on a console is completely shared, and very fast. The GPU works at its full speed, and the CPU is able to do a couple of things that are impossible to do with good performance on a desktop computer:

• load and manipulate models which are then directly accessible by the GPU. When loading models, there’s no need to read them from disk into the CPU memory and then copy them onto the GPU - they’re just loaded and accessible.
• manipulate the frame buffer using the CPU. Often used for tone mapping and things like that, and a nightmare for emulator writers. Something like RPCS3 emulating Dark Souls has to turn this off; a real PS3 can just read and adjust the output using the CPU with no frame hit, but a desktop would need to copy the frame from the GPU to main memory, adjust it, and copy it back, which would kill performance.

Yeah, swapped out grub for systemd-init on a running Arch system not too long ago. Arch is cool with it. Be sure not to make any really bad typos while you’ve not got a boot manager, of course.

Once you start Vim, you don’t even need to activate the lock screen when you leave your desk. Ain’t no-one going to be using that machine for anything nefarious any more.

Us Scots can say our aitches - always annoys me to hear “an hospital” on the BBC.

Faaking Laanduners - that’s who’ll be saying “an hero”.

Money is an emotional thing. Do I believe that this coin / bit of paper / number on a website is something that I can exchange for goods and services? If not enough people believe that, that currency will collapse.

Mind you, not using money is inefficient at scale. Sending the bag of potatoes that I’ve grown in my garden this month to my internet provider for continued shitposting privileges only goes so far.

From a UK perspective, a lot of US cars would be illegal to drive on public roads here - too large, too dangerous for pedestrians and other road users. “Dangerous” also applies to some of your other potential exports too. Chlorinated chicken, for instance, isn’t considered safe for consumption. So the absence of a market for those goods isn’t simply “customer preference”.

As a European, we’ve been too dependent on the US on some things for too long. We need to be more independent. The situation in Ukraine has shown that; we need to be able to support our allies better. But the US trashing their own economy, making themselves into global pariahs and handing over their superpower status to China is what I would have described as “not my dream way” of achieving that.

If I believed that they were sincerely interested in trying to improve their product, then that would make sense. You can only improve yourself if you understand how your failings affect others.

I suspect however that Saltman will use it to come up with some superficial bullshit about how their new 6.x model now has a 90% reduction in addiction rates; you can’t measure anything, it’s more about the feel, and that’s why it costs twice as much as any other model.

After having used Grub for about twenty years (eek) I was uncertain about the alternatives, but systemd-boot is absurdly better. Much better configuration, much better documentation, fixes a while pile of bugs that Grub team had as “won’t fix” for years and years. No reason to ever go back.

Does make me think about the story of Thales of Miletus; ancient Greek philosopher, got asked what use was philosophy if it doesn’t make you any money. Predicted good weather, and monopolised all the olive presses, made a fortune.

For a modern example; shares in Rheinmetall (German firm who make, amongst other things, the turrets for tanks) have gone through the roof after the recent US debacle. I could have told you a year ago that Trump getting in would have meant the US abandoning Ukraine; obvious in hindsight that that would mean a boon for European arms manufacturers.

I don’t think you need to be quick to take advantage. I think you need insight. If there’s a topic that you’re knowledgeable about and you can see which way the wind is blowing, then you can make your own boat.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thales_of_Miletus#Olive_presses