red369

I find this immensely frustrating.

My work laptop (HP ZBook Studio 16 G11 - the current model) will will only charge from the USB C ports on the left side, not the right side. Unfortunately, that is low down my list of charging complaints for that laptop. It will not charge from USB C unless it is given a power supply that is at least 100W, even if it then only draws a fraction of that.

There is an exception, where it will charge from a lower wattage power supply (like 60W) when in standby or turned off. Often, it is happily charging away, and as soon as you wake it up, it stops taking any power. As soon as I need more, it takes less. And it is definitely not the case that it is draining faster than it is charging. It just stops charging.

Presumably, the justification for all this mess is that it is only supposed to be charged from the barrel plug 180W power supply, but with a weight starting at 1.73 kg, I would rather not lug a 1/2 kg power supply too.

Perhaps in all their efforts to make it slim and lightweight, they wanted to avoid extra power circuitry. After all, in their efforts to slim it down, they also cut an HDMI/DisplayPort, a camera cover - everything in fact except 3 USB C (not all thunderbolt), a USB A and a 3.5mm audio port. Our office meeting rooms are nicely wired with HDMI and USB-C chargers, but people are still forever trying to locate an HDMI adapter, or going back to their desks to get their power supply.

I think the GP was talking about the fact it is hard to find an EV that is bundled with a lot of invasive software.

There's another post on this article asking for an EV that doesn't: "need internet connectivity via wifi/esim at all? I'm looking for something really simple. A chassis, four wheels, an engine, airbags. Basically my current ICE car, just electric."

I'm hoping that they get a lot of good suggestions, but I'm not holding my breath.

Central Europe looks like it would have been lovely!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Interglacial#/media/File:...

The linked picture is just an artist's interpretation, not a photo, and I assume you were mostly joking too. I think we agree that it's not a good idea to hurry in warming the planet.

Orange is bright brown!

By the way, my comment is entirely in jest.

I would struggle to have to choose between only the words "red" and "yellow" to describe orange colours. Except for the orange fruit. I'm happy calling those yellow.

But the YCombinator logo? Yellowish red?

I agreed with you, and then went to the Wikipedia pages for both. I might have changed my mind now.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violet_(color)

Huh! That's very interesting.

I am definitely not the person to shed any light on what is going on, but you've added to my feeling that these adapters are all incomprehensible, so I'll try and do the same for you.

I have a USB C ethernet adapter (a Belkin USB-C to Ethernet + Charge Adapter which I recommend if you need it). I ran out of USB C ports one day, and plugged it through a USB C to USB A adapter instead. I must have done an fast.com speed-test to make sure it wasn't going to slow things down drastically, and found that the latency was lower! Not a huge amount, and I think the max speed was quicker without the adapter. But still, lower latency through a $1.50 Essager USB C to USB A adapter, bought from Shein or Shopee or somewhere silly!

I tried tons of times, back and forward, with the adapter a few times, then without the adapter a few times. Even on multiple laptops. As much as I don't want to, I keep seeing lower latency through this cheap adapter.

Next step, I'll try USB C to USB A, then back through a USB A to USB C adapter. Who knows how fast my internet could be!

I've been cold in an office at work and ran a stress test on an old laptop which was destined for e-recycling, so that it would blow warm air on my hands.

It wasn't achieving anything doing that work, but it did work well. At least I think the office was cold from not being heated enough, as opposed to being over-cooled in summer. I really hope that was the case!

For some reason, I must have been using the laptop for another purpose too, and I got attached to it and requested that it be wiped and took it home and used it as a daily-driver for years. It was a silly blue Dell E4300, and had a very easily swappable HDD tray so I bought a few different trays/faceplates, and could dual-boot by swapping HDDs in seconds (it didn't really need the screw to hold the tray in place). Bad battery life, but the battery could be swapped in seconds too.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Dell-Latitude-E4300.12612.0.ht...

A little more punctuation would have made it easier, and it took me a little while.

Once it finally clicked for me, I actually found it an interesting point I haven't heard before. That the main cause of the satanic panic was a fear that world-building becoming too popular would expose the likelihood that Christianity was also a fiction.

Personally, I think I find the idea more interesting, than I find it convincing.

I also find that interesting.

And not intending to defend the motives of anyone involved, but I'm hoping we can not worry about literally all jobs being destroyed, and AI companies amassing all the wealth in the world.

Don't we need at least some humans working and earning to buy these AI services? Am I not being imaginative enough? Is it possible for the whole economy to consist just of AI selling services to each other?

I realise that even if AI destroys most jobs, or even just a lot of jobs, and amasses most wealth, or a lot of wealth, it would still be a terrible thing for humans. The word "all" could have just been hyperbole, and it is still a valid point. I just want to know people's thoughts on whether entire replacement is possible.

I agree that these movies are really being cranked out. I hadn't even realised quite the extent of this until I went to look. But I think some of these movies are good enough that it shouldn't be disturbing that people in influential positions find them appealing:

I know a lot of people are critical of the Rotten Tomatoes score, but I find that when a high enough percentage of reviews are positive, it is likely I will enjoy the movie. Some of the Marvel movies have a very high proportion of positive reviews (admittedly, those reviews could be just positive, not very positive). And for most in this list with a very high score, I think it's deserved.

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

Arguably, one indication of the limitations of the Rotten Tomatoes score is the number of these Marvel movies with high scores :)

Btw, I'm not trying to convince you that if you watch the movies you'll like them. Just that they may not all be as bad as you think.

I'm going to write a silly comment here: For a moment I thought you wrote "... LLMs. Yeah, they're transformative, but I don't know that they're going to be eating ramen in a Neo-Tokyo street bar anytime soon."

I liked that mental image a lot! (I try to maintain being uncertain whether Deckard was a replicant)

Piggybacking off your comment to advertise my new favourite. Very quick, and gets me having some of the protein powder I'm supposed to be drinking anyway. Does result in having to wash a blender though :) Blend: - Instant coffee (caffeinated or decaf) - 1/2 serve of chocolate flavoured protein powder (unfortunately this is obviously a vague/unhelpful quantity) - Milk - Ice cubes

My favourite recent discovery is Assistive Access in the iOS Accessibility settings. You pick the apps you want access to (and set privacy permissions), then when you launch the mode your iPhone only shows those apps.

If you feel a sudden compulsion to access something you didn't allow yourself, you have to exit the mode, which takes as long as a reboot.

There are quite a few limitations of this mode, so it won't be for everyone (or maybe anyone on here?) but it's a pretty good detox. A lot stronger than screentime restrictions.

I like this, and I agree with the sentiment!

But does anyone else feel we might need to cross the search engine off this list soon? Since whatever happened which is reducing the usefulness of Google search (Search Engine Optimisation?), is search better now than it was in the pre-Google days?

Tangential question - would search engine optimisation have been less effective/destructive if there was more variety in the search engine people choose?

I have no idea about the 0.5% increase in drop goal distance, but tongue-in-cheek, I would say only 0.5% as many attempted drop goals - given the Fijian team's emphasis on a ball-in-hand style of play instead of kicking the ball away.

On a slightly related note, I always found the games played in Pretoria in South Africa fascinating. It's 1350 m above sea level, so kicks all go 10% to 15% further (my estimate) which makes quite a difference when there are players kicking penalties from over halfway even at sea level.

I've given this a little more thought, and I agree more with "Windows really does suck from a UX perspective" then I was thinking when I wrote my comment.

I really should have included the recent escalation in hostility towards users in my thoughts - built in ads, pushing unwanted products, trash news in new tab pages etc.

I agree completely about each being good for its own thing. I quite like iOS as a phone OS. The limitations often bother me, but since it's tiny screen that needs to fit in my pocket, I'm creating my own limitations anyway so I'll use it less (1).

I switch around enough that I try not to do crazy amounts of personalisation in my desktop OS. Probably this evens out the OSs and there are aspects I like and dislike about each. I guess I prefer KDE Plasma to Windows or MacOS. I choose that for my own computer, but I spend far more time in Windows. I'm not sure I agree it it much worse from a UX perspective. It allows keyboard only usage very easily, which is something I struggled with in MacOS.

1) I'm only focusing on the UI - there are some things I struggle to forgive, like not being able to set add my own ringtone or alarm tone, or not being able to have the volume of a ringtone increase as the phone rings like on every ancient feature phone.

I found reading mode worked perfectly. It usually does for me, and for a while I actually set it to enable by default for all websites with manual exceptions. The cases where it doesn’t work well are usually very long articles which load in parts, which I try not to read on my phone anyway (and of course websites that aren’t primarily one large block of text).

Full title:

Obesity as a behavioral addiction: moving past quick fixes and the case for inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders

I agree with the replies to this saying that the fact it could lead to drama should not prevent people doing things like this, but I can see this causing trouble/resentment too.

I think a lot of the other unasked for examples given could also cause resentment. Perhaps often the right thing to do is just taking the risk.

Flying ant day has always fascinated me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuptial_flight#Flying_ant_day

I remember when I was searching the file for some passwords my friends and family use, it took me a while to work out that number too. There are some passwords that many people seem to independently come up with and think must be reasonably secure. I suppose they are to the most basic of attacks.

I was going to provide my passwords to any random person on the internet, Troy Hunt might be close to the top of the list, but I think your sentiment is sensible.

I remember searching the dataset being fairly straight forward. It's been a while since I've done it, but I think I just downloaded the text file and then grepped it for hashes of my passwords, but I see people doing much more useful things:

https://medium.com/analytics-vidhya/creating-a-local-version...

Thanks! I only knew HP as the some computers and shitty printers company (and I realise that I swapped your adjectives, but I feel this way around is more deserved)

I never had a very strong opinion about HP products either way, so I can't really discuss how much they have declined, but are they so dead?

I am typing this message on very average HP keyboard, connected to an HP EliteBook and some HP monitor. The other monitor is Dell, and sure, it's nicer, but it's also newer. I see the mouse is also HP. None of these are amazing, but none of those are particularly bad. When I have a permanent desk, I do often bring my own peripherals into the office to use, but I don't mind any of these enough to do that semi-regularly. If my company were to ask what corporate laptop I would want instead, I would need to look on notebookcheck.net to see what I am missing out on. I wouldn't even bother trying to improve on the keyboard, mouse or monitor.

Sure, I didn't purchase a single one of the products above, and I can't think of anything I own right now which is HP, but I don't intentionally avoid their products. I tend to use refurbished corporate laptops for personal use, and at least one has been a refurbished EliteBook.

Apart from their printers, which other comments say I should particularly avoid buying, are they much worse than their competitors? (I think printers are a problem area and I would just buy the Brother printer anyway)

Edit: I just want to add, this might feel argumentative, but I am just genuinely asking. Maybe their products are a significantly worse experience and I've just not noticed. Or maybe they produce products that feel similar but don't last. It all feels similar pretty similar to me, with some ergonomic differences which mean I prefer some to others, and some breaking and some lasting forever. I've never noticed a pattern, but I've never looked either!

Thanks for reminding me of that! I considered that when I was finding it hard to find a passive PoE injector.

It's not quite as tidy, for example, with the router sitting visibly on a desk, but it's close. And you're right that it could work for anything.

I recently needed to buy a new power supply for my Mikrotik router (hAP ac²), so I decided to just buy a Ubiquiti PoE injector instead.

It feels magical to have the PoE injector tucked in a cupboard with the optical network terminal, and outside Narnia, the router has only one cable going to it. Also, the Ubiquiti PoE injectors are particularly satisfying. Powered by standard AC cables, and a nice simple design. Now that I've experienced this magic, I'm not going back!

However, as much as I love the hAP ac², it only accepts passive PoE. I don't love passive PoE - it scares me! Unfortunately, it seems like most (all?) Mikrotik routers only accept passive PoE.

Does anyone know of a good alternative when it comes time to replace my router? I would have liked it to be Ubiquiti, but I don't usually read positive things about them around here.

My comment is going to be like a tangent to a tangent, but since it's about Bitcoin it sort of comes back to the original topic.

I agree about digital payments, but one of the things that I found disappointingly complex about Bitcoin is needing to receive change when making a payment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unspent_transaction_output).

I only made a few Bitcoin transactions because I found the whole experience did not feel like the future. That was a while ago now, and as other commentors have pointed out, it not seems obvious that the real value in Bitcoin lies elsewhere.

I agree with your feeling that about Apple devices eventually getting updates to the point they becomes sluggish. I have just reached that point with iOS 26 and my iPhone 13 mini.

I am undecided in my thoughts about how malicious this is. Do people think that it is something like wanting to cram more features into the operating systems, and they are careless how it affects the earliest supported models? Or do most people think it is planned obsolescence?

Apple generally offer updates longer than Android, so is it more pronounced on iPhones than Android phones? I remember seeing similar slow-downs on Android phones in the past.

Apple generally offer updates for iOS for less time than Windows. I don't really have a feel for the difference between the two in terms of how much new versions slow down older hardware.

Obviously separating feature updates and security updates would be a way to address, and it's not possible that no one at Apple has considered that idea. They are a business and selling new products is unfortunately a disincentive pushing them away from doing that.

I think it is probably only a hardware issue in the sense that the iPhone 13 mini is probably too old/slow to run iOS 26 as quickly as the old version.

I updated my old/spare phone - an iPhone SE3, which I think has a similar processor and memory (A15 and 4GB). It became a lot more sluggish. I learned my lesson not to upgrade my main phone, also an iPhone 13 mini.

I also noticed a disappointing slow down on a 9th gen iPad, which has even older internals. Actually, perhaps I should be quickly looking into downgrading that if it's possible.