Having an f/.95 aperture doesn't mean a whole hell of a lot the surface area of your sensor is a fraction of a square millimeter. My S24 has an f/1.7 lens on its main camera and it still produces pathetic output compared to a $400 mirrorless camera with a kit lens.

Nova let me turn off animations and effects I didn't care to see and because it allowed me to back up and restore my home screen layout, it made the process of switching to a new device completely painless, even across different Android versions and OEMs. My Android experience has been identical for the last dozen years even as I used LG, Pixel and Samsung phones and a half-dozen different tablets from cheapies to premium models.

Microsoft Launcher probably isn't going anywhere, but I'm still pissed at Microsoft for killing Swype + Dragon, the best keyboard experience Android had. Gboard is barely acceptable, but since it requires me to manually import a user dictionary I have to maintain as a plaintext file, it's never going to live up to just signing in and getting all the acronyms, jargon and proper nouns I use daily back. Lawnchair might be functionally fine for me as well and probably isn't actively fucking me with datamining, but I don't think it fully replicates all the things Microsoft's does.

All in all, this whole deal just sucks.

I'm perfectly willing to do it for others, whether they know how to or not. Someone reading Slashdot comments PROBABLY has the know how to implement the fixes I suggest as well, even if they'd rather just hang out and troll.

Microsoft wants to idiot-proof their OS, but I've run across absolutely tragedies that wouldn't have happened if a user had just not switched to Windows 11, like a retired college professor who can no longer access his life's work because it's on an encrypted PC where he no longer has access to any established authentication due to the effects of early-onset dementia.

I start by using an autounattend.xml that explicitly creates a local-only account and uses relevant ADMX files to set group policies to prevent using Onedrive as a default save location. I run a script on first user login that enables GPOs for Windows Home SKUs if necessary. My default Windows install does not install OneDrive, Recall, Copilot or Outlook by default, although each product can be installed and used by positive user action if they so desire. I also disable automatic Bitlocker encryption on primary drives in Windows 11, which is another massive headache for systems that aren't going on a domain. I know they mean well but it just makes life harder for no good reason. People don't even know what their microsoft account is and then they rapidly become confused about the difference between the account password and the PIN they set up and it's just awful all around. Just fucking say no.

OneDrive / Microsoft 365 is absolutely invasive and if you don't buy the value add of Office in the first place, Onedrive just brings nothing to the table. I have yet to see the combination of misfortunes that would make Onedrive valuable but I've definitely run across people locked out of their own files because they can't get back to a particular wifi network and told microsoft their phone number was an un-textable land line.

Here's the problem with installing Windows 11 on unsupported hardware: Upgrades are very difficult to install. If you were to install Windows 11 24H2 on your i5-7500 PC today, the 25H2 version won't be available to you. Yes, you're on a supported Windows release for about another year and you'll get updates to 24H2 for that time, but soon you'll be back on an unsupported version of Windows again.

There's a fix that involves swapping some files from a Windows Server ISO to the Windows 11 one that DOES make a working upgrade installer, but it's a headache to have to do it every time there's a new version of desktop Windows out in the world.

Honestly, it was the tone of the message, which is admittedly difficult to derive from a forum. IMHO, the proper response would have been one that questioned whether the 'upscale grocer' selling spareribs at $6.99/lb vs $1.49/lb were at different ends of the subjective or objective quality spectrum. In my case, they are literally the same brand: Smithfield. The only difference is that Aldi is $5+/lb less expensive.

That said, IMO, unless we're talking about a butcher that sources heritage-breed Berkshire (or the like) pork from a local farmer, I don't really give a flying fuck where the previously cheap cut of meat I'm going to put on my smoker for 6h is sourced from.

Why would I pay $6.99/lb at one of the 'upscale grocers' in town for spareribs when I can get them at Aldi for $1.49? I, too, drive a Mercedes, but it doesn't mean I'm a fucking moron w/my money.

Soldered RAM is standard for Intel's Lunar Lake lineup and for most AMD's Strix Halo APUs. I can't speak to how well Lunar Lake works but I have deployed some AMD HX 370 systems and they were absurdly nice for ~$750 mini PCs.

I'm not defending the practice of building systems that way but it seems to be an architectural choice by the CPU manufacturers rather than a defect of particular notebook models.

I have nothing but good things to say about the 14" T, X and P series Thinkpads I've bought and supported, even though there is a clear difference in build quality between the T61 I had 20 years ago and the P14s I have now. If nothing else, Lenovo has gradually stepped up its display game in a way IBM definitely never even considered and even without the titanium frame, it's still better made than a Precision 5490.

I ran a dedupe on my drive and eliminated 8 redundant copies of the goatse guy.

#SaveWaterWithGoatse

The average employee lasts well less than a year at a fast casual; this had little to do w/her background.

https://www.fastcasual.com/blo...

I am absolutely certain many of those kids are great at writing code; what I have found in the last ~3y of hiring candidates out of undergrad and/or masters programs is that they DO NOT interview well.

They can answer esoteric technical questions about software dev (I *assume* this is because they study for coding interview questions) but they cannot possibly answer more general questions about themselves, how they would operate in a real-world business setting, and/or how they might build something from soup to nuts.

I'm not asking them to give me real-world experience; but, I expect a college graduate to be able to think about questions asked critically and provide a coherent and thoughtful reply to that question. Even if it's technically 'wrong', the conversational nature is INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT for any work I have done in my 25+ year career.

Anyone can have AI solve most esoteric technical coding problems now; interfacing ability w/others on the dev teams and the rest of the business is what is important in getting shit done.

Colleges need to start investing HEAVILY in leveling up their students in how to interview well.

"Ms. Mishra, the Purdue graduate, did not get the burrito-making gig at Chipotle."

I think this single sentence says more about it than anything else in the article.

I shoot with Canon (R5, R6ii) and Sony (A7r3) mirrorless bodies and I have a Samsung S25+ that I regularly forget has any value as a camera at all. I've made efforts to add smartphones to the work that I do, but even with contemporary flagship devices and a willingness to shoot in LOG format for use in big-boy editing software, it's a lot more work to deal with output from a phone than to use a proper camera. Low-light performance is poor at best and shutter lag is a real thing on phones even when they're just being used for photos. The phone is fine for anything I don't care about, but since I do want output of a certain quality, I'd far rather have a big-boy sensor and a fast aperture lens for my projects.

With regard to people shooting professional cinema projects on smartphones, do please go watch behind the scenes footage. Overwhelmingly, you'll see that they're still using tens of thousands of dollars worth of lighting and production assistance to make that workable. Put a couple 36" beauty dishes with 500W continuous sources just out of frame and I think you'll see that even at 30 year old Kodak DC290 will take amazing pictures.

With regard to fixed-lens pocket cameras, the appeal is most often in something that's pocket friendly and dedicated purpose, even if that purpose is just "I know I'm going to be shooting a lot, so I'd rather drain the battery of this thing rather than kill my phone's battery while I'm walking around." You can get to roughly the same place with a smaller Sony full frame body (e.g. A7C R) or a Pansonic/OM Digital MFT camera and a pancake lens, but by the time you buy in to either platform, you've probably spent hundreds or thousands of dollars anyway. It's all well and good to say that you don't need such a thing, but pocket cameras definitely have better sensors that anything in the action-cam class of product that probably represent the cheapest dedicated portable cameras available otherwise.

Fuji's GFX line have larger-than-full-frame sensors that sometimes get called Medium Format. Given the limitations of Fuji's lens ecosystem, you're almost definitely a professional portrait or nature photographer if you're buying one, and since the only competition they have in that space are Leica and Hasselblad bodies that ALSO cost north of US$8000, this isn't a huge deal. Fuji is actually a bargain in comparison.

But lenses and cameras have seen prices raised across the board. None of the pricing is out of line from Tariff policy, but it does mean that I'm not buying any new gear until someone sane gets back in charge of trade policy in the USA.

I watch dogs (primarily overnight--most for 3-7 days but some 1 day and some >7d) via Rover. I make around $1500/month (pre-1099) and after their ~20% cut (of which most people give back to me in tips).

I WFH so the largely passive income is nice. I wouldn't have found as many people w/o a platform to do the heavy lifting for me in finding new dogs.

I am not advocating that we need to have these sorts of things in the market, but it does make for nice extra cash. YMMV.