- If I buy x amount of ram | hard drive space | cpu power I will never need more.
- No need for version control | Tests. This is a small project
- git commit -m "changes" (its a small change. I will remember why I did it)
- It is too obvious that I put a lot of personal time in this so my boss will definitely notice!
- Why comment this simple method? Anyone should know what it does. Especially me!
- "this should never happen"
- This call can't be from work. Everyone knows I am on vacation.
- I will back up next week. It's not like it is going to crush today.
- It’s 11:30 already? I will work on this for only a half hour more and then I will definitely go to bed!
- This project will take x amount of time!

Now Chrome has a new competitor..

So, I decided to post this based on @Morningstar's conundrum.

I'm dissatisfied with the laptop market.

Why THE FUCK should I have to buy a gaming laptop with a GTX 1070 or 1080 to get a decent amount of RAM and a fucking great processor?

I don't game. I program. I don't even own a fucking Steam library, for clarification. Never have I ever bought a game on Steam. Disproving the notion that I might have a games library out of the way, I run Linux. Antergos (Arch-based) is my daily driver.

So, in 2017 I went on a laptop hunt. I wanted something with decent specs. Ultimately ended up going with the system76 Galago Pro (which I love the form factor of, it's nice as hell and people recognize the brand for some fucking reason). Matter of fact, one of my profs wanted to know how I accessed our LMS (Blackboard) and I showed him Chromium....his mind was blown: "Ir's not just text!"

That aside, why the fuck are Dell and system76 the only ones with decent portables geared towards developers? I hate the prospect of having to buy some clunky-ass Republic of Gamers piece of shit just to have some sort of decent development machine...

This is a notice to OEMs: yall need to quit making shit hardware and gaming hardware with no mid-range compromise. Shit hardware is defined as the "It runs Excel and that's all the consumer needs" and gaming hardware is "Let's put fucking everything in there - including a decent processor, RAM, and a GTX/Radeon card."

Mid-range that is true - good hardware that handles video editing and other CPU/RAM-intensive tasks and compiling and whatnot but NOT graphics-intensive shit like gaming - is hard to come by. Dell offers my definition of "mid-range" through Sputnik's Ubuntu-powered XPS models and what have you, and system76 has a couple of models that I more or less wish I had money for but don't.

TBH I don't give two fucks about the desktop market. That's a non-issue because I can apply the logic that if you want something done right, do it yourself: I can build a desktop. But not a laptop - at least not in a feasible way.

I do not like the direction laptop vendors are taking.

New laptops tend to feature fewer ports, making the user more dependent on adapters. Similarly to smartphones, this is a detrimental trend initiated by Apple and replicated by the rest of the pack.

As of 2022, many mid-range laptops feature just one USB-A port and one USB-C port, resembling Apple's toxic minimalism. In 2010, mid-class laptops commonly had three or four USB ports. I have even seen an MSi gaming laptop with six USB ports. Now, much of the edges is wasted "clean" space.

Sure, there are USB hubs, but those only work well with low-power devices. When attaching two external hard drives to transfer data between them, they might not be able to spin up due to insufficient power from the USB port or undervoltage caused by the impedance (resistance) of the USB cable between the laptop's USB port and hub. There are USB hubs which can be externally powered, but that means yet another wall adapter one has to carry.

Non-replaceable [shortest-lived component] mean difficult repairs and no more reserve batteries, as well as no extra-sized battery packs. When the battery expires, one might have to waste four hours on a repair shop for a replacement that would have taken a minute on a 2010 laptop.

The SD card slot is being replaced with inferior MicroSD or removed entirely. This is especially bad for photographers and videographers who would frequently plug memory cards into their laptop. SD cards are far more comfortable than MicroSD cards, and no, bulky external adapters that reserve the device's only USB port and protrude can not replace an integrated SD card slot.

Most mid-range laptops in the early 2010s also had a LAN port for immediate interference-free connection. That is now reserved for gaming-class / desknote laptops.

Obviously, components like RAM and storage are far more difficult to upgrade in more modern laptops, or not possible at all if soldered in.

Touch pads increasingly have the buttons underneath the touch surface rather than separate, meaning one has to be careful not to move the mouse while clicking. Otherwise, it could cause an unwanted drag-and-drop gesture. Some touch pads are smart enough to detect when a user intends to click, and lock the movement, but not all. A right-click drag-and-drop gesture might not be possible due to the finger on the button being registered as touch. Clicking with short tapping could be unreliable and sluggish. While one should have external peripherals anyway, one might not always have brought them with. The fallback input device is now even less comfortable.

Some laptop vendors include a sponge sheet that they want users to put between the keyboard and the screen before folding it, "to avoid damaging the screen", even though making it two millimetres thicker could do the same without relying on a sponge sheet. So they want me to carry that bulky thing everywhere around? How about no?

That's the irony. They wanted to make laptops lighter and slimmer, but that made them adapter- and sponge sheet-dependent, defeating the portability purpose.

Sure, the CPU performance has improved. Vendors proudly show off in their advertisements which generation of Intel Core they have this time. As if that is something users especially care about. Hoo-ray, generation 14 is now yet another 5% faster than the previous generation! But what is the benefit of that if I have to rely on annoying adapters to get the same work done that I could formerly do without those adapters?

Microsoft has also copied Apple in demanding internet connection before Windows 11 will set up. The setup screen says "You will need an Internet connection…" - no, technically I would not. What does technically stand in the way of Windows 11 setting up offline? After all, previous Windows versions like Windows 95 could do so 25 years earlier. But also far more recent versions. Thankfully, Linux distributions do not do that.

If "new" and "modern" mean more locked-in and less practical and difficult to repair, I would rather have "old" than "new".

After a few weeks of being insanely busy, I decided to log onto Steam and maybe relax with a few people and play some games. I enjoy playing a few sandbox games and do freelance development for those games (Anywhere from a simple script to a full on server setup) on the side. It just so happened that I had an 'urgent' request from one of my old staff member from an old community I use to own. This staff member decided to run his own community after I sold mine off since I didn't have the passion anymore to deal with the community on a daily basis.

O: Owner (Former staff member/friend)
D: Other Dev

O: Hey, I need urgent help man! Got a few things developed for my server, and now the server won't stay stable and crashes randomly. I really need help, my developer can't figure it out.
Me: Uhm, sure. Just remember, if it's small I'll do it for free since you're an old friend, but if it's a bigger issue or needs a full recode or whatever, you're gonna have to pay. Another option is, I tell you what's wrong and you can have your developer fix it.
O: Sounds good, I'll give you owner access to everything so you can check it out.
Me: Sounds good

*An hour passes by*

O: Sorry it took so long, had to deal with some crap. *Insert credentials, etc*
Me: Ok, give me a few minutes to do some basic tests. What was that new feature or whatever you added?
O: *Explains long feature, and where it's located*
Me: *Begins to review the files* *Internal rage wondering what fucking developer could code such trash* *Tests a few methods, and watches CPU/RAM and an internal graph for usage*
Me: Who coded this module?
O: My developer.
Me: *Calm tone, with a mix of some anger* So, you know what, I'm just gonna do some simple math for ya. You're running 33 ticks a second for the server, with an average of about 40ish players. 33x60 = 1980 cycles a minute, now lets times that by the 40 players on average, you have 79,200 cycles per minute or nearly 4.8 fucking cycles an hour (If you maxed the server at 64 players, it's going to run an amazing fucking 7.6 million cycles an hour, like holy fuck). You're also running a MySQLite query every cycle while transferring useless data to the server, you're clusterfucking the server and overloading it for no fucking reason and that's why you're crashing it. Another question, who the fuck wrote the security of this? I can literally send commands to the server with this insecure method and delete all of your files... If you actually want your fucking server stable and secure, I'm gonna have to recode this entire module to reduce your developer's clusterfuck of 4.8 million cycles to about 400 every hour... it's gonna be $50.
D: *Angered* You're wrong, this is the best way to do it, I did stress testing! *Insert other defensive comments* You're just a shitty developer (This one got me)
Me: *Calm* You're calling me a shitty developer? You're the person that doesn't understand a timer, I get that you're new to this world, but reading the wiki or even using the game's forums would've ripped this code to shreds and you to shreds. You're not even a developer, cause most of this is so disorganized it looks like you copy and pasted it. *Get's angered here and starts some light screaming* You're wasting CPU usage, the game can't use more than 1 physical core, and after a quick test, you're stupid 'amazing' module is using about 40% of the CPU. You need to fucking realize the 40ish average players, use less than this... THEY SHOULD BE MORE INTENSIVE THAN YOUR CODE, NOT THE OPPOSITE.
O: Hey don't be rude to Venom, he's an amazing coder. You're still new, you don't know as much as him. Ok, I'll pay you the money to get it recoded.
Me: Sounds good. *Angered tone* Also you developer boy, learn to listen to feedback and maybe learn to improve your shitty code. Cause you'll never go anywhere if you don't even understand who bad this garbage is, and that you can't even use the fucking wiki for this game. The only fucking way you're gonna improve is to use some of my suggestions.
D: *Leaves call without saying anything*

TL;DR: Shitty developer ran some shitty XP system code for a game nearly 4.8 million times an hour (average) or just above 7.6 million times an hour (if maxed), plus running MySQLite when it could've been done within about like 400 an hour at max. Tried calling me a shitty developer, and got sorta yelled at while I was trying to keep calm.

Still pissed he tried calling me a shitty developer...

*rewrites rust mpsc*

you did it wroooong

I thought my threads were locking if I had thousands of jobs spawning thousands of more jobs. turns out it's fine. actually if I organize my data locks in the way everyone wants to do them my CPU fans go off but my original way you don't feel jack shit and processes faster

turns out it's because 320k jobs is a bit much for mpsc. because my jobs can spawn more jobs the whole thing just grinds to a halt. and there's sync-mpsc which allows you to have a maximum number of data you send through it, therefore I can just have 245 sent jobs instead of 320k but then this locks all the threads because for a thread to finish it needs to finish sending jobs, but a sync mpsc won't let you send a job if current jobs are over the specified limit. so all the threads get stuck sending jobs. smart. not. what's even the point of that?!

and evidently there's no built-in way to prioritize certain jobs. the AI thinks you should just send jobs in and each thread should have a priority queue. I don't know sounds dumb to me. then you could by random luck have threads with lots of jobs that need to be prioritized to be done and other threads stuck hanging waiting for previous jobs / the other threads. no thanks

so clearly the solution is to rewrite mpsc but allow prioritization when a thread goes in to ask for a job to do

since my jobs are intended to start other jobs, it makes sense to have no actual upper bound limit to the number of jobs in the queue but to favour doing jobs that won't start new jobs to lower the RAM and compute necessary to juggle all this

hope this is the actual problem. cuz the code works for like 200 jobs spawning 500 jobs each, which is 100k jobs total
but it stalls to a halt doing 8300 jobs spawning 500 jobs each (which if I do the math -- in my tests it stalls at 320k jobs and seems the number should be 4,150,00 jobs -- yeah I think this is probably the damned problem)

I'm fucking tired of my computer having random
2 seconds latency on any basic action and being slow as fuck regardless of powerful processor, ssd and 32GB RAM. Music via bluetooth is basically unusable since every few seconds the music stops for a 0.2s then plays again. I installed this system (opensuse tumbleweed) in February this year and it's just sad that I have reinstall again (any ideas for distro) ?

I made a dummy mistake of buying a CPU without internal graphics and this resulted in having to buy a GPU. So I got myself Nvidia(another mistake) since i though i would be using CUDA on the university. Turnes out CUDA cannot be installed for some retarded reason.
With Nvidia GPU the screens on my two monitors are swapping every time I use a hdmi switch to use other computer. On AMD GPU this problem does not exist. AMD GPU pro drivers are impossible to install. Computers barely fucking work, change my mind. Shit is breaking all the time. Everything is so half assed.

The music player that i use sometimes swaps ui with whatever was below it like for example the desktop background and i need to kill the process and start again to use the program. WTF.

Bluetooth seems to hate me. I check the bluetooth connected devices on my computer, it says headphones connected. BULLSHIT. The headphones are fucking turned OFF. How the fuck can they be connected you dumbass motherfucker computer. So I turn on the headphones. And I cannot connect them since the system thinks that they are already connected. So I have to unpair them and pair them again. WTF. Who fucking invents this bullshit?
Let's say i have headphones connected to the computer. I want to connect them to phone. I click connect from the phone settings. Nothing happens. Bullshit non telling error "could not connect". So I have to unpair from computer to pair to phone. Which takes fucking minutes, because reasons. VERY fucking convenient technology.
The stupid bluetooth headphones have a loud EARRAPE voice when turning them on "POWER ON!!! PAIRING", "CONNECTED", "DISCONNECT". Loudness of this cannot be modified. The 3 navigation buttons are fucking unrecognizable so i always take few seconds to make sure i click the correct button.

Fucking keyboard sometimes forgets that I remapped esc key to caps lock and then both keys don't work so i need to reconnect the keyboard cable. At least it's not fucking bluetooth.

The only reason why hdmi switches exist is because monitor's navigation menus have terrible ui and/or infrared activated, non-mechanical buttons.
Imagine the world where monitors have a button for each of it's inputs. I click hdmi button it switches it's input to hdmi. I click display port button - it switches to display port. But nooo, you have to go through the OSD menu.

My ~ directory has hundred of files that I never put there. Doesn't feel like home, more like a crackhead crib.

My other laptop (also tumbleweed) I click on hibernate option and it shuts down. WTF. Or sometimes I open the lid and screen is black and when i click keyboard nothing happens so i have to hold power button and restart.

We've been having computers for 20 + years and they still are slow, unreliable and barely working.

Is there a cure? I'm starting to think the reason why everything is working so shitty and unreliable, is because the foundations are rotten. The systems that we use are built with c, ridden with cryptic abbreviated code, undefined behavior and security vulnerabilities. The more I've written c programs the more convinced I am, that we should have abandoned it for something better long ago. Why haven't we? And honestly what would be better? Everything fucking sucks. The rust seems to be light in the tunnel but I don't know if this is only hype or is it really better. I'm sure it can't be worse than c or c++. Either we do something with the foundations or we're doomed.

> picking parts for best possible piecemeal upgrade/sidegrade price with parts made after 2011
> need CPU, mobo, RAM, case
> Ryzen 5 2600, 16? No, 32GB DDR4 of just whatever speed...
> wait, what do you mean new motherboards are $300? Wait.
> Wait, no, how is the one Ryzen motherboard under $100 a shit B450M on sale? The fuck are these prices?

TIL motherboards are volatile as fuck on price. In fact, mobos are less stable in value than most crypto.

Jesus fuck.

(The one B450M i saw is actually now $140-some and a nice X570 is currently $120. Why does the price of these fuckers change *daily?*)

as for case none under $100 are good so i picked some random mostly-mesh ATX mid case over my preferred ATX full case and i'm just gonna pray i can find some fan config that works because at this point i'm done with this shit fuck this, a bottom-barrel mobo, low-tier cpu and a decent case shouldn't be $400 or more

MACBOOK PRO 14.2" M3 PRO & M3 - NEW!
• M3 Pro - 12-core CPU - 18-core GPU - 18GB RAM - 1TB
SSD - INT - Space Black - 2800€

I have never seen more brutal specifications for a laptop in my life.

This 1 laptop is more expensive than 2 new iphones and 1 whole imac desktop PC. Why would someone need this?