I personally just can't be productive on a tiny 13" laptop, though perhaps a lot of people just plug in a monitor and keyboard. I much prefer the 15" XPS with more screen real-estate, upgradable memory (at least when I purchased mine) and trackpad/function keys that actually click. I get how the 13" could be nicer if you're lugging it around a lot or trying to use it on a plane, but is the 15" really that hard to carry?
Eh, I go the other direction. At this point, my laptops are mostly just "easily carried workstations" that really only plug into a monitor/dock for real use.
I do occasionally use them on the couch or in bed, but for anything productive... I don't really ever want to work with just a laptop screen (13/15/17 inch - who cares, the form factor sucks for this).
So in that case, the 13 inch machines are great because they're light and portable. Much prefer the 13 inch XPS to the 15 inch XPS. It fits in many more bags and the only real component downgrade is the GPU, which I don't really care about in a work machine anyways.
I also find - surprisingly, they tend to get better battery life, simply because they aren't powering as much screen real-estate (and are doing it without a discrete GPU).
So yes - the 15 inch really is a lot harder to carry (I own both - older gen XPS 15, new gen XPS 13). It weighs literally twice as much and requires a much larger bag.
I'm in the same boat. I've got a monster i9, always ON PC with 128gb ram, linux desktop and a 40TB nas at home. The 80% of the time I'm WFH, it's amazing.
For the other 20% time when I'm on the go, I want the smallest , sturdiest laptop I can have, with the best battery life . I've got a Dell latitude. Although Linux is just BAAAAAAD wet battery life. I can't stand windows OS though.
I'll admit, trying to find a portable 15" is why I caved in and bought the (slightly better) pre-ARM MacBooks Pro. Unfortunately, Apple acted as if you had to compromise a lot to make 15"s trully portable.
I hate the changes to the regular Paint app. They added stuff like layers and now it is really hard to do simple things like cut and paste and move parts of the image around because now you get a transparent hole in the image. I used to use it a lot to touch up or fix things in images of Excel graphs for slides, etc.
Cahokia Mounds are great, but I had to pass through the scariest, sketchiest, most bombed-out looking neighborhoods I have ever seen to get to them. This was 20 years ago, so maybe things are much better now, but I never thought I would see such urban blight and devastation in the USA. It makes me wonder about the civilization that used to live in St. Louis 50 years ago with their grand brick warehouses, industrial might and river boat commerce.
Maybe the population of St. Louis themselves also fits the narrative:
“They put a lot of effort into building...but there were probably external pressures that caused them to leave,” Rankin said. “The picture is likely complicated.”
The main danger is from people losing their jobs and the societal upheaval that could arise from that. AI isn't going to take over the world by itself and turn humanity into slaves, destroy us (unless we put it in charge of weapons and it fucks up) or harvest our blood for the iron.
It is hard to find the link for Windows download, most people (especially us dumb Windows users) want to find a link and download, not scroll a bunch then go to another page then scroll some more and make a decision about which one of 20 links they need. It is not that hard, especially for most people on HN but it does add friction to people trying your software. This is a very common thing with other projects so not just picking on this one.
Finally, when it does load on my Windows machine (using MSI installer and after convincing Microsoft that it is safe to run and bypassing their warning) it loads up super tiny on my 4k laptop screen and is unusable. I suppose I could mess about with the compatibility and scaling settings but I kind of lost interest after all of the above.
I tell you all this because obviously a lot of work went into this tool and from the screenshots it looks beautiful and useful, but is let down by the process involved to get it to run, at least on my machine.
Really weird criticism. If you're confused about how GitHub works, you might follow the link to their website[0] (when you click on "Release" in the readme) and then scroll down to find a "Download for Windows" button.
At least on desktop, there's also a link to the main site in the About section of the repo. This might actually be a better link for the HN submission, as I bet there's a non-zero intersection of hex editor users and people who completely do not understand Git whatsoever (assuming they've even heard of it).
This is how most open source projects do things, 1. because they are not users, and 2. they don't have UX teams and upper management to force them to make it easier to use for people.
Be lucky you get binaries at all, there are many projects that don't provide any at all, and are quite hostile to anyone asking for them!
On another hand, no upper management to push ads and dark patterns. The more old school or even ugly a project looks like, the more I end up trusting it.
> it loads up super tiny on my 4k laptop screen and is unusable. I suppose I could mess about with the compatibility and scaling settings but I kind of lost interest after all of the above.
Oh, it’s this one. I tried it a couple of years ago and it did this, and was somewhat awkward to fix IIRC.
Why would I do that unless I have a strong reason to use it rather than just move on with my day? A link is posted on HN for some cool software, it is already annoying to install it due to Microsoft complaining about it, then when I first run it, it opens up a tiny window an is asking if it can upload information. I don't expect to spend time figuring out its issues. I can't be the only one using a 4K display on Windows.
> Why would I do that unless I have a strong reason to use it rather than just
> move on with my day? A link is posted on HN for some cool software, it is
> already annoying to install it due to Microsoft complaining about it, then
> when I first run it, it opens up a tiny window an is asking if it can upload
> information. I don't expect to spend time figuring out its issues. I can't be
> the only one using a 4K display on Windows.
Spoken as a true reverse engineer, you should ask for a refund.
A more accurate following of the Chinese model would be for the US to insist that DJI builds its drones for the US market in the US, insist on a partnership with a US company who would then siphon off the knowhow and IP to start building competing products.
The key is to stop rent seeking. Musk pilots the most competitive companies on earth, so of course he isn't scared of China or anyone else, because a truly powerful company takes many dimensions of superiority, not just a few patents.
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