Couple this with the fact that many Silicon Valley/tech nerds are in a bit of a bubble, as has existed for a long time... And we are losing more and more news outlets who can critique these giant, strange companies. I am aware other fields of research do cross-disciplinary conversations from time to time, for example have biotech researchers share dialogue with human rights philosophers, religious scholars, etc to think carefully about the purpose and ethics behind work being done and its potential impact. Is that happening within tech?
Tech just hires those people for PR reasons, and those people fall victim to that old saw about the difficulty of getting someone to understand something that runs contrary to the source of their paycheck.
I agree. The death of Edge's Trident and Opera's Presto has been really scary for the web. I know it's really far off but I truly hope Ladybird, Servo, and Flow succeed in building mature and competitive web engines
Truth! I bought my Apple Watch so I could skateboard with my AirPods in and not lose connection. But the connection is a pain to make happen, not intuitive, and sometimes just doesn’t work. I like the watch for trying to keep me reminded to stay fit and active, but I have been considering just not ever buying another one and going without. I turned off all notifications on it because it’s useless.
When I met my future wife, the first thing she did was to check if my personal homepage was fully validated. It was. And we are celebrating 20 raucous years this year!
Yes, I think people who move away from Substack already need to have a brand and a number of followers to drive people to their personal websites, even if they use Ghost. And I do get the concerns that Substack has some super bizarre and awful content in the mix. Their feed shows me stuff every once in a while, from uber-conservative right wing Christians to conspiracy theory nonsense. But my dumb soccer blog/podcast putters along and grows slowly, in some cases, not even from social media posts. It's an interesting platform.
I've never quite found that Linux is more optimized on battery-powered machines for energy savings, even though supposedly there is a lot of room to tweak and optimize settings -- from selecting a low resource window manager/DE to turning off various services to switching up power management utilities. But this does seem like an approach that might produce that kind of fruit?
The really unfortunate thing about linux is the defaults tend to be not battery friendly.
For example, I recently got another 1 hour out of my old laptop's battery because I didn't realize for the intel video card driver I needed to add some modprobe flags to get it to load up a firmware binary blob. Doing that enabled hardware video decoding, faster performance, and lower power usage.
There's a bunch of setting like this that you need to make sure are turned on to get the best battery performance. Some OSes are better about toggling them than others and mine (gentoo) let's you discover later that you forgot to turn them on :).
This is where looking at the gaming centric distros and doing what they do makes sense. I haven't seen all kernel settings for all distros, but my understanding is many choose the defaults and most of the defaults are more optimized for server usage. Which makes sense. Debian's biggest deployment environment is a fleet of servers. For the standard Debian Install, of course. However, my laptop is not a server, so the defaults don't make sense. This is where we maybe need distros that their whole niche is to be laptop friendly. Or, get the bigger distros, to offer a flavor with a different set of defaults for laptop environments.
Yeah, I have this problem. IIRC the last time I looked into it, it requires a specific version of the nVidia driver which isn't the latest version (very unfortunately). I just bit the bullet and went with the 5W of constant consumption rather than figure out how to get that old driver working with my setup.
That's really sad to hear. I think it's just so much to configure for any human to take on. I'm going to run my system config through an LLM and have it optimize it for me see if that works.
You might want to take a look at TLP[0]. It, among other things, backs the power mode/profile panels in Gnome/KDE.
Many distros already try to push good defaults, but you can do a whole lot when optimizing for a mobile experience. You can also do some fun stuff with it, like running a script[1] when going from ac->bat power to, e.g., turn of a service, lower refresh rate or reduce brightness.
Yeah, I wish more people contributed to Netsurf and it gets the momentum it needs to compete with Blink, Gecko and Webkit. So many divided efforts in this area - there's Ladybird, Flow, Servo, Goanna. Even just improving Webkit and making it truly multi-platform (it isn't available for Windows, and the Linux version is apparently not as performant) would greatly even the field.
Netsurf seems pretty closed in terms of who they allow to contribute. However, I need to look more into it and not use the excuse that it's "too complicated" to see if they are interested in my bug fixes.
So grateful for all of the dedicated coders and hackers in this space to keep our old Macs relevant and useable.
PowerFox has tweaks especially for Leopard and Snow Leopard and Mac-quality of life features. You can also try Basilisk, which is the upstream version without those tweaks.
Momiji is another variant targeting Mac OS Mavericks and other targets with ESR Firefox fixes. Works pretty well!
Finally, there is work being done to revive Safari for Mavericks and work to bring Netsurf to MacOS 9.
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