Kinda madly irritating that this excludes the whole charming population of Scotland to hone their great cursing skills because these motherfucking clankers which have as much of a soul as a thermonuclear bomb detonator, as much sincerity as a Russian landmine camouflaged as a child’s toy, as much empathy as a cruise missile hitting a girls school, and as much of a hearth as the boss of Oracle firing 10,000 people with a pencil stroke, and moreovee are too dumb to screw a lightbulb socket are allegedly too sensitive and dainty to receive what people are actually thinking…

A bit like an online shop that sells stuff via Amazon…

You are right with your assessment.

I’d guess it might take one generation until the trials begin. But It might be less depending on how rapidly the climate disaster unfolds. And there will probably a transition period where different institutions, governed by different interests, will be literally at war with each other. Look what happens to the car industry.

If you absolutely have to use LLMs, they should be adressed like servants in old school style, in third person only.

Do you beg your dog to sit down?

I love my X220.

Go for fully Linux compatible hardware. Refurbished business laptops are very good value for the money. For normal tasks, it does not matter if they are five to ten years old.

Ubuntu or Mint is quite okay, I have used both of them in the past and set it up for a friend with little money, little time, and very little PC expertise. Worked perfectly for them for over 10 years without a problem.

Today, if you can get a little help with setting up, I’d recommend Debian stable with either GNOME or KDE. It is more stable and has longer and better long term security support, which did become more important.

Also, it is now easy to set up with disk encryption, which matters for keeping private data secure on Laptops which can get lost or stolen.

I was not dreaming about using numpy on the phone for doing compound interest calculations…

This is also a major problem with social networks, gmail and so on - users think these authorize them to give away private data of you- like phone numbers, mail adresses, text message content, images - of you.

Now things that have been told in confidence only for their ears are added to that list.

I noticed that with self-checkout terminals, fruit varieties are still mis-labeled and missing. I noted that because I write down the price for such items, to be sure I enter the correct variety and price. It wasn’t there. Not only you’d pay more than is on the label - you also risk to be accused of theft if there is a bag ceck. And if you call somebody to correct it, you waste several minutes since the missing variety might not even be in the system.

The time saving is hugely illusory. You really should take your watch and measure. What costs most time at a staffed register checkout is mostly the payment. The staff scans much faster than you.

Try to save a file to “PRN”.

Nvidia is linux compatible hardware

Then why keep people complaining it doesn’t work?

Think before you buy?

But to be honest, TempleOS is way cooler.

While plan9 is Unix tidied up a bit.

Look at distrowatch.org.

Myself, I am using plain old Debian stable since about 17 years, after using SuSE and a bit of Ubuntu since 1998 or so.

I also use a bit of Arch and Guix when it comes handy.

So, I am a boring guy.

But back to your question: What du you want? What is your goal?

Buy Linux-compatible hardware. NOT NVidia.

Fuck NVidia. I saved so much time since I bought an AMD Radeon card.

Here a comment on this from usernomdeguerre on hacker news (ycombinator.com).

“His” and “GKH” refers to Greg Kroah-Hartmann, who is maintainer of the stable kernel series and the speaker in the video.

I’ve included a few slides into text that i thought were eye-opening to me:

From his Kernel Recipes 2026 slide on Mythos

  Mythos's 79 vulnerabilities:
  24 - no detail at all "something crashed"
  14 - not a bug at all
  3 - totally made up data
  15 - already fixed in latest release
    - 11 by others
    - 4 by anthropic
  20 - fixes were needed
    - 7 "assume a malicious filesystem image"
    - 2 "assume you can inject a malicious network packet into the middle of the stack"
    - 2 "NOMMU"
    - 6 sctp networking issues for untrusted devices
    - 2 ipv6 minor network issues 
    - 1 gpu driver for local malicious user

GHK called this “10 ‘real’ bugfixes”, which to me sounds like there’s a wild hype machine around these companies and uncritical parroting of every press release they make that falls apart when you engage the affected real experts.

I found keyboard layout switching to be too much friction.

I am programming in English and writing in English and German. What I use now is the UK international layout with dead keys. Plus compose key bindings for less frequently used symbols like € or °. This allows me to keep the same layout everywhere, which makes my life easier - and typing faster.