StarDreamer

Here you dropped this:

#define ifnt(x) if (!(x))

Nothing but effort. Nobody wants to constantly baby a project just because someone else may change their code at a moment’s notice. Why would you want to comb through someone else’s html + obfuscated JavaScript to figure out how to grab some dynamically shown data when there was a well documented publicly available API?

Also NewPipe breaks all the time. APIs are generally stable, and can last years if not decades without changing at all. Meanwhile NewPipe parsing breaks every few weeks to months, requiring programmer intervention. Just check the project issue tracker and you’ll see it’s constantly being fixed to match YouTube changes.

An API is an official interface to connect to a service, usually designed to make it easier for one application to interact with another. This is usually kept stable and provides only the information needed to serve the request of the application requesting it.

A scraper is an application that scrapes data from a human readable source (i.e. website) to obtain data from another application. Since website designs can update frequently, these scrapers can break at any time and need to be updated alongside the original application.

Reddit clients interact with an API to serve requests, but Newpipe scrapes the YouTube webpage itself. So if YouTube changes their UI tomorrow Newpipe could very easily break. No one wants to design their app around a fragile base while building a bunch of stuff on top of it. It’s just way too much work for very little effort.

It’s like I can enter my house through the door or the chimney. I would always take the door since it’s designed for human entry. I could technically use the chimney if there’s no door. But if someone lights up the fireplace I’d be toast.

Some people play games to turn their brains off. Other people play them to solve a different type of problem than they do at work. I personally love optimizing, automating, and min-maxing numbers while doing the least amount of work possible. It’s relatively low-complexity (compared to the bs I put up with daily), low-stakes, and much easier to show someone else.

Also shout-out to CDDA and FFT for having some of the worst learning curves out there along with DF. Paradox games get an honorable mention for their wiki.

It’s a Chinese character. Pronounced jiǒng.

It was really only used as an emoticon in Asia during the 2010s though

囧

I don’t think either of us is the target audience here. I can see a “cheaper” (questionable) Pro laptop being useful for students going into college with a limited budget. An undergrad CS/graphic design degree shouldn’t tax an 8gb machine too much, assuming students shut down everything else when doing their once-a-semester major rendering/compiling/model training. If people just want Macbook pro software with more ports, a “cheaper” machine is better than none. Personally, I would still get a used/refurbished machine though.

That being said, my current laptop workload tends to be emacs, qpdfview, Firefox, and tmux on EL9. For the remaining stuff, I usually just spin up a VM then ssh/xrdp into it. As for slack, teams, jabber, etc, I’m happy to report I’ve been out of industry/IT for 1+ years and don’t plan on going back anytime soon. For all I care, Apple can call their models unicorn edition. As long as it sells it’s not stupid.

My T480 is my favorite laptop. But this is NOT one of its use cases.

Do not get a Thinkpad if you’re using it for graphic design. The screen color calibration is terrible (even when compared to low end devices)

Last I checked I think some of the Dell laptops have a decent screen (XPS, latitude lines). But they tend to be more on the pricer side.

8gb RAM and 256 gb storage is perfectly fine for a pro-ish machine in 2023. What’s not fine is the price point they are offering it (but if idiots still buy that, that’s on them and not apple). I’ve been using a 8gb ram 256 gb storage Thinkpad for lecturing, small code demos, and light video editing (e.g. zoom recordings) this past year, it works perfectly fine. But as soon as I have to run my own research code, back to the 2022 Xeon I go.

Is it Apple’s fault people treat browser tabs as a bookmarking mechanism? No. Is it unethical for Apple to say that their 8GB model fits this weirdly common use case? Definitely.

No, the 2037 problem is fixing the Y2k38 problem in 2037.

Before that there’s no problem :)

I’m not advocating that teenagers should save no money. I’m just saying you don’t have to save “all” of it.

Good financial planning isn’t just not spending every cent when you can, it’s also figuring out how to get the most out of your money. There is plenty of expensive stuff that I’ve spent thousands of hours with, which makes them totally worth the investment. There’s no way a teenager would be able to figure that out without some trial and error.

I’d say it’s better to get that out of the way now than later. If you make a bad purchase decision as a teenager, at most you’re short 200 dollars. Maybe that startup idea isn’t exactly what you imagined it to be, but at least you figured that out now than after sinking 20k into MLMs.

As a counterargument: spend your money. 200 dollars means a lot more to a teenager than a college student (with an on-campus part time job), then when you find yourself at your first full time job you may sometimes be spending 200 dollars like pocket change.

As a result, you will most likely cherish what you buy now for 200 USD way more than what you can buy down the line. That console you need to save up 6 months for right now? It becomes a lot less sentimental when you can afford it every other month. So spend your money on something that you’d like right now. 200 dollars won’t change your life in college much, but it can change your life significantly right now.

Yep it’s Intel.

They said it up until their competitor started offering more than 4 cores as a standard.

A more recent example:

“Nobody needs more than 4 cores for personal use!”

Piggybacking on top of this to plug another university research project. TrackerControl scans all installed apps afterwards for tracking libraries (i.e. google ads) and DNS traffic to ad servers. You can also use it as an ad blocker to block specific DNS entries.

*Darth Sion enters the chat*

I might switch to it once bitwarden support comes out.

Worst case I lose my Google account. Which I only use for Android (no sync, no mail, no purchases)

Best case, Google no longer defaults to mobile 2fa and finally accepts i want to use totp every time.

Also, how would the biometrics requirement work if all im doing is storing the whole thing in a Bitwarden vault?

My suggestion is to get a device that can do the stuff kids want, but just barely do the things they want.

I probably spent more time tinkering around the family computer than anything else as a kid just to get games way over-spec to run on it. Throughout that process I learned programming, hex editing, and some Linux system administration, which eventually led me to my current career.

These days, it’s probably a lot easier to get started with a raspberry pi. But without something to motivate people to learn tech, why would they do it in the first place?

As much as I love tactical RPGs with massive maps, there’s something magical about the diorama-style maps of FFT