shirro
I am curious who buys generative AI services? The consumers seem to be people making memes or questionable porn with free services. It can’t prepare food, unblock drains or tile a bathroom. You can’t use it for anything like medicine, law or engineering where you would be professionally liable if it fucks up. How is it sustainable?
Framework have been shipping to Australia for ages. I ordered in December 2022 and it drop shipped from Taiwan to rural Australia in about a week. It was faster than ordering parts from pccasegear though that isn’t saying much.
I have been a fan of System76 since I saw some stickers at a conference nearly two decades ago. I think they have good intentions but unfortunately a badge engineering company for most of their existence. The quality hasn’t always been there from their ODMs and foreign RMA bothers me. You can buy a clevo or tong fang from local resellers and cover it in linux stickers.
The used market in Australia is bad for most things unfortunately.
Reviewers like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed serve the Windows gamer market first. If you game on Windows you want to know the best price/performance for your purposes. Benchmarking kernel compiles and database transactions on Linux has zero relevance to a Windows gamer, particularly if Microsoft bugs cause the performance not to translate.
If we only looked at raw hardware performance and ignored platform support we might evaluate Nvidia only on Windows and determine they are the best graphics cards for Linux users which would be insane. Platform support matters to an audience.
Not sold on declarative systems in all domains. It often creates unnecessary complexity for little advantage.
Immutable root has huge benefits in large deployments for consumers, enterprise or servers. Really great for Chromebooks and consoles. Probably would benefit the majority of Windows installations, certainly in enterprise. I do not like the idea of critical systems being updated with random shit becoming standard practice as in WIndows/Clownstrike land. Those guys have normalised insanity to the point they think we are the crazy ones.
However I like to mutate my desktop and development systems. I use linux because I like the freedom to tinker and that includes the freedom to mess stuff up. In practice having root writable only by a privileged user, a signed software distribution and knowing what I am doing mostly keeps me out of trouble. On the very rare occasions I find myself without a bootable system (it has happened to me more than once in 30 years) I know how to recover and it doesn’t stress me.
Adding rust to a massive mature C project that targets lots of architectures and has many contributors is a difficult process. If it succeeds it is going to take a lot more time and patience.
True that copyright always existed to protect publishers and not creators. But in pre-digital times there were considerable barriers to publishing and distributing creative works at scale so while publishers in all media have often abused creators they were a necessary evil if you wanted to make a living.
The worst trick greedy capitalists have pulled recently it to bypass copyright and steal the entire digital record of human creative labor to incorporate into proprietary models and services for their own enrichment. I have no idea how society and our political representation has slept through that. The second worse is insanely destroying their own industry by fucking over both consumers and creatives with increasingly unsustainable greedy and dumb bullshit.
Access to education and other equitable causes really should be fair use. If everyone pirated, and the way things are going it will be the only sane way to get content, then new content is going to dry up unless people are happy with AI slop. We will still see indie self-published works but necessarily the creators won’t have access to the same resources we saw when they were part of an exploitative but productive industry. That sucks. A lot of people are happy to pay for convenient and affordable access to content under reasonable conditions and piracy is something they only resort to when that is denied.
I have a Framework 13" DIY running Linux. It is functional. I am reasonably confident I will be able to buy replacements for anything that breaks which is important to me. It is well designed for repair and upgrade but other devices offer better price/performance/features. If you are on a tight budget and care about the environment buy used.
Windows 9x was extremely time consuming to install with multiple reboots and before that it was all config files. Out of the box 95 couldn’t play media, connect to the internet (thanks trumpet), even access a cd. Normies bought machines pre-installed and got help when the system shit itself. Before there were scripted alternatives large scale Windows deployments were all imaged because of the hours it took to set up a single machine swapping floppies and writing to spinning rust. You had to reboot numerous times and use third party drivers and apps for everything. I recently installed a disposable Win 10 to do a firmware upgrade and Microsoft have come a long way though having to disconnect the Internet to get a local login is very dark.
I isn’t even a Linux vs Windows thing but a competent at your job vs don’t know what the fuck you are doing thing. Critical systems are immutable and isolated or as close as reasonably possible. They don’t do live updates of third party software and certainly not software that is running privileged and can crash the operating system.
I couldn’t face working in corporate IT with this sort of bullshit going on.