Linux was my daily driver from 2007 to maybe 2015, when my regular travel with my travel laptop (a Macbook) turned into my main computing device, even if my home computer was still running Linux.

I might switch back this year and give Asahi a try on my personal laptop. I’m almost to the point where I don’t need to be using proprietary software for professional related things, and once that happens, I might be able to make the switch. The Linux world has presumably moved on a bit since I was last regularly using it, but how different could it possibly be?

Education and enterprise still have a need for a lot of group-managed laptops. Not all of them will be power users, either. Some of them won’t even have sophisticated IT departments (thinking about elementary schools and the like where their IT needs might not run very high).

I agree that we’re probably seeing the waning days of the casual laptop user who administers their own system as an independent device. Everyone will either be further up the enthusiast/power user ladder or will have switched to phones and tablets.

I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target.

This is huge. Apple has traditionally supported its laptops for at least 5 major OS versions and 2 more years of security updates, so they’re essentially telling us that the MacOS version they release in 2034 will not require more than 8GB of RAM to function is gonna be a good thing for all users, who will mostly presumably have much more memory available.

I switched to Macbooks specifically for the 11" Air. I do wish they’d bring that form factor back.

Macbook build construction (ever since they’ve moved off the plastic entry level Macbook to all aluminum for all their models) is really solid but not necessarily rugged. The hinges and ports seem to hold up better than a lot of other devices from HP and Dell or whoever, but some models are more susceptible to drops, dust/sand, moisture, etc., than the solid construction would lead you to believe.

So it depends on use case. I think they hold up very well to normal indoor use, for many years, but might not be the ideal device for clumsier people or those who might be routinely using it outdoors or in more rugged environments.

I think TouchID isn’t a priority for them, but looking at the supported M1 and M2 devices and features, it seems like it could be a daily driver. It has things I never got to work on my first Linux laptop (webcam, microphone, speakers, suspend, keyboard backlight, wifi, bluetooth), although it’s 2026 so those are basically all expected. No thunderbolt, touchID, or display port alt mode, though, does make it a step behind MacOS, with some doubts it’ll ever fully catch up even on this 5-6 year old hardware.

Still, these were very popular devices, so I think they’ll stay on the used market for a long time. I might pick one up if it’s cheap enough.

and every forum had rules against bumping, typically only once in 24 hours, and only like once or twice.

You’re talking about pure bumping where someone has a zero-content comment like “bump” and nothing else. I’m talking about the entire spectrum of low to high quality content, from “bump” to the general phenomenon of reviving old threads to soft bumps like adding additional useless information to an unanswered request.

Other examples include stupid arguments that needed moderation to be shut down (a phpBB or vBulletin post that spanned 50+ pages in a forum where 3-4 was the norm, all because 2 users wouldn’t shut the fuck up), always occupying the top of the chronological sort.

The point is that any active forum with more than 1000 comments per day needed to be heavily moderated. User votes allowed forums to scale beyond that limited size. Chronological sort was terrible and didn’t scale beyond a group of 100-200 users (not coincidentally similar to Dunbar’s number), which is why any decent forum today doesn’t do it by default, including any totally free and open source forums, like the fediverse forum platforms of Lemmy and Piefed and Mbin. And even choosing to put these platforms on pure chronological sort reduces the quality of the overall experience.

Honestly, I dont know how anyone can say that the days before gamification, before adpocalypse, before billionaire hijacking of the internet for their own personal ends, is worse than what we have today. It borders on either lunacy, or propaganda.

I’m talking about the use of user voting, which undoubtedly improved the quality of forums (along with comment threading so that each comment could branch off into its own collapsible side discussion) when slashdot and a bunch of copycats started doing similar things (see HN, Reddit). You can’t look at Reddit in 2026 and complain that the sorting algorithms they implemented in 2005 or 2007 made things worse. No, things got worse around 2015-2020 when the front page algorithm stopped prioritizing quality over engagement bait.

The targeted court cases are to argue that the previously passed legislation already covers these particular facts.

If the legislature passes a law that says “making false statements to another in order to obtain something of value is fraud,” you can expect litigation about the actual contours of what is or isn’t fraud.

Same with legislation against driving at an unsafe speed, causing a nuisance to your neighbors, discriminating against employees on the basis of sex, etc. Court cases decide the edge cases.

If the legislature passes a law banning gambling outside of licensed institutions, and banning gambling for minors, you can expect litigation about what actually is or isn’t gambling.

This particular source seems sketchy, but the broader context supports the core of this story.

There was a report in January from TD Cowen that Oracle needed to free up cash as banks tightened up lending for data center deals, and that certain projects were on hold and in jeopardy of being canceled. That same report projected that Oracle might lay off 20,000 to 30,000 workers.

Then, just this last Friday, Bloomber reported that Oracle and OpenAI canceled their plans to expand their flagship data center in Texas as part of their $500 billion “Stargate” initiative. Here’s the Reuters article describing it at a high level, because the original report is paywalled.

So everyone is looking back at that January report and seeing the recent data center news as confirmation that Oracle wants to free up cash by laying off staff.

The internet was so much better before that shit.

No, you’re looking at it through rose colored glasses. Pure chronological sorting purely awarded the most active commenters regardless of quality, and led people to submit lots of low quality comments. Plus there was the “bump” phenomenon where a useless comment was made simply to manipulate the sorting.

Forums before slashdot just weren’t that great without heavy moderation. By outsourcing some portion of moderation to the users, it made for higher quality discussion in the forums that allowed threading and voting.

Every radio band is subject to their own rules.

Wi-Fi and Bluetooth transmit on frequencies that are “license by rule,” where the FCC license to transmit is granted to everyone who follows the Part 15 rules about the technical details. So nobody needs a separate license to use wifi or Bluetooth, and the devices themselves are only subject to certain technical restrictions, like maximum transmit power and the like.

Ham radios transmit on bands that allow for a license for anyone who can pass the test and pay the fee.

Cell phones operate on frequencies and bands that have much stricter licensing rules, and the devices are certified to follow the technical rules under pretty much all circumstances. They go through much more thorough testing than the radios capable of transmitting on amateur bands or license by rule bands.

It might be possible to use separate accounts related to separate interests

That’s what people should do. And the natural consequence is that there is code switching, where people subtly use different jargon and references and writing style when talking to different audiences.

Nobody is gonna correlate my shitposts or joke comments to my work email, because the way I write in a professional environment is totally different from the way I write with my friends and family, or in casual contexts organized around different interests. Even between different friends, family, or colleagues, I have a sense of my audience, and my tone/style differs significantly for different people.

So at that point, if I have a Linux/technology account and a separate account for the sports I like and a separate account for the local things happening in my city, who’s going to be able to link them by their very different textual styles?

Reminds me of an AI tool that could identify authorship of articles with surprisingly high accuracy, and then they peeked under the hood and realized it was just looking for the author byline at the top of the article that says “By John Doe,” where it completely failed if the article didn’t explicitly say who the author was.

Because each sensor broadcasts a fixed unique ID, the same car can be recognized repeatedly without reading a license plate. This makes TPMS-based tracking cheaper, harder to detect, and more difficult to avoid than camera-based surveillance, and therefore a stronger privacy threat.

This seems like a real stretch.

Cameras and automated license plate recognition are absurdly cheap at this point. And cameras have much greater range and reliability than whatever wireless signal interception this is, which the researchers have said is effective up to 50 meters.

Meanwhile, from the office where I sit (which happens to be more than 50 meters above street level), I can see a highway and read the license plates of all the cars maybe 100-300m away. Plug in a cheap phone as a simple webcam and I can probably log all the license plates that drive by, maybe even correlate that to makes and models of vehicles for redundancy.

And who’s going to detect that I’ve got a cell phone camera pointed out of my office window, or that I’m running that type of image recognition on the phone?

Am I out of touch? No, it’s the lawyers and judges who are wrong.

Seriously though, these are the same people who made it so that you can own a piece of land, so whatever criticism you want to lob at that foundational role of who gets to say what the law is, it applies equally to all forms of property, a manmade concept to begin with.

A human can start off a process by their own design, but with the details implemented by phenomena not in their direct control, and still copyright the resulting work.

If I take a funnel full of paint and let it drip onto a canvas in a pattern caused by the movement of a pendulum, and incorporate random movement from wind on a windy day, how would you assign a “percentage” of human creation there? What about letting the hot desert sun melt some crayons into another canvas where I placed the crayons but didn’t control the drip pattern? What if I record some barking dogs but auto tune it into a melody? Or photograph the natural beauty of a wave crashing onto shore? These are all things that can be copyrighted, even if they’re inherently dependent on natural phenomena not in the artist’s control, because the process itself is initiated or captured or designed by a human author.

First of all, “Intellectual property[sic]” is a not a thing. There are copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets, but they are all significantly different from each other. Trying to lump them together under a single term is disingenuous at best, and using the word “property” in that term is biased loaded language.

You don’t get to redefine words like “property” or “intellectual property” how you see fit, completely untethered to the way the legal system uses those terms with specific meaning.

Intellectual property rights include all of those things, in the same way that copyright can include copyright over text or musical compositions or sound recordings or photographs or building architectures. But note that copyright over each of those types of media is subject to its own rights and rules, and you’ll need to apply the correct rules to the correct contexts. But it’s still useful to group similar concepts together, and have a name for the category. That’s why people refer to intellectual property.

A property right is a thing the owner is entitled to, and a natural right.

This is a naive take. Property rights are natural rights? No, property rights are defined by the legal system of whatever sovereign nation you’re in. And they’re limited by whatever rules of that legal system are.

If I own land in the U.S., I’m still required to pay taxes on it, and to enforce my property rights against adverse possession, lest I lose that property to the state or to a squatter. If I don’t record my ownership with the county recorder I might lose the property to someone else who comes along and records them buying it from the guy who sold it to me (and fraudulently sold it twice).

Property rights can be chopped up and distributed in different ways. I might own a house but rent it to a tenant and have a mortgage on it from the bank, each of whom will have certain rights over that land, despite me being the owner.

And property can apply to tangible things (a painting, a car), intangible things (a checking account balance at the bank, a certificateless share of stock in a corporation, a domain name registered with ICANN), and all sorts of concepts in between (the right to use a particular mailbox in a post office, an easement to use a driveway over my neighbor’s land, the right to use my name and image in a commercial, a futures contract that entitles me to take delivery of a whole bunch of wheat on a particular day at a particular time in the future). All of those are property, and recognized as property rights in U.S. law.

What copyright actually is, is a temporary monopoly granted at the whim of Congress. It’s a license, not a right.

Licenses are a right to do something. In fact, copyright owners assign licenses to others to use that intellectual property all the time.

And the copyright itself is not property over an idea. It’s the right to copy something specific that has already been fixed in a particular physical medium. If you come up with an idea for a melody, you don’t own the copyright until you write it down.

You’re just pretty far off base because you don’t understand how broad the word “property” is, and you don’t seem to want to examine just how man-made other forms of property are, and think that copyright is something special and different.

Motorola Mobility was spun off from Motorola in 2012 and sold to Google. Then Google sold it in 2014 to Lenovo, the Chinese company that had also previously bought IBM’s entire personal computer business.

Original Motorola, renamed Motorola Solutions, retained the rights to the Motorola name in everything except cell phones, and continued to manufacture radio and communications equipment and other signal processing equipment (including stuff like cable TV boxes). They remain a major contractor for militaries, law enforcement, and fire/EMS emergency responders.

If we’re talking about Motorola cell phones, we’re talking about the Chinese owned company, not the American owned company.

I have no idea why a thin client would need a 2.5Gbps NIC.

I know bandwidth isn’t latency but for a thin client having a rock solid network connection to the virtual desktop server is pretty important for the user interface. I’m guessing pushing video and animations can require pretty high data rates, too.

Yup.

LTE can support something like 300-400 connections per band and there are 16 primary bands licensed in the US. 5G and mm wave open things up some more, including beam forming techniques that may allow an antenna array to communicate with two devices on the same frequency at the same time.

But at the same time, each carrier only gets some of those bands, and they want to separate bands by physical space so that neighboring cells are using different bands, and in 3 dimensional space there can be a lot of neighbors. And 300 passive connections simply keeping the connection alive are different from 300 active users trying to actively transmit and receive significant data. Plus real world interference will always make devices come up short from the theoretical max performance.

Temporary/mobile towers go a long way, though, for temporary surges in demand, like sporting events. Things have gotten a lot better on game days in certain places (especially small college towns whose populations basically double on game day, with everyone jammed into a single stadium for about 4 hours).