FWIW half of my workplace runs on Chromebooks that have 8GB of RAM. There are a few things that are a bit average - mostly websites with ludicrously overcomplicated frontends (including the one we build!!) but pretty much everything works more or less perfectly.

We have a few models that are 16GB (i7s - the 8GBs are i5s) and they are WAY better. But I've been really impressed with how far we've been able to get with the 8GB Chromebooks (most of which we bought for AUD$700).

FWIW I have accounts at maybe 7 banks at the moment and zero of them let me use a third party TOTP, I assume for this reason.

I found the setting for this: chrome://password-manager/settings has a "Use Windows Hello when filling passwords". It was off for me - I can only assume that is the default, as I have several Chrome profiles over several PCs and it's off in all of them.

Also noticed there's this:

which, if I click on, takes me to a page that just says "On-device encryption canâ(TM)t be used for this account. Sign in to another Google Account and try again."

Ah interesting, never seen that before! I've just turned it on to see how annoying it is.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by 'auth' here, but on my PCs (Windows 10):

It does require auth for passkeys, I think every time, but not for regular saved passwords in the browser. I have Windows Hello set up for a couple passkeys and I have to auth via Hello when I use them.

But I have regular saved passwords for almost every other website I use routinely and am not prompted to auth via Hello for that. My understanding is that for these, the auth/unlock is done once at user login and then the session has access to the unencrypted passwords.

(I posted elsewhere in this thread about Chrome using DPAPI as of 2024 - this was news to me so it's possible I'm just way out of date).

Been trying to figure out how Chrome does this because my recollection was that Chrome had the exact same problem - I remember making a similar point to you in forum threads a couple years back with people complaining about it then.

It looks like in 2024, Chrome added support for something called the Data Protection API (DPAPI), which provides some mitigation against arbitrary memory reads:

It's not clear from my quick read if this defends against this class of "attack" in all cases but it reads like it might provide at least some protection?

If that is the case, it of course raises the question why Microsoft - who created DPAPI in the first place - wouldn't use that same service in the same way. (i.e. maybe it just sucks and they know it's a waste of time :)

Clink also worth a look: https://chrisant996.github.io/...

Except in this environment they'll just raise a few extra billion dollars and buy all the water anyway and price out anyone that is not a VC funded AI company

Google Assistant has supported this for like a decade via "hey Google, note to self"

FWIW I live in Queensland and we have several zones which use average speed over distance. There are still plenty of stationary point-in-time cameras but a bunch of average zones. Most recently I think was in some of the tunnels in Brisbane.

Middle of the day here in Queensland, Australia - renewables are providing 63.2% of our total energy

This is a shock to clueless CEOs who have never spoken to anyone forced to buy Chromebooks outside of enterprise agreements where nothing matters to either side except the number of zeroes on the invoice.

Our small business has had about 30 people on Chromebooks for about five years now. These have, generally, been great - most of them cost less than AUD$700, though they've gotten more expensive.

We've been buying Intel i5 CPUs with 8GB of RAM. These run most stuff with no problems.

But in true PC style, what the manufacturers have done is make a billion different models with different specs such that there is actually a dramatic difference in performance between them. You can buy something with an AMD CPU with 4GB of RAM and it's a piece of shit - but you won't know until you get it home and try it, because you just bought "a Chromebook".

We started buying i7/16GB models from Dell - these ones fly and are great. But then they simply stopped selling them. For two years they couldn't tell me what their Chromebook strategy was, because they only care about schools.

I think Apple will clean up here by making it simple - there are a small handful of models that are easily differentiable. They're Apple branded so they will be immediately more coveted than a random Chromebook thing.

I'll be buying some of these to replace our aging Chromebooks for sure. Keen to see how they go.

It's a shame because the i7/16GB Chromebooks are awesome to use.

Delightful explanation and now forever in my brain fusion will be "squeezing the wriggling eel with magnets"

Yeh, typo. But it was a bad election result that got him appointed.

We have some measles cases in the community at the moment. They've been cagey about where they originated but they have confirmed it came from an "overseas visitor".

Since RFK Jr was elected, I have been slowly putting together something to pitch to my federal MP to put pressure on them to do something about visitors from the US - exactly as we would from any other third-world nation were diseases were running rampant - like requiring evidence of vaccination status.

No idea what it would look like or what makes sense but just know we have to do something to keep ourselves safe now that we all apparently live in this stupid regressive universe at the moment where we're going to be getting dragged backwards by the insane, ignorant people running the US government.