I don’t want thinner. I want more functionality. Don’t expect me to pay 2 grand for a laptop with no external USB or HDMI ports, for which privileges I can pay an additional $100 or so. I’m frustrated enough by the lack of Ethernet jacks on my Lenovo. The last time I had a Mac (work shipped me one), I was even more frustrated by how bad the built in trackpad and keyboard were and the fact that using an external device to replace them came at a premium price.
The article quotes extensively from the study about this and gives examples regarding what kinds of tasks qualify for those levels.
There was a post here a while back about how younger generations often don’t understand concepts like file system structures because concepts like that (which are still relevant in a lot of contexts) have been largely stripped out of modern user interfaces. If your primary computing device is a cell phone, a task like “make a nested directory structure and move this file to the deepest part of it” is a foreign concept.
I guess my point here is that I agree with yours about this being cyclical in a sense. I feel crippled on a cell phone, but I’m also in my comfort zone on a Linux terminal. Using web apps like MS Teams is often difficult for me because their UIs are not things I’m comfortable with. I don’t tend to like default layouts and also tend to use advanced features which are usually hidden away behind a few menus. Tools built to meet my needs specifically would largely not meet the needs of most users. A Level 1 user would probably have a better experience there than a Level 3 like me. It’s hard (maybe impossible) to do UX design that satisfies everyone.
Vampire Survivors is so much better than it has any right to be. It’s a great way to kill time if I have my Steam Deck around.
Been getting my Elden Ring game into position for the DLC.
Some of it is a fad that will go away. Like you indicated, we’re in the “Marketing throws everything at the wall” phase. Soon we’ll be in the “see what sticks” phase. That stuff will hang around and improve, but until we get there we get AI in all conceivable forms whether they’re a worthwhile use of technology or not.
We recently went through a nuke-n-pave on my kids desktops. I plugged in an external drive for them to do backups, and we walked through the process. This was in Fedora with pretty much default Gnome tools. They came away understanding the process and how to track it, but I think they still don’t really understand file organization.
I did this swap recently as well, on Fedora. I had to do literally nothing, as the drivers were already available and installed. I uninstalled akmod-nvidia to tidy up, but I suppose even that wasn’t strictly required.
It would be cool to see the Steam Deck model turned into a wider model for selling gaming PCs in different formats. A higher powered “Steam Deck” that looks and feels like a console but works internally like a PC, gives root access, can support any PC hardware, allows for upgrades and repairs, etc.
iirc, you install it via an extension. It’s simple enough. I just love the feature.
I still remember having to operate on their old desktops with the snap-down clamshell design. Infuriating.
I think container tabs, which is currently an official Mozilla extension, should be native.
There’s a trust issue here as well since AI only works if you train it and we are training it with our activity, reported to private companies who can do whatever they please with it. I don’t trust anything Microsoft does.
I did the same thing. It’s one of the cheapest upgrades you can get for a PC, but Apple will charge triple the actual cost to maximize profits.
Since the act of writing to an SSD is an act of wear that will eventually lead to a broken storage device, using an SSD for swap is a uniquely bad idea, right? Are Macs still designed so that you can’t replace your own hardware easily? I’ve never owned one, but I was asked to service one many years ago and it was a real pain.
In general, I agree. I’ll add two things:
Still, I’ll take it over an iPhone any day.
Good advice. I’ll add that any time you have to parse command line arguments with any real complexity you should probably be using Python or something. I’ve seen bash scripts where 200+ lines are dedicated to just reading parameters. It’s too much effort and too error prone.
Yeah I just familiarize myself with the city I live in.
Mine uses SMS 2FA AND had a 16-character password limit. I need to switch banks already. Any suggestions for a decent bank or credit union that uses modern password cryptography and app-based TOTP?
It’s very, very costly, both but the hardware and the electricity it takes to run it. There may be a bit of sunk cost fallacy at play for some, especially the execs who are calling for AI Everything, but in the end, in AI doesn’t generate enough increase in revenue to offset its operational costs, even those execs will bow out. I think the economics of AI will cause the bubble to burst because end users aren’t going to pay money for a service that does a mediocre job at most things but costs more.