Battery would be grand for a household solar install. Seats would be nice on the porch. The frunk can hold a lot of chicken feed, and the cabin would make a fine henhouse for a small flock.

That cadence…

It’s a failure of ownership not management. If the people doing the work had ownership over the building, tools, process and products, it would only be as shitty as desired.

cf. Mondragon

Not me, I was only able to get 10³³ year amortization on mine.

how would you know which places to patrol, and when?

This is an extremely regional problem to solve. Where I am, which is a village and exurban-ruural, you would go to the electronics recycling depot and see if they have any choice items. Also you could call the various independent pc repair people to see if they have anything no longer supported but functional for free or cheap.

Also there’s various thrift stores that sometimes have computers cheap.

The closest big city is Vancouver so to curb cruise there I would pick upper middle class neighbourhoods with alleyways, and drive around on garbage collection days. I wouldn’t really dumpster dive unless I knew of a likely source from hearsay.

I do basic video editing, transcoding, front end coding and graphics, and usually push my machine pretty hard. But not for really long stretches. It’s bursty work, so an Air is ideal. If I were to need a desktop replacement I would get a 15" Air with 24 GB RAM.

Long compiles? Renders of 4k video over 30mins and on the clock? Get a pro.

You’re being downvoted but it’s true, they are very difficult to repair and non modular so some parts are crazy expensive. Broken display ribbon cable? $20 replacement cable? Nah it’s a whole new hi-res aluminum shell display for you!

But to be fair I don’t expect to be repairing many of the M1 Airs, it’s a very mature design, 10 years of form factor iteration and a small low power logic board. I’ve hardly worked on any of them, though I own one myself. A few abused batteries are starting to need replacing. It’s just the freaking batteries are glued in, so so stupid; not a reliability problem but an extra half hour of work over screws when replacing the battery.

Yeah it’s been in the ‘best deal going’ category since it came out. Very capable yet fist-sized.

It’s not just the low sticker price. It will save on electricity bills over its lifetime, and it is expected to be reliable like all the mac minis. Get less storage and add a nice fast external SSD drive to save money.

The base 16GB RAM is probably fine for most, but if you’re going to try and get 8-10 years out of it, like a lot of Mac owners do, go for 24 or more.

It can do moderate gaming and the emulation and virtualization future looks good.

It is very possible to limit your interaction with apple, avoid the App Store, not get an apple account, limit the telemetry leakage somewhat, and run software that’s open source or direct from its publishers.

Also: Asahi Linux will work. Eventually.

Most of my work is with Macs, and even one server is running macOS, so for those who don’t know how it works ‘over there’, one runs Time Machine which is a versioning system keeping hourlies for a day, dailies for a week, then just weeklies after that. It accommodates using multiple disks, so I have a networked drive that services all the mac computers, and each computer also has a USB drive it connects to. Each drive usually services a couple of computers.

Backups happen automatically without interruption or drama.

I just rotate the USB drives out of the building into a storage unit once a month or so and bring the offsite drives back in to circulation. The timemachine system nags you for missing backup drives if it’s been too long, which is great.

It’s not perfect but very reliable and I wish everyone had access to a similar system, it’s very easy, apple got this one thing right.

I have a bunch of old macs here with different distros onthem, mostly Mint, that I have been trying to give away to locals (without being obligated to provide support, which is the stickler apparently). They all run great. One could dumpster dive or curb cruise, or around here, lurk at Recycling.

No soil. Might as well grow food in a building.

kakistocracy (plural kakistocracies)

1. (political science) Government under the control of a nation’s worst or least-qualified citizens. [from 1829.]

Remember to visit the range on windy days, folks.

My mother’s village of 800 people, they hung partisans from each corner of the town square. Regularly. It was stressful and fucked up for a little kid, and my grandfather was a partisan.

As always:

Follow the Money

kakistocracy

Noun

kakistocracy (plural kakistocracies)

1. (political science) Government under the control of a nation’s worst or least-qualified citizens. [from 1829.]

Such a prescient episode.

So “I’d hit that” means in 300 years we’ll say hit instead of fuck?

I think the statement you are responding to is not prescriptive, but that the situation needs to be described accurately.

Edit: your edit is an improvement, thanks.

Oh gawd what if instead of instinctively flipping the bird at swastitrucks we all started doing the bodysnatcher call-out? Like lining the sidewalks screeching and pointing.