What happened to librem anyway? They used to be all the rage, now it’s nothing.

What is the battery situation like?

The older, cheaper devices are obviously, well, older and thus the battery degraded a bit. Linux isn’t exactly optimized for these things either. I would expect less than great battery life.

The cool air in the upper atmosphere cleans the waves, though. Obviously that doesn’t work horizontally, everybody knows that.

But that’s exactly what Microsoft promised its shareholders and why they invested billions into it. They need world changing revenue to make it worthwhile.

Why not just recommend adblockers? No ads, no revenue, no matter how much tracking.

Even that is pretty temporary.

If you build a house, there’s a good chance, it will survive for decades or even centuries. The house I currently live in survived two world wars and heavy bombardment in one of them. I don’t think any software will manage that.

I think we (as an industry) need to be honest to ourselves and admit that pretty much everything we’re building is temporary. And not in a philosophical sense. 90% of the code I wrote in my about 10 years of professional work is probably gone by now - sometimes replaced by myself. In another ten years, chances are not a single line of code will have survived.

And most importantly for me personally: they seem to disregard people using multiple windows.

I rarely work in one window, and having a large screen for only one app is pretty stupid.

Gnome feels like it’s intended for small screen devices like tablets.

What I find really fascinating here is that obviously openAI, Meta, etc. seem to be structurally incapable of actually innovating at this point.

I mean, reducing training costs by literally an order of magnitude just by writing better software is astonishing and shows how complacent the large corporations have gotten.

Gemma, ollama and many other models are open source too. In fact, deepseeks models are based on Ollama.

Deepseek showed that actually putting thought into the architecture achieves much more than just throwing more hardware at the problem.

This means a) there will be much less demand for hardware, since much more could be run locally on regular consumer devices. And b) the export restrictions don’t really work and instead force China to create actually better models.

That means, a lot of the investments into the thousands of AI companies are in jeopardy.

For most of the practical use cases, a mechanism to somehow link to your own instance would be enough.

I often stumble upon links to other instances, but from there, there’s no direct way to interact via my own instance. I have to awkwardly copy URL parts around or search the post in my own instances UI.

You could have photoshopped some swifties or Beatles groupies being broken, like the heads of South Park Canadians.

I understand, though, that you’re not a peak performance when overheated. Thermal throttling affects us all.

These patches do offer some benefits for cloud providers or in general orgs that host a bunch of different products on potentially the same machine.

I could see benefits in them, especially if the v3 or whatever addresses some of the issues.

Opposed to the Chinese corporations which are famously basically charity organizations?

What exactly is your point? Your moving goalposts to completely different planets.

Producing literally hundreds of a single type of airplane with orders for the next decade or so isn’t exactly “nothing to show for”.

And even if you discount the actual sales, getting billions in development budget from the US government is pretty good for business.

I have no local thrift store, and the speakers you can find here are often too big. I just wanted small cheap speakers to listen to YouTube videos and essentially an extension cord to plug my (proper) headphones into.

I mean, soundwise they’re fine. Not awesome, but for the price perfectly ok. It’s just that everything else is crap for no reason.

I bought a cheap set of speakers for my workshop PC.

They have two buttons. One is the combined mode/on/off button. Short press turns it on, another short press cycles through different modes, which are not explained anywhere, but have different LED colors. One mode (line in) looks almost exactly like the red standby led, it just has a bit of a blue LED also lit. Pressing it long turns it off.

The second button switches between a regular and a “speech bubble” mode. I’m not sure what that’s supposed to do. However, longpressing that button switches between speakers and headphones.

Then there’s the volume knob. It’s extremely non-linear and has a delay of a second or two, so you have to be really precise. The volume knob is also not really synced to the headphone amp, so each time you put on headphones, you have to turn the volume like crazy, and then remember to turn it down again.

And the maximum fuck you: the speakers are so lightweight, that they slip around when trying to press the buttons, so you always need two hands.

Absolute garbage. Why are they going out of their way to create a worse product? It doesn’t make sense.

I already thought about that, but never really could justify switching.

I would argue, though, that it’s not customization, but rather packages themselves changing over time and sometimes just break.

And sometimes you have crap like a full boot partition, because apt decided to keep all Linux versions for some reason.

The carelessness. Mac OS is far from perfect, but it just happily chugs along. Linux often creates problems by just existing for too long. It’s gotten much much better, but it’s still not good.