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How and why I stopped buying new laptops

solar.lowtechmagazine.com

111–120 of 288 posts

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#111
post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

That's a very interesting observation. I wonder if there's a word for it...

Have you noticed how much entropy goes into a German word? They certainly do have a word for every concept.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

I read somewhere (on HN?) that Italians speak faster than Germans because their words contain less information, so in the end they still communicate the same amount of information per minute. Italians and Germans were used in the example because they were the two extremes.

Is this RISC vs CISC human language philosophy?

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We need to actually coin a word to describe "company solved their use-case wonderfully and can't resist fiddling around with it for reasons that don't align with their user-base*. Can't help coin a new word, but Ralph Caplan described this phenomenon really well. I'm a (software) designer, and I think about this all the time: > When cuffs disappeared from men’s trousers, fashion designers gave interviews explaining…

In fashion, "newness" is a function.

Often even the function.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In German you have verschlimmbessern - making something worse in an attempt to improve it

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

It's because the German language is highly compound. Take any descriptive phrase, remove the spaces, and you have a new word.

In English, it'd be the equivalent of taking "make worse by improving" and turning it into "makeworsebyimproving".

When I was learning German, we were taught the language has far fewer core nouns than English (4000 vs 20,000 is stuck in my head, but this is going back years), but then they bash them together to get the rest of the concepts.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#115
post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blend of verschlimmern (“to make worse”) +‎ verbessern (“to improve”) From your link ...

The point is that's in a dictionary and thus is not a random combination of words.

These two things are not mutually exclusive.

The usage of these specific two words is just widespread enough to be entered into the dictionary.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#116

This story works well for a professional writer. If you are a professional developer/ video editor/ audio professional, or any number of other professions that lean heavier on the hardware they use, it's quite different. If buying new hardware is going to substantially improve my work-day, I'm going to buy new hardware. With the pace of modern hardware improvement, the time between purchases is longer, but there is s…

At least in my bubble, even professional developers, video editors, and audio engineers use a desktop computer as their primary daily driver and do not rely on their laptop for computational power rather than as a medium for presenting their work. Some of them are even switching to tablets for presenting to clients. A desktop computer will always offer more computational power and a more straightforward and cheaper update path. Why update a perfectly well-working laptop for a newer model when you have become accustomed to the quirks and features of your current device.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#117
post #9

The 11" Macbook Air solved the laptop form factor. Thin, light, very portable, USB ports on each side , headphone jack and an external monitor port (in this case, thunderbolt). Could there be some refinements to my 2015 MBA ? Certainly - the two type-A USB ports could remain type A but be upgraded to USB3 ... you could add a USB-C port on each side in place of the magsafe and lightning ports and gain the ability to c…

“Gilding the lily.”

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has anyone else noticed that when conversations about “we need x word for y concept” arise, the German language nearly always seems to be the one that has something similar or already present?

I read somewhere (on HN?) that Italians speak faster than Germans because their words contain less information, so in the end they still communicate the same amount of information per minute. Italians and Germans were used in the example because they were the two extremes.

Nice graph of syllables per second vs bits of information per second here:

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2019/09/28/why-are-...

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use OSS for my entire workflow. KDENLive is the best video editor imo but OSS video editors are still pretty bad. Shortcut is stable but it's basically iMovie circa 2011. Audacity is great. No qualms there. Krita is the king of photoshop clones. Makes gimp look like garbage.

Shortcut It's named “shotcut”, without the “r”.

Yeah that was most likely autocorrect.

Re: How and why I stopped buying new laptops

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I only use OSS for my entire workflow. KDENLive is the best video editor imo but OSS video editors are still pretty bad. Shortcut is stable but it's basically iMovie circa 2011. Audacity is great. No qualms there. Krita is the king of photoshop clones. Makes gimp look like garbage.

I struggle with Krita sometimes, but I think that's because I keep trying to use it like a Photoshop clone. Recently I've started treating it like a Painter clone in terms of my usage patterns and mindset when creating/editing things, and that seems to have resolved most of my issues & annoyances. Well, other than still not really having much in the way of a useful Photoshop clone, but I just run it in a VM these day…

It boggles my mind to this day that Krita even exists and nobody has even heard of it. It's a phenomenal piece of software and the devs should be commended for it.
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