My wife’s 8GB MacBook Air crashed yesterday with Firefox and Find My open and nothing else because of running out of RAM, so, sort of, but they’re not magic. (Find My was using 3GB of memory!)
If you mean it showed the out of memory dialog, that wouldn't be caused by an app using 3GB. The dialog shows up at ~48GB swap space used on an 8GB Mac, or when you're out of disk space and can't write a swap file.
It’s a losing battle me trying to tell my wife to close her Firefox tabs, haha, but yes, Firefox does use a lot of ram when you have 500 tabs. Maybe I’ll get her a 64GB MacBook Pro for the premium web browsing experience she so desires!
I do it myself and I'm sure a lot of people on HN do too. But I've tried to embrace the "zen" of closing all tabs lately and it's been nice. If I really want to find something later I can search my history or, like you said, just bookmark it.
More to do with the faster storage allowing you to swap without noticing it as much. There was this whole trend when m1 first came out of people saying it didn't matter if you got the lowest spec because the ssd was so fast it made up for the lack of ram... totally ignoring that swapping like that was destroying their drives really fast.
Reddit is deteriorating every day like China's economic model is ever-closer to collapse each day - oft-repeated claims that become ever harder to believe when they've been trotted out, on the daily, for fifteen years whilst seemingly never getting any truer.
Personal theory is, you can get into a state where you'd still growing due to network effects, as you're the main location for some topics, but new communities go somewhere else, so you're losing that traffic.
Some of Discord's largest servers are for AI tools, as it seemed like the logical choice when they were getting going. A couple years earlier I'm sure it would have been reddit.
It's ok, many flights from Europe are on budget carriers that require the installation of their app in place of printed boarding passes, so this isn't really an issue.
/s igned someone very much opposed to having to install an app to travel to and from my partner's country in the EU. I'm decreasingly enjoying 'the future'.
Generally speaking you can use the mobile website and add the QR based boarding pass to Google Wallet that way - but if you dig into the TOS you'll almost certainly find an alternative way to get a printed pass.
For example Ryanair, who went 'fully digital' last year and stopped accepting self-printed passes, will provide a free of charge boarding pass at the airport so long as you have already checked-in online before arriving at the airport.
I mean they're the discount bus of the skies, designed for students and people on weekend breaks inter-EU. Avoid flying to Paris (Buvais) or certain other 'city' airports, keep your carry-on luggage within limits, and they're basically fine.
They've a safety record that's beyond reproach, and where else are you going to get flights for ~€50 across Europe?
If nothing else they disrupted a predatory pricing cartel. I'm old enough to remember when a flight England->Ireland or Spain->Portugal could be the guts of €300 or €400. Now we have a complete revision on pricing and it paved the way for multiple good budget carriers like Transavia.
Not to mention Michael O'Leary being an absolute rogue with his PR - particularly the recent spat with Elon Musk
I've seen that once and you could just enter the booking ID in the boarding pass collection terminals and they scan that QR code instead of the one on the app.
This stuff isn't as rigid as they make it out to be.
I've flown with many European budget carriers and have never once seen this requirement. Sure, they might charge for or not provide printed boarding passes, but they've always sent me a PDF or PNG boarding pass by e-mail or provided one through their website. That, in my book, is a non-issue. Forcing an app is a huge issue, and shouldn't be legal if the only reasonable way to get the app is agreeing to the draconian conditions of one of two gatekeeping companies subject to foreign jurisdictions.
At its heart, this was borne out of a desire to fashion technology to help integrate us, enabling a tiny bit more proximity and place amongst our fellows, rather than "uproot" it (as we can all too easily disintegrate, and treat ourselves as purely online beings in incorporeal cyberspace).
Think "Small Is Beautiful" (or really anything by Wendell Berry).
I walk around North London a lot and after a recent day of various hijinx involving careless drivers, I looked into bodycams with an eye to just having one run as I walk around to capture the various dangerous transgressions and then report onwards to the relevant authorities.
But, the more I looked into it, the more self-conscious I got that a) I would be a sad curmudgeon to do such a thing and, b) I'd be sleep-walking into some horrid authority-complicit sousveillance that raises uncomfortable questions.
Still, I'd really like to report those [expletive deleted]s who skip over pedestrian crossings at speed, on their phone. Gits.
If it's for kids, I'd round off those corners or add some kind of semi-flexible skirt around the bottom, because that outward 90° jut on the foot shelf by the front wheel looks potentially... painful.
I've used a length of old vinyl hose, split open lengthwise, to cover sharp corners/edges on some of my projects. Really saves tarps from tearing along sharp edges.
As an outsider not in academia, your system has poisoned your well.
We trusted in you to do the Right Thing, yet a significant sub-system of your culture has entirely successfully undermined your 'Checks and Balances' - a sub-system which has clearly been in action since at least the eighties.
Currently I wouldn't dare to enter the US, while I'm sure I would be relatively safe in China.
And: even before Trump the TSA had elements of despotism. All the while I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
I keep mentioning that to people when they bring up a quite anti-China narrative (or paranoia). Most people in the western hemisphere are way more likely to be negatively impacted by the US than China.
Europeans, Canadians etc are less likely to travel to China so of course Chinese media spying would be less immediately detrimental than the spying of US companies. But even when traveling to China, it's less likely you'll be treated poorly than when traveling to the US.
We in the US have been so propagandized against China that even relatively progressive people that are completely against the Trump admin think China is an authoritarian hellscape. And while China is obviously not a utopia, I'd be hard pressed to find a metric there that hasn't surpassed our own.
China has no free speech and will start flexing its imperial muscle more now that the US is climbing down from the world stage.
China is alright if you keep your head down and you're not of the wrong ethnicity, locked up in a work camp and not allowed to have kids, or too openly gay or trans and so on.
The history of civilization over the past 5,000 years proves that China has never been an empire of foreign aggression. On the contrary, look at the 300-year-old modern history of the United States. Take off the tinted glasses of racism and savor it for yourself!
China has literally has been an empire most of it's history. It's like the 3rd biggest country on the planet. Just Tibet itself is huge and was absorbed into China not so long ago.
US is regressing on trans rights, abortion, etc. Free speech is under threat with the president “attacking” media institutions. You have daylight murder by federal agents followed by propaganda campaigns to blame the victims themselves or on the Democratic Party to create more political friction.
No one is saying China is perfect in these threads, we’re just saying the US isn’t necessarily better. Two countries can be shitty simultaneously.
Two countries can be shitty but the US hasn’t yet put a million of its citizens in jail because of ethnicity. Maybe going there in the future. That won’t white wash what China is.
It would not be higher in total if you included the estimated number of Uyghurs detained in internment camps. Even considering that, there are a couple other factors that don't make the numbers you presented mean much.
One factor is that the U.S. is the 3rd largest by population and will always skew higher in total prisoners than many other countries.
The other factor which explains the relatively high incarceration rate within the country's population is the investment into policing and reporting. We can take a city like Shanghai for example. They had a population size of around ~24m+ in ~2018-2019 [1] but only had 50k cops [2] (I couldn't find citable numbers for today but the data isn't too outdated). New York City, in comparison, has a current current population size of around ~8m [3] with 33k cops [4].
The 2 countries bigger than the U.S., India and China, also historically have had less investment in law enforcement, especially in rural areas [5][6].
The point was that the US touts itself as a free country while having many perverse incentives and mechanisms oppressing part of its citizenry. There's a veneer on top of it of individual freedoms compared to a state like China but in reality it can be as brutal against its population as any totalitarian state, it's just that the power to subjugate and oppress isn't centralised and is more diffused through its institutions across history.
It's not too far in history that the US was deploying the National Guard to fire live ammo against protesters, American police has military-grade equipment deployed against their citizens, I think it makes it even harder that the oppressive power isn't centralised since to uproot this there are countless battles to be won for any change to happen. It's institutionalised, any big institution is really hard to change.
US is quickly heading the direction of China, but China is much much further along the path of authoritarian hellscape: no free speech at all, no freedom of the press, all social media is heavily censored, and the GFW allows government control of the Internet (yes, I know, VPNs exist, but they can be shut down and aren't even on the radar of the vast majority of the population.) All this was already the case in 2017 when I left China and it's even more controlled now (COVID only increased government controls). You don't see this as a foreigner, but as a Chinese you absolutely do. Trust me when I say it's still, even with the current wanna-be dictator and his white supremist minions, much worse than the US in terms of freedoms.
On the other hand, China doesn't suffer from the US' current bone-headed anti-Science and "climate change is a hoax" nonsense, and have a much clearer understanding of where they need to continue investing in order to become the world leader economically and even politically, which Trump in his stupidity is handing them on a silver platter. So in that sense they are far ahead.
China is also of course much smarter when it comes to foreign policy, though Trump has set such a low bar that even a monkey could do better.
I'd rather not live in either country, but if I had to choose, I'd pick the US and it's not even close.
> I never heard of Europeans being treated like shit in China -- simply the better hosts!
Yeah. Also lets not forget:
- Citizens from most EU countries can now enter China visa free. No ESTA and no other administrative crap. Generally no problem to enter and leave the country as long as you respect the law there.
- The Chinese authority are very cooperative when it is about granting some visting Visa to researchers. Most Chinese research centers and Universities have a some kind of direct link to an office that can bypass some of the procedures.
If you dig into my comment history, i've been pretty pro China (despite a ding i will do every time: China rural areas are decaying faster than in the west. I think the main contributor is the difference between contryside/rural pay (80-100€ when i was there) and city/industrial pay (700-800€ with no qualification at the time)).
I will still add a caveat with what you've said: China make/unmake rules pretty fast, and while not hidden, those are not easy to find and understand (especially when you take into account enforcement). When those rules touch on immigration policy or on societal stuff change, it can surprise you. As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law, you should always keep that in mind.
> As a westerner you should always be OK, but this is a country with no rule of law.
Let's be clear: I am not discussing nor defend China internal policies here. I honestly do not care and I am not pro China.
I am pointing a single fact: As a EU researcher, it is easier now to go to China than to go the US for conferences and collaboration. And we do feel more welcome there.
That single fact alone should terrify any US politician with a brain.
Sorry, it wasn't a criticism of what you said, i wanted to add a caveat because what you said was true in 99.9999% of cases, but as China laws application are arbitrary (and their laws change all the time), you still ought to be careful when going there.
I'm guessing my flawed use of an asterisk, resulting in a weird highlighting out of context, confused your interpretation of what I was saying, because I believe we're suggesting the same thing.
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