Honestly just looks like normal lens flare where the sun is blocked by a tree branch. The flare is lens-dependent, but it’s also dependent on conditions. I doubt one could reliably fingerprint someone based on lens flare unless OP is like one of a few people using this lens

Because an average user would do that. Hell, I use Linux full-time and I didn’t know that PopOS in a huge transition. A user wants a gaming-focused distro an picks one. It should just work if we want all those Windows users to transition. He can’t do it right either, there will always be someone complaining about his choice. People here seem to think they’re an average user, when they’re really way above average in terms of technical knowledge. Even if Linus should maybe know better, it’s better that he does some dumb stuff because that’s what many people would do.

Seriously? I have recently been working on my personal programming projects on my ThinkPad from 2014. That thing also has 8 GB RAM. It’s slow, but that’s only because the dedicated video card is no longer supported by NVIDIA. I was totally able to run PyCharm, my program (which was hungry for ram), and Firefox with quite some tabs open without any issues. And most people will be doing more basic stuff on this than what I was doing. Browsing around, editing some documents, viewing some photos. I’m not sure how heavy MacOS is, but I’ll assume it’s more like Linux than Windows. You can do a lot with 8GB if your OS isn’t gobbling up resources to spy on you, show you ads, or run some useless AI shit you didn’t ask for.

I agree that it’s not a lot, but this laptop is not meant for people who need to do more than what I mentioned, putting much more RAM in there would just creep up the price without really offering anything.

Note that I’m not an Apple fan or anything, I’ve never even used anything from Apple.

Yeah exactly. Although it’s also totally understandable that OP is unhappy with their decision. At the end of the day any reasonably large workplace just wants all their IT to be as manageable as possible, which means as uniform as possible in hardware and OS. But using windows for many jobs just kinda sucks.

Too little too late. I’m already over to Linux now. Shit’s been going downhill even before this whole AI craze went off the rails. I hope Microsoft Windows crashes and burns

I used to feel the same. At some point I put some time into setting up KDE how I wanted it and then I just kinda kept using it. Still use it today. I do find the editing tools of the toolbars etc to be extremely chaotic. But once that’s in place it’s actually nicer than Gnome imo

Your view is totally fine, but I guess you’re not understanding why people do this. I’m a millennial, around 30. Personally I buy CDs, I buy vinyl, and I even have some stuff on tape. I’ve also recently picked up film photography and among my friends it’s common nowadays to bring some 2000-2010 digicams.

So why? flac is perfect, and streaming services stream whatever high-quality music you’d ever want to play. Film is expensive, and digicams are often way more shit than whatever a modern smartphone that’s already in your pocket can do.

Personally I’ve become bored by perfection, overwhelmed by choice, and frustrated with the lack of owning anything. When I play a physical album I sit down for it, I am focused on the music. I cannot easily choose the music, I’ll just have to accept the order of the album. There are way fewer choices to overwhelm me. Likewise, with film photography, it feels simpler in a way. You shoot a few images in a go, because film isn’t cheap, and you’ll only get to see them weeks later when the roll is developed. No pressure of the perfect shot, no insane resolution to show any imperfection. And mistakes just happen, because you cannot see what you’re doing, so you just have to accept them. Digitally you can just take 20 pictures and take the best one.

So back to music. Why would one prefer vinyl or tape over CD? As a life-long CD collector, I wondered the same thing a few years ago. But when artists that I enjoy started skipping CD releases in favor of vinyl I hopped in, invested in a shit vinyl player, and didn’t really get it. Sure it had a character, but it wasn’t great in any way. After some more research I found out that it was probably just the vinyl player (please don’t get some cheap shit for a 100 bucks with a red unbranded needle). I invested in an Audiotechnica LP70XBT, and oh boy did stuff improve. I finally get it. The sound is gorgeous, though not necessarily better or worse than CD imo. It’s a bit warmer, with detailed bass but less clinical high end. And I love the whole tactile experience of it. Older vinyl definitely sounds worse than modern CD quality though.

I think it’s the whole experience that people enjoy. Putting the vinyl or cassette in the player, having something move and, as if it were magic, suddenly there’s music. With a slightly different character that differentiates it from the clean and clinical sound of high quality digital audio. Modern digital audio is great and definitely has its place, but at times it can feel sterile, too perfect. The crackles and warmth of vinyl, the grain and slightly off colours of photographic film, they feel like they have more personality. They stem from a time where the imperfections of the medium still kinda hid the imperfections of the artist.

(Okay this turned into quite a ramble but I hope there’s something useful in there :3 )

Yeah yeah I will. Right after another video

In some jobs you can. I switched to working 36 hours which effectively traded money for time and energy. The moment that money bar fills up with sufficient buffer again I’ll probably switch to 32. It mainly provides time though, not energy. But it’s better than nothing

Maybe we should nuke the rest if the world too

It’s horrendously slow, unusable imo. With the larger DeepSeek distilled models I tried that didn’t fit into VRAM you could easily wait 5 minutes until it was done writing its essay. Compared to just a few seconds when it does. Bit that’s with a RTX 3070 Ti, not something the average ChatGPT user has lying around probably.

Damn, maybe AI can replace me after all

So I never really though about this before this post, but the Dutch name is actually really fucking weird. They’re called “pissebedden” here, which is a combination of “pissen” (to pee) and “bedden” (beds). I read that apparently there was a superstition that they would help against bed wetting of you put them in your bed before sleep. I guess that’d help because it’d be hard to sleep with those buggers crawling around in your bed. What’s also weird is that the name isn’t literally “bed wetters” because then the words should be reversed like “bedpissers” or something. So it’s more like “pissybeds” in English.

Idk what tf they were smoking tbh, but it’s the normal word for them and is even used on Wikipedia. Li they’re talking about the zoetwaterpissebedden (fresh water pissybed) as if this is a reasonable scientific name.

Yeah exactly. I’ve been on the receiving end on of (male) bullying quite a bit and also haven’t always been nice to others myself in order to try and fit in. I can only remember one physical incident in all those years. That guy was the classic “movie” bully, just an asshole terrorizing everyone around him, so naturally I decided that something had to be done (it did not go well). Other than that it was all psychological. “Friends” that started saying mean things the moment they were around people they looked up to.

Something that makes it a bit more difficult is also that bullying in these cases was often not black and white. The line between friendly teasing and psychological bullying was often quite thin. In hindsight I interpreted a lot of teasing jokes as bullying because I took everything literally and was very protective of my stuff. That doesn’t excuse them because it was very clear that it hurt me, but it’s interesting that some of those interactions now have become regular interactions between me and my friends that both sides clearly enjoy.

I thought the same, so I bought some Blu-rays and DVDs. DVDs are fine as long as you’re okay with the quality. Blu-rays have DRM though, which in Linux feels like you’re pirating even when playing legit content

True, but it’s still work that’s usually volunteering work. So it’s probably a good idea to call it volunteering so the kids associate it with that. It’s to give kids a taste of what kind of work volunteers do so they might do it voluntarily in the future (like the kid in this post).

Personally I also didn’t really mind it in school. I had to spend a few days at a thrift store and had lots of fun. They installed Ubuntu on their laptops, which was my first contact with Linux. I got to help customers with that. And one time we were moving a couch and accidentally hit a stand that wasn’t attached properly. It fell over and almost hit a customer lol.

Even people who’ve been at it for years. I am skeptical of the AI hype bubble as much as anyone here, but it’s been very useful for fixing things in Linux. Just in the past years it helped me (among others):

• Find an obscure bug that was reported that same day in the kernel, and helped me switch to the LTS kernel to prevent these issues.
• Help me setup up a random 35mm film scanner that I found with cups, and then help me set up a win XP VM when that didn’t work out
• Help me fix bluray playback yesterday after VLC suddenly randomly started to refuse playing it.

Meow meow :3

The “anti-woke” men at my office once crowned me the “woke police” because I commented on one of their sexist/racist/homophobic/ whatever “jokes”. It’s my badge of honour. The weird part is that we kinda entered into some sort of cold war. I could comment on their “jokes”, pretending it was in jest as part of my job as “woke police”, while still getting the message across. I guess it kinda kept some semblance of friendliness and ability to cooperate while we still got our opinions out.

Personally I also ran some distilled versions of DeepSeek locally, though I’d imagine that isn’t really possible for most people.