I went ahead & pulled the trigger a year early on a new laptop. If Taiwan falls, tech is going to double & triple in price if it’s available at all. And it’s my livelihood, so worst case nothing happens and i hang onto that machine and a couple of spares longer. If something happens I will hang on to them even longer.
Even absent China taking Taiwan, “AI” is hoovering up the world’s production of memory chips, so memory prices are set to go up this year anyway. If you’re on the fence about buying something, do it now.
I pulled way back on the markets during Trump 1.0 and I needn’t have concerned myself. I bailed on them entirely 2 weeks before his so-called “liberation day” and so far it wasn’t the greatest move for anything but my peace of mind. I’m on the cusp of retirement and don’t have the luxury of waiting years for the market to bounce back, should it crash.
My current theory is that the markets will reflect the fortunes and prospects of the oligarchy unless & until things become dystopian even for them.
Predicting the collapse patterns of complex systems is notoriously difficult. I am just operating on the idea that my net worth is rising simply because I can save money while I’m still working, and that’s good enough for me under the circumstances. I’m trading greed for peace of mind.
I noticed the fear of labor strikes has remained steady. You can thank Ronald Reagan and his fine republican cohorts for 40+ years of dismantling labor unions in this country so those pesky little displays of collective bargaining don’t effect profit margins. Go Team!
I’ve got 14 computers here in the house, so I’m covered if Taiwan falls. Every year I retire the oldest computer and rebuild it with a new motherboard, CPU, and memory, but probably won’t this year due to the price of RAM and FLASH.
The AI is driving prices up on not just memory–have you seen the prices of high-end graphics cards recently? It’s also pushing utility rates up as AI data centers are consuming ever more electricity.
I’m not into gaming and it’s all Apple tech with M1, M2 or M5 chips so if I end up breaking down and running an LLM locally it will be okay performance.
I already rate shift my office tech – I charge 1.5 kwh of dedicated battery at night and run my office off it during the day.
In a pinch I have 3 x 200 watt solar panels so I can generate some of my own power as well. There’s also enough solar panels on the roof since 2015 to generate 106% of estimated household power consumption overall – although that still goes down if the grid fails. Finally I have 12 kwh of battery backup on 10 key circuits in the event of outages (fridge, office, gas furnace blower, gas tankless water heater, network router & switches, a few lights and outlets). Should hold me for about 3 days even without solar panels hooked up.
Still and all yeah electricity is indeed a rising cost.
I go a somewhat different route. I love giving oldish computers a new lease on life with Linux, so I’ve been sort of stocking up on a few used mini form factor computers that cannot run Windows 11 or are too slow to use for anything meaningful with Windows[1]. Also, I have a Raspberry Pi 5 that I use as a tertiary computer. Quite adequate for streaming music and video, and for displaying documentation while I do stuff at my mancave work table. My main laptop just died from a hardware failure (it survived >7 years of active use, abuse, and upgrades), so I’m now over on my spare laptop, which was a hidden second-hand gem. Modern Linux distros are quite remarkable regarding portability. Even when moving the SSD directly over from my old dead laptop to the spare one (different manufacturer, different CPU generation, different chipset, different GPU, different screen resolution, etc.), I could boot from the same SSD on the first attempt, no hiccups (try that with OEM Windows! HAH! Even a retail version would give you some resistance). Besides a slightly different size and a different feel on the keyboard, it’s just like having the old one It would be a shame to throw the old 4K laptop LCD panel away, so I have started pondering how I can convert it to a monitor
I have never had the patience to fiddle with hardware and system administration. It’s a different skill set from software (although plenty of people do both, of course). I usually use a computer until it wears out or becomes unreliable and like to future-proof with plenty of RAM and storage. However if I were not making my living on the “WinTel” stack I would happily use Linux. As it is I use MacOS hardware and remote into a cloud Windows Server machine on Azure that is maintained and upgraded by Someone Else. I have a Windows 11 virtual instance on standby in case I need to test something locally and I could easily spin up a Linux VM if I actually needed it for something and/or had the time to play with it.
I did lots of work in the Long Ago on SCO Xenix and spend much of my professional time writing command line utilities or OS services, so Unix/Linux type systems would feel right at home to me. Maybe when I retire …
I can understand that preference. And I wish *BSD could have been a real option for me. My first workstation at university was a small DEC Alpha machine that was about to be turned into e-waste unless someone absolutely wanted it. I called dibs, and had NetBSD installed on it. Unfortunately, there were some problems with the X11 keyboard driver on that hardware that drove me nuts, so in the end I had to give up NetBSD for Linux. And I’ve stayed with Linux since then.
My main reasons nowadays for preferring Linux is that it offers more comprehensive hardware compatibility and drivers (especially for laptops) than *BSD, it supports legacy hardware better than most other OSes, and is/has long been the de facto standard for technical and scientific computing. And it was invented in Finland. I have therefore not had any incentives to use anything else.
<rant>
So why don’t I use Windows? Because I’ve always loathed Windows from version 1.0 (its bloat and sluggishness, the GUI look and feel and lack of user configurability, the file system organisation, the supported file systems themselves, the lack of supported file systems other than NTFS/CIFS/FAT-based ones, its pathetic excuses for a shell (some people claim Powershell is decent, but I’ve never had any incentives to learn to use it), the arrogant and targeted lack of interoperability with other OSes, the lack of support for common non-Windows file formats, and now lately the utterly ridiculous but mandatory Copilot keyboard button, etc.) MacOS is way better (and I’ve actually owned a couple of Macs over the years) but it has an even worse vendor and ecosystem lock-in than with Microsoft, especially on the hardware side. And once you’ve bought an Apple system, you cannot upgrade its RAM and SSD, etc. So no Mac hardware or OS for me.
</rant>
As a kinda-sorta descendant of FreeBSD, MacOS is something I should love but I have to say, while it’s better than Windows, it has some rather glaring faults. For example if I copy a large file across a slow-ish network connection, the Finder GUI mostly hangs waiting for the transfer. What kind of multitasking is that? Sheesh. Obviously the GUI isn’t from FreeBSD, but just sayin’. Not much pride in workmanship when stuff like that happens and is never addressed.
Windows is full of little annoyances like that, which never get fixed. MacOS should do & be better. It arguably is overall, but it doesn’t exactly blow the barn doors off either.
It has never risen to the level of “loathing” for me but I basically agree with your criticisms. I work exclusively on Windows Server which seems to be tuned better for performance, lacks the bloatware, etc.
Not unless you’re more of a tinkerer than I am, and are willing to void the warranty. My laptops are all 32G of RAM, my Mac Studio is 64G, and all have 1TB SSDs (the studio has a 4TB external backup drive that all my active devices back up to). If that isn’t enough for whatever workload I’d have, the machine would be old enough to retire anyway. Admittedly, Apple RAM isn’t cheap of course.
But I like the build quality. There was a period a few years back when MacBook Air trackpads were temperamental but other than that it has all Just Worked. The OS used to Just Work too – that is not so true anymore. Lots of arrogant breaking changes that keep devs scrambling – I know some MacOS / IOS devs who pull out a lot of hair over that sort of thing. I think the current issue is changes in how portrait vs landscape orientation is reliably determined on iPad.
And since I’m still working the hardware is all tax deductible so the extra cost isn’t the issue it might otherwise be.
Yep. He’s going to content himself with undermining the midterm elections more likely. Death by a thousand cuts. Latest I head about is the post office has quietly stopped guaranteeing that postmarks will be the day the mail is received / collected, but rather, the date the first automation process touches the mail. The practical result is that if you have a deadline for a mail-in ballot and deposit it on election day, it might end up being postmarked the next day or even later and this would invalidate a lot of mail in ballots. It has also prompted me to file my quarterly taxes a week early when I used to wait until the due date in most cases.
You really cannot get enough RAM or storage. Until my oldest laptop got that hardware failure and I had to give it up, I had two laptops with 64GB RAM + at least 2TB SSD each, a home made NAS box with 6TB, and a selection of smaller computers and Raspberry Pis in diverse configurations. The main reasons for all that RAM are that i enjoy tingering with memory hungy virtual machines, and that I routinely have a shitload of open fans in my web browsers (more than 70 as I write this). I’m now considering using the now unused extra 64 GB in one of my tiny form factor computers.
MacBook Air is just too sparsely populated with expansion ports for me, so I would require a MacBook Pro. And I like bigger screens, so it would have to be a 16". With the RAM and SSD configurations I’d like and require, they would be prohibitively expensive for my own personal use. So no thanks. At least with regular laptops, I can put in more RAM and SSD if I so require. But not with Mac.
I don’t loath WIndows. I use it on desktops and laptops and reserve FreeBSD for servers. Windows has had a consistent UI for decades, whereas FreeBSD and Linux have so many choices (KDE, Gnome, Xfce, Cinnamon, etc.) that look and feel different. Another reason is some software I use only runs on Windows. This is a deal breaker for me as I’d rather not have to run these apps on a VM.
Getting the best performance out of Windows requires proficiency with the registry and the various tuning parameters, but once that is mastered, Windows is quite performant on reasonable hardware.
I build all of my own machines (except laptops) and always use well-supported components, so I don’t have a problem with compatibility issues. I also install as much RAM as the hardware allows, which is 128GB for most of my machines. I use the fastest SSDs available, often in a RAID-0 configuration to further improve performance.
I’m not a gamer, so video performance isn’t a priority for me, but more and more non-gaming applications are taking advantage of the capabilities of graphics cards, so I use high-end Nvidia GeForce boards in some of my boxes. I do a lot of video editing using DaVinci Resolve Studio and Adobe Premier, and both of those make heavy use of the GPU, especially the VRAM. I also have a lot of SDR radios and they use the GPU to do most of their DSP calculations.
My wife has this style of using browser tabs that would put us both to shame. When she was still working, her go-to research mode was to leave open at least one tab on each finding, etc. In my experience though it wasn’t so much memory beyond a certain point as that the odds of some rogue JavaScript code or similar would suck up memory and/or just CPU cycles on at least one tab somewhere and you’d have the very devil of a time finding it.
I probably have 150 tabs open on the laptop I’m writing this on but my wife would run to easily 10x that, usually on multiple windows and desktops as well, and she was adamant that the computer work her way and not the inverse (can’t say as I blame her but I always cringed when I saw her display).
Her only concession was that when her machine would get hot enough or her fan annoying enough or things slow enough, she would cycle through everything closing as many tabs and/or windows as she felt she could do without. In the end she usually ended up rebooting anyway. Fortunately the browser would usually restore everything that was open when she rebooted. If not … well I learned to steer clear of her the rest of the day, lol.
Chrome (and perhaps other browsers as well) has a feature called tab groups. This lets you put open tabs in groups, name and color code them, and expand and collapse the groups. This really helps to declutter things and save space on the tab line.
ICE shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis. She was in a van and trying to back away from the situation when the Gestapo agent shot her through the windshield. The agent claimed she was trying to run him over, but it’s obvious from watching video from multiple angles she was trying to back away from the situation and posed no risk to her killer.
The ICE thugs then held a doctor at gunpoint for about ten minutes before allowing them to attend the woman and possibly save her life.
The Minneapolis mayor said during a press conference after the murder “I have a message for ICE, to ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.”
My opinion: Most UIs suck, on a certain level. But some suck more. Windows has had a consistently crappy UI for decades. To get it up to something that I think is usable, I would have to — as you point out — get a black belt in registry fiddling. And that’s not something I’m going to venture into, especially since I just avoid using Windows altogether, and only when I have no other choice. Lots of the normal things one can do with just the click of a radio button in the majority of Linux GUIs is to let focus follow mouse. I hate clicking in windows to get them to focus (that’s also one of my major grievances with MacOS), or to tab through them with alt-tab (only exception is when going back and forth between two windows, then alt-tab is fine). Move the mouse ever so slightly, and focus is there, no need to click. When doing repetitive work between several windows in a non-predictable order, doing lots of clicking gets really old really fast. And in non-scriptable applications, you just have to clench your teeth and get through with it.
Another is to get rid of that 𐕣 Caps Lock. I remap Caps Lock into an extra Ctrl key, so that ctrl is available with my left pinky finger without having to lift my hand while touch typing. In Linux UIs: Click on a radio button. In Windows: fiddle with the f**king registry. For the rare occasions Caps Lock functionality can be useful, set the UI up to emulate it by pressing both shift buttons, and release it with one of them. Perfect. That’s just another mouse click.
I honestly think the diversity in UIs available for Linux is a great strength. Among all the available ones, you’re pretty sure to find one that suits your purpose. On a computer with enough computing power, I like to use KDE or Cinnamon, as they give me the most options, and they suck less than other UIs. On underpowered computers, XFCE et al. give you basic functionality with a minimum of CPU usage. So I choose UI depending on what I use the computer for and its specs. On Windows, you have only one (crappy) choice.
Edit: Another serious grievance with the Windows UI: Non-resizable system windows that try to present lots of crucial information, with microscopic text fields to enter a potentially long line of text. And system windows and apps from Microsoft presenting e.g. error messages (and sometimes the lines are too long so only half the line is visible, and you cannot resize the windows) that you cannot copy/paste from into a browser so you can search for the solution. Instead, you have to f**cking type it manually (and sometimes you can’t type it in another window, because the UI is blocking switching apps with e.g. alt-tab or mousey clickey, so you have to write the error message on paper) . I could go on and on about other stuff, but I’ll stop here.
It would be a shame to throw the old 4K laptop LCD panel away, so I have started pondering how I can convert it to a monitor 
𐕣 
Caps Lock. I remap Caps Lock into an extra Ctrl key, so that ctrl is available with my left pinky finger without having to lift my hand while touch typing. In Linux UIs: Click on a radio button. In Windows: fiddle with the f**king registry. For the rare occasions Caps Lock functionality can be useful, set the UI up to emulate it by pressing both shift buttons, and release it with one of them. Perfect. That’s just another mouse click.
. I could go on and on about other stuff, but I’ll stop here.