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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 5th, 2023

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  • There’s currently a Kickstarter going on for a watch that aims to be modular and repairable. It’s called UNA Watch.

    Look interesting, but imo with these things it’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, where the upgradeability/repairability only has value, if it is actually provided in the future (and economically viable). Something that can only be proven in time, but requires people to trust it before.

    I’m not in the market for a new watch right now, since I just repaired the screen on my Garmin, but am keeping an eye on it, since sadly Garmin seems to have entered the early stages of enshittification.


  • Agreed. The prequels have flawed execution, but imo a good base. It’s the reverse with the sequels that are mostly style over substance, chasing some pretty shots regardless whether it makes for a good movie. And I take the former over the latter any day. Especially if we remember that Lucas asked other directors to make them.


  • I’d say the most recent major influences were the IPO and the emergence of LLMs.

    Reddit becoming a publicly traded company and the preparation to do so certainly initiated a major shift in its priorities.

    Ai and large language models make it easier than ever to create shiny, but low quality content.

    And the rest is just reddit becoming more mainstream leading to an overall shift towards banal rather than niche topics.





  • If you don’t mind Meta/Facebook, then the oculus quest headsets are also very affordable hardware and deliver a good experience. I think the issue lies with content.

    Smartphones or handhelds like the steam deck with flat screens could use plenty of already existing content made for screens. With VR you want different content that is made specifically for it. There is a decent amount of games (but still much fewer than for other devices), but honestly not that much more.

    Additionally it also can only really be used at home, where most already have other devices.

    It’s a chicken and egg problem. But imo if there were more genuine unique productivity tasks and experiences available through VR, we would see more adoption.


  • If you regularly exercise your max is probably higher than estimated.

    I was under the impression that the maximum heart rate is something that can not be trained. This source suggests that if anything training regularly would lower a persons max heart rate.

    I just think that either one is serious enough about trying to optimize ones training efficiency, at which point the formula wouldn’t be accurate enough for me. Or one takes a more causal approach at which point doing most runs at “conversational pace” is a good enough rule of thumb.







  • That’s pretty much me aswell, besides that I didn’t even spend energy to try and learn others. Simple docker compose, simple ui and easy way to add services.

    I am sure there are alternatives that allow for more elaborate setups and fancier things. But for the low effort I put into it, I got a page with some nice buttons with appropriate icons that scales to whatever screen size it’s displayed on. Only additional thing I did was enabled to show some basic info to see if e.g. SABnzbd is downloading something, which was also super easy.


  • Why do you want a Mac? The only valid choices are aesthetics, brand loyalty or ignorance.

    I feel like something got lost in the discussion here. I don’t want a Mac, that’s the whole point.

    I want a device that is like the Macbook air, but without the crap Apple pulls. So with easily expandable storage, ideally expandable RAM and an easy way to run another OS than MacOS on it (i am aware that in theory Ashai Linux is an option for Aplle silicon macs).

    Because i do think in this case there are more valid reasons than “aesthetics, brand loyalty or ignorance”, simply because the Macbook air to me in many ways seems like a very well rounded, nice package (with the caveat of Apple doing Apple things) and the rest of the market doesn’t offer an equivalent. With the Macbook Air M1 being 4 years old by now and options like Intels Lunar Lake existing, it really would be possible to make.


  • I didn’t specify “non technical” as I’d actually like one like it myself and would consider myself at least moderately tech-savvy. I meant average in what many people actually end up doing on their laptop, which is browsing, writing, watching videos and maybe doing some very minor productivity tasks.

    That said i would say that yes, even non technical users would appreciate a high quality screen. They admittedly probably wouldn’t know to look out for it at purchase or what to look out for on a spec sheet, but in my opinion they would appreciate it during use (more so than some extra unneeded performance)

    The demographic that is just Apple fanboys and they weren’t giving up their overpriced garbage no matter what.

    Yes, apple fanboys will be fanboys, but the M-series Macbook Airs are imo are just a really great piece of hardware. Particularly the M1 when it came out and even nowadays imo is even priced decently for what it offers.

    So far i don’t know a good non-Apple alternative that manages to fully match the M1 Macbook Air features (sans the non-upgradable storage that Apple charges way to much for and that destroys most of the value proposition).


  • As someone else already answered it is of course not ideal for movie consumption, since it gives you black bars top/bottom, but for productivity it is really nice. Everything from writing, spreadsheets or reading on the Internet benefits from it. Reading long horizontal sentences isn’t that comfortable and often times task bars at the top and/or bottom take away some extra space. So a typical 16:9 display ends up offering very little useful working space. The taller aspect ratio isn’t a massive shift, but a nice quality of life improvement.

    It also means that you have slightly more space for the keyboard or a larger track pad.

    If you are ever in a retail shop that carries Microsoft 's surface laptops you could check them out, as they are one of the few laptops that use a 3:2 aspect ratio display.


  • Haven’t looked at Chromebooks in a while, but you are right that the use case would be similar.

    However I was under the impression that they are mostly competing at a lower price point. So I assume you wouldn’t find nice build quality or screens.

    Beyond that I am not really familiar with how chromeOS stacks up nowadays or if it would be trivial to install Linux/windows on them. Especially if they still have EOL dates after which they aren’t updated with software anymore.

    A quick search tells me that Google seems to work on a laptop and plans to merge (?) android and chromeOS more.

    So overall again products that share some aspects of what the MacBook Air makes attractive, but doesn’t offer the full package.


  • Sadly doesn’t seem to be fanless, which imo is a really nice feature when you dont care about high performance. Not sure if in the real world you can find good deals on the snapdragon laptops, but list price is also quite high and that keyboard with touch function keys doesn’t seem great either.

    So in my book that’s still no match for what a macbook air m1/2 offers, which by now are a few years old and can be found for decent prices. They might be aiming at the same market, but aren’t equal.


  • A proper non-Apple Macbook Air equivalent. Because imo for the average user that just browses the internet and does some light office work it seems perfect. And with that I mean:

    • fanless
    • good screen preferably 3:2 or 16:10
    • long battery life
    • unlike the air expandable storage and ideally non soldered ram
    • solid build quality
    • priced at maybe 600-800€?
    • doesn’t have to have the greatest performance

    Tbh i thought we would get it with Intels lunar lake processors, but so far no luck.