Lemmy.world, by political ideology, is most similar to old Reddit. Namely, you’re most likely going to find generally-left-of-center people. Several other instances (namely lemmy.ml) are known for being significantly more left-leaning, basically hard communist.

As is tradition for left-leaning people, there’s a lot of infighting. .world people think that .ml people are tankies. .ml people think that .world people are corporate bootlickers. Both sides accuse the other of heavy-handed censorship.

Basically, I wouldn’t worry about it. It’s just your standard leftism infighting.

I think people tend to have a very narrow view of what goes on around them. And frankly, I don’t think that’s really a bad thing. Everyone does it. It’s just a fact of life. But we have to account for it. Talking about big-picture issues doesn’t work when people are focused their narrow view of the world. Even if they agree with the issue, they won’t be riled up and take action. I think there’s 2 takeaways to this:

First, regarding talking to the people around you: narrow your focus. Focus on things that affect them directly, or frame things in a way such that they interpret it in a way that affects them. Don’t talk about concentration camps, talk about Trump retroactively rescinding birthright citizenship and how that might affect their lives (especially effective if that person happens to be an ethnic minority or is in a relationship with one). When talking about anti-immigration policies, focus on ICE arresting American citizens because they didn’t look American enough. You don’t have to convince people of everything, you just have to convince people of enough that they feel personally concerned.

Second, regarding yourself: it’s easy to think that all Americans are similar to the people that you’re with. Society is a bell curve. You don’t need to shift the entire bell curve to the left to exact change. You just need to stretch it out leftward - pull the left leaning people more to the left. Trump didn’t win by convincing leftists to be right-leaning, he won by convincing the right-leaning moderates into shifting right. Consider the audience and pick arguments that would be most effective against that particular audience. Be more direct toward more left-leaning people. Republican? Sow seeds of suspicion toward Trump. Moderate? Make them fear for their way of life. Left-leaning moderate? Maybe we should punish the rich. Leftist? Hell yeah socialism baby

Best use is to ask it questions that you’re not sure how to ask. Sometimes you come across a problem that you’re not really even sure how to phrase, which makes Googling difficult. LLM’s at least would give you a better sense of what to Google

Until you find that part 42/53 was deleted

FDA is intrinsically good but currently does its job below expectations. Doesn’t mean that it’s bad, just means it’s not doing enough. And without FDA, things can and will get significantly worse. Things can always get worse.

For reference, that business model is called the loss leader pricing scheme. It’s the one where you sell a product for cheap with the expectation that the customer will buy something else that’s more expensive alongside it. It’s more common than you would expect.

For instance, eggs and milk are placed at the back of the store because there’s a higher chance of you picking up other things to buy on the way to the back.

IKEA does something similar with their food court.

The Steam deck is sold at a loss, because Valve makes their money back via game sales. The same is true for all gaming consoles

All F2P games operate on the same principle

My understanding is that Costco gasoline is so cheap because it’s offset by product purchases in-store. Also, Costco food court

Plastic food containers. I mean, we already know it’s pretty bad, but I would not be surprised if it ends up being way worse than we think. That, and most aerosols. Febreze, hairspray, spray tans, things of that nature

What’s New Pussycat on repeat, with an It’s Not Unusual thrown in sporadically

Reference: https://youtu.be/Tv1l1eUhN-E

Everyone has different preferences, so it can be difficult to judge what you may like or dislike. Even in gaming, there are such disparate subcommunities that one subcommunity may not even know of the existence of another. I personally prefer slow paced, artistic, single player games and I can’t stand multi-player games, much less competitive ones.

So my answer is there’s likely something for you somewhere, but without more information, I wouldn’t know how you would begin finding that something

Found someone nice. It was sheer chance, really. Met with a new neighbor and she had a crush on me. Was friends for a while. Years later decided to get into a relationship with her.

Patriotic duck

For me, everything is a belief unless it satisfies the following criteria:

1. It is generally accepted as true among experts
2. There is ample evidence that is both personally convincing and leaves no room for alternate interpretations (not the same as #1, since many fields have “commonly accepted knowledge” that is generally acknowledged as most likely true but has no evidence to back it up)
3. It is specific enough that it cannot be interpreted in a way that is misleading

I find that the one that trips up most people is #3, since some people speak in technically true but overly broad statements and the listener ends up filling in the gaps with their own biases. The listener leaves feeling like their biases have been confirmed by data, not realizing that they have been misled.

In the end, according to my criteria, very little can be categorized as true knowledge. But that’s fine. You can still make judgements from partial or biased data or personal beliefs. You just can’t be resolute about it and say that it’s true.

The Thing (1982) has basically consistently been my favorite horror movie

I mainly do work indoors, so the brightness does not really matter that much to me. But as far as I can tell, the brightness is pretty normal for laptops - I don’t think it’s any brighter or dimmer than other laptops I’ve used in the past. According to this website that I found, brightness is 25 to 486 nits. Google search seems to say that average maximum brightness for laptops is somewhere around 300-400 nits.

My understanding is that the screen is generally what eats up most of the battery on device, so if you plan to have brightness turned up, it might be difficult to find a laptop with a long battery life.

The cpu is on the mainboard and can’t be removed, but you can replace the entire mainboard. Basically, you can upgrade, but you’ll have to upgrade a couple other things along with it

Just tested with normal power profile and screen brightness turned down - battery went down by about 50% after 3 hours. I think my laptop usually dies after 3 hours because I have the screen brightness up

Yes, but that’s my point, you see. Because Arm historically has been used for mobile and small devices, there’s been a strong incentive for decades to emphasize power efficiency. Because x86 historically has been used for desktops, there’s been a strong incentive to emphasize power. It’s only been very recently that Arm attempted to have comparable power, and even more recently that x86 attempted to have comparable power efficiency.

Sure, Arm is currently more efficient, but the general consensus is that there’s no inherent reason for why Arm must be more efficient than x86. In other words, the only reason it is more efficient is just because they’ve been focusing on efficiency for longer.

Both AMD and Intel’s current gen x86 cpu’s are, from what I can tell, basically spitting distance away from Qualcomm’s Arm cpu’s in terms of battery life, and rumor has it that both x86 companies should be able to match Arm chips in efficiency by next gen.

So if efficiency is a priority for you, I think it’s worthwhile to wait and see what the cpu companies cook up in the next couple of years, especially as both AMD and Intel seem to be heavily focused on maximizing efficiency right now

My understanding is that Arm chips don’t have any fundamental advantage over x86 chips. They’re more efficient simply because they’ve been optimized to be more efficient for so long. I’ve heard that upcoming Intel and AMD chips could be able to compete with the new Arm cpu’s, so if you’re not going to get a new laptop soon, it seems worthwhile to just wait and see

Yes, I don’t use the external GPU. I just use the AMD APU. Also I realized that AMD 7000 could refer to both the cpu and the GPU. Ah, AMD and their marketing

Kubuntu on Framework 16 AMD 7000 series here. Sleep is horrible - definitely drains your battery. Bag heats up, and I estimate maybe a 1% drain per hour. I’ve enabled hibernate though I rarely use it.

Battery is alright but not great. I get maybe 2-3 hours of active, light use from full battery.

No compatibility issues that I’ve noticed, though, of course, Linux has its fair share of minor non-hardware-related bugs.

Camera is serviceable but not amazing. Not sure about microphone but I assume the same thing. Speakers are somewhat odd in that the speakers are pointed to the side rather than toward the front, but again - serviceable.