I don't mind my OS using quite a bit of RAM, as long as UI elements are not drawn with HTML, and don't take as long to render as it would take to download a JPEG on a dial up connection in 1995.

Nothing in UI should take longer to draw than the human reaction time (~250ms). Most linux distros I tried pass this snappiness test with flying colors. Windows after Windows 7 don't.

Besides, Ubuntu is just 1 distro. There will always be alternatives on Linux for lower resource usage.

> This is a good goal. But it needs to be more rigorously defined. Autarky can be done. But then you need to accept North Korean living standards.

I'm not sure that's a diss you think it is. They still live better than most societies did at the beginning of the 20th century.

And their current standard of living would also be lifted if not for economic sanctions. The reality is that North Korea is generally a very resource poor geographic location, which ultimately limits your development without trade.

How do you view HTML/Code/JSONs in other applications?

I have an instance of Postman open on my work laptop, and the useful area of the output constitutes maybe 20% of the screen.

Do you just scroll around endlessly every 2 seconds? Or do you have amazing eyesight and use tiny fonts?

> How do you view HTML/Code/JSONs in other applications?

Not GP, but I'll be forever thankful to have been able to make my career focused on embedded software.

In my line of work there's nothing to view because there's no visual component at all. If my user(s) "see" the results of my work, then it means I've catastrophically fucked up.

I spend 90% of my time working in vim within XTerm.

The closest I get to UI/UX is a UART debugging interface.

Use more information dense editors. I work in tmux and nano.

Cmd+Tab skills! But mainly, its a matter of only ever doing one thing at a time and optimizing for that in lots of little ways.

This "rule" is especially useful now that I'm coding primarily through agents. Secret weapon number 2, while everybody else is getting burned out running ten agents at once and producing slop, while I'm now writing more (and better) code than ever.

I've reverted to the mean more times than I can count!

Montgomery county is one of the worst places in the entire US for housing shortage.

The whole first part of the article tries to highlight the success of the 1972-era zoning policy, but ends up making the opposite point, whereas agricultural land is preventing enough housing being built in the north of Montgomery County, whereas Virginia has successfully incorporated density (and more jobs as a result).

Not sure if that was author's intention, or how game theory is even relevant here. It's just zoning and housing policy and understanding of the zero-sum dynamic for desirable land. Some other examples from the article don't make much sense either (except Houston).

Source: DMV native for 20+ years, also an economist (by education, not profession).

I suspect the publication paid the author to write a very particular opinion, because the article reads more like a NIMBY-defending piece.

They are definitely pandering to central planning supporters, and I don't think the author had to be prodded to support this position given her primary job chasing grants.

I was gonna say - as a Baltimorean MoCo is the last place I would hold up as some triumph of YIMBYism.

All they do is elect Republican governors who kill our transit projects.

Maybe not peak, but there is significant overlap, and batteries are cheap enough to cover the gap for the non-overlapping part (e.g. 7-9pm)

Whereas for winter heating, you would want to preheat a lot, and you would also need an oversized PV array, because there's just way less energy available from the sun.

> Agentic commerce will render Amazon and the rest of the rent seeking marketplaces obsolete given enough time. Because LLMs can literally go straight to the seller and perform checkout, do market research to make sure the seller is legit, and the seller can sell for lower than on the marketplace since they aren’t paying a 15-20% cut.

Right.

You'll just end up paying the 15-20% cut to the people who train the model and keep it updated and run the agents that you rent from them.

Did any of the components fail over time?

HDD/SSD?

Pretty surprising to have this thing still be working 17 years later, unless it spent a good chunk of that in 'cold storage'.

Hardware has a weird case of either dying pretty quickly or running forever, in my experience.

I think I can count on one hand the total number of drives I've ever had fail - and four of those were in the warranty period, back in the 90s-2000s.

I have two Phenom II x6 - same generation as Athlon II. One desktop and one server.

The server ran non-stop for the first 10 years. Motherboard, a 790, failed and upgraded to 880G. One memory stick failed, replaced by lifetime warranty (Kingston) but the pair I received was slower CL9-10-9 vs. 9-9-9 for the failed one. After 10 years my router and a rk3288 SBC took most of it's jobs. I moved most of the hard drives (7x 2GB Seagate ST2000DL and 1 spare) into a DAS (SATA RAID enclosure) connected directly to the router where they are still running. None failed. The server bacame an offline backup. I started it weekly to sync. Last week I replaced it with a rk3588 ITX board - not because it failed, but because I wanted to explore / play with the new ARM CPU.

The desktop is also still working. I bought it second-hand a few years after the first. It was used at least 4h every evening and at least 10h every weekend. I'm still using it right now. One HDD failed - it was a 120GB PATA Seagate from ~2004 IIRC. No data loss, it was in RAID1. One GPU failed, a GTS 250, upgraded to GTX 970, still working. I'm going to keep using it for at least 5 more years, possibly more. Firefox no longer supports Win7 and I'm in the process of migrating to Linux. Total Commander (I'm a user since Win31) and file associations are holding me back. xdg-open is... absolutely horrible.

Well it has a SSD in it now so it must have gone through at least one actual hard drive...

Yeah, my work laptop is essentially a thin client, as everything is done via browser.

Even remote VDI instances are accessed through a web page now.

On top of that add all the corporate bloatware and securityslop-ware, and suddenly my "thin" client is using 60% of 10 available cores and 85% of 16GB or RAM.

I don't think it needs an explanation on how insane that resource usage is.

People gloating about Malthusians being wrong keep forgetting that it only takes for them to be right ONCE in the entirety of human history and when they are - you'll be too busy trying to survive rather than posting on internet forums.

The planet has a certain resource-bound carrying capacity. It's a fact of physics. Just because we aren't there yet as of (checks time) 2026-03-27, doesn't mean Malthusians are wrong.

Although to be fair to the other side, I think with abundant renewable energy we'll be able to delay resource depletion for a very long time thanks to recycling (and lower standards of living of course).

Being right at the wrong time is often worse than just being outright wrong. This is one of those cases.