Readit News logoReadit News
crossroadsguy commented on From M1 MacBook to Arch Linux: A month-long experiment that became permanenent   ssp.sh/blog/macbook-to-ar... · Posted by u/articsputnik
cycomanic · a day ago
> But the quality of MacBooks is just another level. I had 3 or 4 so far since 2010, and each of them held at least 5 years. Crazy good.

When I read things like this it really sounds like there is some reality distortion field in the mac world. How is that anywhere special? I'm running a thinkpad X1 as my 2 main laptops (it was my only work machine until 2 years ago) and I never felt the need to replace it. It gave me 8-10h battery life and the only issue I ever had was that 1.5 years ago the battery was reaching end of life and capacity started dropping very fast.

That was just a 70$ repair I could easily do myself.

My youngest daughter just inherited my mother's x220 (?) (she has been running Linux) that I got for my mother in 2011 or 2012. That never received any work and still works fine except that I didn't change the battery so you have to run it of ac power.

My older daughter and my mother both just got some used thinkpads that are >3years old and don't have any issues either.

So from my experience a 5 year lifetime for a macbook is really nothing special and definitely not "crazy good".

crossroadsguy · a day ago
MacBooks are great laptops until the day they break and you are out of warranty; or you are in warranty and Apple in its infinite wisdom and power decides they are not going to honour that repair. So MacBooks are laptops which you use with the constant hope that it doesn't break.

So are MacBooks just another level? Of course not! If you have to use something with the constant fear of it breaking down (and then the only options remaining buying a new one or repairing at the cost often as much or sometimes more than the cost of laptop itself) then that's anything but great. But what infuriates me is people asking "but how many times has that happened?", well, enough times in about half a lifetime! And their extra warranty (which are for + or +2 years, not sure) now cost a lot more than it cost the last time (w.r.t device price) I bought their extended warranty in 2012.

The problem is other than repair bankruptcy, other laptops, esp. at the lower segment of macs (Air et al), there really are not many good laptops in those prices. X1s are costly laptops. But if they offer comparable features then I'd say for repairability alone they will be great replacements.

> and don't have any issues either.

It's very different from something being great. While I absolutely hate Apple making their devices impossible to repair and fact more so making it an unwise decision to even try to repair for the cost, their laptops are actually quite good. But it stops there. Their phones are like ages behind competition and they have a business because of a captive/hostage user base :)

crossroadsguy commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org   giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
AnonC · 2 days ago
> The last two providers offered true end-to-end encryption

ProtonMail and Tutanota offer end-to-end encryption only when both the sender and recipient are using the same (i.e., ProtonMail->ProtonMail or Tutanota->Tutanota). If you’re emailing someone outside those or if you’re receiving emails from someone outside those, and you want encryption, you’d have to go to PGP (with its own complexities).

crossroadsguy · a day ago
That's why I find their mandatory requirement of exposing their hosted emails only to their clients is such a bizarre take (if not pure bs).

I mean for god's sake just let me use IMAP/POP3.

You give me encryption at rest, safety and privacy in transit, and do not sell my data. You also offer to let me put up my GPG key on your admin portal so that I can easily read e2ee mails in your webmail.

Thank you, all that is very nice. Now get out of my way and do not try/pretend to be Signal and email at the same time.

crossroadsguy commented on Leaving Gmail for Mailbox.org   giuliomagnifico.blog/post... · Posted by u/giuliomagnifico
TranquilMarmot · 2 days ago
I spent the past month "de-Googling" my life after I saw a notice in my Gmail inbox that it was 20 years old. I took a step back and realized just how invested into the Google ecosystem I was. Gmail, Calendar, Docs, Drive, Maps, Keep, Photos, YouTube, FitBit, Android. Basically my entire digital life. My goal was more diversifying than security/privacy, but security/privacy is a really nice bonus.

I ended up going with Proton because they had a good solution for mail, calendar, and drive which I was looking to replace. I set up my custom domain to point to it and have my Gmail forwarding to it - any time I get an email to the old Gmail address I go change it on the website or delete the account altogether.

For Google Docs / Keep, I switched over to Obsidian and pay for the sync there. It's a great replacement for my main use case of Docs / Keep which is just a dumping ground for ideas.

For Google Photos, I now self-host Immich in Hetzner on a VPS with a 1TB storage box mounted via SSHFS. I use Tailscale to connect to it. It took a few days to use Google Takeout + immich-go to upload all the photos (~300GB of data) but it's working really well now. Only costs $10/mo for the VPS and 1TB of storage.

Android I think I'll be stuck on - I have a Pixel 8 Pro that technically supports Graphene but there are too many trade-offs there. Next time I need a new phone I'll take a serious look at Fairphone but I think the Pixel 8 Pro should last a few more years.

My FitBit Versa is really old and starting to die - I ordered one of the new Pebble watches and am patiently waiting for it to ship!

YouTube I'm stuck on because that's where the content is. I have yet to find a suitable replacement for Google Maps - OpenStreetMap is still really hard to use and gives bad directions.

crossroadsguy · 2 days ago
Switch to an iPhone.

Apple's software and services (sync, drive, photo backup etc) are so inferior, especially compared with Google's (technically speaking), you'd be anyway forced to use third party (often cross platform) solutions. No risk of going deep into Apple's ecosystem ;-)

crossroadsguy commented on Show HN: I built an app to block Shorts and Reels   scrollguard.app/... · Posted by u/adrianhacar
habosa · 5 days ago
So I only use Instagram for the DMs with friends. I don’t follow anyone at all, so my feed should be empty. For years it was.

Then at some point Instagram decided I must not know what I want, they should show me recommended posts from random accounts.

There’s a setting to turn this off … but instead of being a normal toggle I can only “snooze” the posts for 30 days. 30 days of peace and then the spam comes back.

No matter how many times I make it clear what I want, they don’t care. Just gross.

crossroadsguy · 5 days ago
It’s like X reverting to “For you” from “Following” no matter how intently you ask them to show less often. It’s like X telling you - “don’t ever install our app, it’ll be worse”.

By the way, Meta then must add a paid plan “Messaging Only” mode for Instagram :)

crossroadsguy commented on Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room   nytimes.com/2025/08/18/ar... · Posted by u/asnyder
crossroadsguy · 5 days ago
Even today I sometimes yearn for those good old days of CS 1.6. CS was never the same again after that. Until 2022 I played it. Then on Apple Silicon macs somehow I never got it work, besides I doubt anyone would be playing 1.6 anymore. I did try in browser couple of times but the links I got were riddled with popups and I am sure malware. Thanks for all the shots, CS.

Among og, de_aztec was my favourite map, but somehow ended up playing de_inferno and villa piranesi the most.

But the real fun was the go bonkers world of custom and modded maps.

crossroadsguy commented on Obsidian Bases   help.obsidian.md/bases... · Posted by u/twapi
raviisoccupied · 6 days ago
I’m an Obsidian user. I pay for Obsidian sync, and I love the philosophy behind their product. However, and I feel stupid for saying this, but I just find it confusing to use. It’s difficult for me to wrap my head around plugins, and understanding how it wants me to use it.

For now, I’m just sticking to using it for daily notes, but I feel there’s so much I’m missing.

crossroadsguy · 5 days ago
If all you need is just daily/one-off notes/jottings then Obsidian is not at all something you might want to use. Because, as excellent and a powerful tool it is for right purposes, even w/o its horde of plugins, it will be an overkill for just note taking. My assumption is based on just this comment of yours but you might want to try simpler note taking apps - that just does one thing - note taking, nothing else. Preferably a plain text note taking app for your OS.

When I was looking for nv->then->simplenote replacement Joplin and Obsidian didn't even stay on the radar for more than a few mins.

crossroadsguy commented on PuTTY has a new website   putty.software/... · Posted by u/GalaxySnail
neuralkoi · 8 days ago
I agree, there's some good alternatives available too of about the same length (if you include name + TLD):

    puttyclient.com
    puttyofficial.com
    puttytools.com
    puttydownloads.com
    downloadputty.org

crossroadsguy · 8 days ago
All of these are better than and I assume cheaper than that .software one.

Even puttytelnet.com/org/net is available.

Hell the puttytel.net is available

crossroadsguy commented on PuTTY has a new website   putty.software/... · Posted by u/GalaxySnail
userbinator · 8 days ago
Somehow, these new long TLDs just feel spammy and "fake" and I usually ignore them when they show up in search results. Unfortunately the .com, .net and .org are already taken.
crossroadsguy · 8 days ago
And thus NextDNS blocked it under NRDs blocking criteria :)
crossroadsguy commented on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable   arxiv.org/abs/2507.21919... · Posted by u/Cynddl
energy123 · 11 days ago
The models you're using are on the low compute end of the frontier. That's why you're getting bad results.

At the high-compute end of the frontier, by next year, systems should be better than any human at competition coding and competition math. They're basically already there now.

Play this out for another 5 years. What happens when compute becomes 4-20x more abundant and these systems keep getting better?

That's why I don't share your outlook that our jobs are safe. At least not on a 5-8 year timescale. At least not in their current form of actually writing any code by hand.

crossroadsguy · 11 days ago
And I don’t share your implied optimism that it’s wise to look beyond 5-8 years in any geopolitical/social/economical climate, let alone in today’s.
crossroadsguy commented on Training language models to be warm and empathetic makes them less reliable   arxiv.org/abs/2507.21919... · Posted by u/Cynddl
logicprog · 11 days ago
Hi from the other thread :P

If you'll forgive me putting my debugging hat on for a bit, because solving problems is what most if us do here, I wonder if it's not actually reading the URL, and maybe that's the source of the problem, bc I've had a lot of success feeding manuals and such to AIs and then asking it to synthesize commands or asking it questions about them. Also, I just tried asking Gemini 2.5 Flash this and it did a web search, found a source, answered my question correctly (ls -a, or -la for more detail), and linked me to the precise part of its source it referenced: https://kinsta.com/blog/show-hidden-files/#:~:text=If%20you'... (this is the precise link it gave me).

crossroadsguy · 11 days ago
Well, in one case (it was borg or restic doc) I noticed it actually picked something correctly from the URL/page and then still messed up in the answer.

What my guess is - maybe it read the URL and mentioned a few things as one part of its "that" answer/output but for the other part it relied it on the learning it already had. Maybe it doesn't learn "on the go". I don't know, could be a safeguard against misinformation or spamming the model or so.

As I said in my comment, I hadn't asked it "ls -a" question but rather something else - different commands on different times which I don't recall now except borg and restic ones which I did recently. "ls -a" is the example I picked to show one of the things I was"cribbing" about.

u/crossroadsguy

KarmaCake day3000June 12, 2019View Original