I don't have any personal experience with TUF laptops, so I can't really offer an informed opinion on it. But I assume that's just the slightly more plastic version of their other laptops, so it's probably no worse than any other Asus laptop, though maybe a little less durable if you're dragging it around everywhere.

I've had reasonable luck and been reasonably happy with Asus laptops, specifically the G14 and G15 models.

Currently have a 2022 G14 (the all AMD one wth a 6900hs and 6700s) and it's... fine. It's hot, loud, and has lousy battery life but that's just gaming laptop life.

Only thing I would comment on Asus laptops is their fans are absolute shit and you will - not may - have to replace them after about a year. I've had 4 Asus laptops and all 4 of them have fallen prone to this specific failure. It's easy enough to do (a couple of screws) and like $15 for the fans, but still, it's a pretty consistent failure.

Afaik no, you'll still get flagged from NPCs but I'm also not going to go test it :)

Yep, straight from Macarena to Tubthumping and nobody even noticed.

I'm still waiting for .rar so I can buy unregistered.rar, which is the way it's meant to be.

How many mushrooms can I get in exchange for these stupid spaceship jpegs?

Because it's no longer 1996 and there are domains beyond ccTLDs and com/net/org?

I understand not liking Apple, but my point was more that x86, even good x86, is still literally hot trash if you want anything resembling modern performance.

I really hope that someone steps up with ARM-based laptops that can natively run Linux (because screw Microsoft and the shitty ARM stuff they've done to date) and that they ship at a reasonable price and with sufficient performance. Until then, the sole vendor that can provide cool-running, silent, high-performance ARM with 15ish hours of battery life is... Apple.

No, not really: even at idle the fans are still moving air, and the laptop is warm enough that you can notice it. You CAN force them off, but then you've got a laptop that gets unbearably hot pretty quickly, so that's not really a workable tradeoff.

I've honestly just kinda given up and use the M1 for everything because it literally never gets warm, and never makes a single sound unless I do something that uses 100% CPU for an extended period of time.

Windows task manager is a poor indicator of actual clock speed for a number of reasons, one of which is that it's going to report the highest clock speed and not the lowest one, which in highly multi-core CPUs isn't really representative of what the CPU is actually doing. Looking at individual core clocks and power usage is more indicative of what's actually happening.

That said, I've had pretty bad luck with x86 laptops with the higher-end CPUs; even if you get them to fantastic power usage they're still... not amazing. I managed to tweak my G14 into using about 10w at idle, which sounds great, until you look at my M1 Macbook which idles under 3w.

If thermals are really a concern, you may want to look at the low voltage variants, and not the high performance, though that's a tradeoff all on it's own.

Yeah pvp has, effectively, been completely disabled. The ONLY way it flags is if you manually enable it - even the quests that would auto-flag you won't.

Yes but would a real space program have you fall through the floor of your toilet and spin off out into space? I don't think so.

Enjoying this quite a lot, even more than the "unofficial" way of doing it on Classic servers with an addon.

It feels like, for the first time in a VERY long time, an actual game with slightly more to it than getting a purp that's +2 iLevel from your last purp, so you can grind another one that's +2 iLevel from that one.

Eh, I think CIG has enough true believers buying JPEGs for this to continue pretty much until the whales die of old age or just run out of money to send him. I wouldn't be shocked if we're still talking about this in another decade, except this time it's $1.2 billion in funding.

I guess the real question, ultimately, is how do you deprogram the worst elements of this cohort so that they can like.... respond and converse like a normal human without having to argue every single thing and go on and on and on until they "win"? (Which, IMO, means the other person has just gotten tired of dealing with them more than anything else.)

I will happily admit I have absolutely no idea, and will also admit that I have on more than one occasion been That Guy Posting but I really really try to not let myself be.

While I'm not a psychologist, I read far too much crap online, so take this as a layman's view.

There's been a lot of research around the dopamine feedback loop around social media, as well as the fact that arguing and "winning" is a major dopamine hit, so I wouldn't be the least bit shocked that a lot of the more toxic people are literally addicted to the dopamine that social networks give you that they're arguing and posting for no other reason than their next hit.

He looks like he's either going to tell the cops they're so fired, or he's shit himself.

If you want to keep up with trending topics, find news outlets you believe provide you the proper coverage of what you're after, and just follow the RSS feeds instead.

Mastodon/Lemmy/Reddit/Facebook/Twitter are there for people to post hot takes on the news, not just share the news. RSS is the way to go if the news is what you're after, and not people commenting on the news.

Goons are responsible for the destruction of so many good things on the internet. Best $10 I’ve ever spent.

Eh, I wouldn't go about 'the self-hosted admins didn't do anything!'. There never really was a time when the majority (or even a meaningiful minority) of users hosted their own email.

In the beginning, you got your email address from your school or your ISP, and it changed whenever you left/changed providers, so the initial "free" email came from the likes of Hotmail (which rapidly became Microsoft), Yahoo (which was uh, Yahoo), and offerings from the big ISPs of the era, like AOL and whatnot.

You still had school and ISP email, but it just rapidly fell out of fashion because your Hotmail/Yahoo/AOL email never changed regardless of what ISP you used or whatever, so it was legitimately a better solution.

And then Google came along with Gmail and it was so much better than every other offering that they effectively ate the whole damn market by default because all the people who were providing the free webmail at that time didn't do a damn thing to improve until after Google had already "won".

So if you want to be mad, this is firmly Microsoft and Yahoo's fault for being lazy fucks.