> I don’t care one bit about upgradability or customizability. After a year or two, I’m happy to throw it out and buy a new one. It’s not like upgradability is a bad thing, but it usually comes with tradeoffs to weight and power draw, and I’d rather it all be in one solid package glued together. And I don’t like customizability because I like when all the testing and polish work is put into one configuration.
Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.
To defend OP somewhat: his throw out should be someone else’s pre-owned and then we are square.
Not in defense: This is a customer who sees itself as an ultra pro user that only wants the best on all dimensions regardless of economics. Nice that there are about a few hundred of these customers in the world. This is a market that doesn’t exist and frankly, give this customer their wish and they only have other or more wishes.
The MacBook currently has two models, each available in two sizes, each size has three to six default configurations. There are dozens of MacBooks before you even get into the customization options.
Selfish how, because he clearly does not say that upgradability or customizability are bad things? Its also not like hes proposing something that isnt reality for most manufacturers, especially Apple.
I think the selfishness here is related to being fine with generating a pile of electronic waste that becomes a problem for everyone else, as long as he can avoid carrying a few ounces extra.
It's hard to recycle electronics, because separating materials that are chemically bonded together is very labor intensive and isn't worth it from the price of aluminum, copper, lithium, etc alone.
It would have to cost more to dispose of a laptop for this to work out financially.
People don't buy into this kind of signaling these days. It just does not work anymore.
Which e-waste are you currently running on?
You're just not. I know it.
Instead you run out and buy the newest shiniest thing so you can put a docker container into another docker container. And fill landfills with ewaste as a result.
Your engineering practices most directly contribute to ewaste, because extremely powerful PCs from 15 years ago doesn't hold up anymore to ever more shitty layers of javascript and vibecoded python stuffed recursively into ever more docker containers.
geohot is just being honest. That is respectable. All the signaling bullshit - is not.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread, unfortunately, and we're trying for the opposite here.
I'm tired of this insane right-wing opinion that having an opinion against waste is just virtue signalling, so we shouldn't care about anything because it's all just "signalling" and it's somehow more honest to not give a shit about anything. It's tired and it's disgusting and it's how we get a world where we don't care about improving our society or our environment.
I do care. You might not, but that's a you problem and not anything to do with me signalling anything. I'm being honest about everything I say. You not accepting that says more about you than it does about me.
Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? You've done it repeatedly in this thread, unfortunately, and we're trying for the opposite here.
That's unfair. I'm going unfairly called out even though I stand by my beliefs and I'm only trying to defend myself. How are the replies to my comments in any way acceptable and according to HN guidelines???
"Put your money where your mouth is", come on. That's not acceptable and it's provoking. How can you defend bullies like this?
The problem is doing it as a company. IBM wasn't defeated by hobbyists building their own PCs. They were defeated by other companies reverse engineering their BIOS and selling their own IBM compatible systems. This isn't possible anymore. It just means you get buried in lawsuits until you go bankrupt.
The assumption back then was that other companies would be making shows. Consolidating even more show production in one company is not something we should want.
I guess no Chinese interest wanted to buy it, to jumpstart a favored brand that's a step above random-name when people are picking which to buy on Amazon. Or wasn't willing to pay enough for it.
I think we can all agree that performance is often an afterthought to game developers, particular in bigger productions, but HD2 is sort of a bad example for that.
He's worked on an impressive number of great games. Prey, SW Kotor 2, Fallout New Vegas, Neverwinter Nights 2, Icewind Dale 1+2 and Alpha Protocol (ok, arguably great) jump out at me https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Avellone#Works
Also (to my mind) two of the most successful Kickstarted video game projects so far: Pillars of Eternity (a personal favorite) and Torment: Tides of Numenéra.
(He just needs to jump on a title like Numenéra: Into the Planescape to complete the cycle.)
Anyone who overlooked Prey (as I did for years) but loves the Looking Glass Studios games and successors (Thief series, Deus Ex series, System Shock series, Dishonored Series): just get it an play it. Read nothing. Just play it. You won’t regret it.
I miss the days when I could start Pidgin and it'd automatically log into every single service I use, and I could chat with anybody regardless of which service they were on. I didn't need half a dozen different apps running just to chat. It felt like a utopia compared to what we have today.
Would assume it's to check if a site is foreign propaganda. A lot of the lesser-known news sites that you see linked on social media are actually psy-ops pushing an agenda, many of them foreign-based. Follow the technique in the article and you can easily blacklist Iranian ones.
Why are people in the (presumed) West particularly afraid of the propaganda of a Middle Eastern country? Is the intelligence/propaganda unit there so good that they can program minds from a different continent better than Western oligarchs? This has got “Russia stole American democracy with millions worth of FB ads” vibes to it.
But if there is an easy technical implement to avoid some propaganda then good on them I guess. Why not. One less thing to worry about.
If you’re in any western democracy you should worry about propaganda bots from Iran, DPRK, Russia, and China.
They have well known active operations of helping fuel the flames of political division by amplifying both sides of extremely divisive topics.
If you’ve ever engaged in flame wars about abortion, brexit, Scottish independence, the Ukraine war, the Gaza war, etc, there is a really good chance there were many participants from one of those parties.
Everybody spies and attempts psyops campaigns. I am much more concerned about nations that actively and massively attempt to exploit US election interference: Russia and Israel.
I worry even more about native propaganda bots honestly. Just because they are native it doesn't mean they aren't pushing a massive agenda, and they have even more motivation to do so.
Probably no different than current drives? Who would pay more for worse drives? Particularly in enterprise, where defect rates and error rates make a much bigger difference and quickly add up across such a large number of drives.
> Probably no different than current drives? Who would pay more for worse drives? Particularly in enterprise, where defect rates and error rates make a much bigger difference and quickly add up across such a large number of drives.
Western Digital would like to have a word about shingled magnetic recording drives.
SMR drives aren't worse in any of those metrics except random writes. Yes, people running NAS with them got screwed over, but for your typical use case of storing movies they're fine.
The WD case highlights how manufacturers will cheat as much as they can get away with in regards to profits. That's why I mentioned it.
Doesn't matter if your use case is only stashing porn, mine is stashing archived web pages and wikis, for example. So integrity of both the HDD sectors and filesystem sectors really matters to me.
I also wanted to make a point about regulation requirements. If you cannot guarantee integrity of your backups, all compliance gets thrown out of the window, and your company will be closed if that info gets out.
This requirement is also the case for private citizens when it comes to preservations of filed bills and taxes, for the last 10 years, in all EU countries.
Jesus christ. What a wasteful and selfish way to look at things.
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