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.

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’m a nightmare for any IT department and software developer. I know enough to do damage, but don’t have the patience and knowledge to wield this power. I go around editing shit in random config files in order to “temporarily fix” an issue and then forget that I ever did it, slowly turning and system I touch into a ticking time bomb. This also combined with my unique ability to seemingly break any piece of software by merely interacting with it, especially on Linux, before I even had the chance to install anything. I’ve installed and used Linux on countless devices and haven’t ever had a smooth ride, yet still I’m completely daily driving Linux at this point.

I use Arch by the way :3 (and Fedora, and Ubuntu, and Raspbian, and God knows what else)

For some issues, especially related to programming and Linux, I feel like I kinda have to at this point. Google seems to have become useless, and DDG was never great to begin with but is arguably better than Google now. I’ve had some very obscure issues that I spent quite some time searching for, only to drop it into ChatGPT and get a link to some random forum post that discusses it. The biggest one was a Linux kernel regression that was posted on the same day in the Arch Linux forums somewhere. Despite having a hunch about what it could be and searching/struggling for over an hour, I couldn’t find anything. ChatGPT then managed to link me the post (and a suggested fix: switching to LTS kernel) in less than minute.

For general purpose search tho, hell no. If I want to know factual data that’s easy to find I’ll rely on the good old search engine. And even if I have to use an LLM, I don’t really trust it unless it gives me links to the information or I can verify that what it says is true.

Uhhh, I, uhhh

I use Arch by the way :3

Sorry I couldn’t help it. Technically I started this install as Antegos, but since that project ended I used some voodoo to convince my OS that it’s Arch now with moderate succes.

Oh I do dislike Manjaro. I tried it a few times on some PCs and every time it ended in a dumpster fire. Can’t remember exactly what it was, but it has something to do with pitting me pick the kernel but also completely going to shit if I didn’t pick the right one at the right moment. Constant errors, pain and suffering. When I switched that machine to Fedora it was suddenly happily purring like a kitten without any issues.

Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.

Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3

Yeah I’m on a 5700 or something with 64 GB of DDR4 and I don’t see any issues with it yet. I went that route because I could keep my mobo and it was also way cheaper than DDR5 back then. I figured I’d rather have more older RAM than a full system upgrade.

Is RAM already at a price that it’s worth considering selling one of those sticks? :3

You’re probably aware, but Bitwig studio runs natively on Linux. And tools like yabridge can allow you to run many VST plugins as well. Though it remains a bit of a hassle compared to Windows. I’ve for instance lost access to a NI plugin because their new all-in-one installer/verification program won’t work on Linux

Yeah I feel like anyone who blames Linus for this is missing the point. Was it dumb, yes, but if we want the average (or even a bit tech-savy) Windows gamer to transition to Linux then the distro they use needs to be resistant to this. Most people don’t read shit, they just want things to work so they can play their games. And they’ll happily click through multiple warnings to get there.

Fun fact, this loop is kinda how one of the generative ML algorithms works. This algorithm is called Generative Adversarial Networks or GAN.

You have a so-called Generator neural network G that generates something (usually images) from random noise and a Discriminator neural network D that can take images (or whatever you’re generating) as input and outputs whether this is real or fake (not actually in a binary way, but as a continuous value). D is trained on images from G, which should be classified as fake, and real images from a dataset that should be classified as real. G is trained to generate images from random noise vectors that fool D into thinking they’re real. D is, like most neural networks, essentially just a mathematical function so you can just compute how to adjust the generated image to make it appear more real using derivatives.

In the perfect case these 2 networks battle until they reach peak performance. In practice you usually need to do some extra shit to prevent the whole situation from crashing and burning. What often happens, for instance, is that D becomes so good that it doesn’t provide any useful feedback anymore. It sees the generated images as 100% fake, meaning there’s no longer an obvious way to alter the generated image to make it seem more real.

Sorry for the infodump :3

The people who use it happily don’t make memes about it. I do have some weird errors every now and then, it’s definitely not as stable for me as X11. However X11 wasn’t very smooth with my multi monitor setup, and Wayland improved the smoothness of my PC enormously, so the random issues every now and then are worth it

When do I get my Arch socks? Also, I should try Nix based off this image (which is a trustworthy source of course).

Yeah that’s a bit much tbh. Personally I find the train to be way too loud usually. Other people talking, train noises, maybe a screaming baby or something. I’ll just listen to some music and stare out of the window (if it isn’t dark).

I want to use it but I keep forgetting it exists. Something like this should just be accessible via button in the UI so no-one misses it

They often are :3

Recently my parents showed me some stuff they saw on Facebook. It was all just AI slop, rage bait, advertisements. Seriously, there was barely anything useful on it. They were very avoidant of acknowledging it tho. “But there’s also fun stuff on it”. They were constantly wondering whether what they were reading was real, yet it did plant seeds in their brains. It’s even influencing their politics, I had to have a whole discussion with them (traditionally centre left voters) about how our left wing parties didn’t want to let an unstoppable horde of immigrants into our country. And why voting for a centre right guy because “he looks pretty competent” will also fuck with poor people and important topics like abortion.

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 )

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.

At work I tend to have like 3 workspaces just for stuff I need to be doing. Different projects. My second monitor tends to be reserved for the documentation etc that I need for that project. Then there are multiple workspaces with terminals for ssh, screenshares, and other terminal hackeroni. And one for messages etc.

I prefer to use i3 or away for this but unfortunately not every workplace lets you have that

Ever since I switched to LTS my computer has actually become remarkably more stable.