That’s what you get for buying a cheap device, sadly.

Not always. I bought a Unihertz Titan 2 for 250€ last year and it can be easily unlocked with Fastboot. They even put the full firmware packages up on Google Drive so you can restore a bricked device with SP Flash Tools.

God that is just awful.

I have a coworker who’s doing all of our UI and screen designs. Every time he has finished a design he immediately wants to talk about it and randomly calls. Sometimes when he spots small errors in a live project (“this looks a bit wonky in Safari”, “the headline here needs three pixels more margin”), he wants me to immediately fix them and gets pissed when I finish my current task first.

Dude, we all have work to do here, yours isn’t (always) the most important one. I am very close to escalating this to my boss, because it gets increasingly difficult to ignore it and sometimes it feels like he’s cosplaying as my manager.

In short: I hate getting interrupted when I’m in the middle of a task and I hate someone breathing down my neck. I’ll get to it when I get to it.

On some popular subs, they added new moderators and brought the subs back online by themselves. It was a total shitshow and a clear sign Reddit didn’t give a fuck about the wishes of their voluntary moderators and users.

Don’t you dare criticize the worlds’ most popular generic superhero movie franchise!

I love the sound of old harddrives. At least the ones that have some low grumbling and clicking, not the ones with a high-pitched whine due to failing bearings.

The sound of old tapedecks and reel-to-reels is also pretty nice.

And the sound a Zippo makes when you open and close it.

I have a complicated surname, so when people ask for my email I just show them my ID and say “firstname@lastname.de” and they can type it in, reading it off the card.

It’s made my life so easy!

I also kept all of my spam mails of the last twenty years and trained rspamd with it. It’s got a 99.9% success rate. I’d even argue it works better than some corporate mail providers (what also helps is that I provide the mail service for friends & family as well and we are all collectively training the database).

It was a pain to setup initially, but I don’t want to miss it.

I got [surname].de over twenty years ago and I am so happy about that. Google can gargle my balls, I run postfix, rspamd, dovecot and roundcube.

Pay for new teeth, up my Patreon subscription for my favorite artist by factor 5 and then back some great projects made by human artists on Kickstarter.

They’ll come crawling back to us once the bubble pops and I hope gamers will remember.

To be fair, eBooks have just gotten that big in recent years because the publishers are lazy and cram uncompressed embedded fonts into them.

I always strip out embedded fonts from my eBooks with calibre and I have seen books being reduced from 20MB to 400KB. 🤣

This won’t make this a good device due to a myriad of other reasons, though.

The specs are an absolute joke. Even my Sony PRS from 2008 comes with 64MB RAM and physical buttons.

This thing will choke on epubs with embedded fonts, if it doesn’t just plainly ignore them (which it seems like it will, since they’re talking so much about their own custom font).

Neat idea, but I fear it’s destined to fail. I also think it’s too small. The PRS-505 is six inches and I wouldn’t go any smaller than that for comfortable reading.

You can just do CTRL+R (in bash at least)

I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.

One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.

It also has basically the same plot with the same enemies. Except they added a red lady villain that is weirdly sexualized and a kid gets magic powers - because nature.

A bicycle will transport me in the same manner every time I use it. A calculator will always give me the correct result of 2+2.

What was your point about AI again?

From the guy that brought us: “All the CPUs in the past were built for humans, this CPU is built for agents.”

Dude just invented fictional customers by selling directly to the AI. 😅

Doesn’t have to be a Mac, my GPD Win Max 2 has 64GB as well for a much lower price and it can somehow use 55GB on the integrated NPU (AMD 780M) for running models with ollama. I can even combine that with an external GPU on the Oculink port to increase the total memory.

It takes between 30s to 5min to get a reply, but it does work and it’s mainly useful for going over my project asking how to improve the codebase.

Quality-wise it’s good enough for boilerplate code and small improvements. Wouldn’t trust it to work on big features in larger projects, but I don’t trust LLMs in general for that. I don’t see a big difference to ChatGPT and Gemini (which is a win for local hosting and putting the freedom of computing back into our own hands). But the usual caveats always apply. All models have their problems and people tend to overhype the capabilities of LLMs in general.

I worked in a callcentre for many years and had changing shifts every two weeks. Having to come in at 6am and then getting that switched to 4pm wreaked havoc on my body and after doing this for quite a while, I just crashed and got burnout.

Recovery took me two years, where I basically just slept. Five days a week are just too much, it’s a system designed to squeeze the last bit of labor value out of you and I fucking hated it. Nowadays, I’m not able to physically work for more than four days, or else I’ll crash again.

I had a lot of luck, so I can now work entirely from home. No commute, Fridays are off. Sounds super cozy and amazing, but the thing is: I need that Friday for myself. A lot of times I’ll just sleep so I can have some energy on the actual weekend. 🫩

When it comes to doctor’s appointments, I just tell my boss I have one and that’s it. As it should be. We are humans, not machines.

Same here. Sometimes I need the Friday just to sleep, but it’s nice.