none of these fucks are describing reality when they’re speaking. their diatribes are directed at FOMO-ridden financiers, listening to their bloviating rhymes with half of one ear.
a simple shorthand to keep in mind, everytime they’re talking about AI, think “my dick”. that’s what he’s doing. “my dick is so stupendously vast, I pity those poor creatures about to be ravaged by Him, oh the humanity!”
for the presentation part, watch standup. watch them construct the story, the path they guide you through, how it all comes together. notice how they lay it out, every syllable, every stutter, how it’s all in the service of delivery. planting and harvesting the callbacks. inadvertently, you’ll start picking up on techniques and implementing them and you’ll notice people hanging on your every word.
as to the actual part converting them over, determine who you’re talking to. if people are aware of the issue but are apathetic about implementing change, that presents one set of issues. if they’re completely unaware that there’s a problem, you’re better off changing environments.
I have an easy job, in my roles I implement the privacy aspect for tech-illiterate people from a security standpoint and I have a dictatorial position - they have to listen to me. I also don’t have tech debt when I implement their IT strategy, i.e. there’s never an issue with an OS or app they love or are used to. all of that is way, way harder when faced with someone who can’t imagine life without a $1000 easily breakable/losable/stealable slab of glass with the blue bubble and the tiks and toks and whatnot.
edit: there’s this thing https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/may/24/what-i-discovered-when-i-asked-amazon-to-tell-me-everything-alexa-had-heard I just saw at HN. this dude having a blissfully ignorant walk down melancholy lane, pondering the details of his decade-long spyware-ridden life, completely oblivious to their most intimate family shit just being out there in the world, for anyone to abuse just so he can be a more effective consumer. reaching those people, although possible, is such a tremendous effort I don’t think it’s worth it.
what’s way more angering is the deliberate constant raising of prices. tech is supposed to get better and cheaper at the same time. what was thousands in '06 should be like $100 now. no, a desktop is still supposed to cost north of $1000 without a monitor.
mentioned it a coupla times, RX 570, a midrange GPU, was introed in 2017 at $170. nowadays, midrange starts at like $700?
that same year I bought a Redmi Note, a feature rich budget phone from a budget line for $140. nowadays, a comparable Snapdragon model with an insignificant performance and feature jump is $300+.
you can remove firmware and other software that doesn’t pertain to your system. the regular upgrade process will be shorter and you’ll save some SSD space.
however, you’ll lose the ability to take this SSD and plug it in a completely different system, like e.g. an intel laptop, and have it boot right up, unmodified.
every mobile device I ever owned is encrypted and protected with a reasonably secure pass-phrase so losing it is no big deal. it is conceivable someone could forensic the shit out of my setup but that is highly unlikely; it’s far more likely it’ll get wiped and sold or parted out.
I’ve done no benchmarks but I haven’t experienced any issues ever. the oldest linux device I own is a 2011 MBP (i7-2635qm, so quadcore) and I don’t perceive any speed degradation; it’s possible 1st gen Core i5/i7 could have issues as those don’t have AES-NI in hardware or sumsuch plus they’re SATA2 only, but those would be 15+ years old at this point.
with btrfs that has on-the-fly compression, copy-on-write, and deduping, everything works seamlessly, even when I have database-spanking applications in local development.
so the only thing I’ve changed recently is encrypting every device I have, not just the mobile ones. the standalone devices get unlocked with a key-file from the local filesystem so they boot without the prompt. selling/giving away any of those drives, mechanical or SSD, is now a non-issue.
for future reference, encrypt your drives from the get-go. even if it’s not a mobile device, you can use on-device keys to unlock it without a pass-phrase.
source: used shred on a couple of 3.5" 4 TB drives before selling them, took ages…
that’s for Fedora, for Ubuntu it’s toram I think? or was that for older versions… Esc during boot to verify, if it goes “loading to RAM” then you know it’s working.
to add to what others already said, the work from linux-surface is being adopted in the mainline, so it is possible that your hardware is already supported in a modern distro, like Fedora. boot it off a live USB image and poke around, you’ll get a better feel for it.
pro tip, at the GRUB menu press ‘e’ to edit the first item and then add rd.live.ram and that should load the image to RAM. you can then remove the USB and it’ll be way faster to navigate and it won’t touch your existing SSD install.
all Apple devices are part of a covert peer-to-peer network and its primary purpose is to facilitate the Airtags and find-my-shit apps. it runs on desktops, laptops, phones, ipads, watches, etc., including when they’re supposedly off. you can’t turn it off or opt out of it and what that crap additionally does and how secure it is is unknown.
having said that, if you run linux on an old intel-based macbook or similar (say, up to 2015 models) you’re out of that racket and similarly all Apple or iCloud based crap. they do have a permanently enabled IME but that’s true for the majority of devices sold and, dependent on your threat model, isn’t an issue per se.
not sure about the “credit card” angle as you can’t buy a new Apple device that runs linux, the asahi mess is limited to M1/2 models which are like 5 years old at this point.
using laptops as a forever-plugged-in device (regardless if workstation or server) isn’t the greatest idea. as an intermediary solution, like until you have something more permanent in place, sure. otherwise, look elsewhere.
limiting battery charge isn’t available on all laptop models and is aimed at preserving the battery’s functionality; it doesn’t solve the issue of a forever charged and never emptied battery. on the other hand, removing the battery on a lot of models limits their performance, significantly.
what is a viable solution is if you get a laptop board that runs at full power without battery, you can remove the board from the laptop, retrofit it with better cooling and additional storage (mini-PCI or M.2 to SATA adapters) and you end up with an energy-efficient server. but that requires a lot of work and is not something recommended for non-enthusiasts.
in short, sell it or swap it for something more adequate.
“the egg glides freely…”
the egg does not, in fact, glide freely. it’s also fucking burned to a crisp and there’s like an ocean of oil in there. terrible, terrible video.
so, like torify up until now? tried it on a couple of apps as a replacement, works fine. the rust build chain though, madonn’…
I run all three of those (delta on hosted IMAP servers, matrix synapse, prosody for XMPP) for various clients and each has its own issues that need work. with deltachat there is no fallback if the project stops or gets taken over or whatever. with XMPP at least you have options, this client, that client, etc. as well as decades long development. based on that, some free advice (worth what you paid for it) - don’t give up on XMPP just yet. good luck.
it’s a super-shitty experience, both on XMPP and Matrix, and you touched only on one of the aspects. and that’s not even the bad part. the bad part is nothing better is on the horizon.
so what you gotta do is put on your big boy pants, sit down and figure this shit out. here’s where I made I misstep, let’s figure out how to do redundant backups and seamless restore accross devices. etc.
because, this is it. there is nothing better coming, you gotta learn how to make do with the tech we have. offloading your shit to benevolent dictators and hoping everything will be fine is not a strategy,
borg + vorta. borg is the undelying tech, vorta is the UI. the UI is a little bit rough around the edges but it’s immensely powerful for a wide array of use cases.
those things were designed to run off mechanical drives. so whatever you fit it with will be screaming fast. the bottlenecks you’re concerned with arise with workstation-class machines with fully implemented PCI lanes and such, which are pretty rare in laptops. HMBs also require a beefier CPU as all that buffering introduces overhead; not noticeable on a 6-core Ryzen, noticeable on a dual-core decade-old i5.
summarum: whatever SATA SSD you fit it with is more than adequate. obviously, don’t go with no-name “brands”. also, save yourself the bother and don’t dick around with adapters, just fit a regular SATA 2.5" SSD in there.
there’s this thing: STAR WARS GRINDHOUSE
skip the T470, T480 with 8xxxu cpu is the lowest you should go; the hardware is practically identical (and interchangeable!) but the CPU is a huge difference. also if you find them for cheap, there’s T490 (refresh), T495 (AMD Ryzen), and T14 (newer variants of the T4xx series with Intel and AMD CPUs).
the 12" version would be the X280, again single-channel RAM only. in the 12" space you also have Dell Latitude 7290/7200 (just the latitude series, no inspirons and friends) as well as HP Elitebook 820 (and 830) with 8xxx and newer CPUs. Elitebooks and Latitudes are Thinkpad T-series equivalents with similar build quality and features.
what’s the “low tire pressure” thing?