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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.

    I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.


  • No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.

    I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.


  • Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.

    That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.

    If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.


  • Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.

    With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.

    Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).

    And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.

    So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.

    That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.





  • I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don’t want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you’re allowed to use the platform.

    There’s issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.

    And, that’s okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.

    But, at the same time, you shouldn’t be utterly confused why so many people either don’t want to or bounce right off your platform and aren’t sticky when it’s pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.


  • This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: ‘it’s not ready!’ and ‘who will provide support?’ and ‘it’s too hard for people to figure out!’ and ‘how can you make money if it’s free?’ and so on.

    Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor… it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you’re a clickbait “journalist” on corpo-owned media.


  • It’s just a shining example of how MBA-brain has infested tech spaces, possibly irreparably.

    Tech is driven by the up-or-out, billion-users-or-death, monopoly-or-bankruptcy mentality to the point that it’s leaked from investors to management to average employees and, shockingly, most of the fediverse is tech or tech-adjacent types so it’s not really surprising that this mentality is extremely prevalent: you go with what you know, and if you’re in tech it’s growth growth growth.

    Regardless of if, say, Lemmy ends up with 10 million MAUs or 10,000 MAUs, or 1,000 MAUs, the measure of success is NOT how many users, but if the users who ARE there find value and worth in what exists. If you’ve got 1,000 happy users sharing ideas and conversing meaningfully then congrats! you created immense value, just uh, no money.



  • I was trying to be a little kinder, but yeah, that’s my general opinion.

    It’s one reason I like code that’s actually owned by a foundation/organization that has all that pesky oversight and meetings and politicking because it makes things MUCH harder to be unilaterally sold out from under their users: it DOES happen, but it’s not just writing a check to one guy and hey presto next week your shit is broken/infested with malware/vanishes without a trace.

    They have their own problems and require funding to actually operate as intended, but it’s at least a layer between the ‘I made this’ meme and the users of the software.






  • I don’t think it’s the NDA itself, so much as the tone of the way people framed their announcement of it.

    Since I haven’t used a Star Wars analogy in a long time, I’ll try one:

    If your babysitter wrote you and told you that they’ve got a meeting with the Galactic Empire to take care of younglings on Coruscant, but they can’t talk to you about it, you’d probably be a little concerned.

    Like you know how that ended LAST time, and don’t really have any reason to think that this is somehow different, so you’re probably going to freak out about it.

    As with most things in life, if you make announcements, make them super vague, and include things like ‘I’m going to talk to Zuck about his new project, can’t tell you anything’ then you’re leaving it up to the interpretation of the reader.

    And so everyone is going to assume whatever based on their biases, and if there’s a group of people who are MORE anti-Facebook biased than Fediverse users, I don’t know who that would be.



  • It’s a combination of:

    1. people hate Facebook and don’t want them anywhere near the fediverse and
    2. secret talks with NDAs never foretell good things.

    Meta’s reputation most certainly precedes them here, and they’re not a company known for politely co-existing with others but rather for stomping in, and taking what they want and packaging it and selling it.

    IMO people have a reasonable basis for reacting strongly (though it’s 2023 and the ‘hyperbolic over-reaction’ is the required thing online it seems).


  • HA is pretty nice, but has a pretty big learning curve.

    As for avoiding turning your internet into a IoT botnet, you need network gear that can segregate clients and prevent internet access, and to pick devices that have a local-only API which is not something everything has.

    The real question - and this is coming from someone who spent way more time than I’d like to admit with HA automating things - is what you’re expecting. I absolutely wouldn’t bother doing a setup again because once the shiny wore off, all I use this for is setting a temperature and turning lights on and off: two things the hardware vendor apps does just fine.

    It’s great, unless for some reason it doesn’t work, and that’s kinda an unfortunate state of things for what is still pretty early software. Matter should help simplify things since it’ll be less 100 vendors, 100 APIs you have to support which is kinda the state of being right now.

    Also don’t buy anything from Belkin, screw those guys.