I still think he cares, in fact, I think he cares about this a lot.

Trump in his second term is a puppet for his administration, he’s there to attract spotlights with his seething unhinged rants on hicktown social, his natural stupidity, his weird orange make up, etc. In general, the chaos this clown provides is perfect for masking what his administration is steering the US to.

I do think that ultimately his fragile narcissist ego can be a weakness since I can’t see him going along with this for too long.

He’s a narcissist and he absolutely does get triggered by the idea that people don’t respect him. You can easily tell by how vengeful he is about the most minuscule shit.

So this is where my inexperience kicks in, but I don’t understand how the strong force can function in the same way considering that gluons are massless.

The W and Z bosons having mass prevents them from being able to travel at the speed of light, and therefore they experience time and can only travel some limited distance before decaying into fermions.

But since gluons do not have mass, they, like photons, do not experience time – and so how could they have a half life?

In my mental model of the strong force I assumed that they simply were created and destroyed in an exchange between quarks – much like how photons get absorbed/emitted by electrons. But this alone does not cause a limit on the distance of strong interactions, so I assumed that mechanically any limit on the strong force’s distance must function differently.

Not the person you replied to, and not really an expert either, but I can tell you that the W and Z bosons (force carriers for the weak force) are very short lived and can only travel through space so far before they decay. This effectively puts a cap on the distance of weak interactions.

FYI, their RAM and SSD prices are often almost double what you can find elsewhere – at least that’s the case in the US. Getting a DIY edition and buying these components separately will likely make the price a tiny bit easier to swallow. Still, spec wise alone it will never be a great value.

I had this perspective too when I made the decision to buy one in 2022. But recently what I learned is that their modern gen mainboards often cost between 2/3rds - 3/4ths of a full laptop with the exact same CPU from competitors.

With the amount I have spent on the initial purchase, and now an upgraded board, I would have easily been able to buy two laptops from some other company. I likely would have also ended up having a better display, a better battery than what was available in 2022, newer wifi, and so forth. So no, “upgradability” is not an actual benefit of Framework laptops in my experience.

That aside, I ultimately don’t regret my purchase because I did spill a beer on it last year and I was able to fix it for about $50 worth of parts. Framework’s value comes almost entirely from being able to repair it and eco-friendliness/sustainability.

“Elon Musk is probably the best person to bet on I have ever met,” said Lutnick. “And I think, we all know that, I mean, gosh, in the same week that he saves astronauts with his rockets that he invented — imagine that. He’s building, he’s building the coolest robots you’ve ever seen. Go online and look up ‘Optimus’ — it’s the coolest thing you’ve ever seen, we’re all gonna be buying robots, they’re gonna cost about $30,000, you’re buying a Tesla robot, and anybody who doesn’t buy a Tesla robot is gonna be silly, no one’s gonna be keying anything. Elon Musk is the best entrepreneur and technologist in America and I’d bet on him — I wish I was allowed, but I’m not allowed to buy any stock!”

Thank you for this transcript. I doubt I could have made out anything of what Lutnick was saying given how deep into Elon’s asshole his tongue appears to be.

It’s somewhat typical these days for linux distributions to offer a live cd/usb image that you can use to boot into the OS before installing it. I’d recommend trying a few distributions like that to figure out basic things like if you prefer KDE, Gnome, or some other desktop environment.

When you find something that you do want to install, consider using a custom partition scheme so that you can have /home on its own partition. This will let you install a different distribution later without overwriting your own data (I still suggest making a backup first though). Often installers will give you an option to use a separate partition for /home without having to manually partition everything.

Finally, If you go down the path of buying a new laptops take a look at Framework laptops since they work well with your typical linux distros and offer official support for both Ubuntu and Fedora. They’re pretty focused on making their laptops easily repairable by anyone, but their prices are somewhat high for the hardware specs you get.

I use Pop_OS with my FW13 and I’ve been pretty happy with it. It’s based on Debian but focused on desktop use so the packages will be relatively up to date, but if not you can follow most Debian guides to setup whatever you need. I personally went with that because their desktop environment (modified Gnome) lets you have both regular floating windows and tiling windows.