Yeah. Keychrons are kind of a clusterfuck because they release like five limited runs every month. But… basically all of those are the same feature sets but might have slightly different internals based on whatever they bought in bulk the previous month. It DOES make figuring out what to buy kind of annoying but… logitech and razer have been doing that for years anyway.
Keyboard wise? At this point, prices have dropped enough that there is no real reason to go to one of the major manufacturers for anything that isn’t disposable. And basically “all” of the smaller batch mechanical keyboards are dependent on QMK or VIA to some degree which means you can customize them on any machine that can run chrome.
For the logitech price point/build quality? Unless you know why you don’t want one, you can’t go wrong with a Keychron (https://www.keychron.com/). The price and build quality isn’t “the best” but it is very much on par with the logitechs and razers of the world and they are perfect for someone who just wants “a keyboard that works” or someone who wants to learn what they ACTUALLY want out of a keyboard.
Mouse wise? There are an increasing number of “third parties” but… they basically all suck unless you are going to go crazy and mod them. And while I think the firmware matters less in these cases, there are an increasing number of qmk/via mice but… they mostly feel “cheap” or like they are just proving the viability. I have a friend with a ploopy but even he doesn’t really recommend it. So… you are still more or less suck with logitech and razer and the like for that. But hopefully as those companies lock their hardware down more it will lead to something in between “here is a cheap no name ergonomic mouse” and “here is a five hundred dollar mouse”.
Are there any good resources for qmk/via mice? Mostly can only find a few that feel like they are, at best, proof of concepts and more likely just outright predatory scams to cash in on people who want to spend money.
I am sure marketing folk have a reason for it but… this really feels like the kind of thing you put alongside the PS5 Pro announcement that the entire planet watched. Rather than leaving everyone wondering “so… why would I buy a ps5 pro?”
I am sure the actual quote is even stupider than I can imagine but:
Three kids. Let’s assume 3 sunny side up eggs for him, 7, and 4. That gets 9. Then whatever his couch eats so let’s say 10-11. Then another 3 or 4 for a “big pile of scrambled eggs” for the 3 year old and for the 4 year old to actually eat because yucky runny eggs. And then whatever his servants are able to sneak off to feed themselves.
It is very reasonable for a household that doesn’t care about money or food waste.
I’ve been rewatching Veep in honor of Kamala and only having moderate anxiety going into November and… this is the kind of shit even Selina wouldn’t have screwed up on. Part of that is very much that Selina might be a horrible person but she is a fundamentally good leader who cares about The American People.
But it is also just that this level of unforced error from candidates with entire political parties behind them should be unfathomable. Even Veep usually had to make convoluted situations for why Selina would always be blindsided by something The Main Party did or what horrible tragedy she was accidentally mocking that week.
And yet… that is the GOP.
Getting appropriate resources in place when so many offices have furloughed much of their staff and are wary of any bad optics for having too many active staff? That slows down responses.
And you can bet that republicans (and fox and cnn) will criticize Biden for spending on security for Jan 6 regardless of who wins.
Aww, what a clever little monkey. Make sure the government doesn’t shut down and tank the republicans at the polls over the next month or so but also make sure the government DOES shut down to hinder responses on Jan 6 2025
There is definitely money to be made. Whether it is shilling for a product or even attempting to inflate market share in the hopes of converting said market share into either donations or outright selling to investors.
Yeah, I don’t think they have figured out how to properly manipulate lemmy yet (I have seen a shocking amount of facebook “why don’t these kinds of posts go viral” levels of nonsense, for example). But bots are cheap and to pretend that there is not an active effort to figure out how to manipulate us is naivety, at best.
Maybe it is just that I am an old. I watched reddit fall. Hell, I watched fucking gamefaqs “fall”. Not to mention usenet and the rest. Because the reality is that where there are people, there is money. And modern day advertisement techniques (whether it is AI bots or just people in a warehouse in the global south) are increasingly cheap.
People go there because they don’t care about interacting with other human beings. They just want an echo chamber and to occasionally feel like they are an Influencer.
And you can see the same at lemmy. Someone posts something someone doesn’t like? Immediate downvote (and, for the more pathetic people, downvoting on a few alts as well) with no comment or even attempt to refute things other than MAYBE an ad hominem. And plenty of “What is your favorite X” spam-engagement posts that just involve repeating whatever marketing schpiel they heard in the past.
There has been a recent tendency for people to reference social media network sites that are nothing but bots and… it is increasingly obvious that that is what most people want. They want to feel like they are the tastemakers. They want to be moistcritical without needing to focus test the most normy of center-right takes.
It isn’t about being reasonable.
If you are expected to track your time to this degree (and, to make it clear, the majority of employers actively don’t want you to), there is a reason. That reason usually being different funding sources. Generally a mix of grants and clients.
And if a client or grant source finds out you are lying about those? Maybe you only had enough work to do 34 hours instead of 40 hours in one week. Would you be cool paying extra because the guy repairing your muffler had a slow week?
And if people think being proud of a tool that openly talks about what everyone else silently does isn’t a red flag for employers? Hey, its a great job market so I am sure none of that will matter.
Tracking time is fine.
Normalizing your time to the hours you were supposed to work is a massive no no. Especially if you are expected to break down your hours per project.
I mean, you obviously do it. But you never put it in writing.
Pretending the most important use of bit torrent is Linux ISO’s is the kind of cya that people giggle at.
If a candidate I am interviewing has a tool to change their reported hours to me or clients on their public GitHub? That person is radioactive no matter how many times they say “but don’t do anything naughty wink wink”
So … it is a tool to automate time fraud?
Make sure to put this front and center on your CV
He is getting a better offer from the republicans.
trump and the magats are on the way out. Everyone is scrambling to be the next big thing.
Agree that the macbook IS the “future” (really present), same as it was with phones, because a single monolithic SOC is much easier to manufacture and has massive power and energy benefits. That said, I do like that “new” PCAMM2 format since it does wonders for making even those kinds of systems upgradable… to the extent you would upgrade.
And a macbook with a lot less glue and signed parts is kind of what I think we SHOULD be striving for.
That said, gonna nitpick a bit
Having a highly configurable machine is the opposite of the MacBook. There’s probably a market for the Framework laptop. It fully leans into being configurable and repairable.
Again, define “configurable” and “repairable” because the former is buying dongles and the latter is not too dissimilar from other (non-apple) laptops on the market
That gives the user a bigger sense of control. They don’t feel dependent on huge corporations.
Ah, so we are paying the security blanket tax. Farmework makes me feel warm and fuzzy so I should give them money?
It’s not just a feeling either. Other companies don’t want their customers to repair or exchange anything on their laptops and will void the warranty if you do it. Framework is the opposite as it encourages their customers to assemble and replace parts themselves.
Again, actually check out the landscape. Apple are fucking assholes and always will be. But when even frigging Microsoft is making fairly repairable devices (lots of glue but https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Microsoft+Surface+Pro+4+Screen+Replacement/60348 )?
Mostly it sounds like you are reading that marketing schpiel I alluded to. “Companies aren’t your friends and all want to fuck you in the ass. Except Framework. We are your friends”
Customization has become huge in the PC market, especially among gamers. Framework is smart to try and fill this individualist niche. The marketing works well, just like you said. I find the programmable LED modules quite charming for example.
Probably the biggest thing that happened to PC gaming specifically in the past decade is the Steam Deck. Which is a minimally customizable handheld computer
The option to buy the laptop as a kit for me to assemble myself also sounds fun.
And good for you. Personally, I would rather do my zany projects with random crap I got off ebay or build some gunpla. But… I am not going to tempt fate by saying I would never even consider buying a 1k USD model kit.
Empowerment is what the marketing sells to their customers. Few people really need this product, but many find it desirable.
On that I 100% agree. I just… wouldn’t call that a positive.
Lemmy is an outlier where anything “AI” immediately triggers the luddites to scream and rant (and occasionally send threats over PMs…) that it is bad because it is “AI” and so forth. So… massive grain of salt.
Speaking as (for simplicity’s sake) a software engineer who wears both a coder and a manager hat?
“AI” is incredibly useful for charlie work. Back in the day you would hire an intern or entry level staff to write your unit tests and documentation and utility functions. But, for well over a decade now, documentation and even many unit tests can be auto-generated by scripts for vim or plugins for an IDE. They aren’t necessarily great but… the stuff that Fred in Accounting’s son wrote was pretty dogshit too.
What LLMs+RAG do is step that up a few notches. You still aren’t going to have them write the critical path code. But you can farm off a LOT more charlie work to the point where you just need to do the equivalent of review an MR that came from a plugin rather than a kid who thinks we don’t know he reeks of weed.
And… that is good and bad. Good in that it means smaller companies/teams are capable of much bigger projects. And bad because it means a lot fewer entry level jobs to teach people how to code.
So that is the manager/mentor perspective. Let’s dig a bit deeper on your example:
I dont like Bash because of its, dare I say weird syntax but it made the most sense for my purpose so I chose it. Also I have not written anything of this complexity before in Bash, just a bunch of commands in multiple seperate lines so that I dont have to type those one after another. But this one required many rather advanced features. I was not motivated to learn Bash, I just wanted to put my idea into action.
I did start with internet search. But guides I found were lacking. I could not find how to pass values into the function and return from a function easily, or removing trailing slash from directory path or how to loop over array or how to catch errors that occured in previous command or how to seperate letter and number from a string, etc.
Honestly? That sounds to me like foundational issues. You already articulated what you need but you wanted to find an all in one guide rather than googing “bash function input example” or “bash function return example” or “strip trailing strash from directory path linux” and so forth. Also, I am pretty sure I very regularly find a guide that covers every one of those questions except for string processing every time I forget the syntax to a for loop in bash and need to google it.
And THAT is the problem with relying on these tools. I know plenty of people who fundamentally can’t write documentation because their IDE has always generated (completely worthless) doxygen for them. And it sounds like you don’t know how to self-educate on how to solve a problem.
Which is why, generally speaking:
I still prefer to offload the charlie work to newbies because it helps them learn (and it lets me justify their paycheck). And usually what I do is tell them I want to “walk you through our SDLC. it is kind of annoying” to watch over their shoulder and make sure they CAN do this by hand. Then… whatever. I don’t care if they pass everything through whatever our IT/Cybersecurity departments deem legit.
Which… personally? I generally still prefer “dumb” scripts to generate the boilerplate for myself. And when I do ask chatgpt or a “local” setup: I ask general questions. I don’t paste our codebase in. I say “Hey chatgpt, give me an example of setting the number of replicas of a pod based upon specific metrics collected with prometheus”. And I adapt that. Partially to make sure I understand what we are adding to our codebase and mostly because I still don’t trust those companies with my codebase and prompts. Which… is probably going to mean moving away from VSCode within the next year (yay Copilot) but… yeah.
I strongly encourage taking a look through ifixit’s website as a surprising number of laptops these days are repairable in that regard. I mean, I was doing a quick google to get an example of a laptop they have a guide on and was shocked to see fricking Microsoft Surface screens of alll things are front and center in their webstore.
As for customizability? I can definitely see use cases for that and there have been times I questioned just how much I would be willing to pay to get a headset jack on a modern laptop. But I very much agree with Wendell’s joke over at Level1Techs that those mostly exist for him to get bored during a meeting and disassemble his laptop. After the initial configuration you are unlikely to really touch them ever again (outside of niche cases).
And… years ago I learned the glory that is USB hubs. Dongles sucked. But even a 20 dollar anker hub/dongle turns one USB C hub into 4 As, an ethernet port, an audio jack, and an ethernet port. Having a dongle/hub dangling out is a bit annoying (but honestly a closer match to me plugging it in at my work desk) but… I don’t think it is 250 USD annoying.
Like I said, conceptually I love the concept of Framework but every time I math out what they actually bring to the table… yeah. And it increasingly feels like there is a strong marketing campaign (can’t imagine which investor contributed to that…) to misrepresent the modern day laptop market.
I will say that the best argument I have seen is that the “real” usb c ports are recessed and only accessed through the Totally Not Dongles. Which means it is a lot harder to break/bend a port that would require soldering to repair. I… don’t know if I agree that is a 250 USD feature and have concerns over the implications of the design on the mobo but that is the kind of thing that would be nice for more vendors to adopt. Even if the ports themselves aren’t “modular”, but just to have an easily swapped board/module in the event someone drops their laptop on a thumb drive a hundred times.
Is saving the game from an early leak worth getting rid of physical games? I hope not.
As a PC gamer who has been basically digital only since the late 00s/early 10s? Probably?
But the thing to remember is that, like with DRM, the studios have this data. There are orgs dedicated to analyzing (and selling…) sales data that can detect the impact that Mass Effect PC being “unplayable” for pirates because of securom for the first week or so had on sales (anecdotal but… probably real positive). Because this kind of stuff costs money (well, less so for removing a disc drive…) and they aren’t going to do that if they think it will hurt revenue.
There is no logic. Best case scenario? They are a stupid and emotional child who is doing nothing for the Palestinian people. More likely? They just want to feel morally superior while justifying their own lack of critical thought. And a few are just straight up tankies trying to destabilize The West in the name of china and russia.