Hiya folks,

I work remotely, and I've got a little deck with a table and umbrella that I like to work at for most of the summer. The trouble is, my umbrella can never be fully angled to shade me from the sun.

I find my laptop screen (13") to be woeful for working on outside. Not only is it tiny and promotes bad posture, it also doesn't have amazing brightness. Lots of squinting and hunching, depending on the sun!

Every monitor in my house it turns out is 350 nits, except my laptop screen, which is 500 nits.

Does anyone have practical experience lugging a monitor outside and working on it during the sunny day? If so, what brightness gets you over the usability threshold?

It seems like I could get a 1000 nit monitor relatively easily. Anything above 1000 the market seems to narrow quite quickly.

I'm finding it more and more frustrating having to parse the things I'm actually looking for from what feels like a deluge of rubbish. Are there any strategies, extensions, add-ons, etc that people are using to filter results?

Just had a chat with friends about the possibility and how it would likely be introduced.

Paraphrased into the following;

2.99$/Month
OEM installs have a 2 year license
Upgrades are free for the first year (from 11 to the new)
Comes with Office 365 and AI functionality to soften the blow

What are your thoughts on this?

Now that there are some specs, development news, and Snapdragon X Elite vs Intel benchmarks from the past couple days to discuss (with the exception noted below), I thought I'd put together a few links for people. I'm curious how people feel about this iteration of technology in an ARM package for development, tinkering, or edge AI applications. And are folks enthused by the possibilities (Windows or otherwise), dislike the price points, or tired of the AI/CoPilot buzz?

Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows features Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Arm SoC for AI PC application development

New Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Benchmarks Show It's a Serious Contender

Qualcomm Snapdragon Dev Kit for Windows is a tiny desktop PC with a focus on AI apps

Debian 12 and Linux upstreaming for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite SoC (January, 2024)

Microsoft is already taking orders for both Surface Pro (11ᵗʰ Edition, $999+) and Surface Laptop (7ᵗʰ Edition, $999+)^[1] orders planned for shipping in June. Each can be bought in X Plus or X Elite flavors, though Wikipedia suggests there are several models of the X Elite so I'm curious which flavors we'll see in MS devices.

^[1] Note that I linked to the "business" versions of the MS Store listings because they get straight to the point with a tech overview, etc. The "business" versions are listed for $100 more than the consumer versions.

Sharing this in ~comp, but if there's a better place for this then I'm happy to see it moved to a more suitable location. Thanks!

I'm very sorry, but this is going to be rant. One that may seem to come up almost daily, but I still feel the need to vent.

Every day I feel like I'm jumping through hoops to keep a little bit of privacy and autonomy, without ever winning. DuckDuckGo is my search engine, use a paid mail provider, I try to stay away from anything Google and Meta, use only Signal, ad blocking everywhere, hosting most services locally, etc. It seems, however, to make no difference in the long run. The user-profile-building just seems to enter the home faster than I can mitigate it. Kids install some new app or new hardware ends up listening in, privacy infringement is there.

The reason I'm starting this post now is because I switched ISP and TV provider recently, but it has been on my mind for a long time. Finding one that isn't owned by one of huge 3 parent companies, is almost impossible here. After a year of deciding, I finally figured it was time to throw in the towel and just pick the least bad option. Yesterday was the day of switching and it has been such a frustrating process.

The provided router doesn't allow me to turn off its WLAN. I live in a city, so the airwaves are already crowded enough as it is. No need to keep that antenna on, but screw me, that's not possible. Opened up the device to just remove the card, but everything is soldered on the board and disconnecting the antennas didn't do shit.
It's possible to buy a modem/router myself, but it'll need to follow their requirements and will set me back $200. It would be okay if the rest of the service was great, but here comes the TV part!

The device they use for TV is apparently Android TV. I assumed it would be IPTV with this subscription, but Android TV isn't that. Booting the device makes it immediately clear they are here to harvest data. It makes me so unhappy that a service I'm paying for, is also making money on the side by collecting data. To get a quick idea of what's being done, I routed the box through wireshark to sniff DNS traffic. It's riddled with domains used for data collection and ads. That combined with the features this box wants me to agree to (location, using the mic, access local network, sign into PlayStore, make a profile including real life information) does not make me trust this device. So I've decided to not play and will be sending it back.

People around me are pretty conscious about what they do online, but compared to them I'm highly paranoid. Wherever I look, there are privacy issues. It seems impossible to escape from. How are other people dealing with this?

UPDATE: I don't know if anybody is really interested, but I thought I would update anyway. I decided to listen to my gut and I cancelled the subscription. It feels like the best decision I've made in a long time. It's nice to feel like I'm still a little bit in charge, even though I know that's also just a false sense of autonomy. Suck it, Google! You're not the boss of me :-)

I guess I'll post another thoughtful analysis rant on tech trends. It has been mentioned here in a few threads already but I simply wanted to try to start a focused discussion.

Personally I first noticed significant degradation of search functionality around 2018 or so, while specifically Google was mentioned at least as far back as 2016. But it is not simply Google or even just general search engines. Any random site specific search functionality or discoverability algorithms on various sites share these trends too.

It really seems that the focus is simply on delivering as many results as possible with actual quality or even relevance being somewhere on the tail end of priorities. It is not even just lack of(useful, consistent) search operators, lack of transparency, lack of structured search possibilities, lack of sorting options, lack of granularity - it is the simple disregard for the basic intent of the query with some implementations sometimes being actually more accurate with fewer keywords with no option to modify this behavior.

It is especially damaging for(at least my) ability to research a topic. A decade and half ago I could go in with a topic I had no idea about and emerge two hours later with a very basic but likely mostly accurate and slightly in-depth overview by refining my searches. Now I'm lucky to get one single thoughtful blog post or discussion among dozens or tutorials, 10-bests and ads with the query being almost completely disregarded and keywords being straight up ignored to deliver this deluge of both low quality and mostly completely irrelevant results.

Are there any projects, search engines or anything other that aim to deliver actually useful, steerable, user directed results?