1. Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree. Stuff like this is partially necessity and partially a REALLY good excuse to see what the price ceiling actually is… and then turn that into the floor moving forward. Just look at gas prices
2. The “AI Bubble” is likely to be on the same level as the Dotcom Bubble and the like. It is going to be brutal and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs… and then much of the same tech will still dominate just with more realistic expectations. And that will still need large amounts of memory
3. If the “AI Bubble” really is as bad as people seem to want it to be: A LOT of the vendors who make the parts you are buying RAM to use are going to be gutted. And then RAM production will drop drastically. Which will decrease supply and…

If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.

And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.

But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.

I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.

All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?

So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?

As for whether you should crack it:

1. If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
2. If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)

A LOT of people complained when Thinkpad transferred from IBM to Lenovo. Like almost all things, it was progress conflated with racism.

The big “meaningful” complaint is that Lenovo used more plastics than aluminum. On the one hand, I get it: my T41 was a god damned beast that felt like it could stop a bullet (an important consideration in the US). It also apparently weighted 2.22 kg and I 100% noticed that on trips and even walking around town/campus.

And Lenovo bought the brand around the time that a LOT of people were noticing the weight of their laptops and there was a huge push for “ultrabook” form factors and the realization that it makes more sense to protect your device with a sleeve and a padded compartment rather than “military grade” construction. And… Asian factories were (and still are) much more agile and able to pivot. Whereas US factories still tend to take years (or decades…) to catch up to the rest of the world.

So we got the same xenophobic nonsense we’ve had in every other industry. These thin and light laptops with plastic shells ARE CHEAP PIECES OF SHIT THAT NOBODY CAN EVER REPAIR AND ARE ALL A SCAM SO BUY AMERICAN!!! Even though the shell has almost nothing to do with it and those still had screw based constructions. The real problem was the rapid shift towards soldering/gluing hardware in place. Some of that was to support ultrabook designs and some are just pure bullshit to prevent upgrades.

These days? Aluminum is king again because it “feels premium” but those shells are so ridiculously thin that they are arguably worse than polymer (still feels great though). I blame Apple.

But build quality wise? Lenovo straight up bought IBM’s laptop (and consumer PC?) divisions. It was the exact same factories and designers and capabilities.

All that said: Lenovo is also a REALLY Chinese company. For a personal device? I have zero qualms and literally bought a new laptop for the first time in like 9 years and it is a Thinkpad. From a professional standpoint? A competent IT department can vet devices. I… think I worked with a competent IT department once in my life. But, more importantly, if we are trying to do business with a government org or a high value company/target? They are fundamentally concerned about Supply Chain Hardening (and for good reason) and that just reeks of “We, personally, don’t care about that”. Which generally won’t outright kill a deal but it does put you on a back footing.

Framework Corp is massively frustrating because their secret sauce tech makes absolutely no sense for individuals (seriously, run the actual numbers. It is almost always cheaper to just buy two laptops AND you have less ewaste because there is no box of spare parts) but is PERFECT for enterprise/fleet deployments.

But Framework Corp has no interest in fulfilling that role. To my knowledge, there are no bulk ordering programs and their software/OEM support is fairly mediocre.

As far as enterprise laptops go? There is a full industry around macs for obvious reasons. On the PC side? The only vendors I really “trust” are Dell and Lenovo with MAYBE HP if the middleman org is confident. And… I LOVE a Thinkpad for my personal use (the nub is love. the nub is life) but there are very serious supply chain concerns for professional purposes.

But if Framework could cut the bullshit and either branch out or work with a middleman? Rapid repairs for keyboards and drives as well as tricking people into using USB C dongles would go a long way for many (most?) midsize companies.

Exactly.

If you are describing hitler’s role in WW2? Yes, he was The German Fuhrer.

I would say that, honestly, I prefer the second version as it is more accurate to what he was. But any time you change something you have to ask “what does it mean that we are changing things?”

And since musk is, at best, someone who wishes he was as cool as the losers on LUE back in the day? This is very much not being done with a journalistic style guide in mind.

The ISS (and most engines) also kind of need to be field/garage maintainable. Having to transport a maneuvering thruster back to JPL every few years is obviously a no go.

But also? O-rings (and many kinds of press fits and gaskets) ARE more “single use” than not. That… almost never happens.

Its similar to those wax rings for toilets. Anyone who has ever had to remove/replace a toilet will tell you: Get the actual wax rings because ANY kind of leakage is just hell. But… anyone who has ever actually had to install/replace a toilet will tell you to spend like 5x as much (so… 20 bucks instead of 4) for one of those rubber+wax rings. Technically that is ALSO single use/attempt only but… you actually get a few tries before you need to replace it and find a new helper. You’re going to regret it in 5-10 years when you realize the seal wasn’t great and that smell that wouldn’t go away is a slow leak of piss and shit gas but… it took you five minutes instead of fifty as you kept having to lift the toilet back up to replace the ring.

I feels like all these is really non-issue for dailly user, you’re not gonna open the stuff up every week, most likely you’re gonna need to do it once in a year or two to change some part. If you have any skill repairing stuff, cleaning it up is just a matter of having a toothbrush and some toothpick to clean up the gunk before doing the work, and you will already own a set of driver.

My issue is that it just doesn’t make any sense from an engineering perspective.

Yes, the vast majority of owners will never open their watches up. Hell, they will buy a new smartwatch LONG before they would need to. Like most “right to repair” style topics, we are really talking a very small subset of power users and repair shops.

But what does this get you over the industry/artisan standard? You need one less tool… except now you need a toothpick/brush to properly clean those screw heads. Arguably you always needed one since you SHOULD be deep cleaning your watch before any maintenance, but you technically don’t need one to remove a backplate. And while you probably COULD unscrew without cleaning, you are drastically increasing the likelihood of deforming the screw head and/or outright stripping it.

At best it is a sidegrade. But just look at some of the more… reddit-y responses to this. It is marketing influenced design. People think “screws? I can fix that!” and want to Believe in it.

And, generally speaking, I REALLY dislike stuff like this because it inevitably leads to “enshittification” where things get worse for everyone.

I love my Casio for exercising and hiking and the like.

Casios are, by and large, disposable items. They are not meant to be serviced. They are meant to be replaced. And there are countless stories of Casio putting a LOT of threadlock on those screws for that reason. For some you can get aroudn that to swap a battery or replace a lug but the “preferred” method is to send it to Casio and, if it is under warranty, they basically just send you a new one instead.

And the higher end Casios have twisting backplates that ARE meant to be repaired/maintained have the same twisting backplates as the rest.

Go look at how watches are actually disassembled.

You basically need something to twist it off (magnet, friction, a dedicated tool, or honestly just two properly sized prybars) and then you are set.

This is just yet another case of a tech company “disrupting” because they can’t be bothered to look at what the actual state of the art is and realize there is no point.

Those gonna get jam packed FULL of dead skin and gunk within days.

Watches, generally speaking, have a twist off back plate for that exact reason. And smart watches tend to add glue because it is more reliable than rubber gaskets for water resistance (and because it means you need to contact Apple for replacement parts…).

Its similar to the issue with screws in general. EVERYONE hates flat head screws. People who don’t know that they come in different sizes hates phillips. Everyone LOVES torx…

Until you have something that is exposed to dirt and debris on the regular. And suddenly you are digging the gunk out of those fancy heads by hand while they are still installed. Versus a quick scraping and using the god awful flathead.

I’ll also add on that there are a LOT of blog posts and youtube shorts about “Game X is 20% faster on Linux than Windows!!!” that everyone loves to regurgitate. And the reality is that it was a single outlier or it all boils down to Steam distributing “good enough” shaders to Linux but not Windows (and let’s not get into the weeds of why).

Whereas GN, especially since “All New Data” a few years back, have very heavily focused on reproducible and “good” data. That is why Steve basically apologized for not having error bars or having what looks like messy data for a few of those runs. And they’ve done entire videos on their testing methodology that often includes MANY runs to normalize out the noise.

So without being able to explain exactly why? I doubt they will EVER put Windows and Linux data on even the same page of their website. But… someone who cares will be able to see trends.

And you can similarly do most/all of your dev work in a container that you spin up with a podman alias (fuck hashicorp with a rusty metal pole but damn if Vagrant wasn’t awesome). Hell, there are a lot of arguments that you should.

It inherently becomes a question of what your primary use case for a machine is and how often you spend fighting it to accomplish that. And, personally, I run Linux so I DON’T have to fight my OS. Which… is really weird when you think about it but holy crap Windows and Mac are annoying.

Immutable OSes are amazing for corporate environments and HTPC/Gaming computers are another solid use case. But if your primary focus is whether you can be a developer (as indicated by the doomemacs ask)… you are gonna be cranky.

I’m of a few minds on this.

First and foremost: I am a huge Gamers Nexus fan and think Steve et al are a great complement to Wendell when it comes to the decade of Year Of The Linux Desktop. And I love that they actually addressed the elephant in the room where… quite often you actively don’t want to use the linux binaries for a game.

But I do think that having Linux as the second class benchmarks are inherently going to cause problems. Assuming they stick to doing a batch every couple months, that… okay, ain’t nobody actually buying hardware unless they have to. But still. And this was apparently collected during one of the months where nVidia was a complete shitshow. But Dragon’s Dogma 2 completely breaking is the kind of thing where… look, I became WAY too aware of exactly how denuvo registers a machine while I was debugging that. I was able to get DD2 to run beautifully on my PC but… as a HUGE DD1 fan even I think I wasted my life doing that (would do it again though).

But I keep thinking of how many Influencers have done a variant of “tech isn’t fun anymore”. And… it kind of isn’t. But from the editorializing from Steve et al over the past year or so, it is clear they are excited that things are actually changing sometimes week to week and so many of these problems are ACTUALLY solvable by users. Sometimes it is trivial (check protondb for what settings) and sometimes you find yourself going down a rabbit hole of just how bad the Nioh 2 PC port actually was.

I suspect this ends with the vast majority of outlets embracing “XBOX For PC” in a year or two… and Steve looking even more like the crazy old man of PC reviews. But I do think this will go a long way towards helping the fence sitters get away from MS.

Believe it or not but some content isn’t conducive to being tweeted.

The high level summary you want is “Gamers Nexus is doing linux gpu benchmarking using bazzite”. If you want actual details, watch the video (or at least skim to the graphs).

I use Bazzite for my HTPC (AMD NUC).

For a “set it and forget it” gaming console experience? It is awesome. It feels like I already have a GabeCube under my TV (that I bought for probably half the price…). And when I have to do more complicated things than “run the update once a month”, I just ssh in from either my desktop or laptop.

But… it is an immutable/atomic distro. So if the packages you want to add are flatpaks or appimages? You are probably fine. Otherwise? You get into a mess where you are adding packages to your layers (?) and kinda feel like you are playing with fire. I did that to get iperf3 installed to test some networking upgrades and it was mostly painless but it was also a really bad experience versus sudo dnf install iperf3. And… even on machines where I spend 90% of my time ssh’ing into servers, I still tend to want to install a good amount of local packages as a developer.

So my suggestion would be to stick to Bazzite for gaming first platforms and continue to use whatever distro you like (Fedora for the win!) for “real” computers.

Also, if you aren’t as annoyed by atomic distros as I am, I would still be wary of Bazzite. They have a lot of different SKUs and I don’t care enough to try to parse what each one does. But the common use case is to basically treat a machine like a Steam Deck… which means you boot into Big Picture with essentially no login screens or a REALLY insecure pin code. And then you switch to desktop mode with a single click.

There are ways to harden that (and very much an argument of whether you need to harden a machine in your home). And Linux, generally, has very good protections by actually requiring auth for sudo. But I already feel sketchy that I am logged into Steam/GoG on a box with almost no protections. But I also live in an environment where I don’t have to worry about someone buying 10k in fortnite bucks on my TV.

A lot of people don’t understand how AI training and AI inference work, they are two completely separate processes.

Yes, they are. Not sure why you are bringing that up.

For those wondering what the actual difference is (possibly because they don’t seem to know):

At a high level, training is when you ingest data to create a model based on characteristics of that data. Inference is when you then apply a model to (preferably new) data. So think of training as “teaching” a model what a cat is, and inference as having that model scan through images for cats.

And a huge part of making a good model is providing good data. That is, generally speaking, done by labeling things ahead of time. Back in the day it was paying people to take an amazon survey where they said “hot dog or no hot dog”. These days… it is “anti-bot” technology that gets that for free (think about WHY every single website cares what is a fire hydrant or a bicycle…)

But that is ALSO just simple metrics like “Did the user use what we suggested”. Instead of saying “not hot dog” it is “good reply” or “no reply” or “still read email” or “ignored email” and so forth.

And once you know what your pain points are with TOTALLY anonymized user data, you can then “reproduce” said user data to add to your training set. Which is the kind of bullshit facebook, allegedly, has done for years where they’ll GLADLY delete your data if you request it… but not that picture of you at the McDonald’s down the street because that belongs to Ronjon Buck who worked there one summer. But they’ll gladly anonymize your user data so the picture of you actually just corresponds to “User 25156161616” that happens to be the sibling of your sister and so forth…

in fact a lot of research is being done right now trying to make it possible to do both because it would be really handy to be able to do them together and it can’t really be done like that yet.

That is literally just a feedback loop and is core to pretty much any “agentic” network/graph.

Go ahead and do so, they will have separate sections specifically about the use of data for training. Data privacy is regulated by a lot of laws, even in the United States, and corporate users are extremely picky about that sort of stuff.

There also tend to be laws about opting in and forced EULA agreements. It is almost like the megacorps have acknowledged that they’ll just do whatever and MAYBE pay a fee after they have made so much more money already.

Understand that basically ANYTHING that “uses AI” is using you for training data.

At its simplest, it is the old fashioned A/B testing where you are used as part of a reinforcement/labeling pipeline. Sometimes it gets considerably more bullshit as your very queries and what would make you make them are used to “give you a better experience” and so forth.

And if you read any of the EULAs (for the stuff that google opted users into…) you’ll see verbiage along those lines.

Of course, the reality is that google is going to train off our data regardless. But that is why it is a good idea to decouple your life from google as much as possible. It takes a long ass time but… no better time than today.

As it stands? Cloudflare is still incredibly effective at protecting customers from those DDOS attacks. Which, depending on your hosting solution, can mean very noticeable monetary savings because YOUR hardware/connection didn’t spike. And, regardless, can mean noticeable monetary savings as your engineers didn’t need to recover a crashed system because your setup was just sitting there idle.

That said: If you truly need high availability? You need to do what downdetector did and have alternatives ready in the event that Cloudflare falls over. Same as with your ISP… which should be ISPs plural.

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1. Poe’s law?
2. Endlessly sucking off cheney and mao in hell?