MS doesn’t blame the user when they get confused by a GUI or become intimidated by a command line interface.

Umm, yes they do. Look at copilot (as one recent example). The full range of opinion I’ve ever encountered goes from apathy to hatred. (Never heard of anyone having anything positive to say about it, the ‘nicest’ thing being to the effect of ‘I just ignore it, so I don’t care’). And yet, Microsoft’s attitude is that ‘the user is wrong, deal with it’, and this has always been the case in both Windows and Mac OS, while the various OSS DEs attempt to fix real user frustrations.

Many of the points they make are true for GNOME specifically, but thankfully, there are plenty of other options, and Linux != GNOME.

This Mitchell & Webb sketch comes to mind… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h242eDB84zY

They don’t really have to support the controller, though. Steam input lets you map controller inputs to kb/m inputs, so no degree of controller support is required. If there are any programmes that don’t work (which is possible, there are weird quirks in any system), I’ve certainly never encountered them.

What kind of dystopia are you living in that listening to music or podcasts would ‘raise the alarm’? Yes, don’t do anything inappropriate (definitely no piracy, obviously), or detrimental to productivity, but listening to music? Would definitely quit if an employer had a problem with that.

Is this a thing that’s considered ‘normal’ in the US? (I’m assuming US mainly because other countries are not generally so hostile towards employees)

True, just clarifying to clarify the last sentence:

In UK, it is just the legal term everyone goes by for when you lose your job

Since I think there’s room for misunderstanding that it’s more generic than it is

That’s not quite true, it’s a very specific reason for losing your job. If you are fired for doing a bad job, and said you were made redundant, that would be a lie. Redundancy is about the role, not the individual.

It’s not quite the same thing. If you are ‘fired’ that’s generally to do with performance or conduct of the individual. Redundancy is about not needing (or affording) the role any more (i.e. it is redundant). There are specific legal protections for each case that work quite differently. (You cannot rehire for the same position after a redundancy, for example)

Possible counterpoint: their use as a generic is isolated within the US (maybe some other countries, but certainly not universal), whereas ‘google’ has arguably become a pretty global term (at least in the Anglophone world, and I believe in some other languages, too), so the reach is very different in scope.

(e.g. Despite Kleenex still a big brand in the UK, nobody uses it as a generic. The product is called a ‘tissue’)

I have a sunlu printer (S9+), it was a very good price, it works well enough, and I consider it was worth it for me, BUT I 100% agree about support. It came with a flex plate with a kink in it, so I couldn’t use the full build area. Reached out to support about it. Just never replied, at all. As far as I can tell the support does not actually exist. Since it was only the removable magnetic plate, I could replace it myself cheaply enough, but if I’d had a bigger issue, it could’ve been a nightmare…

In the same way vibe coding has transformed software development

So, that is to say, they expect it to have no impact on serious work whatsoever?

Surely, if you forget it’s even running, you aren’t using it, and it doesn’t matter if it stops running? (With a couple of obvious exceptions like automated backups, etc)

If you’re using the AIO image, backup/restore can handled for you, so no need to worry about the manual steps involved. Or if you’re using a VM, a backup can take the form of full system snapshots, so also no need to understand how data are stored. Granted it’s always helpful to know what your running, but not necessarily requisite, even for backups.

Absolutely. I actually have an upgrade already planned, but it’s just that it’s not because I can’t run VMs, it’s more that I want to run more hungry services than will fit on those resources, whatever virtualisation layers were being used. The fact that it’s an easy fix to more a VM/lxc to a new host is absolutely it, though.

Am I looking at the wrong device? Beelink EQ15 looks like it has an N150 and looks like 16GB of ram? That’s plenty for quite few VMs. I run an N100 minipc with only 8GB of RAM and about half a dozen VMs and a similar number of LXC containers. As long as you’re careful about only provisioning what each VM actually needs, it can be plenty.

Why would you use an LLM for this? This sounds like a process easily handled by conventional logic, which would be cheaper, faster, and actually reliable… (The ‘notes’ part notwithstanding I guess, but calculations in general are definitely not a good use of an LLM)

Or use both. That’s what I do, they serve suitably different needs for different situations, even if there is an overlap, and it’s not like they’re heavy tools