[HN Gopher] Life at 800 MHz
___________________________________________________________________
Life at 800 MHz
Author : blackhole
Score : 212 points
Date : 2022-01-13 22:43 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (artemis.sh)
(TXT) w3m dump (artemis.sh)
| analyte123 wrote:
| A cozy laptop sounds nice. I bet IRC is more than fast enough,
| surprised it didn't get a mention. Also, if you just want to read
| some text on the web as fast as possible, w3m might be worth a
| shot. I use it in TTY2 all the time to look stuff up. Browser CDN
| caches like Decentraleyes or LocalCDN might also be worth trying
| especially with the mnestic set up: you would only have to load
| certain JS bundles once per session.
|
| >a dishonorable mention to twitter for being slower than Discord,
| we wish we were making that up
|
| If you're just browsing Twitter, then the Nitter frontend
| (https://github.com/xnaas/nitter-instances) is way, way faster.
| Does not have algo-recs either, which could be positive. If you
| need to post, I assume you've tried spoofing user agent to
| mobile? This might help with bloated sites in general.
| anthk wrote:
| Check Bitlbee, you'll have IRC proxies for everything. Twitter,
| Slack, Telegram, anythiing Pidgin supports with the -purple
| build.
|
| For music, mocp, and links+/dillo make a good combo.
|
| Youtube-dl+ytfzf+mpv with a config setting up the youtube-dl
| format for 420p = heaven.
|
| In ~/.config/mpv/config: ytdl-
| format=bestvideo[height<=?420]+bestaudio/best
|
| For the rest, Fluxbox+rox+lxappeanrance+nm-applet+xpdf. Ted and
| Gnumeric as a micro office-suite. Or Siag, if you don't need
| Unicode.
|
| On Chromium, it has a --light switch.
| missed-pos wrote:
| The device referred to in the article gave me the idea to
| buy/make such a lightweight device with which you can surf the
| Internet, chat via XMPP, use e-mail, but at the same time receive
| calls and SMS. Also the device needs to run for a long time
| (ARM?) Sounds like something that can be done on a Raspberry Pi,
| but I'm not sure. It would be a good replacement for the phone,
| to be honest. It would be possible, of course, to take a simple
| phone for calls and SMS, but I recently read an article about the
| fact that such phones can have backdoors. In general, it would be
| cool to refuse calls completely, but unfortunately there are
| people who do not have other options. Besides, I go to places
| where the Internet does not work. In general, are there such
| devices in the real world that meet the above requirements?
| agumonkey wrote:
| Oh I've been looking for a similar Sony VAIO but that was packing
| a Core 2 Duo .. there's just so many Sony laptops I could never
| find which model it was (college prof used that on trips).
|
| Anyway nice to see "old" machines getting by.
|
| -- sent next to my thinkpad x61
| tryauuum wrote:
| Ah, to use an ancient device, be genuinely happy you won't waste
| time with video games only to eventually install some games that
| do run smoothly on this ancient CPU. I too have this experience
| anthk wrote:
| Heh, with Mednafen/Slashem and IF Games that wasn't totally
| true ;).
|
| Once you got hacktranslated Japanese ROMs for old 8 and 16 bit
| systems (even the weird ones), you woudn't need modern gaming
| at all.
| marttt wrote:
| The 1000x480 resolution seems interesting. Maybe this machine
| would make a good single-purpose device for writing.
|
| Also, somewhat related: Former Debian maintainer Joey Hess
| famously used a Dell Mini 9 for all his coding [1, 2]. I wonder
| if the Sony has a better, less cramped keyboard compared to the
| Mini 9.
|
| Another interesting guy doing valuable work on low-end,
| underclocked hardware is Nils M. Holm [3].
|
| Myself, I can get most of my stuff done on a Thinkpad T42
| (underclocked to 600 Mhz to reincarnate its dying GPU). With the
| ram-booted Tiny Core Linux, this thing still flies. I'm having a
| hard time ditching it because of the 4:3 IPS screen and excellent
| keyboard. I've even used it to produce lengthy radio programs for
| my country's public broadcasting.
|
| Aside web browsing, there seems to be more than enough software
| solutions, hacks, workarounds and programming languages for doing
| valuable work on rather old hardware these days. Really
| interesting times we're living in.
|
| Then again, might be true that with yesterday's hardware, you're
| limited to solving yesterday's problems. I guess I'm fine with
| yesterday's problems in many aspects of life.
|
| 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4721645
|
| 2: https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/xmonad_layouts_for_netbooks/
|
| 3: https://usesthis.com/interviews/nils.m.holm/
| marttt wrote:
| Some more great musings on actually using low-level hardware
| (inspired by Nils M. Holm's work and setup):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18292613
| aidenn0 wrote:
| I notice IceWM gets mentioned here; I'm always looking for a good
| environment to run for my VNC sessions. Right now I'm using FVWM,
| can anyone comment on pros/cons of switching to Ice?
| numlock86 wrote:
| I have once clocked my CPU down to 400 MHz for a week or so
| (i7-7700K I think it was) when the pump of my cooling loop died
| to keep it below 100degC, although it would have throttled down
| on its own once at thermal limits. Other than games running
| terrible (of course, duh) I couldn't really tell much of a
| difference. Some things were slower like compiling code or things
| like 7z but it didn't feel like a throwback to the late 90s
| because what made computers slow those days were HDDs. Oh, and
| there is GPU acceleration for so many things these days ... like
| watching 4K videos was no problem at all.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| Is it truly necessary to use such an archaic laptop to get the
| two essential features described at the beginning of the article:
| ultra-light weight and a trackpoint? I know the Surface Go 3 is
| light enough, but IIRC the type cover has a touchpad, not a
| trackpoint. In theory, with the ongoing miniaturization of
| electronics, there should be a modern option that meets these
| criteria. But of course, the mass-market nature of hardware means
| that there won't always be a current-generation device that is
| optimal for a disabled user like the author of this article.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| The Thinkpad X1 Nano would maybe fit the bill, 900g and a
| TrackPoint - though its quite a bit larger with its 13" screen.
| boondaburrah wrote:
| For a brief window of time around 2013 Acer made a really
| nice little core i5 11" laptop (Aspire V5-171). Mine still
| works but I'm upset that the mass market seems to think that
| size is only for refurb and chromebooks now.
| treesknees wrote:
| This was my thought as well. Even an older MacBook Air can run
| Linux and is lightweight enough to carry around, if weight is
| an issue.
|
| It sounds like this person is just cheap (it's fine to be
| thrifty), but I'd rather spend a little more on hardware that
| doesn't get in my way of accessing medical information or
| communicating with others if that's my only method due to
| illness or medical conditions.
| sokoloff wrote:
| I bought a Chromebook 4 on Black Friday (Celeron N4000, 1.1 GHz,
| $90 then, $120 now) and similar to the author, I find it pretty
| useful but sometimes requiring patience.
|
| Best part is it doesn't have any work stuff on it, so I can do my
| own light tasks on it without any temptation (due to inability)
| to have work leak into that time. That's worth a multiple of the
| purchase price by itself.
| [deleted]
| grimgrin wrote:
| > Discord on the other hand has a big problem: using a third
| party client is bannable
|
| Hm, that is probably true. Didn't consider. So be it, wish the
| Ripcord author some luck!
|
| https://cancel.fm/ripcord/
|
| > Ripcord is a desktop chat client for group-centric services
| like Slack and Discord. It provides a traditional compact desktop
| interface designed for power users. It's not built on top of web
| browser technology: it has a small resource footprint, responds
| quickly to input, and gets out of your way. Shareware is coming
| back, baby.
|
| Some years of using this and I'm quite a fan. Voice works, but
| not streaming video, last I checked
| jcun4128 wrote:
| This computer reminds me of my fondness for the Compaq Presario
| 615dx a little higher spec, but it was that kind of computer the
| inch-thick ones. That laptop had a really nice keyboard imo.
|
| Was using Linux Mint and Bluefish/Kate text editor.
| birdman3131 wrote:
| "So this thing's main job is to help us stay off our phone, since
| touch screens are the hardest on the health of our hands."
|
| I have never heard this before. On the other hand I have heard
| about keyboards being an issue many times. Anybody else know
| anything about touchscreens being harder on hands than keyboards?
| taubek wrote:
| If you are holding a mobile phone in a hand your palm and
| fingers (thumb) are more or less in the same position. Take a
| look at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5546699/,
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7440311/,
| https://www.toi-health.com/physician-articles/effects-smartp...
| and
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000368701...
| just to name some articles.
| notfed wrote:
| None of the studies you linked concluded any significant
| findings. The most significant, which was unremarkable, was
| from the first:
|
| "There is limited evidence that MTSD use, and various aspects
| of its use (i.e. amount of usage, features, tasks and
| positions), are associated with musculoskeletal symptoms and
| exposures. This is due to mainly low quality experimental and
| case-control laboratory studies, with few cross-sectional and
| no longitudinal studies."
| alexjplant wrote:
| I can only speak for myself but I find using a smartphone
| upright one-handed for longer than a few minutes uncomfortable
| because of the bizarre positions it forces my fingers and palms
| into. It's a flat, slate-like object and our hands are designed
| to grip round things that protrude into our palms. I also need
| to keep my thumb free to use the touchscreen and my hands are
| on the smaller side so I end up balancing it on a protruding
| pinky and contorting the inside back edge of my hand. It's no
| problem for me to use two hands or hold it in a screen-up
| orientation but holding it in front of me for more than a
| minute isn't fun (despite having decent dexterity and grip
| strength from deadlifting, typing, playing instruments, etc).
| abruzzi wrote:
| I defintely find "large" phones to be very uncomfortable and
| cramping to use for more than a few minutes. Thats why I
| haven't upgraded from my first gen iPhone SE. Thats even a
| little too big--the iPhone 4 and previous iPhones were the
| perfect size. I'm not a heavy smart phone user, but for the
| two weeks I had an XS, it was the most difficult phone I ever
| had. I couldn't hold onto it, and was dropping it constantly.
| So I gave it to my brother and bought another SE used (before
| the XS, I had an SE that got water damaged.)
| Pxtl wrote:
| I do wish landscape typing hadn't gradually gone by the
| wayside. I used to be a firm landscape-typer and found it
| much more comfortable for my hands, but I've accepted that
| phones just aren't designed for it anymore - too often the
| keyboard fills too much of the screen to see the textbox
| adequately.
| exikyut wrote:
| I sometimes tend to let my phone fall into the nook of where
| my pinky finger meets my hand, when I want to hold it near-
| vertically/upright. I can agree that this doesn't really work
| well long-term, it's much more comfortable to hold it flat
| since it's less likely to simply fall out of my hand (...)
| that way.
|
| I occasionally brace my index finger against the top edge of
| the display; this used to work _great_ on my Note 3 with its
| giant bezel (particularly at the top), my current Mate 20 Pro
| 's notched edge-to-edge screen doesn't play well with this
| though :(
| UncleOxidant wrote:
| Yeah, I hit that sentence and was hoping for more details.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| That tripped me up for a few minutes. I decided that since the
| author is using we in the singular not plural so it is that
| person's experience only and not meant to be a blanket
| statement. Also, I can only assume that the author meant a
| touch screen on a phone and not, say, a touch screen on a
| laptop because I can't imagine how that is difficult on
| someone's hands.
| xena wrote:
| Additional context: this is a person who wrote a brainfuck
| interpreter in sed on my couch using an iPhone. I tend to trust
| their input as to typing comfort implicitly.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| They're too powerful for glass.
| crispyambulance wrote:
| That's hilarious (and very impressive), but also not
| applicable to the vast majority of humans that use touch
| screens! I mean, just how much do people type on touch
| screens?
| coldtea wrote:
| Smartphones are hell for thumbs and index fingers
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| What is the allure and purpose of going back to 800 Mhz? I mean I
| did it myself this week, but was frustrated enough to think it's
| a really dumb idea, waste of time. I can't even articulate why I
| did it in the first place.
|
| I used a Raspberry Pi 4 (1500 Mhz) as a daily driver for 4 days.
| Struggled with hidpi scaling, no Signal Messenger, overheating
| CPU, Youtube at 360p, HTML Gmail.
|
| I went so far to upgrade Pi to SSD, plus heat sink. Considering
| adding active cooling... but the said nope, back to Macbook Pro.
| Why do we even try?
| freebreakfast wrote:
| Change your workflow. You cannot expect a less powerful system
| to perform the same as a more powerful system.
|
| Rather than watching YouTube directly, use youtube-dl with VLC.
| Rather than using HTML Gmail, use IMAP and a native email
| client. Rather than using Eclipse, use vim.
|
| We all fall into patterns. We grow to find comfort in those.
| But, we can't expect to maintain those patterns when
| circumstances change.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| Thanks for the good suggestions. I'll try them out if I ever
| find a reason to try again!
| MisterTea wrote:
| > Why do we even try?
|
| Depends on how hard you want to try or compromise on.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| I do wish that more laptop vendors would consider the really-
| thin-and-light market. There used to be all sorts of weird
| pocket/palm PCs available in the sub-2lb range, but I guess that
| phones and tablets have pretty much canibalised the market.
| wildzzz wrote:
| There are plenty of 10in Chromebooks out there, some can be
| setup to run Linux easily. I think some of the Acer models are
| below 2lbs. Other than that, there are some little 6 and 7in
| mini netbooks but they aren't cheap. You might as well just buy
| a decent phone or tablet for that price. I think the netbook
| phase was a means to an end where we now have very small,
| capable PCs in our pockets at all times.
| akoster wrote:
| Nice post - Reminds me of my experiences using an IBM Thinkpad
| T42 (2GB RAM, 1.6 GHz single core CPU) and Raspberry Pi Model B
| (512MB RAM, 700MHz single core CPU), quite a bit of compilation
| required these days due to a lack of binaries but still a fun
| exercise on a weekend
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| A girlfriend of mine had surgery on both wrists.
|
| She got the Dragon Speech software, and I was surprised at how
| good it was.
|
| You can of course dictate all your notes, documents emails. It
| also provides means to navigate your OS, start programs, close
| them, and a lot more.
|
| It is expensive but she could do most of her work with two hands
| that didnt work.
|
| A while back I saw a video about a guy who wrote code using such
| software (not sure what he used in particular). This can be
| tedious "Open bracket", "new line" etc.
|
| He had spent a long time tuning it so it was fast and efficient.
| He used a set of custom grunts and noises as "macros" for all the
| bracket brace, and other symbols that are in heavy use in
| programming languages.
|
| If you were just listening to him and didn't know what he was
| doing it sounded a bit distressing.
|
| https://www.nuance.com/dragon/businesbs-solutions/dragon-pro...
| xvector wrote:
| 404 link
| ASalazarMX wrote:
| https://www.nuance.com/dragon/business-solutions/dragon-
| prof...
|
| I wonder if the parent comment typed that URL by hand.
| danuker wrote:
| I suspect a laptop touchpad, because the touchpad might
| have buttons at the top, and the extra "b" could be close
| to them.
| casion wrote:
| I write code with speech to text, and it's nothing like this.
|
| Anything that's can be templated is. There's natural language
| integration with LSP. I use Vim mode "naturally" etc...
|
| It's not like reading what's on your screen word by word. It's
| less input than typing.
| thatcat wrote:
| what software did you use?
| Lorin wrote:
| I'd love to hear a short sample of what this sounds like!
| YorickPeterse wrote:
| To add to that:
|
| You'd use a custom vocabulary as well. So rather than "curly
| open" you'd use "heck", and instead of "enter" it would be
| "bark". I'm just making the actual words up here, but the
| point is to use a different/more simplified vocabulary that's
| also easier to understand by the computer.
|
| https://talonvoice.com/ is also worth keeping an eye on.
| jcun4128 wrote:
| I wonder with copilot would you just say "new function
| called" and it would make your block statement.
| throwanem wrote:
| You refer to Tavis Rudd's PyCon 2013 demo:
| https://youtu.be/8SkdfdXWYaI
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I worked with a guy who wrote code like this. He was, indeed,
| pretty productive, but it was hell sitting next to him without
| good headphones. Was this guy you're referring to a long
| haired, kinda scruffy guy who had worked at Amazon at one
| point?
| marban wrote:
| I've owned almost all generations of these little machines (in
| addition to a Psion Netbook) and to this date they're among the
| design & form concepts that I miss the most. With the docking
| station and optional extended battery, PCMCIA, etc, they would
| adapt to any work environment, but even in bare-bones mode, you
| could get some actual work done -- Which isn't always the case
| with an iPad unless you add bulky extras. I wish Apple had the
| balls that Sony had back then.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| What current devices would come closest do you think?
|
| Maybe a Surface? Or rather something like the new foldables?
| marban wrote:
| I'm not following hardware news really; Just buying whatever
| Apple cranks out. But I'm considering buying an early 90s
| Psion MX5 as a mobile typewriter.
| wvenable wrote:
| GPD's mini laptops are probably the closest.
| tandav wrote:
| If you live in terminal you can ssh into server from smartphone,
| I do this often
| Twirrim wrote:
| Via TLP on Linux, I've been capping my laptop's CPU (i7-8665U) to
| 800Mhz whenever I'm on battery. 800Mhz on a relatively modern CPU
| is quite remarkably fast and sufficient for most things.
|
| Out of curiosity I've got CPU Frequency being polled periodically
| and updated in my taskbar, and the CPU spends a remarkable amount
| of time bouncing between ~600Mhz and ~800Mhz, because even when
| actively working, it's quite quiescent. Obviously compiling,
| running test suite, browsing etc. etc. will cause it to jump up
| to full speed (4.1Ghz with turbo, or there abouts).
|
| One of the things I've found myself doing is paying a bit more
| attention to _what_ is consuming CPU resources when that
| frequency goes up. For example, I noticed that Zoom will randomly
| consume a couple of % of a CPU for about 20-30 seconds
| periodically. I know it also maintains some kind of notification
| hook to Zoom infrastructure. I don't need that persistent
| feature, so now I have a lightweight bash script that looks to
| see if I'm in a Webinar or Meeting, and if not, nukes zoom. The
| advantages are probably minimal, at best, but it took my fancy
| for whatever reason :)
| Hello71 wrote:
| > Via TLP on Linux, I've been capping my laptop's CPU
| (i7-8665U) to 800Mhz whenever I'm on battery.
|
| in most cases, on modern hardware, limiting the frequency
| significantly below its nominal maximum will reduce battery
| life. for a fixed amount of work (e.g. parsing an HTML
| document), it is more efficient to complete the task as quickly
| as possible then return to a low-power state. the picture gets
| somewhat murkier when considering increased voltage
| requirements at higher clock speeds and certain fixed-wakeup
| workloads, but the majority of scheduler tuning for battery-
| powered devices over the past decade has been towards going to
| sleep as quickly as possible, even if that requires a high peak
| frequency.
| anthk wrote:
| More than nuking, send kill -STOP to the zoom PID. To resume
| it, kill -CONT.
| emptyparadise wrote:
| I love this laptop's form factor.
| kraquepype wrote:
| Wow seeing XMMS brings back some memories. Before Pandora and
| streaming players, I had a machine under the bed that only ran
| XMMS to play music in the room. It allowed controls via game pad
| port, so there was a game pad in the room to play/pause/switch
| songs.
| hnthrowaway0315 wrote:
| I have a PowerBook G4 with upgraded memory. The only caveat is
| the power cell that gets hot quickly so I have to wire power in
| everytime.
|
| I installed a few applications including a web browser but then
| got bored. There is nothing a modern computer cannot do what it
| does, and miles better. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it
| TBH. I made the purchase based on an impulse and now I'm paying
| for it. Fortunately it didn't cost too much.
| [deleted]
| _benj wrote:
| This is more along the lines of my "vintage".
|
| Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering
| their c64 and Ataris and whatnot!
|
| My first computer was a celeron 500MHz with windows 98 (maybe
| there was a 300MHz with win 3.1 but I never got it working)
|
| So, this blog is nostalgia! Winamp and the Linux clone!? DDR2!?
| Back in my day we had some other thing that I don't remember the
| name (sdram?), we ruled the city because with winrar we could use
| the T1 of the university to download stuff, then split it in 4
| 3.5" 1.44Mb floppy disks to install on our computers!
|
| Oh, and CD-R changed the game forever! And usb... it took a while
| and a few dongles (parallel to usd, serial to usb, ps2 to usb)
| and hunting down the proper .inf file, but it was glorious!
|
| That's my kind of nostalgia :)
| Frost1x wrote:
| >So, this blog is nostalgia! Winamp and the Linux clone!?
|
| XMMS: http://www.xmms.org/
| _benj wrote:
| That one!
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| MOS Technology 6510 @ 1.023Mhz here!
| _benj wrote:
| I cannot fathom...
|
| My closes reference is a PIC16F that I used to program in
| 8bit assembly, but the thing was 8MHz, and I only blinked an
| LED! :)
| boondaburrah wrote:
| Closer than you think since IIRC the PIC, like the Z80,
| takes 4+ clock cycles to complete one instruction and the
| 6502 can sometimes do it in 1 (albeit a much
| simpler/limited core, but obviously
| Commodore/Apple/Nintendo et al made it work).
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| They made it work by not doing picture rendering on the
| CPU. Same as GPUs today. Still impressive though
| ddingus wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTRkZ-SKs5g
|
| That's basically the CPU running at 1.024 Mhz. The video
| hardware is dumb, runs independent of the CPU, and just
| scans a region of memory to send pixels to the display.
| All software pushing pixels otherwise.
|
| You are not wrong with the NES, C64 and other machines
| using a graphics chip with sprites and other hardware
| features to assist in various ways. But, quite a lot
| happened on the CPU.
|
| BTW, this game is done on a 1Mhz 6809, all software
| pushing pixels.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wAKxa5C9jHY
|
| (I would skip out to the middle somewhere in that video
| to get a sense of what is being done)
|
| On that game specifically, it's a single frame buffer.
| Screen divided into two halves, each drawn while the
| display is delivering the other to the player.
| boondaburrah wrote:
| The Fujitsu FM-7 line of 8-bit computers actually shipped
| with two 6809 compatible CPUs (Hitachi 6309 IIRC) and the
| second one just did software graphics the whole time
| pretending really hard to be a GPU.
| boondaburrah wrote:
| I got my first computer in the days of CD-ROM and was amazed
| that a CD could hold more data than my Win95 (later Red Hat 6
| (not RHEL)) Pentium Packard Bell's 512MB HDD could.
| jerf wrote:
| "Thanks kind of feel left out when folk here start remembering
| their c64 and Ataris and whatnot! My first computer was a
| celeron 500MHz..."
|
| In a lot of ways, between the c64 and the celeron 500MHz is an
| enormous, almost unrecognizable leap, whereas between the
| celeron 500MHz and the machine in my hand is just a lot of
| incremental change. I had a machine ~2000 that was de facto a
| 500MHz Duron (running at its full 1GHz overheated very
| quickly), and I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm
| using now. Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player. Wifi
| needed a dongle. The integrated webcam is new since then.
| actuallyalys wrote:
| >I used the same basic paradigm on that as I'm using now.
| Emacs, browser, terminal windows, MP3 player.
|
| I don't disagree with your overall point, but two parts of
| that paradigm, Emacs and the terminal emulator, do date back
| to the C64 era. Here's Richard Stallman on developing GNU
| Emacs: "There were people in those days, in 1985, who had
| one-megabyte machines without virtual memory. They wanted to
| be able to use GNU Emacs. This meant I had to keep the
| program as small as possible." [0] Emacs may never have run
| on Commodore computers, but my impression is that it ran on
| very similar computers.
|
| [0]: https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html
| hit8run wrote:
| I like the new 16inch MacBook Pro but for sure prefer my iMac Pro
| and am looking forward to replace it with something new presented
| this year. Life is too short for crappy hardware.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Sorry, I have to ask about the pronouns. Does the use of "we"
| imply that this laptop is shared by multiple people?
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| By definition it does. I'm not sure what weird literary device
| the author is going for here.
| emptybottle wrote:
| The article is written to be read back in Gollum's voice
| bityard wrote:
| It's possible the author has multiple personalities, it's a
| good thing that they are running a multi-user operating system.
| foobarbecue wrote:
| I mean, I suppose it's a reasonable pronoun for someone to use
| if they wish to be referred to as "they" ...
| kmm wrote:
| "They" is almost exclusively singular in those circumstances,
| regardless of its etymology. Similar to how "you" derives
| from the old English second person plural pronoun, but is in
| virtually all variants of modern English acceptable for the
| second person singular.
| [deleted]
| Youden wrote:
| I also found it confusing. I was wondering if it was this
| person's preferred pronoun but their Twitter [0] lists "she" as
| of "January 2022" and all the testimonials use "she" too [1].
|
| [0]: https://twitter.com/EverfreeArtemis
|
| [1}: https://artemis.sh/
| verytrivial wrote:
| No, it's just a pronoun flex. Spend as many cycles on that as
| you think it deserves.
| jmrm wrote:
| Some people doesn't know that, aside of media creation and
| consumption, we don't need so much power to do other things.
|
| Most of my university assignments were done on a Acer Aspire One
| netbook (1.3/1.6 GHz Dual Core Atom, 2 GB DDR2 RAM) and I had no
| problem. To program in C, C++, and Python in Debian is simple
| great, and to simulate circuits with SPICE related software on
| Windows 7 is also good.
|
| I started using it because it was more light and more comfortable
| than the newer laptop I had (15" 4th gen Intel i5 laptop), and as
| a small device for reading PDF is great, so i ended up using it
| more and more, and for more tasks, leaving it for exclusive
| academic usage and letting the other for games and media.
| Jerrrry wrote:
| My Acer Aspire 1 is still kicking with an external monitor.
|
| It was supposed to be a disposable laptop, it outlasted and
| persisted through everything else.
| FranOntanaya wrote:
| I still have my Samsung NC10, had it running an IRC bot until
| recently in power save mode with no fans. Opening a modern
| version of a browser is pretty revealing about how heavier
| the web has become though.
| marttt wrote:
| The NC10 was/is a great machine. Considering the
| dimensions, it had a remarkably good keyboard. I also liked
| the "fanless mode". It felt quite sturdy, and, iirc, you
| could open the screen all the way down, to 180 degrees. The
| one I had for some time did suffer from its symptomatic
| "white screen" issue, though.
|
| I did some writing on this machine, and I always felt
| really concentrated, quite possibly because of the small
| screen.
| fogihujy wrote:
| Seconding this. The NC10 was an amazing little thing for
| writing a lot when on the go. Too bad the white screen
| issues have killed most of them off by now.
| dleslie wrote:
| I have the first EeePC, still working and with a replaced
| battery. It makes for an adorable little ssh terminal.
| UncleSlacky wrote:
| Haiku OS works well on them, too.
| VLM wrote:
| As for media creation, SaaS is where its at for weak endpoints.
| My ancient chromebook battery is going and it could never run
| CAD, office, or video editing natively, but it runs onshape
| which is SaaS 3-d CAD, and Google Workspace/suite/apps whatever
| its called this week, and Wevideo SaaS video editing perfectly
| fast no slowdowns or problems pretty much ever. The onshape
| viewer works great on my phone and tablet so if I'm building
| something far away from my desk, I've got the prints with me.
| Unlike my desktop keyboard, my tablet touch screen is sawdust-
| proof.
|
| Another discovery I made a long time ago was network
| connections are usually fast enough and small battery friendly
| CPUs are slow enough that its faster to send a video file to
| AWS (or have it there to begin with), spawn a linux box on AWS,
| run handbrake in CLI mode to convert the video to some obscure
| format on a very CPU beefy machine, and download the converted
| file, and delete the huge (and expensive) AWS instance, than it
| is to transcode video locally. Some CPU based transcoding is
| very slow if you don't have a lot of cores and its brutal
| thermally and to the battery.
|
| If you only have one SaaS app in your life, the old meme was
| what do you do when the internet is down? Well, the internet is
| almost never down for me, I'd pick up my laptop and go to a
| cafe or library if it was, and everything I do is online or
| SaaS or VPN'd in so I wouldn't crabby about one app being down
| I'd be crabby about being completely and totally shut down.
|
| That anti-SaaS argument in 2020's is like arguing that people
| have to drink bottled water because what would they do if tap
| water stopped working one day? If we're in a situation where
| the tap water stops working then we got bigger problems than
| which bottled water company to enrichen.
|
| The linked article seemed surprised that a 2009 device could
| play video, but I had been using Mythtv for 7 years by that
| point including occasional HD video on a relatively weak settop
| box class of computer and doing youtube for awhile so his specs
| for playback seem very low compared to what I was doing in '09
| on small devices, but whatever.
| emteycz wrote:
| Doesn't OnShape actually run client-side?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I used a similar computer as my daily driver for half a year.
|
| I lost touch with all the groups I who use Slack for organizing.
| hprotagonist wrote:
| This is now the second or third author i've found this year who
| uses the royal we.
|
| Am i missing something? Are we in _Cryptonomicon_ -style
| Relatively Independent Sub-Totality mode non-ironically now?
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Interestingly, the past blog posts use singular "I" up until
| the middle of the post "A Story of Microsuites, and Atrophy"
| from 21st of September, 2021: it starts with "Let me give you a
| view", but ends with "We lived there for three long years".
|
| But diagnosing over the Internet, while a fun pass time for the
| diagnoser (diagnostician?), is _very_ unreliable.
| azalemeth wrote:
| I just assumed that the author shared the laptop with their
| partner.
| keyme wrote:
| Ugh. All the way through I was imaging that Siamese twins wrote
| this piece or something.
| edem wrote:
| Or maybe somebody with a split personality.
| malf wrote:
| It sounds like a genius solution to shut up people who loudly
| refuse to use "they" for "oh, purely grammatical reasons, of
| course"
| hprotagonist wrote:
| "One" is a fairly formal voice, but certainly an option with
| a long precedent.
| edem wrote:
| I don't know but I've stopped reading the article after 5
| paragraphs because of this (and also some other reasons...)
| treesknees wrote:
| What were the other reasons?
| dt3ft wrote:
| I stopped reading because there was no background to
| anything. I landed there because I saw it on HN, but I had
| no idea what was going on. After a few paragraphs, I lost
| interest.
| Joker_vD wrote:
| Uh, they started to use an old laptop (presumably that
| they just had lying around) because they wanted to spend
| time on their phones less, and here's how it worked out.
| To be honest that's a fairly common story structure here
| on HN (with precise details different, of course), what
| more background do you want or need?
| dt3ft wrote:
| I can't quite put my finger on it, but I'd appreciate
| something along the lines of who they are and why the
| reader should invest their time to read on.
| robotkaput wrote:
| funny, I had a different theory: A concerned tech savvy parent,
| trying to save its children and spouse from the hazardous
| impact when using touch screens.
|
| > So this thing's main job is to help us stay off our phone,
| since touch screens are the hardest on the health of our hands.
|
| So lets heal this small children hands with this small keyboard
| :-)
| rsynnott wrote:
| Notoriously, Margaret Thatcher used the royal/singular we once
| ("we have become a grandmother"), so it's not reserved strictly
| for monarchs.
|
| It's at least less jarring than illeism, where one refers to
| oneself in the third person, I suppose...
| snkline wrote:
| There are other usages of we for an individual. I think the
| writer is trying to use what is called the editorial we, not
| the royal we.
|
| I will say it's use in that article is rather jarring however.
|
| edit: Looking it up, it appear this has a fancy name,
| encompassing the royal we, the editorial we, and more: Nosism.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nosism
| codetrotter wrote:
| I figured maybe the author used they/them as their pronouns.
| But the main page has some testimonials referring to "she". So
| idk what's up with the royal "we".
|
| Sometimes in science, people use the collective "we" in their
| writing. But like you say, the OP is using royal "we", so I
| don't think scientific writing is the reason either.
| djrogers wrote:
| First person pronouns aren't gendered, so even if this were a
| they/them using person, the darren.rogers@cybereason.com'
| doesn't make sense. What it did do was distract form the blog
| post, to the point that I stopped reading it.
|
| I just kept picturing someone creepily talking to their
| hairless cat while saying 'we'
| mhh__ wrote:
| Assuming they're non native it could be a butchered idiom
| from scientific writing.
| rob74 wrote:
| I'm not a native speaker, but AFAIK if you use "they" to
| avoid specifying a gender, it's "singular they"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they), so using the
| first person plural still doesn't really make sense...
| jrockway wrote:
| Their next blog post talks about being banned from Twitter
| because they put in a birthdate that made them under 13, so
| I'm guessing at some point they decided that they were reborn
| as some sort of collective (Twitter profile says "hardware
| witches | server maids"). Thus, "we" instead of "I".
|
| It's Hacker News. This kind of stuff is pretty normal here.
| donkarma wrote:
| no it is not
| jrockway wrote:
| It is. You have to understand that the way you see
| yourself is not necessarily the way other people see
| themselves. For centuries people hid this from society,
| but now people are open about it and it turns out that
| it's pretty OK.
| donkarma wrote:
| doesn't make it normal
| [deleted]
| dijit wrote:
| > Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine
| trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that
| benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3?
|
| Uh, I actually did this, it wasn't so bad honestly it just took
| about a day to rebuild everything.
|
| Honestly the Sony VAIO that I had was _awesome_ in some regards,
| the hi resolution display was extremely crisp! It fit comfortably
| in my inside jacket pocket, the battery didn't suck.
|
| The only issue I had honestly was the proprietary connector to
| get ethernet (though this was more annoying in 2012 when I was
| doing this, these days laptops don't seem to have ethernet); the
| only other issue was that the GPU was extremely slow with Linux.
|
| it was probably extremely slow in Windows too, but vista (which
| was installed on the thing) was far-far too heavy to understand
| why it was slow at all.
|
| The nearest best laptop I've found that is in all areas superior
| than the Sony VAIO P-Series (aside from being a bit taller) is
| the GPD P2 Max which is basically perfect.... if only it had a
| passively cooled ARM CPU.
|
| https://gpd.hk/gpdp2max2022
| leeter wrote:
| I also did this (around ~2008), a friend of mine and I built
| near identical Atom boxes with first gen (Diamondville) 64bit
| atoms on Intel motherboards running 865 chipsets IIRC. The
| GPU/Chipset was louder than the CPU because the CPU was
| completely passive. I did emerge Xorg on that... it took I
| think a day and a half(ish) even optimizing the heck out of
| compile options to use everything march=native... it was slow
| as heck. But it lasted me for years as a little project box
| until I replaced it with an 4th gen i5.
|
| You really do start to ask yourself if you need a package if
| compiling it will take a day or two. Hence OpenOffice never got
| installed.
| wildzzz wrote:
| At one point in college, I was using an old Thinkpad x41 tablet
| and wanted to mess around with gnuradio. I wanted it on my
| tablet laptop since I had that on me most hours of the day.
| Compiling gnuradio took several hours. I was running arch so I
| want unfamiliar with compile times for things I grabbed from
| the AUR but it was atrocious. I started it in my first class of
| the day and would just throw my laptop in my bag while it was
| still compiling and walk quickly to my next class so I could
| grab a power outlet before Pentium M sucked up all the battery.
| dmitryminkovsky wrote:
| I did Gentoo on a 600mhz Athlon. It was certainly a humbling
| and informative experience.
| dTal wrote:
| I use a GPD Micro PC throttled to 6 watts TDP, which means the
| fan can stay off permanently. It fits in a jeans back pocket,
| and has an ethernet port. And a serial port. And a full size
| HDMI port. And three full size USB ports, and a USB-C port.
|
| I wouldn't trade it for much...
| throw827474737 wrote:
| Details please, which? Or is there a whole range of options?
| trollied wrote:
| This: https://gpd.hk/gpdmicropc
| Mystlix wrote:
| Compiling your own software is a really humbling experience.
| When it takes way more time to compile a browser than a full
| fledged OS or you find out that seemingly simple programs need
| to pull a mind boggling amount of dependencies you really start
| to question the state of the software world
| dijit wrote:
| I think the main reason browsers are so extremely slow to
| compile is the heavy templating.
|
| But, I agree, I can compile my entire OS including user-space
| software and desktop environments in _about_ the same time it
| takes to compile chrome.
|
| Which is scary.
|
| But then again, people want it to do everything (WebUSB,
| WebGL etc; etc; etc;). So it stands to reason that it's
| inherently complicated and difficult to compile.
|
| I wonder if the high iteration time hampers development...
| mwcampbell wrote:
| > I wonder if the high iteration time hampers
| development...
|
| You might be interested in this post from someone on the
| Edge team at Microsoft:
|
| https://textslashplain.com/2020/02/02/my-new-chromium-
| build-...
|
| In particular:
|
| > I returned to Microsoft as a Program Manager on the Edge
| team in mid-2018, unaware that replatforming atop Chromium
| was even a possibility until the day before I started. Just
| before I began, a lead sent me a 27 page PDF file
| containing the Edge-on-Chromium proposal. "What do you
| think?" he asked. I had a lot of thoughts (most of the form
| "OMG, yes!") but one thing I told everyone who would listen
| is that we would never be able to keep up without having a
| cloud-compilation system akin to Goma.
| zh3 wrote:
| > ...that seemingly simple programs need to pull a mind
| boggling amount of dependencies you really start to question
| the state of the software world
|
| Recent jawdrop: 'apt-get install asciidoc' on a pi needs to
| pull 189 packages, will use 889Mb of additional disk space.
| arthur6667 wrote:
| Maybe you already know, but in case not or someone else
| needs this: try with --no-install-recommends, it skips a
| lot of bs.
|
| I don't recall exactly what it was, but I remember
| installing something like a tiny library and it wanted to
| also install mysql-server or something like that >_<
| mayli wrote:
| due to depends on latex and friends.
| tokumei wrote:
| Gentoo was fun, too bad I don't have time for it anymore. I
| used to go for nice walks when Firefox was compiling. Great
| opportunity to go outside and take a break.
|
| USE flags in Gentoo also allows for a much more configurable
| system.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > GPD P2 Max
|
| Save for the processor being better than any VAIO's, I
| disagree. I find all of these to be absurdly unreliable (crappy
| firmware) and very cheap hardware for the price, not comparable
| at all to the typing experience on the P-Series. And the
| "trackpoint substitute" is a disaster, resembling a "tiny
| touchpad" more than a trackpoint.
| dijit wrote:
| Hrm, interesting.. I disagree with your opinion about the
| hardware quality, it feels sturdy and keys travel quite
| nicely. The screen is fantastic in color reproduction (for my
| needs), has high resolution and gets bright enough.
|
| There's no trackpoint/nipple and I hadn't considered that a
| problem as I'm weird and spent a lot of time getting used to
| only using the keyboard some years ago- so an oversight on my
| end and you're completely right, the touchpad sucks.
|
| The firmware is extremely bare bones, but I wouldn't say it
| sucks since I don't have any reason to believe it's bad. (Nor
| good, it just works for me.)
| ArtWomb wrote:
| >>> imagine trying to compile all your packages from scratch on
| a system
|
| used to be the norm back in the unix days. finding exact pre-
| compiled binaries for your exact arch/OS combo was like finding
| a pot 'o gold ;)
|
| am also amazed at how well gba emulators run on older devices!
| dt3ft wrote:
| Who are they and why are they using this old laptop? I wasn't
| able to find anything in the article that mentions this.
| aasasd wrote:
| Regarding games: PS1 games may run with PCSX-Reloaded aka PCSXR
| (the most-current-before-Retroarch fork of PCSX)--if the machine
| has any 3D acceleration. However, Retroarch's version is probably
| out, their requirements are higher.
|
| N64 emulation may also be possible, however afaik it's a gamble
| whether accuracy is ok and games don't glitch all over.
|
| Of course, mashing the gamepad--or the keyboard--is not good for
| hands. OpenTTD is indeed much more relaxing on the fingers.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Glad you enjoy your life at 800 MHz! I appreciated your article
| although the plural form to address a single person (not the
| editorial "we") makes me uneasy for political considerations.
|
| So many more things could be easily enjoyable on such hardware if
| the software ecosystem allowed it. I'm also curious what hardware
| modularity like Framework is doing could have achieved two
| decades ago: if you could easily plug in a chip to decode/encode
| video quickly, this computer could probably play any kind of
| video.
|
| > We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to require
| javascript to look up packages but here we are.
|
| I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
| curl https://crates.io/ {"errors":[{"detail":"Not
| Found"}]}
|
| Apparently, without a specific Accept header, crates.io thinks i
| want a JSON response for a crate lookup, not the homepage. Now i
| don't even remember why i was requesting this URL to start with
| (not in a script) but i don't understand the logic of that and
| the maintainers in the chatrooms seemed to consider it's not a
| bug.
|
| I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist" distro
| but that they're two debian releases late (still on stretch) does
| not exactly attract me.
| csomar wrote:
| > > We have no idea what crates.io thinks it makes sense to
| require javascript to look up packages but here we are.
|
| >I've had a similar experience with crates.io:
|
| They do have an API (ps: I built crates.live on top of it). I
| think they have a very good reasons to block the crawling of
| their main website. Otherwise, people might abuse it. Actually,
| they recommend you _identify_ yourself when crawling their API
| to not limit you. I didn 't do it, and found no problem
| constantly calling their APIs.
| guessbest wrote:
| I have a laptop from 2009 or 2010 running at 800 mhz with a 32
| bit CPU. It has to run an older version of Ubuntu (18.04)
| because nothing supports it nowadays. Even 32 bit packages are
| hard to get. I see no reason to use antiX or other esoteric
| distros since ubuntu runs fine on it and supports the hardware.
| I doubt antiX supports more hardware.
|
| Someone else recommended it here, but I don't see the
| advantages over a robust package repository like ubuntu 18 or a
| minimal ram only distro like puppylinux.
| https://cheapskatesguide.org/articles/antix.html
|
| Funny enough I got puppylinux running from a dos (windows)
| partition and running out of RAM on just 2gb on a Toshiba
| Portage m200. I've even got Windows XP Tablet edition running
| on SSD, but it can't really connect to much online due to the
| TLS limitations. And newer versions of the linux kernel don't
| support the wireless chipset. It is also difficult putting an
| old non-PAE kernel into a newer distro.
|
| TLS really killed the utility of a lot of older computers with
| regards to using the "modern internet".
| slacka wrote:
| I have an old Dell with a 32-bit 2.33 Ghz T2700. Linux fully
| supports the GPU, and no issues with missing 32-bit packages
| on OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It's a spare browsing / retro gaming
| machine hooked up to the TV in the guest room. For gaming, it
| runs everything from arcade MAME to Mario Kart 64 like a
| champ. For browsing, it's not speedy but not bad on heavy
| HTML sites like gmail/youtube.
|
| I agree antiX was a poor choice. No issue with PAE kernel on
| Tumbleweed i686. If OpenSUSE ever drops x86 support, there's
| always Debian or Arch 32 (if I want to stick with a rolling
| distro).
| anthk wrote:
| Openbsd will run fine, even with TLS.
| guessbest wrote:
| Sure it runs, but will it run TLS 1.3? that seems to be a
| big requirement for websites these day
| anthk wrote:
| Yes, no issues.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Uhm? https://antixlinux.com/antix-21-grup-yorum-released/
|
| https://antixlinux.com/antix-sid-iso-files-available/
|
| If you feel too irked/offended by antiX there is also
| https://mxlinux.org/
| bitwize wrote:
| > Glad you enjoy your life at 800 MHz! I appreciated your
| article although the plural form to address a single person
| (not the editorial "we") makes me uneasy for political
| considerations.
|
| You assume Artemis identifies as a single person. In all
| likelihood, they are a plural system. Statements like yours are
| microaggressive at best.
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| There was one slip in the article though: "did I say". Which
| makes it even more jarring to read, IMO.
| bener wrote:
| A plural system? You say that as though it requires no
| explanation.
|
| I don't get the "political considerations" part, but this is
| the first time I've encountered anyone referring to
| themselves as "we" online, and I also found it jarring.
| bitwize wrote:
| A plural system is multiple identities or personalities in
| one body/mind. Plural systems are increasingly demanding to
| be recognized and respected as such -- and companies are
| starting to comply. Much like trans and nonbinary identity,
| plurality is an aspect of identity we're all going to have
| to deal with now.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Does the United States current recognize plural folks as
| a protected class? Do we even have the infrastructure to
| recognize them in any meaningful fashion? To extrapolate
| on that, how much research has gone into understanding
| the dysphoria that these people experience? Do we have a
| medical basis of understanding when it comes to how
| plural systems affect the mind? Do we even know if it's
| healthy to address plural systems as their individual
| components?
|
| I apologize in advance if this sound antagonistic, but
| putting plural identities on the same levels as queer and
| trans ones seems... a little premature, if you ask me.
| RoddaWallPro wrote:
| Genuine question: How do you differentiate this from
| full-blown mental illness? Because this sounds 100% like
| what society traditionally recognizes as
| schizophrenia/split personality disorder. Or, in more
| extreme cases & phrased less politely, insanity.
| BTCOG wrote:
| AntiX is a wonderful systemd-free debian and now also has Sid.
| It's fast as fuck in usage. It's best left as a live system.
| gcr wrote:
| I don't want to speculate about Artemis specifically, but
| first-person plural pronouns to refer to oneself typically
| isn't a "royal we" or anything like that, it's just what helps
| some folks feel comfortable, especially those who have DiD or
| who label themselves as plural. See
| https://www.reddit.com/r/plural/wiki/index (keywords:
| "plurality," "multiplicity," ...)
|
| I'm dating someone who refers to themself in the first person
| plural; it becomes perfectly natural pretty quick :)
| heurisko wrote:
| I never knew this was a thing. I'm not on board with
| promoting the use of "we" as a replacement for first person
| singular as being an acceptable societal norm, unless you're
| the Queen.
|
| Sorry, but it is too close to contributing to mental health,
| or personality, disorders for me.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I never knew this was a thing. I'm not on board with
| promoting the use of "we" as a replacement for first person
| singular
|
| Thou art fighting a losing battle; the grammatical first
| person singular will soon be as passe as the second.
| user_7832 wrote:
| > I never knew this was a thing. I'm not on board with
| promoting the use of "we" as a replacement for first person
| singular as being an acceptable societal norm, unless
| you're the Queen. Sorry, but it is too close to
| contributing to mental health, or personality, disorders
| for me.
|
| Wait until you find about about languages like Hindi where
| the plural form can be used for respect even when referring
| to an individual :)
|
| I hadn't realized that calling an individual in plural was
| even a point of contention until comments on this thread
| pointed it out (likely because I'm used to it from Hindi).
| Don't forget, the author may be bi/multilingual.
| pjerem wrote:
| > Wait until you find about about languages like Hindi
| where the plural form can be used for respect even when
| referring to an individual :)
|
| In fact it's pretty common amongst a lot of languages.
| Most Latin-derived languages use the plural to show
| respect. But of course, never to talk about yourself.
| You'll use the pluralized form when talking to strangers
| or to people who are over you hierarchically (but this
| usage tends to disappear in a lot companies).
|
| As a French, reading someone speaking about itself as
| "we" is shocking not because it looks like there is
| multiple people involved (but it also does) but because
| it looks like the person tries to be "above" you
| hierarchically. Of course i know it isn't what's intended
| but language interpretation is an automatic mechanism.
| xena wrote:
| Something cannot be a disorder unless it causes harm.
| Things that are not disorders and are out of the ordinary
| can be considered adaptations and can be advantageous.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Harm to whom? Many things can cause harm to oneself
| (socially, at least) without harming anyone else. Being
| odd about your pronouns is one of those things.
| numpad0 wrote:
| If you ain't changing and if you ain't adapting you might
| as well not be alive :p
| bener wrote:
| I may as well not be alive if I'm not adapting to people
| using "we" as a personal pronoun?
| gcr wrote:
| What is there to "adapt"? Whether or not I use "we" to
| refer to myself doesn't affect you, and also doesn't ask
| you to change your behavior.
| BossingAround wrote:
| > label themselves as plural
|
| Definitely contributed to me not finishing the article.
| coolso wrote:
| Life honestly becomes so much more pleasant when you avoid
| interacting with the pronouners as much as possible.
| tomxor wrote:
| But what is the intended purpose?
|
| It seems ambiguous to me, I was honestly trying to figure out
| if there was more than one person using the author's laptop,
| or if it was a multi-author article or something.
|
| Not that English isn't chocked full of ambiguity - I just
| haven't managed to identify a benefit over using the more
| commonly accepted "I" here.
| [deleted]
| fuzzer37 wrote:
| > label themselves as plural
|
| No
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I have heard it from a "sovereign citizen". They seem to use
| it when wanting to talk about themselves (flesh) inclusive of
| their various personhoods and corporate entities. I imagine
| that traffic cops find it unsettling for a lone driver to say
| "we" are going somewhere, as if there are other people
| somewhere unseen in the vehicle.
| blackboxlogic wrote:
| After finishing the article, my main take-away was how
| impressive it is that such a quirky tech setup could work for
| both of them. I was comparing it to my relationship and how
| difficult it is to share any item/space which is also
| customized to either of our preferences. It gave me hope.
|
| Then I read these comments.
| myself248 wrote:
| I interpreted this as the "editorial we" or perhaps the
| "author's we":
|
| > The editorial we is a similar phenomenon, in which an
| editorial columnist in a newspaper or a similar commentator
| in another medium refers to themselves as we when giving
| their opinion. Here, the writer casts themselves in the role
| of spokesperson: either for the media institution who employs
| them, or on behalf of the party or body of citizens who agree
| with the commentary. The reference is not explicit, but is
| generally consistent with first-person plural.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We
|
| It's quite standard usage.
| FredPret wrote:
| Sounds like that guy "All" from Zoolander
| throw10920 wrote:
| > I'm also very curious about antiX "proudly anti-fascist"
| distro
|
| "Anti-fascist" doesn't actually mean that - it's a political
| dog-whistle.
|
| > they're two debian releases late
|
| That's in line with their use of Palemoon, which lags behind
| normal Firefox feature (and security) releases due to their
| decision to support older features (mostly XUL) (not that this
| is very avoidable, because maintaining an XUL fork is _very_
| hard work, and not for the faint of heart).
| dobs_bob wrote:
| Dog whistle for what?
| smoldesu wrote:
| I guess fascists who want to prove that they can render
| their swastika on an Antix machine no matter what the
| developers do.
| cperciva wrote:
| There's no unified "anti-fascist" movement, but the common
| theme among the self-described anti-fascists I know is the
| belief that physical violence has a legitimate place in
| democratic processes.
|
| Frankly they remind me of a line by Nietzsche about staring
| too long into an abyss.
| bluedino wrote:
| Wow. Atoms were slow when they were new. 2-4 times slower than a
| E5300 Core 2 Duo or whatever was common in 2009.
|
| That said, with maxed out RAM and a cheap SSD they were 'enough'
| and they came in some neat formfactors. I had the Lenovo S10
| netbook, but the 1024x600 was very hard to live with. They didn't
| offer anything special in the way of power savings or battery
| life, either.
|
| For the price, a 2-3 year old Dell or HP laptop was a better
| choice, and then the iPad came out...
| smm11 wrote:
| I've got an XPS that I never turn on, an S21 phone that I use
| sparingly, and a USB-C to HDMI adapter at home that lets me turn
| my phone into my desktop computer (Dex).
|
| This is me typing on a work computer, but I don't count that. My
| computer is a phone.
| seqizz wrote:
| > Technically Gentoo is also in the running, but can you imagine
| trying to compile all your packages from scratch on a system that
| benchmarks worse than a raspberry pi 3?
|
| Hmm I knew at least one person who did it.. Yes, it's exactly how
| you'd imagine.
| danans wrote:
| I used the Vaio PCG-505 for a few years after college. I mostly
| worked as a freelancer, and it was surprisingly good as a work
| laptop.
|
| I recall running Eclipse and recompiling the Linux kernel on that
| device.
|
| The magnesium body had no match at the time. I didn't even mind
| the purple color.
| simonblack wrote:
| _Life at 800mHz_
|
| 800 MILLI Hertz (0.8 Hz)! Now that _is_ slow. <grin>
|
| Actually 800 MHz is slow by today's standards, but it's a lot
| faster than the 4 MHz Z80 that my first computer used.
| [deleted]
| tagoregrtst wrote:
| I saw that!
|
| I believe 0.8 Hz would be about par with the earliest
| electronic relay machines. So (assuming it doesn't take 10MW),
| just about useful to compute admiralty tables.
|
| Like you, I was a bit disappointed when I realized that I
| wasn't about to read some half practical computing at 800mHz
| masklinn wrote:
| It's not even necessarily that low depending on the standards
| you apply / references you use, lots of chips have base clocks
| which are quite low especially for low-power CPUs or SoC.
|
| For instance the Atom x6200FE has a 1GHz base clock. According
| to its spec sheet it can't even burst (while the higher-rated
| X6211E has a 1.2GHz base clock and can burst to 3).
|
| Your problem's more likely to be that it's an Atom from 2008
| (which implies lots of performance-related concerns, like being
| pre bay-trail and thus in-order), than it being 800 base / 1.3
| burst.
| ale42 wrote:
| Too bad, reading the title I was hoping for some UHF mystery
| signals ;-)
| api wrote:
| When these discussions come up I routinely post this:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GEOS_(8-bit_operating_system)
|
| Yes it was pretty limited and not quite useful yet for real work,
| but it shows what could be achieved on an 8-bit 2mhz CPU with
| less than 64K of useful memory.
|
| Modern software is VERY bloated.
| mwcampbell wrote:
| This comment seems somewhat at odds with one that you posted a
| couple days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29899933
|
| Personally, I would use the iPhone 3GS as the baseline minimal
| hardware that can support all of the must-have features of
| real-world software, because the 3GS was the first model
| capable of running the VoiceOver screen reader (in addition, of
| course, to all the other things it could do). But then, I'm
| sure I'm over-emphasizing the must-have feature that matters to
| me.
| api wrote:
| I think both comments are true. Take something as lean as
| GEOS and upgrade it to support 5K displays, HDR color,
| unicode, etc., and I still think it would be several orders
| of magnitude smaller and faster than most of today's
| software.
| [deleted]
| morganvachon wrote:
| Out of curiosity I checked eBay to see the going rate for this
| particular portable; of the two listed, one has a starting price
| of $350 and I watched the other go from a $99 bid to $150+ in an
| hour. Apart from the quirkiness or the need to replace one's
| recently dead machine, I can't wrap my head around such a high
| price for such low performance. For a little more than the higher
| priced unit, one can get a Gemini PDA or similar device with a
| more modern and faster processor, and come out even more portable
| and with excellent battery life (though I did note the author's
| need for a non-touchscreen device due to a handicap, the
| touchscreen on a modern portable doesn't have to be used if
| there's another pointing device).
| BTCOG wrote:
| I ran these specs or a very close approximation as a daily driver
| for many years on a couple Gateway Atom netbooks. I consistently
| ran Debian unstable (Sid) with minimal window managers and
| desktop environments from 2011-2015 or so with mostly i686-PAE
| kernels.
|
| I was confused by the constant use of "we" in the writing here
| and at first assumed this person was sharing the netbook with
| multiple other people. By the end I came to realize it was
| something more like a split personality usage? I found it odd.
| anthk wrote:
| On Emulation, Mednafen should run fast if you set the right core
| for SNES, avoid any opengl and shader output, and compile it
| yourself with "-march=native -O3" and the rest of CFLAGS and
| CXXFLAGS.
|
| It should emulate any 8 and 16 bit systems wells, even the GBA
| (which is 32 bit).
|
| Also, on low end systems, solene@ from openbsd wrote a challenge
| on her personal site (gopher and gemini too) on keeping yourself
| on a single core device (grub/lilo option available just in case)
| and 512 mb of RAM at most.
| awiesenhofer wrote:
| Oh wow, great to see someone else still enjoying and even using a
| Vaio P!
|
| After lots of lusting over them back when they where new (1) I
| managed to find a used gen 2 one a while back and just adore it.
| To me the gen 2 series devices are still one of the most
| beautiful gadgets ever designed, but I am a huge Sony fanboy so
| ymmv.
|
| I rock a neon green version with a blazingly fast 1.6ghz Atom and
| crisp 1600x768 screen - its still quite usable like OP describes,
| runs fine with Lubuntu, though nowadays I only use it to play
| some DOSbox games once in a while.
|
| An old review with specs details and pictures of gen 2:
| https://www.laptopmag.com/reviews/laptops/sony-vaio-p-gen-2
|
| (1) I forgot the name/url, but there was this kinda famous
| website of some shop in Hongkong that would import all these
| great - mostly Japan-only - laptops to the us/eu, even in often
| very rare configurations (umts etc). Maybe someone else on here
| remembers!?
| Rediscover wrote:
| I used to go through dynamism.com and conics.net for importing
| Panasonic Let's Note and Sony laptops. Was it either of those
| that You were trying to recall?
| rospaya wrote:
| I was in love with various tiny computers, had a Sharp Zaurus
| C760 for some time, it was a full Linux machine in a small
| clamshell.
|
| https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7162
| settrans wrote:
| Despite being (ostensibly) state-of-the-art technology, I feel
| similarly about my 2021-vintage MediaTek MT8183-powered
| Chromebook.
|
| Despite costing sub-$300, its CPU is comparably powerful
| (according to Passmark) to the Vaio VGN-P588E's contemporary
| desktop CPU, the Intel Q6600. Of course few PCs in 2009 had 4GB
| of RAM at the time (to say nothing about the GPUs of the time).
|
| The MT8183-based machine offers a surprisingly capable computing
| experience, allowing for simultaneous Meet presentation +
| JavaScript-heavy web application usage, all at that retro
| computing price point.
|
| Where it ceases to feel like my X61, however, is in battery life.
| Where the X61 only lasts a few hours of heavy usage with a fresh
| battery, the MT8183 chugs along for 12+ hours.
| jdmoreira wrote:
| Interesting. Can you run mainline linux on this machine? I
| don't want to deal with ChromeOS
| CameronNemo wrote:
| Maybe? mt8183 seems to be one of the better supported
| mainline Linux SoCs.
|
| https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin.
| ..
|
| The "Cadmium" distro (Debian based) seems to have some
| support for a "Duet" device, which I assume is the mt8183
| based Lenovo Chromebook Duet. They say that the cameras, hw
| accelerated video decoding, and external video output do not
| work.
|
| https://github.com/Maccraft123/Cadmium
| allenbina wrote:
| Near the beginning of the pandemic I got frustrated with the
| trackpad and battery life of my lenovo yoga, so I bought a ~$250
| asus l204m.
|
| Aside from my 2011 15 inch MacBook Pro which also had its issues,
| this has become my favorite laptop. I don't mind the small
| keyboard surprisingly, and I find myself getting light work and
| practice problems done while my wife and I watch TV.
|
| The cons: video playback, the screen resolution, something about
| how the screen refreshes is also odd. 4gb max memory. I carry a
| dongle to use a generic usb-c charger.
|
| The pros: Actual 10 hour battery life (mint xfce), and I can get
| 12 if I drop the screen brightness. Full size HDMI port. Great
| linux compatibility (from what I can tell). MicroSD expansion
| sits flush. Light and small, and I actually prefer 11-12 inch
| laptops now. Only costs $250 so I throw it in a bag if I'm going
| somewhere.
|
| I get the fun around these devices and cyberdecks, and I have a
| couple raspberry pi projects, but at $250 for x64 processor and
| 4gb memory with a keyboard, screen and battery, it's not even a
| close call for me.
| traverseda wrote:
| I don't understand what makes the "antiX" linux distro they're
| using "proudly antifascist".
| BTCOG wrote:
| The idea behind it is using only free software, and nothing
| non-free. The guy who runs AntiX goes by the username
| Anticapitalista and the theme is not supporting corporate
| computer systems and consumerist cruft.
| smegsicle wrote:
| The only other time I've heard of "IT-fascism" is when this
| 'abebeos' character threatened someone's job for not taking
| seriously a 50% claim on a $7k bounty for 'documentation,
| testing, and integration work'.
|
| https://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=92729#c56
| (relevant discussion is collapsed)
|
| threat: comment 56; "IT-fascism": 58,60,61
| VLM wrote:
| Google search results show their repeated response to questions
| like that on their forums is anyone who disagrees with them in
| any way or criticizes anything they've done is literally
| Hitler. They're apparently very hard to get along with.
|
| Its a rather interesting and extreme solution to endless bike
| shedding arguments. Should "our" editor be vim or emacs? Well
| anyone who disagrees with me is literally Hitler so we're going
| to use XYZ and you'll like it or go away. That's an interesting
| strategy to save time on eternal discussions.
| BTCOG wrote:
| It goes back a long ways and it stems from very minimalist
| only free software linux communities. Many of these
| communities I've been privy to for 15+ years take pride in
| running in the smallest memory footprint, are anti-Java,
| anti-javascript, anti-Poettering (systemd as a backdoor),
| etc. and this is the premise of it. This community will get
| very mad at you for suggesting to add in those things that
| they deeply hate, i.e., javascript or non-free software
| blobs.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| I searched for antix antifascist and came across this post:
| https://www.antixforum.com/forums/topic/anti-fascist-antix/#...
|
| >>antiX is not anti politics, it is anti fascist politics.
| Politics is everywhere whether you like it or not. Put simply,
| we do not tolerate politics or people spreading
| hate/prejudice/violence against people because of their skin
| colour, race, religion (or none), gender, sexuality.
| malf wrote:
| They write it on their web page. This makes people who are "not
| fascist, just anti-anti-fascist" out themselves.
| traverseda wrote:
| I did poke around a bit to try and see if there was an
| explanation, or any explicitly anti-fascist features. I guess
| it is just intended as some kind of in-group identifying
| thing? I had thought maybe they were implying systemd was
| facist, as they stress that the distro doesn't use systemd.
|
| I guess I assumed it would be a stronger connection, given
| that the distro is called "anti"-X and it's "anti"-facist,
| that it would have some explicit tor integration or
| something.
| tandymodel100 wrote:
| I think the subtext is some people associated systemd
| opposition to right wing politics (not fully unfounded if I
| understand) so the maintainers wanted to get out ahead of
| it when releasing another distro without systemd
| [deleted]
| traverseda wrote:
| I hesitate to ask, but can you provide some context for
| linking anti-systemd sentiment with fascism?
| Minor49er wrote:
| I checked out antixlinux.com to see and they don't explain it
| on the front page, About page, or on their FAQ
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