aard

The main thing rubbing me wrong is forcing to support the parents - parents decide to have a child, so they do owe the child support during its live. The child didn’t have a choice in this, and therefore owes the parents nothing. Now if the parents were decent people there’s a high chance the kids want to help out because of that - and that’s a perfectly good thing to do. But there should not be a forced obligation by society.

Screen is another thing - but I can live with that, mostly - it’s a bit hard to find x86 notebooks with decent resolution (not talking retina style, just better than “1080p on a 14 inch display”). And while the screen itself is nice on the apples I’d prefer a lower resolution one if I can get a matte screen instead.

But fact is that nobody wants to sell you a proper x86 notebook. It’s almost impossible to find something with more than 32GB of RAM, and while there are a few with more than 64GB they’re all xeon based monsters larger than 16", as far as I can tell can’t really be ordered, and have a price tag equal or larger to a full spec 14" mac book pro. And obviously you can’t really think about battery life with intels space heaters.

It’s especially sad as current mobile Ryzen CPUs could very well compete with Apples ARM CPUs - the one thing Apple is better at is the absolute low power state, as soon as it has too actually do something the power (and TDP) curve is very close to mobile Ryzen. But pretty much every manufacturer fucks up the thermal design, or gimps it in other ways.

One exception nowadays: Business notebooks - and that’s only because the rest of the notebook market went to shit. If you want a somewhat compact notebook with more than 64GB of RAM, decent CPU performance and good battery life Apple currently is the only one offering something.

Helsinki is getting out of the “burning stuff to make electricity” business. It used to have coal power plants - last ones closed down in 2023 and 2024. There are some dedicated plants for district heating still, but also there’s the trend to move away from burning stuff.

RCS is just stupid. When I was still building phones a decade ago we had some operators ask for it - but after reading the standards decided to just ignore it and hope it passes. Pretty much everybody did that, until google got interested - presumably because they figured it’d be a good way to get control of messaging on a lower level. As that’s exactly what RCS is: control of messaging, and ideally the option to charge for it, just like SMS and MMS before that.