No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you’ve got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that’s not really a workable tradeoff.
I’ve honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.
Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it’s going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn’t really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what’s actually happening.
That said, I’ve had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they’re still… not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.
If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that’s a tradeoff all on it’s own.
Another point of view is that OSS and Linux is absolutely amazing.
With a very limited set of exceptions, you can grab Ubuntu or Fedora or whatever, make a USB boot drive, and be in a GUI and shitposting on the internet in about 5 minutes.
Linux has grown tremendously from when I started using it, which was when you’d probably have to end up editing a config file for X11 to add the modeline so X knew the resolution and refresh rate of your monitor because there was no auto-configuration for anything more than like 640x480@60hz (and even that might not work).
And in just a few years we went from very very few games working with Wine, to damn near everything that doesn’t need ring0 rootkits working almost perfectly.
So yeah, it’s not perfect, but it’s absolutely light years from where it was 5 or 10 or 20 years ago and maybe focusing on how great it actually is vs bemoaning the things that still need work will help keep you motivated.
That said, at the end of the day software is just a hammer: you use it to build something. If Linux doesn’t work but MacOS does, or Windows, or whatever does then use what works. There’s no point in using something that doesn’t do what you want to the point that you’re angry/stressed/tired of dealing with it, because life is way too short to spend all your time fighting broken software when all you wanted to do was draw a picture or play a game or watch a movie or whatever.
And that’s why corporate social media is so sticky: your average user doesn’t care WHAT is done to them and the most they’ll maybe do is grumble slightly and spend a little less money, but won’t actually bother to do anything or make any changes, or go somewhere else.
Talk to your instance admin for that. Mastodon caches remote images and serves it from the local server to local users, so it should be fast unless the admin has something broken or configured wrong.
I love the Silicon Valley techbros lately. Their sales pitches have gone from ‘we have this cool new thing’ to ‘we’ve created something that solves the problems you didn’t have until we created the problem you’re now dealing with!’.
Much shareholder value or something, I guess.
I think the top 3 reasons are, ultimately, the same reason; the people who are already there don’t want you there, and they like the obscurity of discovery and obfuscation of communication, confusion around instances for onboarding, and ability to gatekeep exactly how you’re allowed to use the platform.
There’s issues with the underlying platform, for sure, but the established user base likes it the way it is, and is very strongly invested in preventing change.
And, that’s okay! If you have a platform that you enjoy using, it should be defended, and aggressively.
But, at the same time, you shouldn’t be utterly confused why so many people either don’t want to or bounce right off your platform and aren’t sticky when it’s pretty obvious (and has been for a while) that the culture is the big driver for it.
This feels like the same anti-FOSS FUD that was there 20 years ago against linux: ‘it’s not ready!’ and ‘who will provide support?’ and ‘it’s too hard for people to figure out!’ and ‘how can you make money if it’s free?’ and so on.
Of course, the whole world runs on Linux now and it’s eaten the lunch of every single proprietary competitor… it just took more than a week to do it, which is far too long of a cycle if you’re a clickbait “journalist” on corpo-owned media.
I don’t think it’s the NDA itself, so much as the tone of the way people framed their announcement of it.
Since I haven’t used a Star Wars analogy in a long time, I’ll try one:
If your babysitter wrote you and told you that they’ve got a meeting with the Galactic Empire to take care of younglings on Coruscant, but they can’t talk to you about it, you’d probably be a little concerned.
Like you know how that ended LAST time, and don’t really have any reason to think that this is somehow different, so you’re probably going to freak out about it.
As with most things in life, if you make announcements, make them super vague, and include things like ‘I’m going to talk to Zuck about his new project, can’t tell you anything’ then you’re leaving it up to the interpretation of the reader.
And so everyone is going to assume whatever based on their biases, and if there’s a group of people who are MORE anti-Facebook biased than Fediverse users, I don’t know who that would be.
It’s standard, but I can also understand why someone would find it a little concerning. You’re grabbing prominent developers and admins and such and they’re telling everyone they’re going to have a meeting with Meta they can’t talk about and, honestly, given how Meta generally behaves, I can understand why the interpretation is ‘they’re up to some shit we’re going to hate’.
It’s a combination of:
Meta’s reputation most certainly precedes them here, and they’re not a company known for politely co-existing with others but rather for stomping in, and taking what they want and packaging it and selling it.
IMO people have a reasonable basis for reacting strongly (though it’s 2023 and the ‘hyperbolic over-reaction’ is the required thing online it seems).
HA is pretty nice, but has a pretty big learning curve.
As for avoiding turning your internet into a IoT botnet, you need network gear that can segregate clients and prevent internet access, and to pick devices that have a local-only API which is not something everything has.
The real question - and this is coming from someone who spent way more time than I’d like to admit with HA automating things - is what you’re expecting. I absolutely wouldn’t bother doing a setup again because once the shiny wore off, all I use this for is setting a temperature and turning lights on and off: two things the hardware vendor apps does just fine.
It’s great, unless for some reason it doesn’t work, and that’s kinda an unfortunate state of things for what is still pretty early software. Matter should help simplify things since it’ll be less 100 vendors, 100 APIs you have to support which is kinda the state of being right now.
Also don’t buy anything from Belkin, screw those guys.
It’s not just the difficulty, it’s that the fediverse runs on reputation.
If you get a reputation for being an instance that has offensive/illegal content, you’ll get defederated and your users will get a materially worse experience than the rest of the instances that are federating with each other - and it really only takes one or two things to get that reputation.
sh.itjust.works is a prime example: it didn’t take an awful lot to get them down the defederation road, and I suspect most admins would want to maintain their reputation and an easy way to do it (until we get like… moderation tools) is to just gatekeep what communities show up on your instance.
As a counterpoint to that: any new community that gets created on an instance is now a possible liability the site admins have to own.
Makes a lot of sense that you wouldn’t want anyone to make anything on your site, since that’s how you end up with /r/jailbait, and /r/fatpeoplehate and so on.
Seems reasonable you’d want to make sure you understand who is creating what and why on a platform you’re ultimately responsible for.
IANAL, but I did spend a few years handling DMCA/Trademark takedown requests for an IaaS provider.
The answer is ‘Yeah, probably, but’, in most cases. If your instance is actively sharing copyrighted media, say, a stolen photo, and you get a DMCA and you’re in a jurisdiction where the DMCA applies (which is, of course, a US law and not some global copyright cartel) you probably are going to have to comply and remove the content.
If it’s just a link to content, say an embedded youtube video, you likely don’t need to comply since embedded content isn’t hosted on your server and thus isn’t something you can ‘remove’, but that’s a situation where shit gets murkier.
TLDR; it’s complicated but if the URL for the claimed infringing material is hosted by you and you get a notice you probably have to take action to remove the content in the URL.
As a really old person, I was thinking today the vibe was unlike anything I’ve felt since Fidonet ;)
Mastodon is good if you’re after following specific people, rather than just general topics.
I’ve bounced off Twitter and then Mastodon several times because my use for social media is more for link aggregation and discussion, and I don’t really necessarily care about who I’m having a discussion with, but rather that there’s a good discussion about an interesting topic going on.
I know hashtags are a thing and you can follow them, but I’ve kinda found them hard to deal with on Mastodon because everyone puts a giant pile of hashtags on everything so you end up following certain tags and like, maybe 1/3rd of the things that show up in the feed are actually really related to everything that was tagged.
I do run an instance and find it’s useful for certain things, but I very much prefer the Lemmy approach to content.
Good news! Twitch is currently shitting all over itself with T&C changes around mandating exclusive streaming on their platform from their partners.
The hilarity is that some of the streamers are moving over to Kick, which is a platform that may or may not have been built from the stolen Twitch source code, which is just the most amazing drama possible.
I’d like to add a comment here just to add some visibility:
If you have an uncapped/unlimited internet connection, you should seriously consider running the Archive Team Warrior
They’re heavily involved in scraping and archiving data from all over the internet (and, recently, most/all of Reddit) so that it’s preserved, regardless of what happens to the underlying platform.
I run it on my home server in docker, but they have a lot of options for doing so and it basically requires just running it, and then forgetting it exists.
I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.
I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they’ve done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is… Apple.