• 2 Posts
  • 286 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • It’s… Not great. It’s on par with other $300 laptops, which isn’t saying much. 8Gb of RAM in current year isn’t really enough anymore, and the screen is basically the cheapest possible. You’re looking for a laptop with a screen resolution near 1920x1080, and ideally 16 Gb of RAM.

    It’s gotten very hard to recommend laptops based on the brand name, since pretty much every brand has started pumping out crappy laptops to capitalize on the brand.

    Like others said, try looking at business laptops, either surplus or liquidation sales. They’re not great either but at least you’re ideally not getting fleeced.

    If you’re feeling adventurous (and I’m mincing my words, this won’t be a breeze if you don’t know much but you’ll learn a ton), the best bang for buck you can get in a portable format is a Steam Deck with USB hub + mouse and keyboard (could be travel size if you want). Can be had for less than $500, if you have the budget portable screens also exist, and for that price it beats any modern laptop under $1000. I understand that it’s not exactly for everyone though.





  • It seems your assessment is correct. You’d be surprised at the speeds you can get on poor wifi when you don’t care about latency. The average speed marching up with your download is a dead giveaway too. The fact that maximum over 5 minutes exceeds it is a bit weird, but it could be explained by some networking equipment in the middle (probably at your ISP if I was to guess) terminating MTUs for whatever reason. A common one is misconfiguring various solutions for capping internet speeds to subscribers, where your local MTU will be set correctly but the outgoing ones will be set to the maximum speed of the link.





  • Alright then I’ll do you one better:

    Google regularly abuses their market share dominance in browsers in order to push for changes to web standards that benefit them, such as their web integrity api (which would have prevented blocking ads). This is monopolistic behavior, and the largest ad company on the planet shouldn’t get to decide web standards.

    As a side note: both firefox and Samsung are paid handsomely (just like apple) to have Google as a default search engine. This also is monopolistic behavior, if you built a better product than them then you couldn’t outspend them to get to the same position.