8gb of ram is definitely not ideal for the computer lifetimes people expect from macs, even for a very basic user, but it’s not too low to be forgivable except for the fact that modern macs use a SOC design and can’t upgrade the “RAM” (I know it’s not conventional ram; still gonna call it that). That aside, assuming “they” is still apple, the majority of what you said is… not correct. I’m gonna try to reply to each point without being a dick, but I’m sorry in advance in case it comes off that way or if it goes way too long. In order:

The average Mac owner’s use cases are nowhere near too demanding for the hardware - ever since they stopped trying to cram inefficient intel cores into a tiny chassis with the world’s shittiest cooling (2020), macs have been significantly more powerful than the average user needs in the short term. Someone who’s only trying to run some safari/firefox tabs, iMessage, a music client, and maybe a document or spreadsheet editor at most isn’t gonna be held back by the hardware of today at all - shit, 2020’s original base M1 macbook air with no fans would still be chugging along just fine today with that workload. On the off time a user like that does max out their ram (chrome with a million tabs, or if they’ve got a lot open and try the new apple intelligence stuff) modern ssds are fast enough that bumping a program into swap space doesn’t make the UI take a year like on HDDs. Should there still be more than 8gb ram on a computer (theoretically) designed to last 8+ years? Ideally, yes, but it’s really not the dealbreaker (again, for the average use case) that people make it out to be - it’s not gonna suddenly turn a new mac into a steaming pile of shit on year 3 or something.

About upgrades, I’m not really sure how to address this - what upgrades are just adding LLMs? Whether you’re talking computers or phones, I can’t remember an upgrade cycle for either in ages that hasn’t been double digit power increases. Software-wise, none of the upcoming software updates are “just” AI stuff - ios 18 adds a bunch of cool shit and while I don’t follow or care about Mac software, I’m sure a lot of that made its way over there too. This part is a little pedantic (please don’t take it as me being an asshole lol, zero hostility I promise), but I also wanna note it’s not just LLMs - they’ve got multimodal models for images and video too.

Your last point is subjective so I won’t try to claim your opinion (other than the bit about modern hardware running at capacity) is wrong. I do wanna offer a counterpoint tho, because while I agree that AI is overhyped and a lot of what companies are bragging about is mostly fluff (fucking genmoji???), there’s some tangible ways it’s gonna improve user experience. A more flexible Siri is probably gonna be the most-used one, since needing to be perfectly explicit and clear about what you want Siri to do is probably its biggest problem rn. An LLM backend will let it look past a badly phrased request or a stutter to the actual meaning of what you were trying to say, which is gonna make telling someone you’re about to get there while driving so much less painful.
The one I’m personally most excited about is one of the multimodal AI capabilities - fuck the image generation/editing (fun but overhyped imo), semantic media searches (searching photos for “mom and dad in front of that one waterfall”) are such a game changer, and the idea that I can have that without sending my photos and contacts to some external server is so wild to me.

Anyway, not trying to argue that 8gb of ram is a good design choice or force you to like AI, but I’m pretty into cpu/gpu/SOC advances and couldn’t just let them be slandered

Exactly, what can AHK do that a generic plasma shortcut plus a script in your language of choice couldn’t?
Genuine question, I haven’t looked at AHK in years

It physically hurts me to say anything in facebook’s defence, but to be fair this is an account centre link to an account config page

To add to this, with rustup you can add different build targets than the current system - could let you build the binary on a more powerful pc and then just scp it over.

Yep, not implying it is - like I said, just taking the point to a logical extreme where (ideally) everyone would agree that at least some speech can’t be allowed with no repercussions. I’m curious where along the spectrum of fucked up things to say you’d personally draw the line - were you focusing on the distinction between nazi shit/gore and a direct threat because you’d consider either/both allowable, or just wanting to point out a false dichotomy?

Yeah nah gay guy here to ruin your theory - I’ve got absolutely no attraction to boobs and/or feminine asses. I’m sure some tendency towards bisexuality is more common than strict homo/hetero-sexuality, but I strongly doubt I’m alone in this either.

I can see what you’re saying in the sense that nothing should physically be stopping them from saying it, but also nothing should be insulating them from the consequences of what they say, right? To take it to a logical extreme, if a kid says they’re going to shoot up the school the next day, I hope we can agree that requires more from school admins than just “well, it’s his right to say that”.
I personally also think it’s stupid for a school to be involved for a shirt like in the OP (western society is much too puritanical about simple nudity/body parts, imo), but there’s clearly a line somewhere about what speech/expression can be allowed in public. Assuming you can agree with that, where would you want that line to be? I’d personally draw the line before it reaches threats to peoples’ physical/mental health (like the nazis and gore I mentioned).

I think if this were a small company or one that paid more than the bare minimum to artists I might make the attempt to respect their T&Cs, but for Spotify…

Not a Spotify user and haven’t looked into it myself, but I’ve also heard about people getting a subscription in countries where it costs less for some significant discounts. Maybe your gift card trick paired with that would let you subscribe in a foreign country without needing a credit card there?

Out of curiosity, would you say the same applies to putting nazi propaganda or violent gore on a shirt and wearing it in a school?

I’m not even into knives, but if this is the shit you guys get up to in this community I’m def subscribing lmao

I didn’t consider account recovery, that’s a good point. Personally I don’t usually bother with it for anything I want to be private - if I lose it I lose it lol.
It’s still not perfect, but some of the private email hosting providers like proton have email aliases, so you could use one for recovery without giving any info to hackers (assuming you trust the email provider). Definitely less secure than only a public key being exposed, but maybe an acceptable tradeoff for the convenience of an existing established solution?

Damn everybody seems to be hating on this and idk shit about the history of anarchy to say if it’s valid, but I gotta add that this quote goes hard

You rule out social networks, but why? Wouldn’t a fediverse microblogging (or full blogging) platform work fine for the purpose? Just pick an irrelevant username and a strong+unique password and only access your account through tor using any and all relevant best practices.
Given you want the continuity of the author preserved, I don’t see the functional difference between the posts being associated with an anonymous account and them all having your public key. Am I missing something?

Imo option 3 is basically what he did - keeping $700 means he basically took $35/hour as a babysitting fee. Not sure what’s standard for babysitting rates (child free for life), but I sure as shit wouldn’t take responsibility for a child for that much lol. The amount aside, rather than theft I see the situation as him inflating the value of the service he was providing - still a shitty thing to do in other circumstances, but one we collectively accept as not illegal theft when it’s by brand names and “luxury” stuff.
In other circumstances I’d fully agree with your point that the kid’s in a morally ambiguous situation with money he knows was stolen scammed from his parents, but from both the kids perspectives at the time thinking anon really was gay, he was in a vulnerable position with a very real chance of being cut off by his parents and needing to support himself. That removes any ambiguity imo, even ignoring the fact that his parents are bigots who more than deserved what they got

I like this one, but looking at it from a different angle I say nice things about people behind their backs pretty regularly that I absolutely would not be prepared to say to their face cuz toxic masculinity. Anybody have tips on how I can keep working on the opposite of this problem? 😭

Sometimes it makes me sad to think how much humor like this will be lost when time removes the context that enables it

Tried this prompt on dev-bnb-nf4-v2 and it spat out a (sorta NSFW?) lady robot instead:

Honestly I’ve found the opposite of what you said, where on Debian based distros I commonly had to go to a project’s git repo and follow readme instructions to build when it wasn’t in an apt repository. Meanwhile on arch, the only thing you have to install manually is yay and then afterwards everything is in the AUR. Not saying that makes arch more user friendly than Debian (obviously), but that one aspect I do actually find easier on arch at least if you’re willing to use an AUR helper.

I don’t think I’d call it anything wrong, but the subvolumes definitely do make it different for installation purposes so that following ext4 instructions for bootloader configs or kernel arguments could put you on the wrong path