I always thought of Macs as not a good value before, but nowadays for laptops at least they seem to be relatively good.

I still find them annoyingly unintuitive, but that’s probably due to lack of experience. At least they come with some (old) version of bash and support standard stuff like ssh out of the box from my understanding.

I probably should mention I’m on bazzite, so a lot of things just work out of the gate, not sure about other distros.

They work out of the box, but the firmware updater is what’s windows only (pro 2 and pro 3 at least). Not even a MacOS version of the firmware tool.

The larger issue I found with them was that hollow knight and silksong didn’t capture the triggers properly on their Linux version making them unplayable. Also the games would crash once in a while. You have to run the windows version with proton to get a solid experience. I read it was due to outdated Linux input libraries used by unity or whatever game engine it uses.

They also advertise on the bay area in the US by the highways one time we drove by. Although compared to all the AI garbage companies that promise the world on their billboards, it was generic “protect your privacy - mullvad VPN” and something like that. I only remember it because of the mascot.

Not in my experience. Once their clients budgets get cut by funding cuts due to reality and they notice it doesn’t do anything of benefit (on the clients side), they will be all “client first”.

He probably found himself on the bottom 5% performers after losing the company billions if dollaroos with the dumb VR investing. He just didn’t want to be let go.

Surely you meant someone like John Stuart.

You are more optimistic than the maintainers of those older projects that have started to ban LLM generated bug reports. They tend to be a waste of time for the maintainers (e.g.: cURL project).

Macroslop*

I wouldn’t. Why would I bother at this point. Their commitment is to making money, not customers.

At least they ran trials. I feel the federal gov’t would just buy the shit with our taxes.

There’s going to be plenty of idiots that will see the never proven mostly unusable robot as a good thing for the company. Another trillion dollar bonus package approved!

I still get a bunch of AI bullshit unless I go out of my way. Also I swear they keep reactivating it as much as google when you opt out (or select ddg no ai as your search engine in Firefox and still see that garbage).

You didn’t sneak anything in, they just don’t care enough. Even the most useless IT admin has a GUI to see any and all executables that any user runs. They even know if you use bat or sh scripts that you add an argument with a plain text password (which is considered amateurish since it leaves the credentials directly on the history).

Also fair warning, most endpoint security software that companies are forced to use nowadays (if they want consideration to work with certain clients like state and federal) do SSL man in the middle with certificates they push to their hardware. Accessing personal data and websites using company resources is like handing out your password to them, and at least in the US, could open you up for litigation of you get on their bad side for how you use company resources.

Above might not apply to startups, but as mentioned, if they want to work with certain clients, they have to run that kind of software to be considered for contracts. This means actions could have delayed consequences if a client has some audit request for any reason.

Librewolf by default clears cookies on close, which is kind of annoying for anything with a 2fa login. It can be changed on the settings, but you have to know that’s an option and the root of the behavior, which most regular people won’t.

Read about that boot issue and how it starts as a “full storage” message. Also how it was outside the warranty period for most cases, so you end up with a literal brick. I’d be pissed if my TV died just a few years in.

If we go by personal experience, we recently had the time of several people wasted troubleshooting an issue for a very well known commercial Java app server. The AI overview hallucinated a fake system property for addressing an issue we had.

The person that proposed the change neglected to mention they got it from AI until someone noticed the setting did not appear anywhere in the official system properties documented by the vendor. Now their personal reputation is that they should not be trusted and they seem lazy on top of it because they could not use their eyes to read a one page document.

Technical specs don’t capture the bugs, edge cases and workarounds needed for technical subjects like software.

They more often than torrents do have the wrong tags when its not English music. Took me way too many emails to google music and Spotify before they stopped screaming at me with ALL CAPS on one album and before removing the dots after album track names (1. Track Name), not to mention the ones named TRACK 1, etc.

Or insider trading.