If a fcking coffee on starfcks costs 12€ and the coffee shop literally next door which has 50x better coffee offers the same or very similar coffee for 2€ and probably even has friendlier staff, the choice is simple. Starbucks is killing themselves. Pikachu shocked face.

Being a developer I slowly noticed that 99% if the people in this world don’t even think for a single milisec how anything in tech came to be. They use extremely advanced smartphones, apps, huge servers, games, everything. And no one ever thinks “huh, how did they made this?” They literally think making a whole OS is like making a pancake, 5 steps and 5 minutes and you are done. Or heck, they don’t even think that, they don’t think anything at all about it. They just… use it. Like it magically appeared there and they can now use it. They have absolutely zero idea how much effort the simplest things they use daily took. Some don’t even think about the fact that stuff like Facebook is a company and needs to make money. They just know that Facebook is magically there and works. How does it work? “Well, you open the app and click buttons”. But they never think about how the app and buttons came to be.

Stuff like “what is a cloud? What happens when you put something on the cloud, like Google drive?” They get absolutely broken and cant answer because they can’t even understand what a cloud is and why the files are accesible from everywhere.

It gets to a point where people get “shocked” when you tell them that Android or macOS has hundreds or thousands of developers working on it daily. They literally think Android just happened to appear out there and brands just decided to pre-install it on the phone they sell, like it was something that you “just install”.

Well, long story short, this eventually comes back to bite devs in the ass when we try but fail to explain to a client that “creating an AI that takes stuff from a database and magically creates new stuff” takes more than 2 days. Client gets mad when we say something is impossible in the hours budget that we got.

Simon Riggs like many other people literally make our world turn but people will never know who they are or why they are needed. This world biggest heroes often go unnoticed.

Picture this: you buy a car. You buy a new set of wheels/rims and a new radio system with Android and whatever. You also put some new carpets on the floor of the car. Now you need to take it for a simple routine maintenance and checkup at the car brand official shop. After a few hours you go back there to pick you car up and it has the stock wheels, stock radio, stock carpets and everything and you ask where the hell is your stuff and ALL of them on the shop look at you confused like if they never seen any different accessory on that car before other than the stock ones, or don’t know what you are talking about. All they know is that the car is now “according to spec”.

This is what it feels like after updating Windows with Linux in dual-boot on the same drive.

Good luck shipping stuff in glass packaging. Very heavy, extremely fragile, big, expensive. Glass is only worth it on reusable stuff. We need to find a good material for “throwaway” stuff. Eco plastic made from stuff like bamboo are great starting points. They feel like plastic even mcdonalds is using this material for their throwaway spoons. And it can’t be that expensive or they wouldnt be using it for free spoons

Everytime I buy something from a local shop or a western brand, it comes packaged with minimal plastic, and a lot of well thought out materials. Even if they use plastic, its always a very thin plastic and very “soft”. Can’t describe. But when I buy ANYTHING from aliexpress you can tell it came from china just by looking at the packaging. It has SO MANY LAYERS of plastic, and very hard and thick plastic. If you buy for example a single keychain comes with 20x the weight of it in plastic. They smell so much to plastic chemicals too, something that “western plastic” doesn’t smell like. Every time I have to drink from a paper straw I remind myself that a 10x10cm sticker I bought came with 5kg of plastic and still arrived damaged from shipping.

We don’t need to reduce even more. We need to somehow force china to reduce it. I am againt taxes for everything, but maybe tax the amount/weight of plastic that comes on stuff you get from china. And find a way to tax the sender, not the buyer. Maybe that will make chinese companies to actually think about reducing they 50 tons of useless plastic waste they make each second.

The problem with AVP is that it constantly feels extremely lonely. The fun part about VR is playing stuff together, games, being in the same room even if others are in different countries, have funny full size avatars, interact in a “vr-chat” kind of way. VR is supposed to be a fun version of our world. AVP is extremely serious, too “professional” focused, and especially b o r i n g. All you do on AVP is exactly the same that you would do by yourself with your current devices already. Just even more isolated from the world. And even the most enthusiastic Apple users eventually get this feeling when using AVP. While stuff like Quest 3, Valve Index, PSVR2 all might look “cheap” and “not polished” at first, while using them all you get is “wooow” factor and fun. AVP, yes its well crafted and polished, but it does basically nothing and feels lonely inside it.

Use private dns on your wifi settings and input dns.adguard.com into the dns setting. Sometimes this can cause connection problems tho. It’s a bit hard overall to block stuff on iOS, too strict of an OS

The Ray Tracing argument and 4K are both shit arguments. On the PS5 most games are not 4K native, those that are, are locked to 30 which is an horrible experience. Ray Tracing is the same thing, and not only is PC Ray Tracing much more advanced and better looking, but it also locks you to 30 fps modes on PS5. I doubt the PS5 Pro will change that. If you forget the 30 fps sad modes that have 4k/ray tracing, suddently you can actually build a PC yourself that plays the same games for $600-800 (bit more than a PS5 but ITS A FULL PC, does everything, not games only) that for that price can play 1080-1440p games with ease at 60 fps with graphical fidelity similar to the PS5 if not better since you can better fine tune the graphical settings of all games. Ray Tracing will kill it, just like it kills the PS5.

In my style of life (PC-first) I myself consider a console to be one of those extra expenses that you have only if you have free money to spare. Having games on your couch and big TV is amazing, but if you need a PC anyway for daily life, might aswell waste a bit more and get a great PC for gaming too. If it’s a powerful laptop, it can also be your living room “console” just by plugging some cables anytime. Having a console after having a good PC feels like luxury to me (in a bad way), and very optional.

However if your PC is absolute trash but you see no reason at all to buy a new one, because your life style rarely needs to use it, and you absolutely cannot be bothered with Windows configuration and all its BS, then a console is 100% justified. Consoles are great for people who just don’t care and just want to play a game a few times per month.

The bigger the screen, the more you notice because it covers more of your field of view. I would say 240Hz is the sweet spot. You can definitely feel the improvement from lower rates, but rates above it start to be barely noticeable. However I am fine with 144-165Hz if I wanted to save money and still get a great experience. Bellow 120Hz is unusable for me. Once you go high refresh, you cannot go back, ever. 60Hz feels like a slideshow. For gaming 60 is fine, but for work use and scrolling around I can’t have 60. Yes people, high refresh rate is useful even outside of gaming.

Funny thing is, while gaming, even if my monitor and PC can do it, I rarely let my fps go above 120-140. I limit them in the game. PC gets much quieter, uses less power, heats up less and its smooth enough to enjoy a great gameplay. I will never understand people who get a 4090 and play with unlocked fps just to get 2000 fps on minecraft while their pc is screaming for air. Limit your fps at least to your Hz people, have some care for your hardware. I know you get less input lag but you are not Shroud, those less 0.000001ms of input lag will not make a difference.

To be fair, 60Hz to 75Hz is barely noticeable even by those who are used to notice these things. If you can’t tell the difference, it’s understandable.

Then, the bigger the screen, the more noticeable high refresh rate is, because it covers more of your field of vision. So in a small iPhone screen it’s not easy for everyone to notice (and then there is the fact that iPhones rarely go to 120Hz anyway which is an absolute mess by itself but that’s another topic, so your 15 Pro probably rarely goes above a noticeable Hz change anyway).

However, if you get a 144Hz or above, 24" and above monitor, you will IMMEDIATELY see the difference against your 60Hz monitor. Even moving the mouse feels more responsive and accurate. Makes targeting stuff with your mouse easier. Reading text while scrolling is possible also. It unlocks a new world, it’s not only for gaming. Casual and work use also benefit a lot from high refresh rates.

Mine just lasts literally weeks, but I never tested it. It is so worry-free that I sometimes go multiple days without picking it up and when I finally do it has like 85% of battery and I don’t remember how much it had when I suspended it so I never even think about it. The TLDR is that the suspend in Linux works magically.

True, Apple even stops supporting macbooks software-wise in just 5 years. The new macOS sonoma is only available for macbooks after 2018. While I have a toshiba at home from 2008 running Windows 11 (16 years old, upgraded with more ram and SSD). Macs and longevity can’t be in the same sentence.

Buying macbooks is the stupidest idea ever if you want longevity. Heck they even stop supporting them software-wise in just 5-6 years. I still have an old Toshiba from 2008 that is now running Windows 11 fully upgraded, with more ram and an ssd, and is being used by my parents daily. Tell me any macbook that not only can be improved hardware wise (upgraded) but also be kept fully up to date software-wise in almost 16 years. None. The latest macOS didn’t release to macs before 2018. That’s only 5 years of software support for 3000-4000€ laptop. Sorry but, macbooks have the worse longevity of any other brand. If you want longevity, you just did an immensely stupid purchase, sorry to tell you.

I can see many future domestic uses that might need multiple terabytes per sec of speed. Especially everything around AI and machine learning. Imagine your device having instant access to multiple terabytes of a shared global library of machine learning data. Its a bit dystopic but thats another topic.

Another thing you can imagine is being able to play games directly “from the cloud” but processing them on your hardware. Imagine you have an xbox, but don’t have any games stored on it. Everything you play is fetched in real time from the server but still processed and computed on your hardware. So you get crisp clear image and visuals but games can now be so realistic that they themselves need 1-2TB of storage to store the whole game. So, with enough internet speed, we wouldn’t need to worry about storage space anymore and how big a game is. You just buy the game and click play and play instantly, but still computing the game locally. Or, if you still need to download and store the game, having a game be a 700GB download might be as “casual” as a 5GB game is nowadays (remember when we got shocked that games started to be more than 1-2GB? Now, 80GB is common). And you will be able to download the whole game in a few minutes. Game worlds can be huge and still be downloaded in minutes. Storage is also evolving day by day so 10TB of SSD might actually be kinda cheap in 10 years.

You can also imagine games so complex that they can now comunicate between players huge amounts of data so we could even share the same angle every leaf in a tree is moving to the wind so all players on that server would see the same exact movement of the leaves. The bandwidth is so high that you can actually start to share all of the most insignificant details between a multiplayer world.

You can also imagine Netflix being able to stream 8K 60fps HDR to your phone as easily as nowadays it streams 720p.

Virtual Reality. It needs insane amounts of bandwidth for anything. If you want to share a truly multiplayer VR experience you need all the bandwidth you can get. VR cloud gaming could be a thing since they could now transmit 2x 4K 60fps streams with minimal latency.

These are all casual domestic uses for unlimited bandwidth applications. Don’t worry, we will always need more and more bandwidth, because with more bandwidth always comes new tech, and with new tech the need for more bandwidth also increases. Infinite cycle.

Well I myself have no patience at all to compile stuff myself, I can say I am half casual half linux nerd. I’m in the middle. Compiling stuff is too much, especially drivers and low level stuff like that. At that point I will just give up on the hardware or the OS/distro. That’s mainly why I still dual boot. I have a SIM Racing setup and even with drivers that exist already and many awesome community made GUI tools (like Overdrive GUI) that get updated almost daily (which is impressive), it still is very hit or miss and most of the times it is either not detected at all or just half working. Even after using linux myself since the Ubuntu 7 and Gnome 2 days, I still dual boot Windows because well… sometimes life is just more peaceful when you can just reboot your pc and have funcional hardware again. I work under linux and play under windows. That’s peace for me. Except nowadays I am staring to play non-Sim Racing stuff on linux too because Proton is amazing. But it still requires a lot of manual labor to make it work. And when I teach linux to other people I always teach the dual boot way and how they can easily jump back to what they are used to. In your case… I think I would just get a different wifi card if possible. If its an embedded one, well… maybe I would just get a new motherboard/device anyway, or just use another OS and call it a day. Sometimes it’s the better way. In your case probably the amount of people that need drivers for hardware like yours is diminishing day by day, so the probability of it ever getting fixed also diminishes. I found out that in the Linux world it’s always better to stay with mainstream hardware as much as possible.

I understand, but seeing this post right after my experience today was the biggest coincidence ever and kinda funny that it worked right away in Linux while in Windows I had to manually go get the drivers for it. Linux used to be bad, but it evolved A LOT in terms of drivers support while windows just kinda stayed the same. I remember facing the same problem of booting a new Windows install and having the wifi option completely gone (no drivers) in Windows 8… many years ago. Windows 11 and the experience is still the same. And it’s a modern Realtek card, not even close to being obscure. This post + this experience today was just a nice internet moment

Funny that my brand new laptop just arrived today and its own wifi card wasn’t recognized in Windows, so I had to use my phone via usb-tethering. It’s a Lenovo Yoga Slim 7 (14APU8) by the way, Ryzen 7th gen, full AMD, OLED etc. It came without any OS (no way I’m paying for Windows lol) and my first Win11 experience on this laptop was “please choose a network to continue” and no networks were displayed at all, because wifi card had no drivers (Realtek btw). Windows setup wouldn’t let me continue without a network, but there was no way to have a network. Funny Win11 moment right there. After some hours configuring everything I then installed my usual dual-boot Fedora and everything worked even in the live-usb. This meme is not valid for Linux anymore. Windows however, now thats a meme.

Valve seems to be the only company on this capitalist world that actually understands that company profits cannot and should not grow exponentially forever without eventually destroying itself. All other companies don’t know or want to stop the greed ad are constantly pushing for more profits to see until where they can push the greed and milking without losing “too much” costumers. They even weight the amount of costumers lost vs the extra profits to see if its viable to lose those costumers and still profit, like Netflix. Valve does not work like this. Valve grew to a size, and that size is giving them stable and steady profit. And they are holding that size, slowly growing more here and there but nothing big. The biggest thing they did in like 10 years was the Steam Deck and they will not update it with a Deck 2 anytime soon. Valve plays the very slow, but steady profits game. This is how you win as a company. You try to keep yourself on a balance between good profits and good public perspective.

Because privacy and convenience are two extreme opposites and you can only go so far in the privacy direction before you start losing everything. Discord just works a million times better as a public forum/community than Matrix and is much more easily accessible to everyone.

There is a limit. I am privacy conscious but I still use all Google Services for example, because they actually provide me with a better web, work, mobile and entertainment experiences. Similarly, I prefer Discord for big communities with channels, server bots and topics, over Matrix.

Edit: all those people saying we can’t be privacy conscious and use Google Services at the same time: yes you can. Their services literally make my life better so I will keep using them, but I keep what I share with them to the absolute minimum. I go into their settings and disable everything I can about tracking and ads personalization (even if they still track me, I do my best not to be). You can surely still be privacy conscious using non-private products. Being extremist is not how you convince average joes to think about privacy, nor by telling them to give up all they use for unknown (for them) alternatives.

Even as a car guy and a pro-ICE cars, I agree 100% with this. These rolling coal trucks are just cringe, and literally a waste of fuel. I can’t say I care about the climate but I also hate the ones who fuck the climate as much as 50x the amount a normal human does, on purpose just because “fuck the climate”.