ppseafield

I also have an XPS 15 from work, and I run Ubuntu on it. It's a pretty solid laptop.

At first there was a problem with suspend only working sometimes, but after a firmware update it doesn't seem to happen anymore.

At first I didn't like the keyboard and used an external one, but after typing on it daily I really enjoy it. It has a good travel distance and feel, and it's plenty large. I'm glad it doesn't have the 0-9 numpad on the side either, so my hands are centered. The palm rest areas feel comfortable.

Battery life is pretty good. The screen is fantastic and bright. I generally don't use the trackpad, but it seems to work just fine when I have had to use it. I don't ever use the touchscreen.

If you do have a significant workload, the left side of the keyboard heats up rather unpleasantly. (Around the S key.) Sometimes after suspend or otherwise reconnecting on wifi, network-manager gives up, and I have to reboot.

Overall I would recommend it!

I've had a similar experience as the GP, and I find it awful that autoplay videos will follow you around the page, pop-up modals will interrupt you in the middle of reading something, and ads will take up 40% or more of the page, loading between paragraphs while reading. It's hugely distracting to me.

We could make the same argument: you've spend years without adblock, and they have worn you down to the point where you accept active mental blocking of highly distracting ads. And even then you say sometimes it's bad enough for you to leave the site.

It was also a massive vector for security vulnerabilities.

OK, what about lead poisoning? An environmental hazard, especially effects children, preventable, mostly affects poor folks and developing nations. This seems like it's pretty analogous.

Pop_OS is based on Ubuntu, which is itself derived from Debian.

In the case of one of the poems in the article, the test makers incorrectly formatted the author's poem, and then asked a question about the format of the poem. That's nuts, right? She even received desperate letters from teachers asking for the answer because the test had made it ambiguous.

My impression of the article is that we should be giving students better education than requiring them to master tests prepared as cheaply as possible, sacrificing coherency, sold as expensively as possible, administered by randos from craigslist with next to no training. Because that's currently the benchmark for middle schoolers.

I agree, the reaction was completely, 100% nuts.

But such an Easter egg could put Nintendo in a similar situation, and I can see why they can't let developers get away with hidden content like this. It would set a bad precedent.

Ah, you're correct. I read one of the figures incorrectly.

As other commenters have pointed out, there is actually a BASIC interpreter available from the 3DS store, so interpreters aren't forbidden. And Nintendo has never been to friendly to software use outside what they explicitly allow.

I haven't seen anyone defending Nintendo's use of proprietary platform lock-in, but only that Nintendo should have been notified about it as part of publishing the game.

Indeed. Although this isn't sexually explicit, it reminds me of the trouble Rockstar got in after the Hot Coffee fiasco. Their publisher had to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars.

(Edit: pkroll is correct, the final penalties were $21 million.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Coffee_mod

We weren't talking about surprise - we were talking about shame. Just because something is legal doesn't mean it doesn't deserve shame. You come off as being oddly defensive towards Intuit.

Intuit lobbies to keep taxes complicated so they can continue to have a business model.

https://www.propublica.org/article/filing-taxes-could-be-fre...

On top of that it's still pretty favorable compared to other web framework sizes.

The article you posted claims that, since animal non-existence is "preferable" to animal suffering, the ethical choice is to euthanize / sterilize as many animals as possible. But you claim after you post the article that the actual better outcome is that animals are brought into existence by humans should be given better lives before they are killed by humans.

> I completely agree with you that the world would be a better place if "everyone were to suddenly switch to being vegan." The point is that in aggregate, not much is ever going to change in the short term

How does social change happen? It is slow. But it has been happening. Not only are people becoming vegetarian or vegan, but those options are increasingly seen as valid, occasional choices for meat eaters as well.

> It can thus be assumed that changing the way animals are raised and delivered will have a bigger impact on their well-being, than will those who do not eat meat continuing not to eat meat.

This is a much different argument than you have been making. You're (now) saying people can't be persuaded not to kill animals, so we should do so in a more humane way.

> https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2018/08/03/you-m...

Yeah, but that article doesn't exactly undermine our points because the poll was only for 1,000 people, and even then the actual Gallup poll says:

1) Vegetarianism is slightly higher among Americans under 50 than among those who are older.

More younger people are vegetarian. This will shape social attitudes for decades.

2) Sales of plant-based food grew 8.1% in 2017 alone and exceeded $3.1 billion last year, and plant-based alternatives to dairy products are soon expected to account for 40% of dairy beverage sales. [...] it appears Americans are eager to include alternatives to animal products in their diets but are not willing to give up animal products completely.

Every single plant-based product people choose to buy means slightly less demand for animal products.

> you think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?

You're forming the question again in the same way as the article:

"You think not being brought into existence is better than a happy life with an abrupt ending?"

When really the question is:

"You think it's better that humans choose not to bring animals into existence in order to kill them is better than humans choosing to bring animals into existence in order to kill them?"

And yeah, I think it is better not to breed animals just to kill them, when we could also not.

> What if supporting humane slaughter led to less animals being factory farmed, which is agreeably relatively better conditions for the farmed animal population as a whole?

False dichotomy: poor factory farm conditions vs. better factory farm conditions. There is also the option of no factory farms at all, which would be the least amount of suffering at the hands of humans.

> That's great for keeping a clear conscience. But realistically is it believable that this will slow down the impending climate change?

Actually, it's in the top global climate change causes, so, yes. And there's an avalanche effect of not having to grow 9 times the crops to feed the livestock: less pesticide runoff, less land needed to grow food so less incentive for deforestation and overall habitat destruction, less hauling and shipping required which burns less fuel...

Honestly: do you really think you're doing the animals a favor by raising them in factory farms? You really care about these cows and pigs, so you eat them? Would you be willing to pay the cost - the real cost, not including subsidies funded by taxpayer dollars - for them to have long, nice, natural lives? Because meat is already expensive, and it's artificially cheaper, and the animals only live about 10% of their natural lives. Chickens can live about 8-10 years but are killed at about 18 months when their egg laying starts to diminish. Cows are killed around the same time, but can live up to 20 years.

Would you choose to be fed okay food, in a pen, until you were about 15, then killed?

This article starts with a false premise: "Vegans are against the suffering of animals."

But really the point, at least for myself as a vegan is that "Vegans are against the suffering of animals at the hands of humans."

Often vegans are also environmentalists in that human effort has put additional major stressors on wildlife - deforestation, oil spills, human-accellerated climate change, plastic pollution, etc. Factory farming by humans happens in addition to wildlife suffering.

Wildlife suffering happens with or without humans, but humans active choose to breed and kill animals when we don't necessarily need to. We could just not do that.

Euthanasia and factory farming are apples and oranges. Cows can live up to 20 years, but are often killed at 18-24 months. They aren't killed with euthanasia, but panicked and terrified, with bolts to the skull and slit throats, right after seeing several other cows killed that way. Their lives before that are often miserable to keep costs down.

Is that the least cruel option?

I wouldn't describe that strategy as great. Having a desired effect, sure, but the tradeoffs are pretty nasty. And doesn't it create potential situations where you require a lawyer? And what if the laws in Texas change, what then?

Wouldn't it be easier instead for healthcare billing not to contain so many gotchas?

The number of staff at many universities has drastically increased in the last 10-15 years.

The number of full time, tenure track faculty positions has not. However, there are plenty of adjunct professors that have low wages, poor benefits, and no job security.

Government-insured student loans mean that the university has an incentive to take as much from that as possible. But the job market now often requires some kind of degree, and new students don't really know what they're signing up for by taking on $25k, $50k loans and beyond.

I think the target audience of this quote is aimed at marketing folks tasked with selling people on specific, already manufactured products / existing services. While this work can be creative, I don't think it has the same kind of impetus as something someone might create because they want to create it.

Here's the context of the quote.

> Here’s the #1 lesson you learn working in advertising (and this has stuck with me, to my advantage, my whole working life):

> Nobody wants to read your shit.

> Let me repeat that. Nobody–not even your dog or your mother–has the slightest interest in your commercial for Rice Krispies or Delco batteries or Preparation H. Nor does anybody care about your one-act play, your Facebook page or your new sesame chicken joint at Canal and Tchopotoulis.

Like Steam, but a little bit worse?

Even the best hardware right in front of you can still currently cause a bad user experience for latency-sensitive games. All it can take is one player with high latency or an unreliable connection, and it can detract from the enjoyability of a game.

And games already have latency from input devices, inputs registering, the game calculating the next frame, the monitor displaying it, and the user perceiving what has happened on screen. Every millisecond of network delay gets sandwiched between all of those.

I used LineageOS with microg on my Nexus 5x for a long time, and it mostly worked. With Magisk Hide I could use my bank apps. But I never got Lyft, Uber, or Bird to work properly.

I used to tutor folks in basic math classes at a small community college, mostly classes leading up to college algebra (Math 097, 098). Varied backgrounds, ages 18-50s.

There was a common theme to some of the problems these students had: if you didn't quickly grasp a concept in the specific way that particular teacher taught it, the class would soon move on to the next topic anyways. And sometimes teachers would not teach one particular thing very well, but it was something the rest of the class's instruction depended on. This left people adrift for the rest of the curriculum. If they took the class over again, they could get stuck at the same point because the class moved at the same pace, often with the same instructor. That's both incredibly frustrating and a huge waste of time and money!

That's correct, you may in fact order an XPS 13 pre-installed with Ubuntu from Dell. But you won't find an XPS 15 model with that option. I couldn't find it in January when I went to buy mine.

I have a 4 cylinder, rear-wheel drive pickup truck from that gets pretty good mpg and has a 6" truck bed. It's been invaluable when having to move anything. If I had the option to buy an electric one at my price point, I would have. Much of the CC-causing pollution from transportation is caused by semi trucks. You can try to consider how your purchases incur transportation needs, but until those trucks stop burning gas, it'll continue to be a problem.

There's not really a whole lot of electric trucks on the market (at the time I bought mine three years ago, IIRC there was one early 2000s Silverado hybrid model), and there's a ridiculous 25% tariff on imported light trucks. [0] As others have pointed out, manufacturers are not interested in making smaller vehicles. I think they would be popular because having a truck (or having a friend that has a truck) can make several situations a lot easier.

One thing I've done (that you can do too!) that's way better for an individual person to help combat climate change is to switch to a plant-based diet. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/18/health/plant-based-diet-clima...

An evolutionary advantage: having multiple, varied food sources is a protection against one of them going extinct. If the apple snails die out, so do the apple snail kites.

Humans are indeed pretty unique in that there are so many things we can eat. It has likely helped us as a species through various natural disasters.

I agree that better social programs, decreased inequality, and drug decriminalization would be a much better approach to preventing gun violence than more people having guns.

> Love it when Americans make decisions for Chinese people and presume to know what they'd want.

This is a discussion about Google (an American company) employees talking about one of Google's projects (as directed by the American company's leadership), but it happens to be about a product for another country.

> Living in China, you know your search engine will be censored. But still, wouldn't you want the best censored search engine that you can get?

As many folks in China use VPNs to get around the Great Firewall, it seems like they would like an uncensored internet.