Early 90s, male, North America

No. They have a trial of 100 one-time searches, but that’s it.

Cursed

That’s hard for me to answer because I’m usually at home plugged in, and I set the max charge in the bios to only 65% so the battery will physically degrade slower (I don’t need the charge). A few hours is really all I can say with any accuracy. Worth noting a few things -

1. Since I bought my laptop they came out with an improved battery I could upgrade to, so you’d get a better experience.
2. I believe(?) battery life is improved a fair bit at least with the AMD ones; less sure on the newer Intel ones.

I will say that if long battery life is your #1 concern this may not be the laptop for you.

I have a 12th gen Intel Framework running Arch. I love it, although as others have pointed out the battery life could be better. Early kernels shortly after release had some incompatibility issues that required specific kernel arguments to fix. Also I had to blacklist the light sensor as it conflicted with the brightness function keys.

The Arch wiki has a page with details on Framework laptops you may appreciate looking at.

Out of curiosity - what laptop maker is installing Sway by default?

I had a few false starts before, but MS force-updating me to the objectively worse and user-hostile Windows 8 triggered my latest (and successful) switch.

Maybe you’re thinking of Pulsar: Lost Colony? It has some similarities (in that someone can captain a ship and look around the bridge) but the gameplay is pretty different. ST:BC was from the early 2000s so there’s definitely not a VR version of it in particular.

I used to play the demo for Star Trek Bridge Commander so much and always wanted the full game - several years ago I bought a copy off Amazon (now it’s available on Gog). Fun game, but it shows its age now.

I suggest checking out their discount brands Kimsufi and SoYouStart. I pay like C$12/month for a dedicated server with a few cores, 8GB of RAM, and 2TB of hard drive space.

Oh I thought you were from .ml. Never mind then.

I see the swears just fine, nothing’s been removed.

Related question - how usable (in practical terms) are these cards for running AI models like Llama or Stable Diffusion? I know it’s technically possible but I don’t want to install a billion AUR packages and a custom kernel, etc.

Yeah they make the same point in their subscribers-only podcast. They did say that they earn enough to be sustainable, so it sounds like they aren’t having to dip into their savings anymore. I hope they get more than that though as everyone deserves to thrive.

Yeah it stops converting numbers too. At my job we have a lot of ids that start with 0, and it was super annoying to have ‘000123’ turn into ‘123’, now it keeps it as text.

I’m not sure what version got this, but there’s a setting now where you can disable auto-conversion and it’s amazing.

https://mashable.com/article/microsoft-excel-disable-setting-auto-conversion-data-into-dates

I wouldn’t call it collecting in the sense of owning them all, but I’ve been building up my game library on GOG and archiving all the installers on an external hard drive. It at least gives me more of a sense of ownership than my Steam library does, because if GOG went away tomorrow I’d still have my games.

Sometimes I like to think of the economy as a small village where people directly goods with each other. The invention of money means you can make a living off of selling to just one person and still have something to offer the farmer, but for this thought experiment this I want to focus on the actual, real, goods and services of the economy.

So imagine a small village. You have the farmer who grows food. You have the blacksmith who builds car parts, and the mechanic that builds cars and tractors. And you also have the village fool who makes people laugh in exchange for tips. The mechanic gives tractors to the farmers in exchange for food, and gives some of that food to the mechanic in exchange for parts. When any of them need a laugh they’ll give something to the fool to hear a joke. And you have your other industries, etc. One day a new person comes to town, who will represent the new tech industry. They realize that they can build a machine that tells the farmer the best days to plant and harvest which will help the farmer grow more food. The farmer happily accepts, paying the tech person some food in exchange. Similarly they’re able to help optimize the other industries, and with the value they’re providing and them being in short demand they’re able to get great wages.

With their prosperity, other tech people start coming to the village and helping the other industries get more efficient. Most of the concrete efficiencies are optimized, so they start working on more abstract ones. Someone builds an app to help the villagefolk find someone to trade with (“I have 2 gears but I need 3 loaves” gets matched with “I have 2 wheat bushels and need 2 gears” which gets matched with “I have 3 loaves and need 2 wheat bushels”), in exchange getting a small cut of those resources, and a larger cut if someone pays for preferential matching (advertising). Other tech people find work helping the other tech people at their jobs (IDEs, libraries, issue trackers, etc.) And other tech people build animatronic village fools to entertain the village themselves (video games).

More tech people come as they’ve heard of how much they can earn at this village. Eventually they start having some trouble finding work to do, everything seems optimized. Some of the wealthy members of the town (let’s say the farmer of the biggest field) says to many of these tech people that they’ll pay them food in exchange that the farmer gets a portion of whatever the tech person ends up earning with what they build (low interest rates). With all the good ideas used up, the projects these tech people are working on aren’t working well (crypto) or are duplicates of already existing tools (how many social media apps do we need, etc.). Still though, the farmer is giving them a lot of food so yet more tech people come to the village, and many of the children of the village (like the farmer’s son) are becoming tech workers too.

Eventually, after a bad crop season (maybe because the farmer’s son didn’t help harvest), the farmer is short on food and stops lending out food to these tech workers. They try to go around to the other villagefolk but most have already been optimized. The tools that optimized life are already built and the required tech people for maintenance is a lot less than those needed to build it, and the number of truly new opportunities to help new industries isn’t enough to provide work to all the tech people.

TL;DR

Tech people earned their crazy salaries when they were helping migrate the non-digital world to the digital world. There were so many obvious opportunities for efficiencies and not enough tech people to go around. ‘Spreadsheet’ calculations literally used to be a day-long affair with a team of people - of course a business would pay anything to a tech person to automate that. Now that times the whole economy.

These obvious efficiencies are finite but we treated them as infinite and kept training new tech workers. Low interest rates helped keep us employed for longer than we should have as we were paid to work on bad products in the hope that maybe there’d be a diamond in the rough and yet we STILL kept training new workers. Meanwhile other careers that provide more concrete value, like mechanics & HVAC professionals, have had a labour shortage as Tech attracted so many young people to itself. This eventually led to persistent inflation which then ended low interest rates. With higher interest rates a lot of speculative tech can’t get funding; Tech is only getting paid for the actual new value it can provide today, which is way less than it used to be.

Yeah I think for the typical user non-rolling distros introduce more problems than they solve. It makes sense in a server environment, but it was so frustrating to look up a severe bug, find its bug report, and see that it had already been fixed upstream 6 months previous. Glad that there are better options now for users of different skill levels.

That hardware issue I encountered was actually because the Nvidia drivers bundled by Ubuntu were old and didn’t support my card, not because Nvidia’s latest drivers had issues. Crazy that Ubuntu was okay with having their latest release just not work on a mid-range GPU (Nouveau also didn’t support the card yet).

I’ve used Linux exclusively for several years now, but problems that killed earlier attempts were:

• I’d encounter a hardware driver issue I didn’t know how to fix (Nvidia…)
• I’d dual-boot Windows for playing games and maintaining both OSes was too much (this was pre-Steam client on Linux)
• I wanted to customize some setting that the desktop environment’s control panel didn’t support, and I’d have to copy/paste terminal commands I didn’t understand, usually breaking something which necessitated a reinstall.
• Ubuntu would provide outdated / buggy versions of software, and installing the newer version meant installing PPAs which could conflict with other packages / cause other instabilities I didn’t know how to fix.

The first two have seen massive improvements but I still find most desktop environments limiting if you aren’t a terminal expert / Arch type of user, and Ubuntu still provides buggy versions of programs.