FR, I had a £4k top spec one, Intel i9, 64GB as my work laptop… And even back then, I wouldn’t have bought it myself for £800 if given the chance. Absolutely atrocious, particularly in terms of thermal design. I remember one summer, having Intel vTune installed and seeing the CPU laptop throttle to 0.25 GHz with Zoom open, because it would wake up the power hungry GPU and the laptop couldn’t deal with a British 30°C summer.

The Apple Silicon ones are lovely in comparison. When I swapped it, I remember going through a whole flight using my laptop without charging thinking “what sorcery is this”.

Shame there isn’t a decent equivalent ARM laptop that can do Linux.

I wish they had a flagship. I would be able to accept compromises of course - thicker, more expensive… But still with top notch components.

There are two things stopping me:

The first one is that for the first time ever, I have a phone that I can just about take on a holiday, not take my DSLR, and not regret the decision. I reckon different people have different thresholds for this, but for me this bar sits at the recent crop of 1" camera sensors (maybe from 1-3 years ago, like Xiaomi 13U/14U, Vivo X100, etc).

The second one is that I tend to get flagships as a way to guarantee some longevity when doing some resource intensive tasks. I consider myself a power user, and while it’s true that phones have plenty of horsepower these days, there are tasks that are quite demanding. For example, I use Ente which does local indexing on the phone for the ML image search (which isn’t an “easy” task) and I do run small edge-type ML models (such as whisper, of re-train the transformer model in FUTO)… Now I know probably I could do those things on a 2025 mid-range processor, but I worry that by 2027 I will want to replace the phone because the things I want to do will have rendered the phone obsolete. A faster processor allows me to go for an extra year or two without suffering a painfully slow phone, so I’d also want this before making the switch.

It’s okay - according to the type of articles they’ve been writing themselves, now they can feel more human and have more quality time. https://archive.ph/hYnrE

Billionaire leopards eating workers’ faces once again.

This is true but at the current computer prices, nowhere near as bad as it sounds. I spend £100/year or thereabouts for GeForce Now, and

• there’s no way I could play games on a £500 laptop that I renew every 5 years,
• no way that a £1000 laptop could get me to play AAA games for more than 1-2 years
• and sure, I could play games on a £2000 laptop, but no way that will last me 20 years.

If you have a life and can’t play any more than 25 hours a week, the value proposition right now is great - there’s no viable alternative that allows you to keep playing AAA games for the equivalent of £100/year.

It was created as a bit of an art experiment. What happens when AI agents take prompts for another AI agents. What do they “discuss”, do they give each other tips and advice, how much weird shit do they do…

From that point of view, it’s been rather interesting.

Only if people stay. Ending remote work is a way to lose 20% of the workforce to attrition. An office costs far far less than 20% of the salary mass, and if they were doing any sort of hybrid work, they might even have enough desk space already anyway…

At this point, and given the current state of Proton (👍) and the current state of Windows (👎), the question should be, “Does the new version of Wine run Windows apps better than Windows?”

It is… if it’s a screen from 2015.

I keep my phones for 2-3+ years and I haven’t managed to get burn-in since the Nexus 6P. I’d say anything newer than a Pixel 3 is free from burn in unless you do something weird (like a demo unit in a store displaying the same image 14 hours a day).

Devs ≠ C-Suite Execs

It might not be sexy, but I’d argue it doesn’t need AI to be.

Take the SMEG ones as an example - they’re not my cup of tea, but the amount of people who are willing to pay a premium for a fridge that doesn’t do anything special other than looking nice shows clearly that.

I think it’s ok, the comment literally says “according to Lisuan”. Which I see as factually correct - that’s the marketing claim, or the performance according to them, just like Teslas have been self-driving according to Tesla since 2012.

“It will cost me an extra £2,500 a year,” said France, who owns seven properties in Merseyside and Essex, including three homes in Chelmsford, which are houses of multiple occupancy.

“I can’t absorb that kind of hit. We’ve already been hammered by rising interest rates and other changes to the sector, and I’ve tried to feed that through gently to tenants. But I had to write to all of them and say I’ve had to do some recalculations and rents will be going up again from next year.”

How much are they making a year off seven properties? Isn’t £2500 the same 2-5% cost of living hike we’ve all seen? Hell some people who commute to London have taken that yearly hit (or almost) on public transport price hikes alone!

You’re making it sound like it’s choosing to misgender her, it’s not. It’s not fucked up because it’s a text extruder making a mistake, there’s no good or bad intention here. It’s shitty because the current state of glorified hallucinating autocorrects is shitty, but not because evil Grok is choosing to do anything.

I’d say for me magical realism has been 2025’s “Genre of the year” so I have a few recommendations.

If you like Murakami you might like Sayaka Murata - I particularly liked Earthlings, it’s a bit less magical realism but definitely quirky and surreal.

Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt was another book that stood out to me this year. It’s an emotional story with a young man and an older woman which uses a very smart octopus as the main character and anchor for the story (even though I wouldn’t consider the story is about the octopus).

Black Girl Unlimited by Echo Brown is firmly magical realism, and also quite good.

Nothing To See Here by Kevin Wilson is about a young woman who gets roped into babysitting two kids that spontaneously combust from time to time. It’s lighthearted but emotional, and I was laughing out loud about once every 5 pages. I had a blast with this one.

I would also class Jandy Nelson’s books as magical realism so I would say you might enjoy that too.

Then there’s This Is How You Lose The Time War, which I didn’t like at all, but has many good reviews so I won’t discredit it. It’s… Space fantasy? There’s no “science” in the fiction, but it has time travel, and weirdness galore.

This is my list of books I’ve read in 2025, in case you find anything inspiring:

And my storygraph profile in case you want to take a look (or not, I won’t be able to know!).

For me I think it was Atmosphere, by Taylor Jenkins Reid. So many emotions lol.

Project Hail Mary was another one of the highlights!

Yeah, I’m not going to defend training AI with copyrighted works… But I’m not going to waste energy siding with anyone who was okay with X. If you stayed in X, you’vr made your own bed. Now don’t cry because the owner is an AI-pandering nazi, we all knew that already.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bT77XP52uw&t=73

“See no path oh soo bay see no path oh SOO BEE RAAAY”

I did not speak french when I was six. I do now, but apparently that doesn’t automatically translate memories from thirty years ago. It took me about 5 years of actively looking for this to find it. I found it by asking in a big forum (not reddit but that sort of thing) for something like “people driving cars deforesting space with lasers”.

Capitalism loves using supply and demand to justify anything… up until it’s time to lower the price to adapt to low demand.

This is ridiculous. If it goes into effect, the same women will complain when they see a big trans man full of tattoos in the women’s bathroom because the law has forced them to go there.

Purely and simply transphobia.

Still debatable, the weights are the code. That’s a bit like saying “X software is not open source because it has equations but it doesn’t include the proofs that they’re derived from”.