Live data from Hacker News

“This is not the computer for you”

samhenri.gold

371–380 of 390 posts

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bingo! IMO, laptops are best used as thin clients and you do the heavy lifting on servers or a box in a closet somewhere. I'va been migrating my workflow to this approach and I'm an embedded dev! My closet does have hw strewn about but once you set it up that you don't have to touch wires it's super convenient. My one gripe with MacBook airs up to m4 was support for only one external monitor. But m4 fixed this.

I thought the single external monitor support was only with the M1. Wild it went on after that

Might just be for product differentiation?

You can work around that, of course, with some limitations. Eg the iPad sidecar thing is not limited to that, I think.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account. If I got a Chromebook as a personal…

Yeah, very little of this is still true of the period in which the Neo or modern Chromebooks exist. If the school is managing these Macs, including laptops sent home with a student, then unless it's for a specific purpose they aren't allowing you modify files, you probably aren't allowed to open a terminal or system settings, and you definitely aren't disabling SIP. You might not even be able to access the open inter…

Most schools will let you do all of those things, either out of incompetence or because it makes it impossible to actually use the Mac for what the Mac is good at.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the post here. You nailed it here; I used Chromebook as the example in my post since the one I used in high school was locked down to basically a kiosk. Couldn’t even open dev tools, much less root it. Such a wild departure from the eMacs I used in my elementary school’s library where I could set bonkers `defaults write` commands and customize every aspect of my account. If I got a Chromebook as a personal…

macOS or Windows can be similarly locked down. In the schools, the school locks it down. In many companies, there are management tools like JAMF, InTune, or NinjaOne that lock down laptops, desktops, tablets, and cell phones a little or completely.

With a Chromebook, there is one thing to lock down. On a Mac, there are a lot of things to do, because the whole point of it is that it's a normal computer.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

`grep -P` kinda annoying. GNU has Perl-compatible regex, and BSD does not. You're reaching for `perl` or installing `ggrep` the moment you need a lookbehind.

BSD grep is the pure grep version though. Perl regex is unnecessary bloat.

Is it unnecessary bloat to match for digits X in patterns $X, say among a bunch of receipts? Eye of the beholder and all, but I'm inclined to think no.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? In that case I retract the statement and will ponder what AI has done to my ability to assess this kind of writing!

Author here, it’s all me. I ran it through Claude before publishing to spot check me on grammar/typos and it caught a few syntax things, but this is just my writing style. Here’s a satire piece I wrote in the summer of 2021. Tonally very different but you can pick up on my voice between it and my essay yesterday: https://samhenri.gold/blog/20210803-localhost/

Welp, my bad. Apologies!

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And faking being sick so he could clap at Apple marketing events. He kinda lost me there.

Lighten up. He was a kid and he knows how silly that was.

It's sick even if it was a kid. Being so brand washed should trigger a parent intervention.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#378
post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the single external monitor support was only with the M1. Wild it went on after that

Might just be for product differentiation? You can work around that, of course, with some limitations. Eg the iPad sidecar thing is not limited to that, I think.

My 2016 MBpro can push 4k60 to 2x external monitors while still running its screen. It’s just ridiculous to me how far backwards they went there

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#379
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m waiting for somebody to come and tell us about the time they punched cards by hand, one hole at the time, and then threw coal in the furnace to have the cards interpreted by a steam-powered computer.

Do you have a substantive argument against any points made by parent?

it should be clear i'm not arguing along the points made by parent nor against them.

Re: “This is not the computer for you”

#380
Totally resonates with me. I was a kid in the country from a yard sale-scrounging sort of family, and we didn't have money for a computer, but we had a strong ethic of DIY and of education. I had a TI-99/4A (1981) in the late 80s, and an IBM PCjr (1984) in the 90s, but I still stretched them both to the limits of what I could figure out, find in any book I could get my hands on, experiment with $1 shareware I'd find at the mall, or learn about from talking to someone. No net, no meetups, no one else with a computer like mine. I'd come across a Packard Bell at the mall Sears, or a Tandy at Radio Shack, or a 486 setup for Wolfenstein 3D in the university bookstore during a journalism field trip. Figured out how to make a RAM disk to fool a PC game running on my PCjr into thinking there was a C: drive, all kinds of stuff like that. Just kept hacking and pushing and learning.
Post reply on HN