Why does everyone always use the old photos of chubby Linus?

Its a bit easier if you use a bath of ice water. Skin separates easier most of the time.

the recent gen mac mini and the iphone “e” range was probably a bit of a warning that they were going to push their entry level equipment a bit harder… I think it’s good for the industry to have some actual competition and disruption in what used to be the mid-range price brackets.

bring back the decently made, adequately specced mid range, we’ve lost it somewhere along the line.

I know their plan is just to get more people into their ecosystem, people will buy this laptop, or have it given to them buy a school or even a business, then they’re stuck in the apple ecosystem and will be more likely to upgrade to their higher end models, buy their phones, cloud services etc.

wicked smart.

on my work PC at the moment (lovely little AMD 5700u mini-pc with 16Gb ram) I have a debloated LTSC build on W11 and two profiles of firefox running with a total of 25 tabs, a couple of them are more complex web apps but most are static pages, plus a couple of file browser, an old dumb custom invoicing app we use (~2003 application so its very light) and a VNC viewer with another machine running.

7.9gb of ram use.

it’s not that bad really, I mean it’s a lot for just mostly websites but we know they arent as light as they used to be, 8gb would be too little since I need some dedicated for Vram as I run 3 displays but I certainly dont need much more than 16.

I did have 32gb in this machine at first since I was doing some light photoshop and basic CAD/CAM, but it very rarely exceeded 16gb, so I cut it back and it’s been absolutely fine.

If you give windows more ram, it will use more ram as a baseline of course, unused ram is wasted ram.

I honestly dont care about the 8gb of ram, that is plenty for the target audience given MacOS’s pretty good memory management, and optimisation of the first party apps the majority of users will use. I would have liked to see the base price be $499, but that would probably have needed something to be cut down to outside of apples standards, like the display or chassis quality.

I’m a little disappointed by the limited USB, its just one usb 3.0 (not 3.1 as far as I know) and one 2.0, I know that’s a limitation of the platform, there arent really any spare PCIE lanes on a phone SOC. They could have put in a USB Hub chip to get two USB 3.0 ports with shared bandwidth, but I suspect that was difficult to do with reliable video and power throughput and someone decided saving a dollar was more important. That’s plenty for your average user, but a pair of usb 3.1 would have been preferred of course.

However… how many average PC users even use USB now? maybe just a thumb drive very rarely or to use an external display. I’m surprised it even has a headphone jack and an SD reader honestly.

I’d suspect the next gen model to use the newer iPhone chip that should bump the memory up to 12gb and I think has a usb 3.1 controller, so they could break that out better.

I dont hate it. it’s filling in what used to be the mid range of laptops that has kinda died in the last 10 years and is full of spec bumped versions of bottom tier plastic garbage with awful screens and short battery life, and a couple of underspecced cut down versions of nicer metal case laptops that are just not very good either.

MacOS is significantly better than windows when using their first party apps, but many third party apps are ram hogs and things get forced to swap more often.

Swap isn’t terrible though, a lot of current gen mac hardware has very fast SSDs and very low latency controllers so it’s pretty transparent in normal use.

I think if you are on a website like this, this computer isn’t for you, but it is for a lot of people who use nothing but a web browser with one tab open 90% of the time.

the newer A series chips have 12GB of ram, so that bodes well for the next generation of the neo.

8gb is plenty for your average non-technical user, and macos is pretty good at memory and process management and swap as long as you are using mostly first party apps, which the average non-tech savvy user will, likely just the default browser and maybe the built in office suite… that’s pretty much it.

its really a case of If you ask whether 8gb is enough… you probably arent the target for this machine.

for Ep 4 I like HAL9000’s cut, Adywan’s cuts are good too. I like their prequel trilogy cuts too.

if you are looking for a supercut of all 3 into one film, I like “Star Wars: Abridged II - The Rebellion” by SubjectZero, though their cuts of the other trilogies arent quite as good in my opinion.

as for other fan edits of other franchises, I just watched the M4 book edit of the Hobbit trilogy and that does a fantastic job combining those three bloated films back into something simpler and truer to the book.

I have the 4K77/80/83 releases in DNR and no-DNR on my server, along with classic despec, Harmy’s and one fan-edit that re-cuts the films.

there’s also 4k80 and 4k83 for the other films, and they are all available with or without noise reduction. the no-dnr versions have incredible detail (to the extent of seeing flaws in the sets and costumes in some cases) but the film grain varies in size and contrast pretty wildly from scene to scene due to having various sources so it can be distracting, the DNR versions are oversmoothed IMO so I just watch with the grain intact.

They have some issues where there are colour and contrast variances scene to scene, again thats from having multiple film sources of various ages and generations, and their intent to do minimal colour correction. sometimes better quality film is found and the releases are updated with that.

They dont intend to be “perfect” but they are sourced directly from projection copies that people watched in the day, which may include some flaws that other versions like Harmy’s aim to fix.

the fitgirl love is part of the whole meme.

in reality the person behind fitgirl is unhinged as fuck and that is very entertaining.

If you follow the homebrewing socials world there was a flurry of AI vs human beer recipe videos and posts a while ago.

in short, yes most of these Ai tools can spit out a workable beer recipe, but as expected it’s more or less just the average of multiple published recipes and not particularly special, and if you ask it to tweak the recipe for a particular quality it falls apart quickly due to a lack of source data for the effects of all possible variables.

Unidan was a legend, he will be missed.

I stopped using Hotmail when gmail launched and I was given one of the early invites from a tech relative. I have the welcome email from '04.

But now I’m looking at moving my emails to a self hosted solution because they have used everything in my >20year email history for Ai and I don’t want that to continue into the future.

If it is possible to make small amounts of those elements on purpose as a byproduct, it can help to offset the costs of the reactor in some small way and help with isotopic/nuclear research in general. But that can be done in pretty much any fusion reactor design to some degree.

As for Alchemy of the future, If in a thousand years we can just built whatever materials we need (including potential ultra heavy stable elements) from raw subatomic particles we don’t even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.

a lot longer than that.

Synthetic corundum, spinel and others have been around for over 120 years, and optically transparent uncoloured sapphire glass for over 80 years. They are just aluminium oxides.

ALON is just the new hotness, and not as good as some others in terms of visible light transparency.

Aluminium Oxide (Al₂O₃) can be crystal clear too, it’s just Sapphire, I have a chunk of it on my wrist right now, looks pretty clear to me, and almost as hard as a diamond.

any particle accelerator can do that just incredibly slowly.

Alchemy of that sort has been doable for generations, it’s just WILDLY impractical!

Same issue hit me, some government and banking services wouldn’t accept my .info and .services domains, so I have a backup .com for those.

Wish I didn’t need it though, its 2025.

I use Ad-Guard instead of Pihole because the pi-hole software used to be missing some of the DNS features I wanted at the time, and I just stuck with it ever since. I have the main DNS server running on my Unraid Box, and a backup that runs on my HomeAssistant Pi4B.