150% gang here. Actually 200% on my laptop but the resolution of that display is just ridiculous.

Fossil fuel power plants are unfortunately still profitable for their owners (billionaires...). The cost of building them has mostly been written off a long time ago. None of this is about what is good for America in the long run...

See also Bourdieu's Outline of a Theory of Practice.

Yup. Ubuntu promises the best of both worlds, and in my experience the end result is noticeably worse than Debian. You notice when things are deliberate and tested versus cobbled together and made to work.

The weird thing is that Ubuntu manages to sit in some unholy local minima.

Debian rock stable, changes slowly and carefully.

Fedora rock stable, changes rapidly and constantly.

Ubuntu is just painful.

Note: this is on the desktop, I just use Debian on the server as the host OS - some habits are hard to break.

Consider checking out Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Best of two worlds - stable foundation of Debian, easy-to-use interface of Mint. I have been using it for about 2 years now, very happy with it.

https://linuxmint.com/download_lmde.php

Used Cinnamon (on Fedora) for several years, it’s an excellent DE in the classic (and therefore best) style.

Fedora KDE is hard to beat on the features that matter to noir_lord scale though, it’s always good to have choices.

Curious what features you like in KDE. I also like kDE, but don't use it as my primary DE - in the past, it has felt complex to me.

Still supports a proper taskbar, one per screen with windows from only that screen on that screens taskbar (that's just how I've done it since the 90's but it's a must have because I think in terms of screen relations to where stuff is, it's my mental model) and virtual desktops (Cinnamon and XFCE both do this as do others) and it supports Wayland (which is why I'm not still on Cinnamon which I really liked as it's just coming out of experimental support for Wayland).

You can also disable sorting of windows in the taskbar, disable combining them (eugh, I hate that so much) into a single entry (never understood that design choice on OSX or DE's that do it by default, don't hide my shit when there is space to show both).

It is complex for a UI in that there are lots of things you can tweak (spread around in the settings) but just because you can doesn't mean you have to of course.

I mostly just leave the defaults except for the above and rebinding a bunch of the window management, beyond that I strip it back to a start menu, taskbar and clock on both screens.

Mostly I like it because when I'm using it I never have to think about it, if I have to consider the DE (in that it's not just working the way I'd expect it to) then it's failing as a DE because it is getting in the way.

XFCE, Cinnamon and KDE all clear that bar (others may, they are just the last three I used going back well over a decade), Gnome hasn't since v2, KDE has defaults but it doesn't have "opinions" on how you should use it the same way as some of the others.

Switching to KDE from Cinnamon was a non-event after years of using Cinnamon, it took maybe half an hour to find the all the settings I wanted to make it work how I wanted.

It is extremely stable/polished (at least on Fedora) out the box, I want to use my machine to do things, playing with WM/DE's used to fascinate me and 25 years ago I had the inclination, now I just want boring software and a DE as the main interface to the computer should be boring in actual use.

TLDR: I want the classic WIMP desktop, I don't want to have to configure a bunch of half supported/unstable extensions to do it.

I suspect there are plenty of people out there who habitually buy the most expensive of what Apple has to offer in any category. I guess Apple was leaving money on the table by not having anything in this price range in the first place.

Interesting team, what does Bella bring to the table?

Mostly her toys which I should throw without first taking them. Only throw, no taking

I've heard enough, she deserves a promotion!

Having a dog is one of the best things someone working in tech (in anything?) can do. It changed my life.

Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a moat.

This is like the Bronze Age collapse when city-states fell one by one to displaced demand, under the refugee interpretation of the Sea Peoples.

Interesting, I had not heard of this theory.

The Sea Peoples were only a part of the reason, the other reasons included climate change, volcanic eruptions, disease etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Late_Bronze_Age_collapse

Can anyone recommended any books?

The historian Brett Devreaux did a good summary article earlier this year:

https://acoup.blog/2026/01/30/collections-the-late-bronze-ag...

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline is great and is exactly on this topic.

I read that book earlier this year and really enjoyed reading it. The audiobook was also spoken by the author.

Also from Cline: After 1177 B.C.: The Survival of Civilizations (2024), ISBN 978-0691192130

For a TLDR https://youtu.be/aq4G-7v-_xI?si=7yNv6FKuGfqbz_rv is generally beloved

I have a feeling this is part of it, especially when you consider how many services let you use any of many available AI providers.

Except that nobody has a grok subscription so that makes zero sense.

Agree with the sentiment - but some companies like mine bought into cursor, and post acquisition, grok is relatively cheap via cursor

I know you meant this as a joke, but enough people might be using a routing service like openrouter.ai

Nobody is swapping out Claude for Grok, bro.

Nobody.

I did, at least until Fable 5.1. Grok’s models are excellent, amazing price-performance and speed too.

All you have to worry about is whether or not it’ll output kiddie porn or racist vitriol

SOMETHING SOMETHING HITLER SOMETHING GROK

Do you have any evidence for this claim, or are you just making it up?

Yes, I have carefully composed a twenty page report, mostly quantitative, and then I condensed it into this short comment.

Users perceiving the products as largely interchangeable and quickly DDoS'ing the other providers when one is down. So much for the possibility of a moat.

> pay a maximum $16.68 billion

Why "a maximum". Do can we expect that in practice it will be much less?

Some payment is withheld unless competitors (Youtube, TikTok) take specific actions as well.

"It tested well with the focus group..."