Why would I throw it away, when I can give it to someone who needs it more, or sell it?

Because selling is always a hassle, dealing with choosing beggars and scammers, and it may not be worth much anymore for general use.

For example, my old PC is a i7 4770k… it can’t run Windows 11 or play remotely recent games. I don’t know anyone who could use this thing, so to save a few watts I took out the GPU, put it in eco mode and have been using it as my Linux server.

My NUC uses 6-7W idle.

I have played around with some mini PC’s (minisforum and beelink brand), they’re neat but they turned out to be not very reliable, two have already died prematurely, and unfortunately they are not end-user serviceable. Lack of storage expansion options is an issue as well, if you don’t just want to stack a bunch of external USB drives on top of each other.

The logic behind the keep-right law is this:

1. It is illegal and dangerous to overtake on the right.
2. It optimizes the capacity of the road. If you are in the middle lane with nobody to the right of you, the space to the right of you can’t be used by anyone, because of point 1.

To address some of your points:

be in the way of people trying to get on

The onus is on the people who are trying to get on to merge properly. Moving over for people who are merging is generally discouraged. Personally, I only do it for slower traffic (large trucks) or with short, difficult on-ramps.

in, what, 4 seconds

The way keep-right is policed is that you are only expected to move back to the right lane if that lane is free for a reasonable distance. Police typically use a margin of 20-30 seconds or so of middle lane camping without passing anyone before ticketing you.

I’m going to merge when it’s -safe- to do so

As you always should. Keep right doesn’t change that.

I could technically squeeze in between two of the cars in the column I’m passing

See above. You are never expected to squeeze in between two cars. As long as you are passing you are allowed to be in a lane to the left of the traffic you are passing. The faster driver coming up behind you just needs to wait until you have finished your pass and have the space to move over.

Anyway, my point still stands. You may prefer your keep-your-lane logic over keep-right logic, but in large parts of the world it is against the law, and you should try to follow the laws of where you are. I’m not saying keep-your-lane logic is indefensible when considered in a vacuum, I’m saying you’re not in a vacuum so you should be predictable and follow the same rules as everyone else.

The logic still applies though

No it doesn’t outside of [parts of] the US.

For traffic to flow safely and predictably, we should strive to do what the law prescribes, so that everyone is on the same page instead of everyone operating according to their own made up rules. The law in most places is keep right if possible, regardless of how many lanes there are.

US defaultism much?

It’s possible those are still using Xwayland

You can use xlsclients to check.

wmctrl and xdotool don’t do anything for me with native Wayland windows. It only seems to work for applications that use Xwayland.

So while I can use it to resize and position xterm or urxvt windows, it does not work with foot or kitty or firefox windows.

No. Those are X11 only.

I had a bunch of wmctrl window placement scripts that I had to rewrite in kwin’s (awful) scripting language when I switched to wayland.

It’s also why Belgium is relatively low compared to the Netherlands.

I’m sure that in Flanders the English proficiency is on par with the Netherlands, and certainly better than in Germany, but the French speaking parts pull the average down.

I think part of the reason is that francophone regions overdub all media in French, so when growing up, children never consume media in any other language than French, except maybe some music. You could literally watch French TV for an entire day and not hear a single word in another language than French.

It’s even more confusing because in my native language (Dutch), we have those words too ( gnoe and gnoom ), and we do pronounce the g.

Of course, no Dutch speaker would ever miss the opportunity to pronounce a g :)

Meanwhile, me, a non-native English speaker:

þ

I have to ask… what the hell is that thing?

Guys this content was by boomers for boomers

Tom’s Hardware sold out looong ago, sold in 2007 to some faceless consortium. The original “Tom”, Thomas Pabst, who is GenX and not a boomer btw, has had nothing to do with the site since.

The editor of this article looks to be a millennial btw.

DNS does nothing for youtube.

I think the problem stems from how LLMs are marketed to, and perceived by the public. They are not marketed as: this is a specific application of this-or-that AI or ML technology. They are marketed as “WE HAVE AI NOW!”, and the general public who is not familiar with AI/ML technologies equates this to AGI, because that’s what they know from the movies. The promotional imagery that some of these companies put out, with humanoid robots that look like they came straight out of Ex Machina doesn’t help either.

And sure enough, upon first contact, an LLM looks like a duck and quacks like a duck … so people assume it is a duck, but they don’t realize that it’s a cardboard model of a duck with a taperecorder inside that plays back quacking sounds.

LLMs are decent with coding tasks if you know what you’re doing

Only if the thing you are trying to do is commonly used and well documented, but in that case you could just read the documentation instead and learn a thing yourself, right?

The other day I tried to get some instructions on how to do something specific in a rather obscure and rather opaquely documented cli tool that I need for work. I couldn’t quite make sense of the documentation, and I found the program’s behavior a bit erratic, so that’s why I turned to AI. It cheerfully and confidently told me (I’m paraphrasing): oh to do “this specific thing” you have to use the --something-specific switch, and then it gave some command line examples using that switch that looked like they made complete sense.

So I thought: oh, did I overlook that switch? Could it be that easy? So I looked in the documentation and sure enough… the AI had been bullshitting me and that switch didn’t exist.

Then there was the time when I asked it to generate an ARM template (again, poorly documented bullshit) to create some service in Azure with some specific parameters. It gave me something that looked like an ARM template, but sure as hell wasn’t a valid one. This one wasn’t completely useless though, at least I was able to cross reference with an existing template and with some trial-and-error, I was able to copy over some of the elements that I needed.

That’s another option, but it’s a bit more cumbersome having to cherrypick which exact backports you need for your specific hardware. Also, if you then for some reason don’t upgrade to the next stable release when it comes out, backports get abandoned after 1 year instead of the customary 3 years for the rest of the oldstable release.

From my experience, running trixie/testing the past year or so on a minipc with hardware that was a bit too recent for bookworm, I can say that the cadence of security patches has been about the same between bookworm and testing.

And let’s be honest, on a desktop system your main attack surface is going to be the software you go online with, i.e. the browser. So if you make sure that is kept up to date (flatpak, vendor repo, …) that already goes a long way.

the ctrl-super-alt is completely different

It’s not “completely different” … and that’s the problem. Completely different I can handle. I can manage knowing vim keybindings, readline keybindings and standard windows keybindings at the same time. What I can’t handle is: having to use command + C on one Mac and control + C on Windows to copy, but then in some cases you do use “control” on both OS-es, and sometimes control and alt are switched … It’s because they are similar but different that it’s such a mess trying to get proficient in both at the same time.

Eh. Windows has its share of annoyances, but once I have set it up to my liking my desktop workflow is very similar to my KDE setup, and WSL + Windows Terminal gives me a functional Linux shell environment.

And at least on Windows I don’t have to deal with cmd/control/alt switcharoo messing up my muscle memory.

The correct way with a new computer with recent hardware is to install Debian Testing to get a recent kernel, firmware and mesa and stuff, but put the code name of the next release into your apt config instead of “testing”. So then when the next version is released, you can just stay on that, now stable, version.

Trixie just got released today though, so for the time being you can probably get away with using that.

every service will get your ID or photo

To be fair, that’s not how it will work. The site and the identity verifier will be two different things, the verifier only attests that you are not underage and the site doesn’t get your identity.

Still harmful though, because you can be sure that there will be scamsites redirecting people to fake but real looking verifiers for blackmail and identity theft purposes.

I for one will never put my ID or photo into any age verifier ever.