Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power. Others might have a different opinion but that would be my choice.

I’ve found that you don’t need to go that far above the $200 cost of an Intel N100/150 system to get a mini PC with a significantly more powerful AMD processor. It won’t be the latest generation but it will be capable of a lot more than those low-power Intels, and from my measurements many AMD processors of the last three generations or so are good at saving power when they’re idle, so it won’t use a ton more electricity. Sometimes you find used ones on eBay at a decent price because someone upgraded.

Will they be able to circumvent Google’s restriction?

I’ve not noticed Cinnamon being any faster than KDE. I’d recommend KDE for someone coming from Windows.

I like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed: everything’s up to date and it’s very stable for a rolling distro. Very occasionally an update is problematic but there are easy rollbacks thanks to btrfs. KDE Plasma is an easy desktop environment for a former Windows user too. One weirdness is you’ll have to get used to using the command line to update native packages and Flatpaks (“sudo zypper dup” and “sudo flatpak update”), because the GUI updater apparently isn’t really intended for the rolling distro.

Israel only agrees to ceasefires when they think it will be useful to recover prisoners and so get domestic opposition off their backs, to extract one-sided concessions from Hamas before proceeding with killing them, or to buy time to plan the next attack. Israel wants to finish the genocide and doesn’t care about ceasefires.

The article suggests that if VPNs are banned, businesses will have to find other ways to secure their connections and that would be expensive. But it’s not even clear that anything could do that job without, by that very fact, counting as a VPN according to this bill and/or others like it. Effectively, they’re proposing an end to all securely tunnelled connections across the internet, and that would just make the internet useless for a lot of things businesses (and the rest of us) need to do.

Apparently they were never meant to be taken seriously. Dyson’s article was satirical. Techbros, unfortunately, don’t pick up on this.

Dyson spheres are a joke - Angela Collier

Someone would have to pay for the API calls though. And that tends to mean either pay a subscription or view ads. There’s no technical reason your local LLM couldn’t call a search engine’s API to give you an ad-free search experience, and in fact you don’t need an LLM to run a local ad-free search frontend. But there is a commercial reason, namely that whoever runs the search engine API will want payment. It would be some progress to have an ad-free search subscription, but it wouldn’t get around all the megacorp fuckery that decides what search results you get.

TP USA.

Trump will be in deep trouble for all that orange paint he sprays on Dear Leader’s face.

No, maybe I should.

If Adolf Hitler himself appeared today and shouted some furious hours-long speech about the superiority of the Aryan race at an assembly of tens of thousands of uniformed goose-stepping thugs, people would be asking, “was that a dogwhistle?”

These AI systems are brought to you by execs who don’t know the joy of creating anything but lines that go up.

CEO of AI music generation firm Suno claims majority of people don’t “enjoy” making music

This was exactly the concern of the TV and movie writers who went on strike. Instead of being paid writers’ wages they’ll be paid much less as editors to clean up AI slop, while effectively doing the same job because what it writes is so bad.

It’s also the time for allies to step up and organize. This is everyone’s battle for rights and trans people can’t be left to fight it on their own.

I hope Canadian rights campaign groups start to push for the government to recognize that trans people are not safe in the USA and deserve the chance of asylum here.

Is there any hope that this designation makes it easier for trans Americans to apply for asylum in other countries? I’d love to see Canada step up and welcome trans refugees. We do have our problems though: politics is lurching to the right and the fascist sharks are circling. I worry for my trans friends here too. But we’re mostly not at MAGA levels of insanity, and I hope what we see in the USA shocks Canada out of our drift towards it.

And if you don’t have a passport they’ll arrest you and send you to a camp for undocumented people. If you try to escape they’ll arrest you and send you to a camp. The only way through is active, organized resistance and defense in large numbers.

How many times have lone Americans fought back against cops and won? The only way to put a brake on this is a massive movement of active solidarity with trans people. Anyone who considers themselves a trans ally (anyone with a heart) needs to make contact with others and organize to support and defend the trans community. Make it difficult for them to turn this nonsense into anything but words on paper. Fund legal and medical aid for trans people. Be ready to obstruct the Gestapo together when the time comes. If you don’t, and try to lay low, the Nazis are still coming for you soon enough.