2016: most people just do some web browsing, videos, and documents.
2026: most people just do some web browsing, videos, and documents
But I like your take. You’re right. Software should linearly get bloated and slower as a function based on time.
mediaanalysisd loves to go brrr. They certainly handle close-to-OOM situations more nicely than most Linux distros with their growable swap
Why? Were we incapable of using computers 10-14 years ago when 2-8gb were standard? 16 gigabyte computer to log into email, instagram, and facebook. Give me a break.
I walked into a Best Buy last fall just to kind of browse the computers on offer. The sales rep recommended a laptop (Asus, I think) with 16gb of RAM, saying he actually even got his aunt one of the same model he was recommending to me.
That’s insane. What the fuck is going on in these big tech companies that people are recommending 16gb of RAM for aunties and normies?
Rhetorical question, the answers are: mega-reliance on webviews, every mid-level PM having to ship “features” to justify their position and to climb the corporate ladder, and every UI designer getting the brain-sickness that’s rounded-corners and animations everywhere, while some VP of product insisting on more ads and user-tracking. Add “agentic” aka slop coding to cap a decade of learn-2-code bootcamp 2nd-rate programmers who vigorously studied Cracking the Coding Interview without properly understanding the fundamentals… and voila!
That’s the splendid thing about the Neo. Apple is saying ok, we know it’s only 8GB of RAM, but through the service life of the laptop we can ensure that that will give you a good desktop experience.
I do what you are asking about literally with a 2014 Thinkpad. The only thing is I don’t use any “fancy” features. For instance, with Jellyfin I ensure that the data is in a commonly supported format to ensure there is no transcoding or remuxing performed by the server itself.
So, just find any computer made in the last 7 years, slap Linux on it, and I’m sure you’ll be fine.
The student who wants to actually go learn something and become an expert in a field has to contend with the fact that universities are just gilded vocational schools. And at least in the USA you will go into a lot of debt if you don’t come from wealth just to get through it. And there are no promises of stable income and employment when you do get through it.
So, while I think this person comes out the other end functionally no more informed than before, and I would not want to work with her, I can’t fault her for recognizing the bullshit that is the American education system and exploiting it.
For my own part, I busted my ass through university and now I’m seeing all my efforts get gobbled up into AI, cheapening everything I’ve ever done and worked for, and possibly evicting me from my career sometime in the coming few years. That wasn’t a concern when I graduated, LLMs didn’t exist yet. But they do now for current and future students.
Overdue
Remember when Scam Altman posted a picture of the Death Star to explain how scary GPT5 is? lmao these people are all such cretins and I hate them to the last.
If you want to simulate running Claude while it’s offline, just go run the faucet in your kitchen.
Vista called it SuperFetch, and preloading pages into memory is not a bad technique. macOS and Linux do it, too, because it’s a simple technique for speeding up access to data that would otherwise have to be fetched from disk. You can see that Linux does it as you check the output of free and read out the buff/cache column. Freeing unused pages from memory is very fast, because you can just overwrite dirty pages.
For Windows if 8 gb of RAM is not enough that’s an own-goal. Because it is. Or it should be. Windows 11 is not so dramatically better than Windows Vista SP3 to require a 10x better computer to use comfortably. Actually, in many ways Windows 11 is a massive downgrade from what came before it.
I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target. That means we aren’t jumping the gun on saying “actually you need 12 gigs of RAM” as if that should be normal for a usable computer.
How are you supposed to make peace with a pedophile rapist who has staffed his office with racist Warhawk morons who are convinced they can do whatever they want with complete impunity, and they start bombing you while you are under diplomatic negotiations (twice!)?
The company had about 162,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2025, according to its annual filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
What the fuck how is it that many people. I didn’t realize this shit company run by the shittiest group of people run such a huge operation.
Fuck Larry Ellison. Scumbag.
Eden wasn’t really on GitHub, except for binary distribution (presumably because of the cost of doing that was $0).
I’ve been self-hosting for years, but with a recent move comes a recent opportunity to do my network a bit differently. I’m now running a capable OpenWRT router, and support for AdGuard Home is practically built into OpenWRT. I just needed to configure it right and set it up, but the documentation was comprehensive enough.
For years I had kept a Debian VM for Pi-Hole running. I kept it ultra lean with a cloud kernel and 3 gb of disk space and 160MB of RAM, just so it could control its own network stack. And I’d set devices to manually use its IP address to be covered. AGH seems to be about the same exact thing as Pi-Hole. With my new setup the entire network is covered automatically without having to configure any device. And yes, I know I could’ve done the same before by forwarding the DNS lookups to the Pi-Hole, but I was always afraid it would cause a problem for me and I’d need an easy way to back out of the adblocking. Subjectively, over about 6 years, I only had a couple worthless websites that blocked me out.
I haven’t yet gotten to the point where I’m trying to also to intercept hardcoded DNS lookups, but soon… It’s not urgent for me because I don’t have sinister devices that do that.
I’ll do what the US and Israel have done multiple times now and just claim this was done by a friendly fire US missile
No, no. You misunderstood. You have a “memory” of a thing called DDR5, which you used to be able to afford and purchase. You are supposed to bring that memory with you to reminisce fondly while using this piece of junk Dell is trying to sell you.
I “use” ChatGPT because my employer has forced it into the workflow, and they’re the ones paying OpenAI. So I now have a linear relationship with ChatGPT through my employer. The more work I do, the more I use ChatGPT, even though I do not have a choice in the matter and if it were up to me I’d not be using any AI tools at all.
Using it is now part of my performance evaluation beginning this year.
Pooping?