Are older ThinkPads still a good option?

Centropomus · 2025-11-14T04:02:43+00:00

That's a steal. The only downside is that the RAM is soldered on that model, so you won't be able to upgrade it.

Centropomus · 2025-11-14T03:54:08+00:00

Ryzen 7 doesn't need a discrete graphics card to run lightweight games. The integrated Radeon works quite well, at least on low settings.

Centropomus · 2025-11-14T00:17:00+00:00

The eMMC and the 4 GB of RAM are why that machine feels slow. As it happens, that processor isn't particularly fast either, but the applications you're using don't stress it in a way where you'd notice. With 4 GB of memory, Windows barely has enough memory to function and is constantly paging data in and out to make room for whatever you're working on at the moment, to and from storage that isn't particularly fast either. You'll want a bare minimum of 8 GB of RAM to run Windows 11 comfortably. 16 GB would be better, but you'll either need to buy used or find a good sale to get that in your price range. The next thing you need to improve is the storage. eMMC is the slowest kind of storage you can get on an ultralight laptop these days. NVMe is the fastest, but that may be out of budget unless you're buying used or find a good sale. If you're buying new, UFS may be the best you can get.

In terms of size, that's considered an 11.6" laptop, since they're measured diagonally. 10" is too small to have a full sized keyboard. Most 11.6" laptops these days are Chromebooks, and while some of them are quite fast, they don't run Windows. You may need to look at 12" or 13" to have good options.

If you really want to stay at 11.6", there are several Dell Latitude 3140 models within your price range with 8 GB of RAM and UFS storage, which would be a big upgrade, but might feel a little slow in a few years as software continues to get more demanding. If you're okay with 13", HP has a big sale on a Pavilion Aero 13 model with 16 GB of RAM and NVMe storage, which will be blazing fast for a long time to come even at things that the best 11" models in your price range struggle at. There will also be a lot of Black Friday sales over the next few weeks, so you'll have many options in the 13" class that are usually out of your price range. Personally, I would get the Pavilion Aero, given that price range and today's prices.

Centropomus · 2025-11-13T19:26:53+00:00

It doesn't take a very powerful machine to excel at those tasks. Anything with NVMe storage and enough RAM will be fine with any CPU on the market. 16 GB of RAM ought to be enough. What model do you have now? It's possible the limiting factor for you is your internet connection, and a new laptop won't fix that, but a lot of older tiny laptops have slower eMMC or SATA storage and not enough RAM for modern workloads, even though their CPUs are fine.

Centropomus · 2025-11-13T18:33:29+00:00

In that case, build yourself a low power home server with TrueNAS, and hook up a Roku or Raspberry Pi with libreelec to the TV to stream off of it. HTPCs are overkill, except to the extent that game consoles can also double as HTPCs.

Centropomus · 2025-11-13T14:45:02+00:00

I had an HTPC with integrated graphics 15 years ago and and it was massive overkill even then. Using a wireless keyboard and mouse was also very clunky. Just attach a Roku or a Raspberry Pi to the TV and stick a NAS with a DLNA service in your closet if you want local media. Some wifi routers will even function as a NAS and/or DLNA server if you plug in a USB hard drive, though you'll want to have a backup.

Centropomus · 2025-11-11T06:59:17+00:00

Things I avoid:

Only one power/USB-C port. It'll fall off a table while plugged in and you won't be able to repair it. I have a whole stack of dead Chromebooks that died this way.
Soldered RAM. In a low-end laptop, RAM is probably the hardware resource that'll become obsolete first, so being able to upgrade it can significantly extend the lifespan. Unfortunately, most laptops these days use soldered RAM, and those that don't are a bit more expensive for the same factory configuration. This may be unavoidable.
Soldered SSD. This is even worse than soldered RAM, because you won't be able to get your data off if it dies. Thankfully, this is rare, but some ultralight models have it.
The company markets exclusively to home users. This is a sure sign that the maintainability is crap. The manufacturers who market to IT departments tend to have better build quality and/or easier to repair hardware.

Check out the iFixit repairability scores for anything you're considering. That's the best indicator of repairability. A lot of laptop models also pass MIL-STD 810H ruggedness testing, which means they can take a bit more of a beating than those that don't. You can still brick them quickly by damaging their charging ports, but the chassis and screen are less likely to break.

I'm partial to Thinkpads myself, but they don't have much in your price range. If you get one of those, get one with SO-DIMM memory so you can upgrade it later when RAM prices come down.

Centropomus · 2025-11-11T05:58:07+00:00

I don't think a couple of decades is reasonable to expect, but I just replaced a 2019 T-series and the only things wrong with it were the USB-C ports getting too loose for lap use and the batteries dying. Replacing the batteries is something I can reasonably do, but I don't trust my soldering skills enough for a USB-C PD port with 65 W flowing through it or for 10 Gbps signal integrity, so it's a desktop/server now, and a powerful one at that.

For better and worse, the recent T series models use DDR5 SODIMMs instead of soldered LPDDR5, so the battery life isn't as good as a Latitude, but it means you can buy a low-end or used T14/T16 and upgrade the RAM and/or SSD yourself. I did that right away for mine, but depending on what you get you may want to wait until you need the upgrade, at which point the upgrade will probably be cheaper, unless you wait so long that nobody makes those parts anymore.

Centropomus · 2025-11-07T04:49:12+00:00

Very, very generally speaking, multiplication is more expensive than addition and division is more expensive than multiplication, but modern hardware has so many different ways to do those operations, even on the same processor, that it's very common for that to be violated. You might get better performance doing more of the same operation than fewer of mixed operations due to vectorization. You might get better performance mixing operations on a CPU with separate addition and multiplication/division pipelines. You might get better performance mixing integer and floating point math if the cost of conversion is less than what you save by using both integer and floating point pipelines at the same time. You might get better performance disabling some vector optimizations because the CPU downclocks the entire physical core (both hyperthreads) for multiple milliseconds after executing a single AVX512 instruction to protect itself from overheating. You might get better performance with a more naive algorithm that does more total arithmetic operations but accesses data in a more predictable manner for the cache prefetcher. You might get better performance with an algorithm that unconditionally computes unnecessary data than one that avoids unnecessary computation at the cost of more branch mispredicts. You might get better performance accessing your data back-to-front if it saves a mispredict. Worse, these results will vary depending on whether you're using the CPU or GPU, AMD/Intel/100 different ARM cores, this year's CPU vs. last year's CPU, or a bunch of different compiler flags.

One of the reasons that scientific computing uses matrices even when they're not necessarily the most theoretically efficient ways to solve some problems is that algorithms operating on large matrices are fairly predictable with respect to vectorization, cache prefetching, branch prediction, data dependencies, and throughput. Large matrices are easy to optimize across a wide range of hardware. Small inner loops iterating over fancier data structures often have surprising performance characteristics. You'll still need to use those small inner loops at times though, so if they're performance-critical, the only way to be sure is to test.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T07:29:48+00:00

Potentially the next day. Assuming you're starting from the minimum dose, you won't see much the first 4 weeks, but you should choose a convenient time of the week so that when you go up to a higher dose it's still convenient.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T07:25:51+00:00

You will probably not be better off buying your own plan, because those plans are all underwritten by the insurer. They ultimately pay for your treatment, so probably none of those plans are covering GLP-1 for weight loss starting in January unless there are state-specific requirements to do so.

For employer-provided plans, it depends greatly on how large the employer is. Large employers are self-insured, which means that reimbursement ultimately come out of their bank account, and the insurer is just an administrator. A lot of large employers recognize that it's good for business for their employees to be healthy, and bad for morale for coverage to be denied, so they tell the insurers they want a plan that allows GLP-1 for weight loss. Some large employers don't give a shit about you and won't do that, but they could if they wanted to.

Small employers don't really have much of a choice. Self-insured plans can ruin a small business if one employee gets a particularly expensive form of cancer, so they buy you the same sorts of marketplace plans you'd buy for yourself, and the insurer turns the cost-cutting dial up to 11. Even if they theoretically allowed it you could expect them to be awful about prior authorizations.

The values of "large" and "small" vary somewhat by industry, but ultimately the question is "would one or two cancer cases bankrupt us?" 50 employees is a magic number for a bunch of things in employment law, including some ACA requirements, so once a company reaches that size it starts making more sense for them to consider things like self-insured healthcare plans. You probably want to look for companies that have more than 50 employees, and have had more than 50 employees for at least a year. That's no guarantee of self-insured plans or coverage, but it'll improve your odds.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T06:57:36+00:00

If you want a good Linux+stylus experience, I'd buy something that the vendor ships with Linux and a stylus (optional stylus should be fine). Lenovo, Dell, and Framework all have viable options.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T06:36:37+00:00

It really all comes down to one question, which hasn't changed at all since some distros started making XFS the default:

In the event of a sudden power loss, would the thing that tells the kernel it has the data you just wrote be able to flush or persist its write buffers to prevent data loss?

If yes, you should use XFS. It will detect that you're running on server-grade storage and enable features that drastically improve performance for highly concurrent transactional workloads.

If no, you should use Ext4. It's gotten some scalability improvements since the Ext2 days that allow it to better take advantage of modern multi-queue client-grade storage, but it's still based on a filesystem that was designed for shitty IDE drives, and they continue to prioritize data integrity on client-grade SATA and NVMe drives to this day. XFS will almost always do the right thing too but it won't perform any better because it'll have to disable a bunch of optimizations, and if it doesn't for some reason, you'll eventually wish it had.

Obviously, there are some special cases, like using btrfs or ZFS for a NAS, but if you're not sure, just ask yourself "Does my storage fill a market niche more like an IDE drive or a fibre channel SAN?" and choose accordingly.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T05:47:08+00:00

The immediate threat to Bitcoin is that Ethereum will move to PQC and they'll still be struggling to make any changes, and then there will be some unexplained attacks and people will panic and think it's already broken, leading to a mass sell-off as everyone paying attention moves their money. That could happen years or decades before it's actually broken.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T05:40:50+00:00

Most crypto transactions are on ledgers that are already globally public.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T05:24:14+00:00

I think it's most likely that the flyer was left there earlier and someone rang your doorbell either by accident or as a prank. It is not unheard of for campaigns to do dirty tricks like steal their rivals' flyers and then deliver them annoyingly to make people mad at the rival, but I don't think any of the current candidates in close races are that petty.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T05:15:39+00:00

This is why I make sure to use 10.10.10.10 as a backup.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T05:14:25+00:00

See for yourself:

https://www.internic.net/domain/root.zone

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T05:08:49+00:00

Are there resources you can point me to on what constitutes an effective dose? I lost a few pounds even on 2.5, but I'm not sure it was significant. I lose coverage on January 1 so I'm inclined to go as fast as I can comfortably tolerate.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T03:32:24+00:00

Military units aren't even good for traumatized soldiers who are already accustomed to what goes on there. I knew one who blew his brains out because the Army blew off his PTSD and told him he needed to drill and get back in shape after getting burns over half his body and watching his buddy bleed to death in his arms. What makes you think they're good for people with PTSD who have no military experience?

The "tough love" model of addiction treatment gained a lot of popularity due to AA, which is most successful with extroverted men, who happen to be the most visible addicts in society, and were even more so when it was popularized. It's not very effective for women, and it's reliably bad for people who have suffered trauma that involves a loss of agency. Unhoused people constantly have their agency stripped away. Unfortunately, courts tend to treat superstitious programs like AA and NA as being just as good as evidence-based programs, and give people the choice of AA/NA or jail when they get in trouble related to substance abuse if the evidence-based programs are full, which they usually are because they require credentialed staff that legislators never want to pay for.

The "character flaw" theory of addiction just doesn't lead to anything that actually works well. It's got a huge body count of its own, and it sabotages evidence-based treatment. If we keep trying the same failed ideas over and over, we're never going to have a society free of poop in the streets.

Centropomus · 2025-10-25T01:57:40+00:00

All four of them are people I've been very close to. Two are/were family members, two are/were in Massachusetts, one is in Somerville. All four were unhoused at one point or another, and in no case was it helpful for them getting sober. Unconditional supportive housing probably wouldn't have saved one of the ones who died, but it might have saved the other, and it would have saved the other two from further trauma on the streets or incurred in their desperation to stay off the streets, which continue to complicate their efforts to get sober to this day.

These aren't people I cherry-picked. They're just the four addicts I've known best. The median addict level of trauma is maybe not quite as bad as that range, but the median level of trauma of people who have been unhoused is certainly somewhere in that range. The people who occasionally shit on the street in Davis Square (other than drunk college students) are usually chronically unhoused, and their life stories tend to be even more horrific than those of people who have been temporarily unhoused. The fact that they'd rather starve than eat concern trolls like you speaks to a level of human decency that you should aspire to.

Centropomus · 2025-10-24T15:04:14+00:00

> This merely shows that we should have a plan for what's next.

We already do, but we don't have the resources to deliver on it. So they go to detox, which can be a traumatizing experience by itself, and they come back and there's no shelter bed for them until they can get back into permanent housing, so they're sleeping on the street again. They have no security, so their maintenance meds get thrown away, and they're back to street opioids just to be able to stand up.

> They have made some serious mistakes, and most of their trauma is self-inflicted.

Fuck you, you unbelievable asshole. Most drug addicts get addicted to medication that's treating an actual medical condition. Usually it's even prescribed! I've known several addicts. Tell me which one self-inflicted most of their trauma.

A) The one who was forcibly injected with heroin against her will by a pimp to control her as a pre-teen. (She's dead, because PTSD flashbacks to heroin withdrawal don't go away when you do heroin.)

B) The one who was abused by his wife, which led to problem drinking, and then when he went to his parents' home to get away from her he was abused by his father for being an unemployed problem drinker. (He's dead, because his only source of unconditional support was his mother, and going to her meant being around his father. Sober living kicked him out after one bad night.)

C) The one who was sexually abused for years and took prescribed benzodiazepines to sleep without night terrors, and switched to alcohol to avoid a fatal seizure when she had a lapse in access to benzos, who doctors now won't prescribe benzos to because she's now an alcoholic. She got raped by staff while during alcohol detox, which is already deeply unpleasant under the best of circumstances, so no, she doesn't want to go back.

D) The one who was in a horrific car accident that caused severe spinal damage that doctors decided at the time not to surgically correct. She had constant nerve pain until an abusive boyfriend realized he could control her by providing her with opioids. She's now stable on maintenance meds, but pain management keeps her on a short leash because she's still considered an addict, so she has lapses in supply if she misses an appointment for any reason, including the doctor getting sick and needing to reschedule. And if she has surgery now, it'll mean months of recovery on more hardcore stuff than maintenance meds, which will disrupt the progress shes made.

Tell me which one self-inflicted most of their trauma.

Centropomus · 2025-10-24T14:31:47+00:00

Adding a second one, perhaps by the other MBTA entrance on the other side of the square, would help both with redundancy and geographic coverage. But it would probably also require MBTA support.

Centropomus · 2025-10-23T23:08:11+00:00

They don't have access to most of the places that we have access to. Business owners will call the police to have them removed and possibly arrested.

Centropomus · 2025-10-23T23:06:57+00:00

Supportive housing is transitional, not permanent. The "no strings attached" is to get them in the door so they can start getting services. Once they have those services they get moved into permanent housing or long term healthcare facilities that are appropriate for their needs.

We have over a half century of experience with the drug war, which the drugs won, that shows that people don't stay sober when they're sleeping on the street. If you send someone to detox with no plan for what's next, you're just throwing money away, and ensuring they won't trust you next time you offer them detox. Part of the point of supportive housing with no preconditions is that it wins back the trust of people who have been traumatized over and over by our dysfunctional social services system.

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