PorkrollPosadist

The UEFI firmware stores a list of boot loaders in NVRAM (a dedicated chip on your motherboard) in what are called EFI Variables. Sometimes this gets fucked up if the drive numbering changes, like when a drive is added or removed (physically, or "effectively" due to power failure or some other freak incident), or if it is snowing outside, or if the machine is booted on Friday the 13th in an even numbered year. It sounds like rather than GRUB just disappearing, the EFI variable pointing to it has. You might just need to re-create this EFI variable. The tool for this is efibootmgr. Though it can be helpful, you don't actually need to do this from a chroot environment. You could do it from any rescue CD (if you need to re-install GRUB, then you should do it from a chroot though).

The UEFI firmware usually will make no attempt at auto-detecting bootloaders (with the possible exception of BOOT\BOOTX64.EFI). The OS installer creates an EFI variable at install-time, and if it becomes invalid for whatever reason it gets yeeted.

Don't recommend going for a "gaming" laptop as those are riddled with invasive BIOSes, poor heat management, very low battery life and also weight issues. If you want to play demanding 3D games just get a steam deck separately.

100%. Gaming laptops are a trap for all the reasons mentioned, PLUS you're paying at least 3 times as much for the performance compared to a desktop. PLUS the way GPU acceleration is implemented in laptops is by rendering certain windows on the dGPU and having them composited on the iGPU. This is done for power consumption reasons, but the architecture is a lot more complex then desktops where the CPU sends commands to the GPU which sends a signal to the display. It is a lot more prone to intermittent issues like video latency, tearing, applications not using the appropriate GPU, etc. You still WANT a dGPU, but expectations for the ideal gaming experience should be limited.

A laptop is supposed to be a portable computer. That comes with trade-offs, but (in my humble opinion) portability is non-negotiable. That is the reason you are getting a laptop, instead of getting more than twice the performance for the price in a desktop. If you are buying a laptop it shouldn't be 20 inches long and weigh 30 pounds. Get something with a high resolution 15 inch screen without a numpad. Get a bluetooth numpad if you really need one. It should be able to fit COMFORTABLY inside a bag. You get a big laptop which barely fits in your bag and guess what? The corners of your laptop now define the profile of your bag. Every time you put your bag down you are dinging the corners of your laptop, fucking up the hinges and cracking the thin parts of the case in-between the USB ports. You don't want a CD drive/burner either. That shit just takes up space and makes the thing nearly half and inch thicker for NO REASON. Nobody uses that shit anymore.

One thing I can say is that the build quality on a laptop is very important. A lot of people shop for laptops like they're shopping for any other computer - by specs. What CPU does it have? How much memory does it have? While this is all important, It needs to be housed inside a case that can actually endure the wear and tear of mobile use. Somebody IS going to trip over the power cable and send the thing crashing to the floor. It is going to be thrown around inside a backpack repeatedly, crushed against surfaces on busy buses, subways, elevators, or airplanes. Build quality is very difficult to discern when shopping online, so ensure you can put the thing back in the box and refund it in the event you open it up and it seems flimsy. It is only going to get worse with wear.

I think the "AI processors" are just the AMD marketing department jumping on the bandwagon. MAYBE they have caches sized appropriately for certain workloads. They don't change anything about the relationship between the operating system and the hardware it's running on. They don't make software behave any differently. They are just ordinary amd64 (a.k.a x86_64) CPUs.

All bets are off with Microsoft Windows however. They seem hellbent to cram Copilot into every nook and cranny of the operating system.

While it is true the filesystem itself is an abstraction, it is a common abstraction used by every contemporary operating system for the past 40+ years, including the ones which hide this aspect from the end-user, excepting highly resource-constrained embedded systems. You could define an operating system as something that does filesystems and be like almost correct. If alternative architectures (like a global key-value store with namespaces, for instance) were in common use, then they would be worth mentioning in a practical "how computers work" course rather than courses for people specializing in computer science.

if most of the files you care about are photos, do you need to care how the fs works? what about the difference between ext4, fat32, gefs? to me both are pretty important but i don't expect most to care

Yes. This should be required knowledge in our age. Nobody should graduate from school without a fundamental understanding of how computers work. You don't need to know the technical differences between ext4 and NTFS, just that different filesystems exist. You should know what an operating system is. If we don't teach these things, people will perceive computers as magic. They will resign themselves to helplessness.

If your country doesn't have an entire toolbar for municipal grocery stores it is less sophisticated than Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic (which is a game).

because you can actually ban the creeps and stop it from looking like Facebook.

13:50 SOME REPORTER, OFF-SCREEN: The cost of living is something that you and Mr. Mamdani seem to agree on. Democrats have run New York City for a long time, Mr. Mamdani, Do you see Democrat policies specifically as being a problem and [stammering, but basically "I'd like both of you to answer"]

14:10 MAMDANI: Look I think that there are many things in our city where we have to own the responsibility of the things that have existed long before the president was the president and those are also part of the message of our campaign was to take on a broken politics of our past and I ran against a number of candidates which represented different versions of that past, and what we found time and again is that working people were left behind in the politics of our city and what we're looking to do is put those people right back at the heart of our politics so that we don't have a situation where we're in the wealthiest city in the history of the world and yet one in five can't even afford $2.90 for a metro card.

14:45 OFF SCREEN: Mr. President?

14:45 TRUMP: You know we had some interesting conversations and some of his ideas really have - the same ideas I have. But a big thing on cost - you know the new word is affordability, another word is just groceries. It's sort of an old fashioned word but it's very accurate. And they're coming down they're coming down. They were - You know we had both of us, we had the highest inflation in the history of our country the last four years under... [dramatic pause] the Biden administration. and we've got inflation down now to our normal numbers, it's going to go even lower than that.

That's roughly it. I transcribed it myself. Might have misplaced an article or changed a "are" to a "were" here or there. You get what you pay for :)

Also,

Donald Trump Will Stancil

"THE ECONOMY IS DOING FINE"

The bit on TMK about Zohron rotating the Statue of Liberty so it faces Mecca was so fucking good.

Could simply be that Donald is having a much better time with Zohron than he did with Mohamed Bin Salmon earlier this week.

Damn I lucked out. Two years ago when I built my current PC 128GB of DDR5 ended up costing me like $230 (4x32GB). If I bought the same DIMMs today it would be $1160. What. The. Fuck.

Success: You climb out of a hot shower with only two thoughts on your mind. Juice. Mallomars.