goosedragons (u/goosedragons)

goosedragons commented on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series? · Posted by u/stephenheron

bigyabai · 2 days ago

All Ryzen mobile chips (so far) use a homogeneous core layout. If heat/power consumption is your concern, AMD simply hasn't caught up to the Big.little architecture Intel and Apple use.

In terms of performance though, those N4P Ryzen chips have knocked it out of the park for my use-cases. It's a great architecture for desktop/datacenter applications, still.

goosedragons · 2 days ago

Sort of. Technically the Ryzen 5 AI 340 has 3 Zen 5 cores and 3 Zen 5c cores. They are more similar than the power/efficiency cores of Apple/Intel but 5c cores are more power efficient.

goosedragons commented on The MiniPC Revolution jadarma.github.io/blog/po... · Posted by u/ingve

aborsy · 2 days ago

Does anyone have recommendation for a mini PC with min 2 sata ports for two 3.5” HDDs, min 2 NVMe for ssd storage, one ssd or eMMC for OS, and 64GB of RAM, with the ability to power up the HDDs from the miniPC (not requiring external power source)?

The HDDs are installed in a case externally. An external PCIe slot to support those 4 mixed drives via an adapter would work too. I tend to avoid usb HDDs enclosures, since usb connection doesn’t work well with ZFS.

That would be a cool ZFS NAS.

goosedragons · 2 days ago

That's a NAS. Just get a 2 bay NAS.

goosedragons commented on The MiniPC Revolution jadarma.github.io/blog/po... · Posted by u/ingve

kccqzy · 2 days ago

> You can get MiniPCs with 4-6 internal M.2 slots that are great for building a NAS with.

Where can I find that? My current Intel NUC has two M.2 slots and a SATA connection. If I were to relax the definition of a MiniPC to include mini ITX then yes I can find these, but given how the author talks about being all-in-one, I doubt the author is talking about mini ITX builds.

goosedragons · 2 days ago

They're pretty rare, but there's some.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2025/mini-nases-marry-nvme...

You can also get larger ones like the Asus Flashstor that can do 12.

goosedragons 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

coliveira · 4 days ago

There's another issue: Windows keeps turning off the screen after a few minutes of idle time, no matter what I try. They have options to control this, but the hardware seems to override these options for some reason.

goosedragons · 4 days ago

Download Power Toys and use Awake. Will keep the screen on if you want.

goosedragons 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

kelipso · 4 days ago

Even the Air has a great builtin webcam, so I don’t have to carry around a webcam like I used to do with my old laptop (which is more than 8 years old and I still use because it has replaceable batteries and ssd lol).

goosedragons · 4 days ago

Somewhat unfair since it's technically a tablet, but the Surface Pro webcam is very very good.

goosedragons 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

pjerem · 5 days ago

I’d say it’s barely 3 things :

- The trackpad (but other manufacturers now have tolerable alternatives and anyway you can work without it)

- The screen : at an equivalent price point (and even more), nothing comes close to Apple screens. The cheapest MacBook have a better screen than most high end PCs.

- The audio : Apple truly did some sorcery to get such an awesome sound from machines that are flat as sheet. It’s so good that you can watch a movie on your MacBook without earbuds and don’t be bothered.

Everything else like build quality is overall better than most other alternatives but a few other manufacturers are also good at it.

I say this as someone who uses a MacBook for work despite loving Linux and who hates what macOS have become. The hardware is really that good.

goosedragons · 4 days ago

The MBA screen is /alright/. It's better than a lot of Windows machines but you can get better for the price for sure. I'd argue the screens in the Surface line are comparable and arguably better, 3:2, brighter, 120Hz at basically the same price. And there's loads of 4K OLED Windows laptops if you're willing to pay for them.

Apple screens also tend to have pretty bad response times too. They are sharp and color accurate but fall down in places.

goosedragons commented on Tiny, removable "mini SSD" could eventually be a big deal for gaming handhelds arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/quantummagic

marcianx · 7 days ago

I've found this to be a common Americanism, but it's still incorrect, I believe. When I moved to the US in my teens, I was surprised at the sheer disregard of English grammar rules in common vernacular here, to the point that some folks (though not my English teachers) think their incorrect use is correct. :) The most marked case I saw was in a Dodo video where the person correctly said "lying", but The Dodo's captions "corrected" it to "laying".

But I digress.

goosedragons · 7 days ago

The fun thing about grammar is if enough people do it and think it's correct, it's correct. Languages change.

goosedragons commented on I used to know how to write in Japanese aethermug.com/posts/i-use... · Posted by u/mrcgnc

lyall · 13 days ago

When learning Japanese, I purposely chose to _not_ learn how to write any of it by hand. As the author notes, writing (by hand) is in fact a separate skill from reading. So I decided I would not invest my limited time, motivation, or brain space to writing.

Overall it's been a successful approach, and I recommend it to new learners unless they have a particular interest in being able to write by hand or they feel strongly that writing the characters helps them remember them.

It's only rarely that I have to write anything other than my own name in Japanese. I've practiced my address but writing it in English is fine in 99% of situations. Being able to write properly would save a little embarrassment, but I still believe my language learning time would have a much higher ROI in other areas.

goosedragons · 12 days ago

It is a separate skill from reading, but I think it's still useful.

At the very least learn the strokes of common radicals. In my experience things like denshi jishos can be VERY picky about how you input them. It makes word lookup much faster IMO anyways.

goosedragons commented on Streaming services are driving viewers back to piracy theguardian.com/film/2025... · Posted by u/nemoniac

godelski · 13 days ago

Piracy also offers:

0. Ability to watch offline!

1. Ability to fix subtitle issues with minimal tweeks like change size or moving location.

1.2 Ability to get subtitles if they aren't offered (or offered in your language)

2. Ability to normalize audio.

3. Ability to buffer videos when on a poor connection.

4. Ability to create collections, organize, and track your movie as you wish

5. Arbitrary number of user accounts

6. Multicast streams to watch the same show across different devices regardless of if someone has an account or not (see JellyFin's SyncPlay)

7. No big organization tracking you and selling your data to the highest bidder

There's more, but honestly pirating is just a better experience. I can't tell you how many times Netflix has fucked up the subtitles so they are covering half my screen. There's tons of little issues like that that are just random and the only option is to just not watch Netflix (or pick your streaming service) that day.

Besides that, for the price of a yearly subscription you can build a NAS that can do all this for you and you get to keep the movies. Instead of having a monthly fee you can progressively add more drives and this can also be used for all your other things. Pictures, home videos, games (you can make a Steam cache), your local AI models, or whatever else you want. With $1k you can build a pretty good system, though that's 3 years of 4k Netflix, so not the cheap route in the short term.

goosedragons · 12 days ago

I think my favorite thing of not even piracy, just ripping my DVDs, is the ability to watch a random episode of a show. There's some shows like The Simpsons that I don't want to watch in production order any more, nor do I want to manually select. Now I just tap some buttons in Kodi and it randomly picks a recently unwatched episode.

goosedragons commented on Blurry rendering of games on Mac colincornaby.me/2025/08/y... · Posted by u/bangonkeyboard

latexr · 13 days ago

That is not only completely irrelevant to the point, it’s also wrong and inconsiderate of the preferences of others. I agree with the other commenter that the Mac App Store has advantages in terms of experience, especially if you’re not constantly gaming.

* Steam is constantly updating, every time you open it, and until recently videos would almost always fail to play on my Mac.

* The Epic Games launcher is so atrocious that calling it “feature-rich” feels like a bad joke. I find it so bad that I don’t even open it to get the free games, opting instead for the website, and even then I am super selective about any game I get (fewer than 10%) because I always think I’ll have to deal with that app. In its current state, there is zero chance I’ll ever by a game on there, all because of the app. My “favourite feature” is how if you queue a bunch of games to install and then set a few others to uninstall, those are added to the same queue and you have to wait for the installs to finish before the uninstalls get a chance. So if you are low on disk space, now you have to, one by one, cancel each of the installs and tell them to start again, so they are added to the bottom of the queue.

* GOG Galaxy was the biggest disappointment. I was expecting to like it but it only lasted an hour on my machine before I trashed it. It felt old and incomplete.

goosedragons · 12 days ago

It's not irrelevant. How much is Apple really making off Mac game sales from the MAS?

Compared to the MAS, Epic is a good launcher for games. Take a look at CP2077. On the MAS you can't just download the language you need, you have to get all of them. This increases the download by 60GB. No other platform has this issue. So it ends up being 160GB which is nuts and more than half the storage on a base model M4 Mac. It's insanely barebones and half assed for gaming.