The only upgrade that matters for most non-gaming or video production use cases any more is RAM anyway.

If you run one application and no browser you can make 16gb work. Or if you don’t mind constant bogging I guess you can use 8gb, but to me at that point you don’t really have a usable computer any more.

Yes they did but that’s only because now 16gb is equally as bad an experience as 8gb used to be due to the ram needs of their new AI chip.

Compare the experience on that with any Mac (even an old intel one) with 64gb and you will understand instantly how important it is. Now go look at the 1000%+ markup they put on their ram and disk and you will see the problem.

But the change to a base 16gb only happened in 2024 so there’s no conflict between your two observations.

I upgraded my 2018 Mac mini to 64 GB and realized that all my performance problems immediately disappeared. Everything is instant. CPU and GPU are totally meaningless for my use case, but RAM is massively important.

I don’t do anything fancy, just kind of standard home office stuff- photos, music, email, Evernote, OneNote, etc. But I have large databases in each. I use up most of a 3TB RAID. I regularly cross the 32gb threshold in memory use.

I could get by with 32gb if I wouldn’t mind tolerating some throttling, but 8-16gb is off the table entirely. Even my little 16 gb macbook I just use to screw around on while I watch tv can’t keep up with just doing email, some text editors and browsers without bogging, sometimes massively.

It’s getting to the point where Macs are just becoming unusable due to this nonsense, and I’ve never been more motivated to leave the platform. I can’t pay $3000 for every computer or just live with bog slow computers.

Try living in a small country, there’s tons of stuff like that.

It is in the sense that now external storage can be as fast as internal storage, so you can just upgrade with external SSD’s and not pay the 1000%+ markup that Apple charges for storage and RAM.

Yet you already have direct neighbors of Russia like Hungary and Slovakia simping for Putin, so proximity to the threat doesn’t seem to overcome the tendency towards misinformation and manipulation against your own best interests.

It’s true, that’s the advantage of a larger user base. But when I compare my homepage of Reddit after 15 years of refinement to that of my lemmy homepage after 1 year, my lemmy one is way better. Most of those niche communities devolve into memes and nonsense like the same questions being asked over and over and over again after a while. Great for searching, but for actually getting content on a regular basis from, mostly a waste of time.

They don’t have to have everyone on them to be good. In some ways it’s preferable not to. Reddit was far better before the Digg migration, and we might already be living in the golden years of Lemmy and not even realize it.

I think the smartest ones will. Really I don’t mind a smart intelligent community like this one.

It’s hard when there’s easy points to be scored by saying “why should we spend our hard earned money on far away wars when we can spend it at home on hookers and blow!”

It has improved here though, thank Jeebus.

I fully agree. When I feel like using a Twitter like platform (which is exceedingly rare), I use Mastodon

I never liked Twitter to begin with so I’m not one to defend him. My preferred one is Mastodon, but generally I don’t like the format to begin with. At any rate, I’ll still take pre-musk Twitter over Xitter any day.

It will almost certainly become Twitter as it was created by the Twitter founder. The only difference being that it will become the Twitter from before Musk took over. Which is a massive difference.

Seedbox VM running on my Synology permanently routed through VPN running radarr, sonarr, jackett, plex. I find stuff either by searching what’s new for the month or by occasional subscriptions of the streaming services.

That will almost definitely be the threat from Trump

Trump will try giving Ukrainian land to Russia and Zelensky won’t go for it. End of story.

Trump will try to offer both sides an ultimatum such as:

Putin, make a cease fire or we will increase support to Ukraine

Zelensky, make a cease fire or we will end Ukraine support

In the end Ukraine will likely be the one getting screwed, they will have to give up their land and likely get little in return. Almost no chance this ends up working.