Nalivai

Oh, they fucking do that? Bloody hell, that’s low. Maybe it depends on a country, but when I bought my previous Lenovo around 2019, they had an option without the OS and it was slightly cheaper, and only available for a small subset of laptops.
The only new laptop I got since was Framework, and obviously, they’re also great in this regard, but I feel like they’re outliers.

If a company is doing it it’s already is. But most are selling you windows compulsively.

Falling for other different grifts

Which ones? I’m not familiar with this side of him

What do you mean? Cory figured it out like 20 years ago already, he was reporting on tech bro grift from the beginning

Well, in this case we’re talking about websearch, and there is no non-american websearch, so you don’t have many options.

I would only recommend not starting with Ubuntu, there is a cultural idea that it’s the easiest, but it really isn’t, and has some very unique “features” that aren’t for everyone.
The bigger question is not what distro to get, but what desktop environment to chose, because that will be your interface and that’s where the first point of tension will come from. I highly recommend KDE.
Other than that, every modern distro will be basically the same, you install steam and it just works.

There are, broadly speaking, two categories of problems with LLM generated code (well, everything, but code here specifically). One is purely technical, does it bring anything to the process, does it broadly speaking saves you time or effort. And the second is everything else: environmental impact, the bubble of it all, the consolidation of power to all the worst people, erosion of skills, death of education, inflation of prices of consumer electronics, psychological impact, and so so so much more, all lumped together as non-technical downsides.
A bunch of llm-proponents, and here we sadly have to include even Linus, are only engaged with the first category of problems, throwing the whole second category aside as “irrelevant”. And a lot of those people are smart enough so I don’t believe they don’t see this.
If there was only the problem of the tool being kinda shitty but useful for some people, I wouldn’t be so against it. I still don’t believe they actually benefit from it, but if they think they do, I’m not going to argue with them about it.
But it’s fundamentally not true. You can’t ignore the second category in your evaluation. To quote Linus himself,

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing “La La La, I can’t hear you” at the top of your voice like some people seem to do

about the fact that even one of the downsides from the second category makes the whole “but I, a person with 40 years of experience, can use llm in such a way that it sometimes produces some benefit” not worth it. No benefit of it is worth the fact that the new generation of junior developers don’t know how to write code on a fundamental level, while elon mask owns all of humanity’s personal data and can do whatever he wants with it. Even if those benefits were kinda big, it wouldn’t worth it, but they aren’t.

LLMs are tools and, like all tools, are more fit for some purposes than others

This is the whole problem, this take is disingenuous. Nobody who actually argues in good faith and knows what they’re talking about, argues that LLM isn’t a tool, or it’s something bigger than that. The argument that is being ignored is that LLM is a tool that inherently has downsides that are bringing more “bad” than it brings “good” when it’s useful. But proponents successfully argue that they can use LLM with some benefits, and act like they answered something, and any retaliation to that is unreasonable.
My favourite analogy is asbestos, and I say it as a huge disservice to asbestos. Asbestos is an amazing material that legit has many very important uses (way more than any LLM will ever have), but we’re not using it because we understand that no matter how great of a insulator it is, and how nice it looks as snow replacement on a movie set, and how wonderful it is in a cigarette filter, the supercancer it causes kinda nullifies all that.

I fear that this all-or-nothing attitude brings more harm than good. If leads to the thinking that if nothing is perfect nothing should be done anyway. More than once people were saying to me that they’ve read that they can get your data anyway so there is no difference between a firefox with adblock on linux and google chrome on windows 11 with all the trackers active.
And this is exactly the attitude that those who are selling our data want us to have.

To be honest, this is one of those times where I would say that it’s not that bad. Can’t expect a company to outright violate the laws of the country they’re registered in, you need to be friends with Trump to do that. If they keep their shit away from all the corpo vultures and only comply with direct subpoenas, it’s probably the best we can hope for.