Used Chromebooks are plentiful and cheap on eBay and many of them are easy to convert to Linux using the tools and instructions at https://docs.mrchromebox.tech/. I used to have a house full of Chromebooks, but now all but one of them are Linux laptops. My favorite is the Acer CP713 because it comes in flavors with lots of RAM and drive space. I also prefer the convertible touchscreen models because they can go on a shelf and make cheap and attractive Home Assistant dashboards.
You get a dealbreaker keyboard because of the lack of an alt key and you don’t even save much money for the effort of working around the Chromebook restrictions. A laptop originally sold with Windows is so much more straightforward to work with.
I’d just grab something like an HP EliteBook 840 G10 on eBay. Around $300, upgradable RAM and SSD, and reasonably recent. Relatively modern/attractive aluminum build.
Or I’m sure there’s some other 2-in-1 not-Chromebook convertible model you can grab if you need the touch screen.
You seem to know what you're talking about. I used a cheapie Taiwanese Intel netbook for years, on Linux, with great success. When it came to replace it, there was nothing left in that niche (i.e. small and cheap) except ARM Chromebooks with (apparently) locked bootloaders. So I reluctantly bought a heavy and expensive Intel laptop.
Was I wrong to assume that the average big-box-store Chromebook cannot be jailbroken, or has only driverless hardware, or are things changing here? If the latter, surely this opens a boulevard for Linux? Any insight much appreciated.
If you are using a password manager, start by searching for every record with your gmail address. Make a list. Every day, go to the next entry on the list and change your email with that app or service.
Of course, set up gmail to forward messages to your new address and filter them into a folder. Once you have changed all the services you know about, watch for emails coming to the gmail folder, looking for more services that need to be updated. Eventually the only thing arriving in the folder is spam and you can just route it all into the garbage.
I am not an MS Office user, but I have seen the effect of format lock-in with Google Sheets. A few months back I began a project to de-Google my life, which went pretty smoothly until I tried to download my spouse's accounting spreadsheet from Google Sheets to Excel format. Both LibreOffice and Excel could open it, but nothing worked correctly. So for several months, I kept that one Google Sheet live until I could come up with an alternative. When I created the original file in Sheets, I was blindly using all sorts of features and capabilities (including Google Forms) that simply have no direct analog in other products.
A couple of days ago I bit the bullet and dug into the Excel file and figured out how to redesign everything and get it going again. Yay me. I'll admit I don't like the UI in LibreOffice, but I didn't like it very much when I first tried using it (as Star Office) back in the 90s either. Yet I keep coming back to it.
If I'm going to be locked into a format or app, I'd rather it be something like LibreOffice.
I was a 14 year old digital electronics hobbyist at that time. At $666 it could just as well have been $1 million. The most I could possibly afford at the time was about $50. For me, personal computing didn't become truly affordable until the Commodore 64 came along in the 80s, and by that point the Apple II was about 4x more expensive. The Apple computers were revolutionary, but to me they have never been affordable.
As someone who grew up with only vinyl in the 60s and 70s, I would never choose it over a CD for audio quality.
BUT I would enjoy recreating the rituals that go with playing vinyl: obsessive cleaning of the disks, the gentle manipulation of a delicate tone arm, and the soft thud when the turntable cover drops. Playing a record was a minor event to be savored. I doubt the younger generations are getting all of that right.
Vinyl absolutely CAN sound great. If you have a nice amp and good speakers, modern listeners will be amazed at the fidelity possible from vinyl played back on a good turntable with a decent signal chain.
BUT.
CD is still better. CD is simpler. You don't have to faff about with cleaning them, or treat them like hothouse flowers. The platform is incredibly portable.
And yet: Vinyl is more fun.
We moved last year. Our audio room can play streaming, CD, or vinyl. It's the first and third options that get by FAR the most usage. CD comes up once in a blue moon.
I'm solo developing a spaceflight simulator on Linux (using the Godot engine), exporting binaries in both Linux and Windows. It turns out that I really didn't need to bother with the Linux export anyway because Steam runs the Windows version on Linux without any problems.
The ONLY thing I'm still having trouble with under Linux is Steam VR on the HTC Vive. It works. Barely.
Yes, most likely. Steam is dominant, and it's not hard to make a Windows release that works under Proton.
Though in my case, I currently offer demo/beta releases for both Windows and Linux directly from Github. If I ultimately elect to release my game under a GPL license, then supporting both Linux and Windows directly would make sense.
I used to be an educator, and many of my students had an autism diagnosis. I would get to know them and often eventually decide that they were "just like" me, except that whatever their problems were, I had it worse.
So then I would look at these autism checklists and say, "yep, that's me," but when I actually looked at the strict diagnostic criteria, it wasn't that clear.
Looking at this article, I get it. There are other, more focused criteria that can be more appropriate. But those diagnoses don't trigger the special services, so they don't get used often enough.
What is my takeaway? People often don't conform to a model of average human behavior. Being unusual isn't necessarily a grave character flaw (which is what my mother had me believe) but merely an expression of the great variety of human intellect and behavior. It gives me license, without official diagnosis, to enjoy being who I am without shame or embarrassment.
The diagnosis criteria are written by and for neurotypical people. Autistic people are likely to dismiss them as not fitting because they are reading them too literally.
Also we tend to underestimate our own symptoms. As a ADHD person it took me a long time to understand that many of my struggles were not things everyone experienced. I still find it hard to really grasp that most people don't suffer from executive dysfunction and can just do things, even things they are not interested in.
Honestly if you relate to autistic people chances are high that you have some form of neurodivergence. It might be worth trying to get a diagnosis, even just to be sure.
I've also been working on half a dozen crates of old family letters. ChatGPT does well with them and is especially good at summarizing the letters. Unfortunately, all the output still has to be verified because it hallucinates words and phrases and drops lines here and there. So at this point, I still transcribe them by hand, because the verification process is actually more tiresome than just typing them up in the first place. Maybe I should just have ChatGPT verify MY transcriptions instead.
It helps when you can see the confidence of each token, which downloadable weights usually gives you. Then whenever you (your software) detects a low confidence token, run over that section multiple times to generate alternatives, and either go with the highest confidence one, or manually review the suggestions. Easier than having to manually transcribe those parts at least.
Do they actually have access to that info "in-band"? I would guess not. OTOH it should be straightforward for the LLM program to report this -- someone else commented that you can do this when running your own LLM locally, but I guess commercial providers have incentives not to make this info available.
Naturally, their "confidence" is represented as activations in layers close to output, so they might be able to use it. Research ([0], [1], [2], [3]) shows that results of prompting LLMs to express their confidence correlate with their accuracy. The models tend to be overconfident, but in my anecdotal experience the latest models are passably good at judging their own confidence.
Just the other evening, as my family argued about whether some fact was or was not fake, I detached from the conversation and began fantasizing about whether it was still possible to buy a paper encyclopedia.
I admit I didn't even know I was using RCS on Android until I switched to a cheap flip-phone and I could no longer post to a Wordle group chat that I had been in for years. What is the possible advantage to the user for a messaging platform that ONLY works on an Android or iOS device with an active number? Don't want.
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