kamen

General purpose computers have been fast enough and had enough memory for a decade now. I bought a quad core (8 threads) laptop with 16 GB of RAM and a 1 TB SSD, 2 GB VRAM twelve years ago. Around the same time I built a NAS with an HP Gen8 microserver, also with 16 GB of RAM for ZFS. That one I recently upgraded with a better CPU for 20 €. Both of these machines still perform really well for most tasks. I haven’t upgraded my phone in 5 years, and my tablet in 8 years. These start to show their age because of the small amount of RAM built in. Last week I bought high end EIZO monitors from 8 years ago for 50 €. These are fine!

Ask yourself, are you even doing things that are limited by your hardware? If you are limited by hardware, could buying a last generation high end machine fill your needs? If you need vast amounts of computing power, renting cloud computing might be a solution as well.

Yeah, I generally agree with your points. I dislike the push to planned obsolescence with everything. I’m also trying to maximise the life out of things I have and I buy a little less often even if under normal market conditions I can afford new things whenever I want.

I’m a hobbyist photographer (so almost everything I throw at the hobby is out of pocket) and recently made a jump to higher megapixel cameras (the megapixel increase wasn’t a requirement, more of a side effect). I have a pretty adequate AM4 PC, but suddenly the 32 gigs of RAM that it has don’t quite cut it. Could’ve maybe bought 64 back then, but opted not to. It’s still a workable situation, just not ideal. Had to replace a dead SSD recently (the Phison controller ordeal), swallowed the increased prices on these as well (because the old one was “luckily” just a few months out of warranty). As for the RAM, before the price boom I could’ve gotten a decent 64 or even a 96 GiB DDR5 kit for 500-ish EUR (to add to a new CPU and mobo) - and now both cost 1500+. Upgrading the existing also wouldn’t be exactly easy because when I built it I hunted a very specific combination of frequency and timings - just buying anything would cost as much as it did when it was brand new. Should’ve jumped to AM5 last year, I could’ve even sold the current things at a profit now, but who would’ve known… At this point it’s a market crisis after another market crisis - maybe we should buy and never look back at the prices the next day.

Glad I’m stocked on memory cards that should last me for a while.

There is, however, a bigger problem that’s not addressed - manufacturers seemingly only playing nice to big corporations while screwing the end customer.

No, I’m pretty sure it was about eating. But hey, whatever tickles your imagination…

Reminds me of the case when anon found out that very cold and very spicy foods don’t cancel each other out.

IMO it’s important to recognise that both are valid in different scenarios. If you want to click through and change something that’s actually doable with a couple of clicks, that’s fine. If you want to do this through the CLI, it’s also fine - if you’re someone who’s done 10 deployments today and configured the same thing, it would be muscle memory even if it’s 5 commands.

Quick! Break something!

I guess it’s hard when they’ve probably factored in ad revenue in the pricing. It’s not a new practice - it’s been done with cheap Chinese smartphones that were sometimes sold below the cost of hardware and production.

It’s terrible, I agree. Brands like this go into a list of offenders that I’ll make sure to avoid in the future.

Remember that some people voluntarily pay for TV and streaming with ads.

… until they start to understand and begin messing with you in return.

Honestly, the way they’re speaking. I’m fine with them calling it “american”.

I’m not a native English speaker, but I’ve always been confused by breaking up sentences like this. My understanding is that if one sentence doesn’t make senses on its own, it shouldn’t be standalone, but rather an introductory to the other one.

So Simplified English instead of Traditional English, right?

TestDisk has saved my ass before. It’s great at recovering broken or deleted partitions. If it’s just a quick format done with no encryption involved, you have a very high chance of having your stuff back. That’s of course if you catch yourself after doing just the format.

Other than that, yeah, I’ve also had my moments. Back in high school not only did I not have money for an external drive - I didn’t even have enough space on my primary one. One time a friend lent me an external drive to do a backup and do a clean reinstall - and I can’t remember the details, but something happened such that the external drive got borked - and said friend had important stuff that was only on that hard drive. Ironically enough it wasn’t even something taking much space - it was text documents that could’ve lived in an email attachment.

And that’s a great example where a GUI could be way better at showing you what’s what and preventing such errors.

If you’re automating stuff, sure, scripting is the way to go, but for one-off stuff like this seeing more than text and maybe throwing in a confirmation dialogue can’t hurt - and the tool might still be using dd underneath.

You either have a backup or will have a backup next time.

Something that is always online and can be wiped while you’re working on it (by yourself or with AI, doesn’t matter) shouldn’t count as backup.

Again, depends on what your use case is. Even if you find a stripped down OS that’s less resource heavy, you’ll probably still be using the same other software (i.e. same browser on the same modern web, and you’ll be out of RAM once you open 10-20 tabs). If a manufacturer has meant this as base specs for a thin client, you’re not tricking anyone (but yourself) by trying to use it as a full featured computer, and you’re still driving sales (at least on the hardware part) on a deliberately crippled product.

If you want to vote with your wallet (as IMO everyone should), you don’t buy this and repurpose it; you simply don’t buy it.

Depends on what you do and depends on how it’s set up.

At a previous job we had thin clients set up to connect to some remote desktops, and indeed they were running an OS locally, but had barely enough resources to run the OS and the client app.

It’s like he asked his chatbot to come up with this argument.

Sometimes even just one phone is too much.

This has to be rage bait. I feel like the less time I’m on there, the happier I am. Even the 30 minutes daily limit that I usually set for apps like that is time I’m never getting back.

The only reason I have an account to begin with is because I’m a photographer (even if just a hobbyist) and I like to have some presence in the circles I’m in. If it wasn’t for that, I wouldn’t be there at all.

Bought a bunch of 20s a while back. My only concern now is if (when) one of them dies, I might not be able to get the same one (or any at all).