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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don’t want iOS’ version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.

    I don’t need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple’s processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel’s offerings are just not competitive and I’m not buying any of them.

    This leaves me with very few options - I’d be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don’t seem to exist.

    And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I’m sticking to that one for now.



  • If only I could install it on the Surface Pro X…

    Damn, they worked so hard to gain goodwill in the last few years and it seems they’ve set out to destroy it in record time.

    WSL and WSL2, Android Apps, working with Qualcomm to get their ARM computers to a credible state, the new Powershell and the push to open source so many things…

    And in the past 12-18 months they’ve been crashing and burning, either backtracking on those things or by starting new initiatives to become scummier and scummier. TPM, Copilot, the ad situation, abusing their position of power with office/teams, the giant safety holes in the Recall feature… But it seems every day there’s something new in the news. It’s never ending.




  • I agree with the philosophy, but not with the approach.

    If you own/make the OS, and you know that the registry can get orphan entries which slow down the system, don’t wait for the user to open an “optimisation app” to clean that up. Just make sure the registry is cleaned transparently and in the background.

    This seems to me like a tactic to get less tech-savvy people to accidentally set Edge as their browser and ensure their Ads and Microsoft’s tracking is working as the mothership mandates. Worst part is we have evidence to think I’m not being the slightest bit cynical here…






  • This is one of the rare things where the Spanish left and right agree, for different reasons.

    Simplifying a lot:

    • The left generally supports culture, actors, theatre, writers, Spanish made movies. They see piracy as a threat to the earnings of those people.
    • The right has historically cut any sorts of subsidies to the “culture creators”, but they see piracy as a threat to the publishing, TV (…) industries.

    They both support SGAE, which translates cleanly to the General Society of Authors and Editors, who protects their interests by charging fees to everyone who dares look at copyrighted work.

    • You own a bar and you play TV, Radio, or Spotify? You have to pay SGAE.
    • You buy a computer, part of the money goes to SGAE.
    • You buy a blank CD, DVD, Hard Drive, you pay SGAE (because they know you will put copyrighted material there, and if you don’t, well, fuck you)

    It’s a fucked up system and I don’t know if things have changed in the past few years as I don’t live in Spain anymore. But it honestly feels like a prosecution of the population who is so evil and trying to destroy Spanish Culture.



  • Well it might be off, as there are other factors, but I wasn’t meaning it as hyperbole - road damage is proportional to the fourth power of axle weight, and a typical bus weighs about 10 times the weight of a compact, so damage would be roughly 10^4 times larger. This is called the “Generalised Fourth Power Law” and there are tons of links about it:

    https://camdencyclists.org.uk/2020/06/the-fourth-power-rule-cyclelicious/

    (Which btw, you can apply the other way and state that you need an insane amount of bicycles to match the road damage of a single car).

    If they took the top end bracket of SUV weights and the bottom end of bus weights, they could have reached vastly different numbers. I used 1800 kg (large sedan or compact SUV) and 18000 kg for a bus (the mercedes Benz citaro starts at roughly 18500 kg), to keep the numbers simple.




  • I put the blame on Microsoft here. I am more pro-ARM than I’m pro Apple; I had a surface pro X and ended up giving up on it because Microsoft has put zero effort into enticing developers to make ARM versions of their apps. Google drive still doesn’t have a functioning app (!!) for Windows on ARM, which at this point has existed for over 10 years. (Emulation doesn’t help here as it needs drivers).

    In contrast, Mac has had apps since basically day 1 of Apple Silicon, and ARM support in Linux has been pretty good for years.


  • Well that’s the point I was making with my comment. “We don’t need different cars” is just the wrong statement. We need to redesign our cities from the ground up to be planned around people, not cars. But that is going to take a good 50 years, assuming a decent amount of effort goes into it. We don’t have 50 years. We need better cars in the meantime, not just to ignore the problem they are until we reach the year-2100 utopia where everyone can travel in bicycles and hoverboards.