HP Zbook G1a (Ryzen AI max+ 395) is getting closer and has an M.2 SSD slot. But Macbooks undeniably have better battery life (touchpad, sound and display). I selected this over Macbook because I value linux and openness more. But it's true Apple managed to make some really good devices with apple silicon and the competition has a hard time catching up.

Before apple silicon, I was making fun of apple fanboys as CPU specs were mostly bad and it didn't make sense for the price. Apple silicon changed that. And it doesn't look like it will change very soon, sadly. I would like to see more really viably alternatives.

Monitoring and influencing majority is enough for having power over citizens. Real criminals will use other unmonitored channels, of course.

It would be enough to just show a single character (* or some other to distinguish) if there is something typed in and show no character after using backspace to delete the typed password.

It doesn't make sense to show the exact amount of characters. It just leaks the password length.

Exactly, it will have 0 effect on scammers. It is primarily made to piss off people and make it more difficult to install independent free software.

Recently I fixed my X11 tearing by simply running a compositor (compton). Not having a compositor didn't prevent xserver from working but it was tearing. I remember that historically it was a mess, some x11 gpu driver even had a "TearFree" configuration option.

I wonder how long those flash chips can survive with the OS swapping 24/7.

Very long. It was already a concern when the 8GB M1s came out.

I can also recommend Ente. It is pretty polished. Go-based backend using Postgres DB, Flutter-based android version, React-based web frontend (electron for desktop).

One of the examples of devices which are e-waste from the time they were manufactured. But people won't listen. Soon there will be lots of complains of people that they can't run more than one app on it and that it's garbage. It's like macbook 12". It's funny that some people believe that 8GB of RAM will make software developers rethink their RAM consumption and that they will now optimize their apps because of it.

Depends on what you expect from the model. For coding/agentic tasks there is SWE Bench https://www.swebench.com/ which gives a better picture. MiniMax, GLM and Kimi K2 seem to be better models for this purpose than Qwen. And it matches my (limited) actual experience.