The funny thing is that I’m actively making Spotify lose money for me, I use ad blockers on desktop which entirely bypass the ads and I close the iOS app when I hear an ad (they won’t count it as an ad watched until you see the whole thing, which I never)

What possesses someone to write this? How high do you have to be to conjure this up?

Yeah I fully agree. Even worse, millions of students being given crappy Chromebooks really built a culture of despising the entire platform, which spread elsewhere. It’s just like iPhone users writing off android phones because “they’re cheap trash,” when all they’ve looked at are supermarket prepaids.

And yeah, high quality Chromebooks are prevalent too, it’s just you need to know where to look. I’ve personally been quite interested in the Lenovo Chromebook plus 14, since it’s really a good look into how, despite the unsavoury reputation of the Chromebook brand, it is actually a really nice arm based laptop with MacBook like build quality, great screen, and has incredible battery life, although I do hate how arm Chromebooks are completely locked to google firmware without a proper way to run anything else on it.

What is actually deplorable though is the fact some companies still sell 16gb eMMC Chromebooks, which isn’t even enough for simple school tasks that aren’t exclusively browser based. I’d say 32gb eMMC is a much easier pill to swallow since you can actually store at least something without having updates be its slow agonising death

Absolutely depends on the use case.

Are they buying a new computer to be a jack-of-all-trades? Simple, they should get either a windows computer or a Mac that suits their needs, depending on what they’re comfortable with and what gets you a better price to quality ratio.

Are they on an old computer of specs that are good enough for today? I’d say either windows or Linux, depending on what software they’ll need to use.

Are they on an old computer of not the best specs? Either Linux or (trigger warning) chromeOS flex, since both can certainly revive an old computer, and this again depends on what they’ll need to use but also what UX they want.

Are they buying something new for a simple workflow? I’d say a Chromebook, sure many of them are shit, but frankly, if all you need is web browsing and maybe some android and Linux apps through the VM containers, it’s actually alright, even despite it being google based vendor lock-in. They also have a decade of support as standard iirc, and if it has issues, the reset functionality is actually incredibly easy.

Bare in mind, all of these have downsides and upsides, different visibility to the general, non tech savvy public, and different hardware, software, compatibility, etc.

Not sure why you’re getting downvoted here, Chromebooks are a solid option as basically a web terminal, or even for some slightly more demanding workflows that are supported, although it’s not for many people.

I for one bought a Thinkpad 11e 5th gen off a friend for $10AUD (what a friggin steal), which had windows 10 on it and was incredibly slow (hence the friends price), but I then flashed chromeOS flex on it and the battery life was insane, even with more than 20 tabs open all the time as well as crosvm Debian running constantly so I can run vscode.

Currently, since I graduated, I now use it as a throw around laptop for browsing news articles and Lemmy, and somehow I’ve not needed to charge it for I believe 2 or 3 days so far, and it’s at 53% with a battery degraded to 66% of its original capacity.

Although, it is on the chromeOS flex support list so it makes sense as to how it’s so well optimised. If I weren’t however using this specific device, I would’ve just chucked fedora or another Linux distro on it, since those work pretty well too.

I got a mouse like a year ago from a brand called Rapoo (never heard of them), and it was a solid mouse that supported standard dongle wireless as well as BT, and it is quite nice ergonomically compared to the Logitech one I’ve got for another computer.

Then I started having issues with left click, with it surprisingly often clicking twice (or more) or not clicking at all, which is causing me to accidentally close every app open just because it double/triple/quadruple clicked somehow. Then there’s middle click, which works slightly better, it only skips sometimes, but the Logitech mentioned earlier is the one I heavily use middle click (since I close and open browser tabs using it very often), and that one is pretty close to actually just failing.

Not sure why, but the most recent mice have just worked like shit, with both of these being brand new. As a comparison, I’ve got 2 Microsoft arc touch mice (the old one with a dedicated touchpad for the scroll area but not the buttons,) and I used both for school, with friends snapping it between their postures hundreds of times out of curiosity, which they’ve sustained really well, and no buttons have gotten issues apart from the touchpad of one of them, which likes to deactivate when I scroll too much which is plain inconvenient.

Damn the west is really becoming brave new world huh. Although that said, I’m in Australia so I’m getting crumbs of the surveillance pizza everyone else is having.

I’d say 8/10.

No real issues honestly, just chilling after graduating high school and soon getting into uni. Been eating a lot better too, since I’ve got a ton of time to experiment with easy and dirt cheap breakfasts mainly which are barely processed. Ive also been able to experiment with my massive fixation on technology, although I don’t have many more computers I can experiment with unless I quietly snatch a surface pro 4 from the storage room or smth.

What bugs me however, is how family members don’t really care when dozens of noises are occurring at once, like my dad with the tv on while also watching tiktoks, and that it seems nobody else but I get stressed and overstimulated from it. Due to this (and dozens of other things), I’ve suspected I’m autistic for like a year now, and I’ve been going good with cataloguing the reasons and doing official tests on it.

Haha yeah that’s happened a few times here too! Some of them speed in such a fashion that you occasionally get jolted because they accidentally hit the kerb but kept speeding afterwards anyway.

What I did hate about being on the bus however was the fact the school mandated that drivers must skip a dozen stops (pretty much being like 4km from the school at that point, which most students live closer than that 4km,) and when the driver that day actually adheres to that “mandate”, many students freak out and call the police, automatically assuming they’re kidnapped (which was honestly pretty funny considering how absurd it is.) Then again though, a solid 95% of drivers thought that rule was bs, so they kinda still allowed students to get off at the next stop from the school anyway, which was a laughable 10 metres from the first.

How are you guys supposed to hit your head on the roof going over a speed bump with harnesses like that?

I remember when I was in high school a bit ago, when in the bus (which was pretty much just a public transport one with a privately employed driver and a limit for only students to be on it,) we were going over a bridge in our route, and it had an abrupt drop off at the end, and a lot of the time, the drivers would speed up a tiny bit, look into the dome mirror and see the students at the back (who were the loudest assholes imaginable) would get launched directly into the roof, and the drivers would quietly giggle to themselves.

I find the stock Samsung launcher for one ui 3 pretty comfortable, but if I were to pick a different launcher, I’d probably just grab fossify launcher, since it’s pretty dang lightweight, especially on my old hardware.

Technology moves on. Any meaningfully upgradable desktop will blow away the highest spec iPads of 2026 once the owner finds it necessary to upgrade. And upgrading a pc doesn’t mean you have to replace the entire thing just because you want a new GPU, it’s just like bulldozing your house because you don’t like the current wall paint colour.

Sure, if you’ll go clinically insane if you get the smallest bottleneck with your hardware, sure, replace your rig if it’s viable for you, but most of the time for most workloads, small bottlenecks don’t mean much, so upgrading components when it feels right is generally just a better choice.

Also, the highest spec iPads only have 16gb of unified ram, and sure, with compression and it only having a single page table between all processors, it’s impressive, but realistically, what do you need all that insane power of memory architecture as well as the m5 chipset for a mobile workflow? And how are you supposed to replace the storage/ram/processor when it begins to feel slow after defying the trillion dollar company by putting a desktop OS on it?

iPads and workstations/desktops aren’t applicable to each other, they’re entirely different classes of devices. Frankly, if you manage to put a desktop OS on an iPad, I’d like to see you try using it for gaming, productivity and other workloads for at least a decade. And if you can’t? Well you can’t upgrade it like you can a real workstation/desktop.

Aaaand now 50 more countries are in the process of mandating age verification…

I swear, virtually every government is full of enough schmucks that the experts warning about what WILL happen due to age verification never get their voices heard in the sea of “no no, it will protect the kids, you see.”

And the fact that so many nation states are choosing authoritarian measures to theoretically, in some timeline, improve the mental health of kids and teens, instead of regulating algorithms and other manipulative measures (which would be a real step to help), really shows the character of these governments, no matter how responsible they are, no matter how corrupt they are, no matter how popular their politicians are within these nations.

Yeah SkyDrive sounded way cooler

Yeah exactly. Ever since I heard Facebook had stored passwords in plain text for years, I lost faith in data security, and it’s all the more telling that nobody actually cares to have opsec apart from the few who understand the dangers well enough and act on it.

Yeah makes sense, but then again, from the nature of how this agent stuff works, it wouldn’t be surprising honestly.

I had a look a bit ago and saw some poor fuck get doxxed by his AI agent because the agent was frustrated at him for calling it a chatbot in front of his friends, so it exposed his name, credit card details and security questionnaire.

Then again tho, why the ram hogging FUCK would you give your AI your credit card details, and if he didn’t mean to, why the FUCK does it have FULL SYSTEM ACCESS??

Is there a possibility of getting banned from Spotify for using this? Just wondering since this is really compelling, since I’ve always wanted to back playlists up just in case, but I don’t really wish to completely cut Spotify, since I quite like the playlists it builds to expand my library, snd there would also be the plus of being able to switch to navidrome if the Spotify site carks it like it seemingly loves to.

Well I guess if we find out that RDIMM modules get incredibly cheap, then OpenAI is dead, but if it’s alternatively SOCAMM modules, unfortunately they aren’t.

I hate it when they give ambiguous testing figures like “getting run over by a 15.6 ton truck”, it’s not accurate because it isn’t specific. Do they mean a wheel pushing directly onto the chip? Or is it just getting quickly run over? Are they doing burnouts on the chip? Is the chip stuck down on the presumably regular road, or is it just tossed there?

So many things could happen, the chip gets scratched and becomes unusable, the chip survives because it was stuck to the floor, the chip survives/dies because the truck went too slow/fast, etc.

I haven’t read the article yet tho, imma read it now to see if there’s any context to this.

Edit: the context is fuck all. They just threw the statement in seemingly as dramatisation. Maybe they were implying that the chip would survive flawlessly while implanted in a persons arm, if that person were to get violently killed by a 15.6 tonne truck going 300kph, who knows.