Notices by Scott Williams 🐧 (vwbusguy@mastodon.online), page 3

OK, I'm gonna say the quiet part out loud. The biggest reason why American guitars cost more than Mexico, Korean, or Indonesian made guitars is that American companies intentionally sometimes use cheaper parts. I've played some amazing Chinese made guitars and some underwhelming American made ones. The premium on "American made" often comes down to marketing based on racism/nationalism, exploitation, and corporate greed. Tariffs aren't going to fix that.

@tobhe @Conan_Kudo Sounds like Lenovo has done a good job, then. Similarly, Lenovo has had good lvfs support where a number of x86 vendors still lack as well. I love my P14S's I use in my dayjob. Having that kind of out of box experience with ARM would be killer.

@tammeow @cas @jorge @sfalken @Conan_Kudo Neal is a longtime Fedora and OpenSUSE leader. As far as ARM, being on the Asahi governing board should say something:

https://asahilinux.org/governance/

@Conan_Kudo @tammeow @cas @jorge @sfalken My biggest accomplishment was managing to get the latest Pop_OS to run on the Pi500 in January. I'm not remotely near either of your levels when it comes to DT stuff. Spot showed me some uboot setup stuff for ARM over a decade ago and I was amazed how quickly stuff got into the weeds even for Beagle boards at the time.

Hot take: The Snapdragon X PC's would have sold far better if they were pitched as the PC Apple Silicon counterpart instead of the all in on AI marketing. Better battery life with top performance and touting compatibility should have been a clear slam dunk. For strictly AI, there's not much of a compelling reason to buy it over a Ryzen. Microsoft entirely and completely failed to read the room. Qualcomm OEM vendors should tout #Bazzite gaming compatibility instead.

#Microsoft #ARM #Copilot

Tyrants, totalitarianists, and dictators have been around for the entire history of humanity. What's more remarkable are the periods and places where that wasn't the case. Totalitarianism, violence, and war aren't and haven't always been inevitable, despite the pervasive myth to the contrary based on hopelessness, sometimes even mixed with good intentions. Every totalitarian dictatorship and empire based on violence eventually falls. That is a consistent historical truth.

@grammasaurus @inthehands @wdlindsy And now another one in Arizona!

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/aircraft-collision-arizona-airport-leaves-least-1-person-dead-rcna192843

Today, I've added a public data dump of the US Social Security Administration (SSA) website. This data dump includes things like #disability #research, policies, forms, and guidance for same sex couples, etc.

https://git.lsit.ucsb.edu/publicdata/ssa-gov

#data #datarescue #ssa #socialsecurity

@grammasaurus @inthehands @wdlindsy There was also a plane crash in Santa Barbara on January 31st.

https://kmph.com/news/local/officer-and-civilians-rescue-pilot-from-fiery-plane-crash-in-santa-barbara

@sarahjamielewis There are a number of them. #Keycloak is probably going to be the easiest to get going. Apereo CAS and Shibboleth IdP are also possibilities, but those are generally going to be more complex and geared for larger deployments.

If a customer has a bad experience but you quickly make it right, you may or may not lose a customer, but if you don't and string someone along on top of it, you've just motivated them to tell everyone they know to avoid doing business with you.

@jbz Where is Gondor in our hour of need?

Now would be a great time to move to #Nextcloud if you care about the privacy of your own data.

When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.

-Maya Angelou

Glad to see #Nintendo is bringing back the classics with the #Switch2.

Is there a way to opt-out of Daylight Savings Time this year? Asking for me.

Alternative headline: Google had trouble selling Gemini so they're making everyone pay for the AI features whether they wanted it or not.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/15/google-raises-the-price-of-workspace-plans-making-its-ai-features-included-for-free/

Tom's Hardware: MNT Reform Next open-source modular laptop crowdfunder goes live for $1,099

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/mnt-reform-next-open-source-modular-laptop-crowdfunder-goes-live-for-usd1-099

#ARM #Linux

Sys Admins leave the best Christmas presents.

I lol'd

#meme #crypto