No. They have a trial of 100 one-time searches, but that’s it.

That’s hard for me to answer because I’m usually at home plugged in, and I set the max charge in the bios to only 65% so the battery will physically degrade slower (I don’t need the charge). A few hours is really all I can say with any accuracy. Worth noting a few things -

1. Since I bought my laptop they came out with an improved battery I could upgrade to, so you’d get a better experience.
2. I believe(?) battery life is improved a fair bit at least with the AMD ones; less sure on the newer Intel ones.

I will say that if long battery life is your #1 concern this may not be the laptop for you.

I have a 12th gen Intel Framework running Arch. I love it, although as others have pointed out the battery life could be better. Early kernels shortly after release had some incompatibility issues that required specific kernel arguments to fix. Also I had to blacklist the light sensor as it conflicted with the brightness function keys.

The Arch wiki has a page with details on Framework laptops you may appreciate looking at.

I started self-hosting a bit prior to when Docker took off, and getting multiple services running was much harder. Service A wants a certain version of PHP installed with certain plugins while Service B wants a different version. You’d follow a tutorial for installing Service C and desperately hope that it wouldn’t somehow break Service A or B. You installed Service D for a bit despite all the installation pain and now want to uninstall it - I hope you tracked exactly what config changes you made throughout the system so you can undo it.

Docker fixed all of this by making each service independent through containers which made self-hosting 10x easier. I’d also add that I love how easy it is to transfer my setup to a new server - I keep all of my container volumes in a specific directory and my docker-compose files in another and that’s all I need to backup / transfer. Without Docker you’d have to specifically handle each & every configuration file and database location, and if you later upgrade to a newer version of the OS or a different distro you’d have to handle possible conflicts between your versions and what the distro expects.

Maybe you’re thinking of Pulsar: Lost Colony? It has some similarities (in that someone can captain a ship and look around the bridge) but the gameplay is pretty different. ST:BC was from the early 2000s so there’s definitely not a VR version of it in particular.

I used to play the demo for Star Trek Bridge Commander so much and always wanted the full game - several years ago I bought a copy off Amazon (now it’s available on Gog). Fun game, but it shows its age now.

Oh I thought you were from .ml. Never mind then.

I see the swears just fine, nothing’s been removed.

I wouldn’t call it collecting in the sense of owning them all, but I’ve been building up my game library on GOG and archiving all the installers on an external hard drive. It at least gives me more of a sense of ownership than my Steam library does, because if GOG went away tomorrow I’d still have my games.

Sometimes I like to think of the economy as a small village where people directly goods with each other. The invention of money means you can make a living off of selling to just one person and still have something to offer the farmer, but for this thought experiment this I want to focus on the actual, real, goods and services of the economy.

So imagine a small village. You have the farmer who grows food. You have the blacksmith who builds car parts, and the mechanic that builds cars and tractors. And you also have the village fool who makes people laugh in exchange for tips. The mechanic gives tractors to the farmers in exchange for food, and gives some of that food to the mechanic in exchange for parts. When any of them need a laugh they’ll give something to the fool to hear a joke. And you have your other industries, etc. One day a new person comes to town, who will represent the new tech industry. They realize that they can build a machine that tells the farmer the best days to plant and harvest which will help the farmer grow more food. The farmer happily accepts, paying the tech person some food in exchange. Similarly they’re able to help optimize the other industries, and with the value they’re providing and them being in short demand they’re able to get great wages.

With their prosperity, other tech people start coming to the village and helping the other industries get more efficient. Most of the concrete efficiencies are optimized, so they start working on more abstract ones. Someone builds an app to help the villagefolk find someone to trade with (“I have 2 gears but I need 3 loaves” gets matched with “I have 2 wheat bushels and need 2 gears” which gets matched with “I have 3 loaves and need 2 wheat bushels”), in exchange getting a small cut of those resources, and a larger cut if someone pays for preferential matching (advertising). Other tech people find work helping the other tech people at their jobs (IDEs, libraries, issue trackers, etc.) And other tech people build animatronic village fools to entertain the village themselves (video games).

More tech people come as they’ve heard of how much they can earn at this village. Eventually they start having some trouble finding work to do, everything seems optimized. Some of the wealthy members of the town (let’s say the farmer of the biggest field) says to many of these tech people that they’ll pay them food in exchange that the farmer gets a portion of whatever the tech person ends up earning with what they build (low interest rates). With all the good ideas used up, the projects these tech people are working on aren’t working well (crypto) or are duplicates of already existing tools (how many social media apps do we need, etc.). Still though, the farmer is giving them a lot of food so yet more tech people come to the village, and many of the children of the village (like the farmer’s son) are becoming tech workers too.

Eventually, after a bad crop season (maybe because the farmer’s son didn’t help harvest), the farmer is short on food and stops lending out food to these tech workers. They try to go around to the other villagefolk but most have already been optimized. The tools that optimized life are already built and the required tech people for maintenance is a lot less than those needed to build it, and the number of truly new opportunities to help new industries isn’t enough to provide work to all the tech people.

TL;DR

Tech people earned their crazy salaries when they were helping migrate the non-digital world to the digital world. There were so many obvious opportunities for efficiencies and not enough tech people to go around. ‘Spreadsheet’ calculations literally used to be a day-long affair with a team of people - of course a business would pay anything to a tech person to automate that. Now that times the whole economy.

These obvious efficiencies are finite but we treated them as infinite and kept training new tech workers. Low interest rates helped keep us employed for longer than we should have as we were paid to work on bad products in the hope that maybe there’d be a diamond in the rough and yet we STILL kept training new workers. Meanwhile other careers that provide more concrete value, like mechanics & HVAC professionals, have had a labour shortage as Tech attracted so many young people to itself. This eventually led to persistent inflation which then ended low interest rates. With higher interest rates a lot of speculative tech can’t get funding; Tech is only getting paid for the actual new value it can provide today, which is way less than it used to be.

Yeah I think for the typical user non-rolling distros introduce more problems than they solve. It makes sense in a server environment, but it was so frustrating to look up a severe bug, find its bug report, and see that it had already been fixed upstream 6 months previous. Glad that there are better options now for users of different skill levels.

That hardware issue I encountered was actually because the Nvidia drivers bundled by Ubuntu were old and didn’t support my card, not because Nvidia’s latest drivers had issues. Crazy that Ubuntu was okay with having their latest release just not work on a mid-range GPU (Nouveau also didn’t support the card yet).

I’ve used Linux exclusively for several years now, but problems that killed earlier attempts were:

• I’d encounter a hardware driver issue I didn’t know how to fix (Nvidia…)
• I’d dual-boot Windows for playing games and maintaining both OSes was too much (this was pre-Steam client on Linux)
• I wanted to customize some setting that the desktop environment’s control panel didn’t support, and I’d have to copy/paste terminal commands I didn’t understand, usually breaking something which necessitated a reinstall.
• Ubuntu would provide outdated / buggy versions of software, and installing the newer version meant installing PPAs which could conflict with other packages / cause other instabilities I didn’t know how to fix.

The first two have seen massive improvements but I still find most desktop environments limiting if you aren’t a terminal expert / Arch type of user, and Ubuntu still provides buggy versions of programs.

In the case of the creator of the video, they literally don’t.

The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, characterizes himself as Christian and a man of faith but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church.

Source, which then links to a video also on the NYTimes.

FYI I’ve had a really good experience with using Headscale for a true open-source Tailscale experience. It helps that the Tailscale clients work with it too and that Tailscale (very unofficially) help support it.

You’re both arguing over different things. US crime is lower than it was 30 years ago, but to show that you need an article that doesn’t compare just 2023 vs. 2022 like the NBC article did.

I’m going to address your question in two ways it may be read.

The world is worse than it was

I completely disagree, I think the world has never been better. Look back even 70 years and you have the threat of cold war, other wars (Korean War, conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Middle East, …), much more poverty, starvation (China’s Great Famine), illiteracy, a lot more nasty pollutants that we’ve since moved away from.

To go a bit more US-centric, although much of this is mirrored elsewhere to varying degrees, you had much, much higher crime rates (possibly due to lead in gasoline), women could be raped by their husbands and had minimal rights, gay people were persecuted, black people were killed for fun (lynchings) along with other deplorable treatment, etc.

Right now you live in a world where practically all information is available at your fingertips at minimal cost, where most people will at least tolerate your presence even if you don’t fit neatly into their ideal world, where we’ve made a lot of progress on limiting and reversing environmental damage (ozone layer). We have more medical cures & treatments, longer lifespans, greater nutrition, more education, incredible entertainment options (Netflix, Steam, YouTube, etc.).

The world is better than it ever was, but the pace of improvement has slowed / gone stagnant

Yeah I get the anxiety, things do seem more unstable than they were 10 years ago. I’m super thankful to be living in our so-far-the-best age but I don’t take for granted that it can stay wonderful. Much of the benefits we now enjoy were hard-won victories that required hard work, and I suspect that to keep making the world a better place it’ll require us to pay it forward by also working hard. But don’t take it for a given that we’re due for pain and conflict; human events are too complex to follow simple narratives and it’s possible in 5 years we’ll all be relaxed and thankful that these current problems fizzled out.

• Tabletop Gold (Pathfinder 2 play through)
• Not Another D&D Podcast (D&D play through)
• The Ezra Klein Show (NYTimes opinion columnist, has super interesting guests and experts)

I think you should take baby-steps and focus first on just getting something running for you to use. Maybe first experiment with configuring an application you’d like in a virtual machine before you spend money on hardware too.

It’s not a bad option, but probably the best choice would be to just buy a new Framework entirely and sell the old one. Other than other home-labbers I’m not sure who’d be interested in buying a last-generation Framework mainboard, as anyone with a Framework already would likely upgrade to the latest.

Big laptops aren’t really my thing, but you may be interested in the 16-inch Framework that’s coming out as it has a slot for a dedicated GPU.

To be honest you probably won’t save money as you’ll be more likely to upgrade regularly. I bought my Framework 13-inch last year and already bought a gorgeous new matte screen for it, and I’d been eyeing upgrading the mainboard with the new AMD one now. In the past with laptops I’d hold onto them for years until they couldn’t perform, and now I’m considering upgrading my device a second time within only a year?

I really do love my Framework, but the easier upgradability makes upgrading more likely, which means more expenses - unless you can restrain from upgrading more often than you would on a laptop. Since budget seems to be a concern for you this may be worth keeping in mind. On the other hand though, I’d be concerned about how long a $500 laptop will last you anyway (the ones I used for years were more like $1200).

One final thing - some parts can’t necessarily be carried over when upgrading to a new generation. For example, to upgrade to the AMD mainboard I’ll also have to buy new RAM as the generation upgraded to a newer variant. If I want to use my old mainboard as a home server, I’ll also have to purchase replacement parts for what it loses in the upgrade (new hard drive, new expansion ports, cheap case). It’s great if you had an existing need for a home server, not so much if you didn’t. Since I hate throwing out electronics I’ll end up buying more to keep it operational, even though in practice I won’t use it very much.

TL;dr - Framework makes upgrading and reuse cheaper and easier, which if you’re like me makes you spend more money and upgrade more frequently.