Why is there a (presumably AI-generated) Earth on fire for the “end of the universe”, when the Earth would be way gone far sooner than that (that is, in a few billion years when the Sun blows up to a red giant)? It’s pretty misleading in my opinion, as it makes it seem like a doomsday apocalypse kind of scenario.

The catching on fire doesn’t make sense either, as the end of the universe will likely be very very cold (a heat death, some might say).

I’d go a step further, and say it’s a bad idea to recommend any Ubuntu-based distros. Yes, that means Mint.

Note that Mint released a Debian-based spin (LMDE)! Pretty interesting I think

My question would be for what time zone? That seems like an important detail

The Philippines were named after a Spanish king, King Phillip, or Felippe in Spanish. Given that the country was first controlled by the Spanish for ages, then the Americans, I’m guessing that at first the Spanish name for both the people and the territory was used, but when the Americans took over, the English-ified name of the territory was used, while the Spanish name for the people stuck as colonial powers use the name for the territory more often? Perhaps the Filipino diaspora also plays a role in this. I don’t know, just my guess.

Pretty cool that both brands show the charging spec on the cable! Props to Startech in particular for labeling that the cables are USB 2 data transfer speeds

Looking at the reviews, the silicone sleeving of these looks pretty cool! And quite neat that Creator Warehouse is able to compete with the bigger brands while not having a ridiculous price tag, the prices seem pretty good actually (but shipping to many countries will be higher, which is understandable as a smaller company). Hopefully they become in stock soon!

As I understand, Qualcomm chips are best supported, due to Adreno and Turnip drivers being more readily available. Mediatek, Exynos, and Tensor chips don’t have as good driver support compared to Qualcomm chips, so less games work. Also, Pixel 10 (i.e. Tensor G5) is relatively new, is a new architecture compared to older Pixels, etc. (G5 was made by TSMC while G4 was by Samsung I think? So likely quite different)

Samsung S24 Ultra onwards have the anti-reflective “matte” coating (diffused vs shiny) while the S26 Ultra is the first with the dumb “privacy display” feature.

It’s neat tech, but it significantly reduces the resolution when enabled, it has worse viewing angles when disabled (since half the pixels are less visible when viewing side on) and the feature is done better with a cheap screen protector. Pretty cool that you can use it for notifications, but I think that’s the only part-of-screen tinkering you can do with it, it’s that or the whole screen, so you could just set the notifications to hide message contents?

Math rock is a thing? Quick search tells me that unfortunately it’s not actually about (aboot) mathematics, darn. Pretty neat music though!

At least Ubuntu doesn’t require TPM 2.0 security bits! That’s a silly restriction whose only purpose is to create more e-waste and more money to Microsoft

And yes, as others have said, Win11 with 4 GB of RAM is not nice. I force-upgraded a Win10 laptop with 4GB of ram (but no TPM 2.0 chip) and mouse clicks were quite slow to register, and all the menus took their sweet time to load up. Yikes. And I am certain it was the lack of memory causing the performance hitches, not the missing TPM 2.0 chip. Installing Mint on it lets it live for another day, hooray! Still slow, but usable enough as a computer. I now run a much newer laptop with EndeavourOS (w/ KDE Plasma) and I enjoy it a lot!

When the cold war waned, both the U.S. and the Soviets began to denuclearise, treaties were signed, etc. tensions were deescalating (if you search for a graph for no. of nuclear weapons over the years, you see a peak during the cold war then a gradual decrease)

Now, everyone is afraid that nuclear war could be coming soon, with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump’s America kidnapping Maduro in Venezuela and bombing Iran with Israel, not to mention his threats against several other nation’s sovereignty (many of which are NATO members), Israel’s starvation of Gaza, conflict between India and Pakistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan are having conflict too, the world is a mess, made worse that all conflicts I mentioned above involve nuclear armed states and could have additional nuclear armed states intervene in.

If you ever want to try LibreOffice, try using the “tabbed” interface by going to the “user interface” option, then it will look more similar to that! If possible, I would recommend using ODF over MS doc formats (ODT, ODP, ODS vs DOCX, PPT, XLSX). MS Office opens them fine for the most part (aside from specifically PowerPoint on web, it renders reduced opacity images weird! Everything else seems fine though) and the document format isn’t proprietary. Bonus points that it makes it easy to differentiate files (odt is open doc text, odp is open doc presentation, ods is open doc spreadsheets! MS office extensions aren’t standardised at all), downside is you have to try hard not to call presentations “ppts”

Perhaps it’s talking about the Cold War where both sides built enough nukes to obliterate the world numerous times, then began to disarm as the Cold War came to its end, and now rearming yet again threatening another nuclear arms race?

Well it would be weird if they gave you bonus points for it /s

Personally, I use a combination of Codeberg (cloud backups) and a self-hosted Forgejo instance (local backups). Redundancy is always good, if one goes down I still have my projects saved in the other!

That’s kind of his thing though. He does the same for corporate products too (recently, see Macbook Neo being the Macbook No)

I have recently made a short script that converts Gregorian dates to Symmetry454 ones. Additional functionality might be added at some point, but currently do not have the time.

I am also working on two games (using Godot, if you’re wondering). One is a platformer where a duck (the player) is tasked by Prometheus to steal the “fire” from each of the twelve Olympian gods, starting with Dionysus, the god of wine, so the duck needs to steal the knowledge of wine-making for the humans while going through various obstacles and puzzles. I’ve already made some basic levels and I think it’s turning out pretty good! The second game is a HOI4-esque grand strategy game set during the cold war, but with controller support (so wars will most likely be turn-based and focus more on intervention/supporting your side of the conflict). This one is in pretty early days, but I have already implemented basic functionality (selecting nations and occupied territories, factions, basic focus and research system), and I will soon need to add actual fun bits in (like a functioning battling mechanic, actual focus webs and research trees)

I have exams coming up soon so I don’t have much time to work on silly programming projects right now, I need time to revise and such!

then blindly confident

coming from a school-issue Chromebook could get a great upgrade moving to these.

Good point, it looks to be way better than any Chromebook in terms of performance, build quality, etc.

This will certainly sell and will net Apple a lot of market share!

I would expect Apple to stop supporting those sooner than the Neo

Hopefully not! If Apple does cut off support, there’s always the option for Asahi Linux!