I read that Chinese found a way to upgrade DRAM on GPUs, for example, making RTX 2080 Ti with 22 Gb DRAM, or RTX 4090 with 48 Gb. The modded cards are better (by price and RAM size) than the new ones manufactured by NVIDIA, although some say they are not reliable.

13 inch screen is a toy usable only for browsing social media and not for real work.

That's a take, for sure. I use a 14" as my daily driver. Sure, I plug it into a big monitor when I'm at my desk, but it's perfectly usable standalone.

I used to use an 11" as my daily driver (and that was before retina-resolutions were a thing). It wasn't ideal, but it was fine for development work.

As someone who likes small-screen laptops: no. The screen size is not the problem (unless it is also low-resolution), it's the battery size, and what the battery can power for a "reasonable" amount of time.

13-14" is the sweet spot between power storage, size, and energy efficiency in my opinion.

13 seems to have emerged as the generally best compromise for using at your desk and traveling. Even a 15” is still small relative to an external monitor and is getting large to fly with.

You don't use your laptop as just a thin client connecting to a more powerful machine over the Internet?

No, I do not. How does this solve the small screen size problem?

I read it as being not powerful enough and didn't parse the size issue properly. What exactly is the problem? I'm regularly using 12" laptops and don't see much wrong with it. Just changes the workflow a bit, as I normally use a 52" screen.

It's not ideal, but then working on a laptop never is.

yeah real programmers only use the biggest screens, the bestest cpus, and discrete graphics

Thereby all but ensuring the software they write will be sluggish on end users' computers- and "Runs fine on my machine." shall be their mantra.

"bestest" CPU is not required, but with 13 inch screen you have to either make everything tiny and strain your eyes, or have only 10-15 lines of code in the screen. Also, modern websites and apps use gigantic font size and you will have like 3 paragraphs of text in one screen.

Are you coding in Word or something? 36 point Times New Roman?

Companies have standardized on, mostly, 13” laptops with whatever accessories. But, honestly, for some people who never leave their desk, a desktop of some sort is probably a better choice— though just connecting to a server works too.

It costs like how many standard laptops? 3 or 4? They use the most expensive CPU (but not having best cost/performance ratio) for example.

What is the profit for a manufacturer if you buy one laptop and use it for 10 years straight instead of buying a new one every 3 years?

Also they not only solder DRAM, now they solder keyboards so that you cannot replace it easily. My garbage keyboard broke after just 2 years of using and I had to solder ~100 plastic pins to replace it (and the replacement keyboard turned out to be not of a great quality).

Yeah. My sister had a laptop that required a heat gun to remove its fragile keyboard, which was glued in place.

What a garbage company, artificially limiting the performance.

This is why "right a reprogram" should exist. Anyone should be able to reverse-engineer and reprogram anything that has a CPU.

>What a garbage company, artificially limiting the performance.

That's just modern corporate capitalism.

Manufacturing economics favour making everything the same for scale, while sale economics favour market segmentation.

Why not just use a web app from laptop at home? Why do you even need an app on your phone? So that you can urgently transfer money to some scammers you met in the street?

I do not have any banking apps, and I log into a bank account maybe once in month or less often.

Agreed that a website should be fine, but (Dutch) banks require the app as a second factor to log into the website. Fido2 hardware tokens could replace the bullshit requirement of "choose Apple or Google to be your overlord in order to use our service".

Ehm, no. They don’t all do at least. For one, Rabobank does not require it. You can use the app to authorize in the browser. But for big transfers you still need their Rabo Scanner (which you get the first one of for free).

It's being phased in due to regulations. They're allowed to offer insecure SMS 2FA to confirm transfers, etc. as an alternative but are supposed to move away from it.

We use SMS OTP as a second factor. Although banks of course want to save some cents and use push notifications for those who has a mobile app.

The EU has regulations requiring banks to move to an app with device and app integrity checks. SMS 2FA is temporarily permitted for backwards compatibility but is explicitly considered a legacy approach that's being phased out due to being insecure.

SMS OTP is not very secure relative to a push notification to an app

The same functionality available through a web app on a laptop is available on a GrapheneOS phone through the same web app. Banks increasingly limit features such as sending transfers or depositing cheques to their iOS and Android apps. There are government regulations and industry standards being put in place which require using an app with device and app integrity checks to approve transfers. The EU has these kinds of regulations but temporarily allowed using insecure SMS 2FA for confirmation instead.

> Banks increasingly limit features such as sending transfers or depositing cheques to their iOS and Android apps.

Not only these features. Viewing PIN, enabling bank cards for internet purchases, enabling/disabling cards.

Unfortunately the only way I can spend directly from my work-sponsored FSA account is if I download their app. I haven't, since I can still just submit receipts, but they won't send you a physical card.

I think EU regulation kind of force the banks into app usage as 2nd factor

Yes, they're required to move to apps with device and app integrity checks. SMS 2FA is temporarily permitted for the transition period.

A lot of banks are dropping support for making transfers from their regular webapp. AFAIK, in some countries a total of zero banks support this.

In Russia, all banks I tried, are usable via web app (because smartphone apps live only 1-2 months before they are detected and removed from app stores). The disadvantage of a web app is that it is not always-on, doesn't allow tracking users are well as a real app, and cannot display advertisement notifications.

EU regulations require banks to require confirmation in an app with device and app integrity verification. They don't specify what that means but they have to do it. SMS 2FA is temporarily allowed for the transition period.

Apps are not required to use the Play Integrity API or a similar attestation API. The details of what they're required to do are unspecified and open ended. Many are interpreting it as meaning they use the Play Integrity API and we have to convince each one to permit GrapheneOS via the Android attestation API. It's not good and we would greatly prefer if this wasn't happening even if we were managing to convince most apps to permit GrapheneOS.

Many Android phones are not unlockable without hacking. They use cryptography to protect the bootloader and to get the unlock code for your own phone first you need to provide them all your information.

You can be impolite at your home as much as you want but in public spaces we need to enforce politeness with harsh punishments.

Great let's pay everyone's fare from your income then.

It looks disgusting so I wish there was a hefty punishment and AI cameras.