Author: Jake Russo

WordPress was the CMS I’d use when spinning up cPanel websites on a $30/year Namecheap shared hosting plan in the fifth grade. That is to say I’m somewhat familiar with it.

For the past few years, this site has run on Hugo, which I covered in a previous post. In fact, I had a second site, running on the “notes.” subdomain, also using Hugo but on a different hosting service. That site was easier to update and ended up being where all of my writing went. That website has merged¹ with my “main” one, and all of its content lives here now.

This WordPress instance is running on EasyWP WPEngine because it’s fast and cheap reliable. They seem to have a strange hobby in suspending it for abuse, but hopefully that stops be fantastic so far.² The theme is an ever-so-slightly modified version of the basic Twenty-Twenty Five one.

I have ideas for things to write about, but I’ve learned my lesson about making promises in that department. I’m mostly looking forward to finishing this post so that I can point the domain to this site.

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¹My second site is still up at the time of writing, but it’ll disappear soon, and all of its content is already here!

²EasyWP didn’t work with a custom domain, at least the way I was trying to configure it. Well, it sort of did in that some of the content showed up on the custom domain, but all the site’s references were to pages on the EasyWP subdomain. This is probably just a setting in WordPress, but WPEngine had a Cyber Monday sale and cashback.

Hi! I have been writing a lot for school lately, which made me remember that I actually enjoy doing this sometimes. When it’s marginally enjoyable to write about things about which I have no interest, it must be truly enjoyable to write about things that do interest me. That’s the theory anyway.

Both this website and my main one are out of date, and I would like to get around to merging them into one. I finally stopped paying $7/month to host a one-episode (two-, if you count the “trailer” one) podcast. I found out that it broke for some reason, so I was quite literally paying for nothing for some period of time. I guess it doesn’t make that much of a difference, since, while it was working, I was paying for practically nothing. Anyway, the podcast is on Acast now, and it took practically no time to transfer.

I’m still young, and I have no idea how change works. I’m going to college soon and am in my last few months of high school. It’s incredibly boring, and I do a horrible job staying motivated and getting work done. I’m looking forward to being interested in school once college comes around. We’ll see if that (school being interesting—I think the antecedent might’ve been unclear) prospect just keeps receding into the horizon…

I know that my life will change a lot and that this part is almost over, but I don’t know it yet. I guess I’ll have to realize it sooner or later.

I was recording some voiceovers (for personal use, nothing particularly interesting) the other day using my podcasting setup, and it reminded me that I like talking and listening to myself talk while editing that audio. I might get around to recording another episode of something.

Publishing things online is always fun, even though ~no one reads this. I’ll probably think of more random things to type.

• The Razors-and-Blades Myth(s) by Randal C. Picker :: SSRN
  • This one was recommended by Byrne in TheDiff.
  • An interesting “well, actually” story about the origin of the “razors and blades” model
    • Gillette didn’t sell razors at a loss and make up for it with the blades!
    • They actually charged a premium for both their razors and their blades, both during and after the life of their first patents.
    • They invented cheaper, disposable razor blades
  • I shave with a safety razor now, both because I find it easier and because the blades are cheap enough that I don’t have re-use them, and its blades are the thinner ones that Gillette pioneered.
  • Interesting parallels to razor-and-blades lock-in with HP printers — Gillette warned customers against using genuine blades in third-party razors; HP warns about the inverse.
  • The paper probably could’ve been much shorter; 30 pages seemed a little excessive.
• Charter-Disney Winners and Losers – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • Disney caved to Spectrum!
  • A look at the future of video entertainment
  • Ben’s prediction about re-bundling might be coming true.
  • “The Arc of Video — Winner: Consumers” seems like a stereotypical economist’s faith in the system, but it’s true nonetheless.
• Office of Public Affairs | Justice Department Sues Google for Monopolizing Digital Advertising Technologies | United States Department of Justice
  • Straight from the horse’s mouth, as they say
• U.S. v. Google: What to Know About the Biggest Antitrust Trial in 20 Years – WSJ
  • I’m biased towards thinking antitrust lawsuits against tech companies are frivolous and annoying.
    • I like many of the big tech companies — many consumers do? — and government hearings have been total jokes.
  • I’ve heard Sherman Antitrust doesn’t work well for tech companies who control demand, not supply.
    • Consumers are free to choose competitors; they don’t because the dominant player is just better.
      • But maybe the dominant players wielded their superior product to effect unfair market conditions where competitors couldn’t compete effectively.
  • Google’s adtech business seems a little shady, and I don’t know enough about it.
  • I’ll keep following this case!
• A Beginners Guide to Generalized Second-Price Auctions
  • I became really annoyed because I forgot what a second-price auction was when reading about the Google case. This reminded me.
• The Lindy Effect
  • The effect makes sense intuitively (though might not be applicable in some of the ways in which it seems to be intuitively), and I had been thinking about it sometime during the week or two before I happened upon this link in The Browser.
  • I didn’t understand much of this paper.
    • Most of the math — outside the sliver I remembered from AP Statistics — lost me completely.
    • I circled some things to google.
  • It was fun to read though.
• How not to be fooled by viral charts – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
  • I appreciated “not to” as opposed to “to not”.
  • An interesting tour of some stupidly misleading charts, loose heuristics on identifying such charts (though he notes that more concrete rules are difficult to define), gives advice on finding real data (e.g., FRED)
  • Lots of pictures
• The Trouble with the View from Above | Cato Unbound (cato-unbound.org)
  • I’m impressed with The Browser‘s ability to include things in their newsletters that I’ve thought about lately.
  • The discussion of how governments understand things narrowly and quantifiably, then forcing that view into reality was really cool.
  • I found the writing to be excellent and very engaging.
  • I finally purchased the book!
• Apple’s iPhone Event; Innovation and Iteration; Pricing, Inflation, and Services – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • We’ve reached peak iPhone, at least for the time being.
    • “Boring” Apple keynotes are only boring because the products are so good.
    • Innovation compounds
  • This was probably going to be the year the iPhone switched to USB-C, regardless of the EU’s stupid regulations.
  • The skit about environmental friendliness was really dumb and unfunny.
    • Climate change, to the extent we can or will alleviate it, will be alleviated through technology and innovation.
• Prologue–Chapter 2 of Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson
• Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson review – arrested development | Biography books | The Guardian
  • I read this the day after receiving and starting the book, just to hear it called an “dull, insight-free doorstop”.
  • “Isaacson comes from the ‘his eyes lit up’ school of cliched writing, the rest of his prose workmanlike bordering on AI.”
    • LOL
      • It could probably be shorter and better written, but I’m hardly 3% through, so what do I know.
      • Maybe clever prose is difficult in a non-fiction piece of this length and scope?

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I may have read some other things this week and forgotten about them. I’m working on being better at including things in this list, but sometimes I fold up the printout, put it in my backpack, and neglect to look through my bag for several days after.

I drew a few things a couple months ago.

What types of things?

I drew two people: a man and a woman, based on a coloring page and the first ‘beginner drawing’ technique I found¹ on YouTube.

I drew a mushroom and some spheres.

It was actually quite nice: I like to multitask, to feel like I’m completely engaged. I’ve struggled with this, though, because there’s a hard limit (at least for most of us) at one stream² of language. I’ve tried to surf the internet while listening to a podcast or an audiobook, or even do homework or write while receiving another stream — it doesn’t work! I switch back and forth and have no idea what’s going on with either language stream; it decreases productivity and confuses me.

Drawing, though, does not stress my ability to process only one stream of language; it uses a different part of the brain!

Maybe it’s total placebo, but I felt like I was using a region of my brain that I usually hadn’t. And it was satisfying, also, to feel completely engaged while drawing and listening to a podcast.

So what happened? Why did I stop³ in June? Maybe, by now, I could’ve managed some passable sketching ability.

This is a flaw of mine, one of which this blog might be evidence: commitment. And not to people; I can stay highly committed to friends, relationships, other things that involve people. For example, I couldn’t stay committed to the gym to save my life, but I can stay committed to a personal trainer; I quit drawing after a week max, but maybe I would stay committed to in-person⁴ art lessons.

I don’t know exactly why. There are even activities to which I am, when you zoom out, quite committed: walking, for example. But even with walking, I go through cycles of walking four miles per day to four days per month.

Maybe it’s a time management thing, and maybe I should structure my time better.

This post doesn’t have much of a moral, but I imagine this plight is nowhere near unique to me. No one trick will work for everyone, and probably not even in isolation for many people; productivity gurus are con artists, and Atomic Habits is dull.⁵

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¹which consists of copying a coloring page upside-down so that you don’t think as much about the object you’re supposed to be drawing as you do about the lines, etc. I didn’t find this particularly convincing, but I did it anyway.

²I heard it phrased this way somewhere and now can’t find where.

³I just remembered I’ve managed to make this into an activity for which my progress is graded in school… because I need more busywork, apparently.

⁴I’ve been warned against these.

⁵I read it, thought it was dumb, and felt validated when a favorite podcast of mine, If Books Could Kill, came out with an episode on it.

I didn’t read as much this week: I do most of my article reading during school via print-outs¹ I bring from home². It works out because it’s nowhere near as obvious as a book but still gives me back some of the time that’s being absolutely destroyed by whichever class I’m required to attend. Also, we had Monday off for Labor Day, and I have been super tired.

• Instacart is the Best and Worst Grocery Business Imaginable (thediff.co)
  • I’ve been passively curious about Instacart and was excited when I saw the email from TheDiff.
    • I’ve never used it, but I think it’s cool to understand a little more about the business.
  • Byrne’s writing — at least for me — is tough to read the first time you pick it up. I’ve been reading him since early this year, though, and I’m finally able to be confident in my ability to follow his thoughts. He posts consistently, and those posts are consistently super interesting.
    • Sidenote to the sidenote — I once pasted an article of his into a writing help tool, and it said the sentences were likely too complex for a general audience.
      • This helped my ego. 😉
• Hey tech folks: Vivek Ramaswamy is not the one (noahpinion.blog)
  • I already was not a fan of Ramaswamey because most of what I’ve heard him say is a little crazy, and I’m not a fan of right-wing ideas generally, but this was a good takedown of just a few of his incoherent ideas.
  • His speech is also annoying; Chris Christie was right.
    • Also, it looks like YouTube is now tracking individual shares with a new “si” parameter. This must be pretty new because I’ve never seen it before, and I didn’t see much mention of it after some quick (admittedly imprecise) googling.
• The Rise and Fall of ESPN’s Leverage – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • I’ve never watched sports, and have only tuned into ESPN a handful of times — most of which were five–seven years ago when I was testing connecting my TV directly to the coax outlet in the wall because my cable provider at the time didn’t encrypt the channels or require a set-top box — but I enjoyed this article and have found Ben’s continuing coverage of the collapse of ESPN on Sharp Tech and in his updates quite interesting.
  • The quotes from Those Guys Have All the Fun worked well.
    • According to Ben on a recent Sharp Tech podcast, he’s been wanting to quote this book in an article for a while.
• The prologue to Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller
  • I finish very few of the books I start, which is something I’m working on. That said, I don’t know if I’ll finish this book — one difficulty is that I have too many books, both printed and digital, and I subscribe to Kindle Unlimited — but I enjoyed the discussion of life as being a fight against entropy, disorder.
  • The opening lines were captivating: > “Picture the person you love most […] eating cereal. […] Entropy will get them.”
• Our climate change debates are out of date – by Noah Smith (noahpinion.blog)
  • My current biology teacher is more hopeless about climate change than I’d like, and this was a nice, interesting update to my (limited!) knowledge on climate change.
  • I didn’t know how cheap solar and wind were getting!
• Amazon and Shopify, Shopify and Its Merchants, The Payments Question – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • The AWS model for Amazon distribution!
    • Ben has covered this on Sharp Tech.
    • One of the many differences between the two, though, is that AWS is not branded; Buy with Prime is.
  • This was a good update, but it left me curious about how exactly Amazon Pay is integrated with Shopify Checkout such that Shopify processes the payments.
    • Maybe this was a bit of a miscommunication because the press release seems to imply that Amazon Pay is/will be a payment option but not a required one for Buy with Prime.
  • I enjoyed the nuances about e.g., how Amazon might have wanted the deal with Shopify more than Shopify did.
• Credit card debt collection (bitsaboutmoney.com)
  • I read this about a month ago when it came out, but it was featured in The Browser today, which, to me, was a validation both of the article — reading this very blog a few years ago sparked my (casual) interest in finance and economics! — and of The Browser, the editors of which consistently find excellent reads.

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¹four pages per sheet, double sided, flipped on the long edge!

²or, sometimes, when I’m desperate, print in the school library for $0.10/page

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I wrote many of the entries in this post at once, but the goal is to write my reactions soon after I read an article — which is something I often do anyway, just on the paper on which I’ve printed the piece.

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Week numbers! What’s the Current Week Number? (epochconverter.com)

I’ve fallen victim to a corollary of Parkinson’s Law. Indeed, as work expands to fill the time it’s been allotted, use of that time becomes less efficient. This has described much of my summer: I have accomplished very few of the things I set aside for “when I have more time”. I, embarrassingly, feel as though I haven’t done much at all. While some of that might be due to quirks in memory, I certainly haven’t been terribly productive. In some sense, that’s okay. There’s a value in having almost more time than you know what to do with — and that’s not a luxury I’ll have for much longer.

With just over a week to go before my break is over, I’m experiencing the inevitably familiar emotions of school: frustration, boredom, a shortness of time. It’s difficult for me to say outright that I dislike school, and it’s hardly a brave or original thing to say. There are definitely things I like and things I don’t — it’s mostly a waste of time, but that’s the price to pay for the benefits, which, in my judgement, are the handful of life-changing teachers and the opportunity to socialize. I’m planning a “Retrospective on High School” post¹ at the end of the year, so I’ll keep it brief here.

I’d say I have a couple goals for this school year: one being to finish diploma requirements (e.g., essay, CAS, other busywork), and another being to socialize more with friends new and old. People say to “take risks”, whatever that means. I guess it’s because general advice is so difficult to give that we end up with lines — ambiguities — like these. I think, though, it’d be fair to say I haven’t taken many.

This summer, I

• made friends and spent more time with those I already had.
  • Introvert vs extrovert sometimes seems like a false binary. But I suppose I’m clearly an introvert.
• managed to get fired from a second job after two days of work.
  • It was, ostensibly, without cause, and the restaurant is exceptionally poorly managed, (e.g., they were well acquainted with the health department as well as the federal government, among others) so maybe it’s for the best.
• pulled money out of thin air by cancelling a bunch of subscriptions I wasn’t using nearly enough, one of those being GeForce Now (which I’ve mentioned before).
  • Interestingly, my least used subscriptions were the most expensive — I cancelled multiple for $20/month each.
  • I downgraded my plan on the subscription service that hosts this site because I wasn’t using a single one of the features of the Premium plan.
• recycled my Halo products. (This one is clearly out of place, but the products were the subject of my most recent post here.)
• didn’t accomplish much of anything I set out to at the beginning.

I often cite to myself summer breaks in between years of school as some of the more transformative times. It seems these breaks — at least for me — force a sort of introspection and living with oneself. It’s something that sometimes threatens to drive me crazy.

Maybe, though, I’m misattributing changes that happen during the rest of the year, while school is in session, to the almost artificial breaks between them: if some internal change happened at at some point during the year, I might cite the break separating that year from the previous, rather than the year itself.

Anyway, maybe I’ll finally attend a sportsball² game this year.

I find this might actually be useful because I find that I blank completely when people ask me what I did over the summer. Maybe I could pull out this webpage. 😉

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¹We’ll see whether or not that actually happens.

²I’m not sure how widespread this term is, so here’s the dictionary.

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This is quite incomplete, but it represents what I could remember when I wrote it.

I’ve backdated this post by about a month and a half because that’s when I wrote most of it, and it’ll be more accurate as of then.

In January, I felt the sudden urge to buy a fingerprint sensor. I have a habit of locking my desktop each time I get up, and retyping my password ten times daily was getting annoying. More than that, though, leaving the computer unattended for more than ten minutes locks the password manager. That’s probably drop-down menu away from being fixed, but a fingerprint sensor seemed cool.

Naturally, my purchase research began with an Amazon search for “fingerprint reader”. Among the seemingly random off-brands was one I recognized: Kensington. They make the Kensington lock (which I’ve found intriguing for years since I started noticing it and its logo on things)! In addition to reading fingerprints, it’s also a FIDO key, which is nice (more on that later).

Reviews on Amazon were fine, but they were hard to find on YouTube, Reddit, or separate sites. Lazy Tech TV’s video overview was helpful, though, and we have the same microphone (including the finish)!

The setup was plug-and-play on Windows 11. You, of course, have to navigate to Windows Hello in settings, and setup your fingerprint.

I don’t need it — I could take the extra few seconds to type in my password (or PIN?) each time. But between not having to do that, and using Hello to bypass my password manager’s re-authentication, it makes using the computer significantly more enjoyable. The logo glows white when the computer prompts for a scan, and quickly flashes red for misreads or unmatched prints. Also, my desktop is set to sleep the display pretty rapidly when it’s locked, and just tapping on the fingerprint sensor to wake it up, bypassing the login screen, is satisfying.

The sensor almost always works, and quickly — in contrast to my laptop, whose sensor is quite finicky. The only real problem I’ve experienced is having to un- and re-plug the sensor, but very rarely; this could be a machine- or configuration-specific problem.

I stocked up on YubiKeys late last year (Cloudflare ran an excellent promotion), but a location-fixed one is nice to have. It works on most sites that accept FIDO keys (I had problems with sites that require a PIN when using the key), and requires — like all(?) FIDO2-compliant devices — you touch it when signing in (though it checks touch only, not fingerprint).

Small quality of life improvements in everyday tedium are nice, and this is an example of just such an improvement.

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I haven’t been writing lately. I would use exam season as an excuse, but that hasn’t had much of an impact on my free time. I have some ideas! More soon… maybe. 🙂

Even accounting for hindsight bias, I think Amazon’s nuking Halo might’ve been an easy call. I didn’t make it, and I didn’t think it’d come true so quickly — they just released a new device (Halo Rise) to the lineup earlier this year; this year isn’t half over!

The bands were constantly on sale, and it seemed like Amazon was trying to liquidate them. One of the few things I actually remember from congressional hearings is that Amazon, somewhat unsurprisingly, does lose money on its in-house products like Kindle and (especially) Echo¹, but only when they’re on sale (which is often).

The Halo View was listed for a similar price as a Fitbit but looked much worse. Also, Fitbit is still around, and their app will still work after August 1st! I never found the View compelling; it was a poor knock-off² of a Fitbit. The Band, however, was more interesting — it was different! I think it had a similar appeal as the Fitbit Flex, where there was no screen, no distraction, but the data was there when you wanted it. This has been my approach with sleep tracking — the Withings sleep tracker goes under the matress, silently and forgettably recording data. I can go weeks or months without looking at it; but when I’m curious, I can check on my sleep data. The Band had a gimmick — of course it did — it could analyze your conversations and record how you sounded. It was an entertaining gimmick! Its resolution was higher than I expected: “confrontational”, “reflective”, or “encouraging” instead of “sad” or “happy”. This wasn’t very insightful, though. I tend to have some idea what I sound like and of the emotions I’m conveying. The only value I found was in remembering moments throughout the day, based on the timestamped emotions.

Amazon was almost giving the Band away when I bought it — $24.99. I don’t wear a fitness tracker, and smart watches annoy me; heartrate data³, though, was kind of interesting.

I ended up with the Halo Rise a few months after its release after they discounted it like 30%. It’s surprisingly difficult to find internet-connected⁴ clocks that don’t look horrible — my other one is the Echo Show 5, configured⁵ only to show the current time — and this was one of those. The radar-based sleep tracking (similar to my now-broken-and-recycled Nest Hub gen 2) was interesting. It also seemed like it would make a good reading light. (It didn’t; the angle was weird.) The sunrise/smart alarm feature was cool and reminiscent of the Sleep Cycle app; it was useful for about a week.

Amazon discontinued the entire Halo line a couple weeks ago; coincidentaly, this was right after I read The Composting Theory of Continuous Growth, which references Amazon’s seemingly-failed projects like the Fire Phone and presents them as proofs of concept for AWS services. Applied to this scenario, the health data systems Amazon built might⁶ be for sale to AWS customers.

Conceivably, Amazon might not have turned all Halo devices to bricks as immediately as they have — app support ends in August, making the devices completely useless⁷. But supporting it was probably a complete waste of resources, and they’re refunding everyone! Yes, manufactured e-waste is bad; it’s annoying these products are disappearing. Companies like Amazon and Google, though, have the resources to make customers (almost) whole — Stadia refunded everything, so some customers got to use it for free. With Stadia, time and save data was lost; with Halo, health data is lost (it’s downloadable, but portability might be tough).

I woke up this morning to a notification from Amazon, saying they’d processed my refunds. I’m sure(?) there are Halo customers out there who are more upset than I, but, selfishly, this worked out well; Halo was okay but unneccesary, and it’s nice that it’s free.

Halo is off to compost.

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¹Selling the latest Echo for $49.99 with a free color Hue bulb is clearly not profitable.

²Amazfit, anyone?

³My phone tracks my steps, apparently.

⁴Because they keep time well and automatically adjust for daylight saving time (syncronization with time servers!)

⁵Which likes to turn on other homescreen features and ads, even after I turn them off

⁶Didn’t bother checking

⁷We’ll see if the Rise still works as a light or clock, but the Alexa control seems to go through Halo, so I’m not hopeful.

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As always, let me know if I’m wrong. My nonchalance on this might make for a boring, meandering read.

I wrote this a few months ago, without publishing it. It hasn’t become any less relevant lately, so I’ll leave it here.

It could be a little cleaner and more concise.

I’ve never understood the point. Why? Isn’t the old adage about the positive correlation between banning things and the demand for and allure of those things true?

My school district, and its superintendent — Tim “I own this” Forson — just banned another 23 books. Until today, I didn’t appreciate one of the major effects.

“There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” ― Joseph Brodsky

I was always of the opinion that, while restricting information is generally a negative, parents have competing interests that must be accounted for. The internet is a massive wealth of information, but many parents use parental control software to restrict their children from content they don’t want them to see. What’s so different about parents’ rights in school? Further, how much of a difference does banning books really make, when every book you could ever want is available through the internet — ecommerce, ebook, and the like? (Public libraries, both online and off, are also invaluable resources — at least, until they come for those, too.)

Think of the teachers, the children, the librarians!

But book banning does diminish access, and it does make a difference. School librarians must purge their shelves; teachers in my district can no longer teach the lessons these books hold; and if, say, a certain English teacher were leading his class on a deep analysis of, oh, I don’t know, The Kite Runner, well now he can’t.

“Let children read whatever they want and then talk about it with them. If parents and kids can talk together, we won’t have as much censorship because we won’t have as much fear.” ― Judy Blume

So it’s not just about access. I have access to ~any book I want, and so does most everyone else; but I might’ve never read Persepolis, or The Great Gatsby, or The Kite Runner, among others, on my own, and I almost certainly wouldn’t have the level of appreciation for and understanding of their ideas that I do now. This is about exposure to ideas: ideas that some people, some parents, and certain Ron DeSantises might not like.

Maybe I should be more deliberate with what I read, and maybe I should try to seek out as much meaning as I can; there’s an immense collection of analysis online, and, I’m sure, self-study literature curriculums. But that’s not the point. We need exposure to other ideas; we need to realize that “America’s not always the good guy”; we need to think critically about life and identity and sexuality, socialism and Marxism and the American Dream.

That exposure starts in the classroom.

This is a drum that the right loves to beat — “they’re coming for your guns; they’re coming for your gas stoves”… but now, they’re coming for our books.

And as for the allure factor, I guess I have a new reading list, courtesy of the Department of Education (School Board?).

“Torch every book. Burn every page. Char every word to ash. Ideas are incombustible. And therein lies your real fear.” ― Ellen Hopkins

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The last time I had a laptop was late 2021, before I returned it and built a desktop. That was the right choice: the laptop¹ was overpriced and underperformant, and the desktop turned out to be a much better fit.

Not having a laptop, though, was annoying: I would have waste time, functionality, efficiency, and frustration using the computers at school. I would often have to worry about having access to a computer for sufficient time to e.g., write an essay the class before it was due.

Coincidentally, I saw a YouTube video talking about ThinkPads, their low price, upgradability, durability, etc. People seemed to like the T4xx² series, in particular.

The heft of e.g., the T440 wouldn’t work for me. I have a spot in my bag that can fit a slim, 14-inch laptop, and that’s it. There’s some distain online for the ThinkPads ending in “s”, for slim: less of their components are easily replaceable.

But that’s the tradeoff, I guess. And, realistically, I’m ever actually going to upgrade the thing.

I ended up with the T480s that I’m using to write this post (and every other one on this site, so far). It wasn’t the product of much research; I just saw a listing for an OS-less (but entitled to Windows!) T480s on eBay one day, and bought it. It has an i7 from 2018, 16GB of RAM, an SSD, and a passable, 1080P display³. And the thing was <$300.

The mouse buttons above the trackpad are nice, and I use them instead of the built-in trackpad click. The design is minimal, but businesslike and sharp. They don’t look ultra-premium, but they don’t look like they’re from Wish.com, either.

I worried that the battery would be terrible, or the thing would look like it fell off a truck, but it’s not, and it doesn’t. There are, of course, signs of wear: some of the keys are shiny, and there’s a bright spot in the bottom corner of the display.

But it runs well, the keyboard is quite good (I originally thought it was mediocre-at-best, but it’s really grown on me), and it lasts 5-6 hours, which is about how long you can expect this sort of laptop to last.

Maybe I should’ve gone for an X1 Carbon; it’s basically this laptop but better. But this thing works! My only complaint is the screen, since I think a 3:2 aspect ratio is preferable (though all my screens have been 16:9, and I don’t have the weird LG one) and 2K with a little more vibrancy thrown in would be a welcome improvement. There are also some weird lags, sometimes, but those seem like a feature common to laptops, rather than a problem with this one in particular.

The experience of using my desktop is better (for reference, the keyboard cost more than the laptop), but using my laptop is lower-friction. It means I do interesting things, like writing this post, more often. It also means that things I’d write down and put off until I felt like walking over to the computer and turning it on (yeah, it’s just as easy as it sounds — it’s like eight feet away from me as I write this) got done a lot sooner and more often. I’ve subscribed to GeForce now for a few months now (the 4K tier, since I tell myself I need it for my desktop), and don’t use it much. I’m falling for the sunk cost fallacy, since I’ve spend some amount of money on Steam games, and losing GeForce Now (though I could immediately resubscribe and be fine, when I actually want to play) would mean I lose access to those games. But having the subscription means I one of the things I can do more often is game, since I can open it on this laptop. I might write at more length about GeForce Now, but maybe it’d be after I get a GPU and finally cancel the subscription⁴.

I’m thinking about preordering a Framework Ryzen 7040 series (Ryzen 5) because of their famed efficiency, and because it’d be a nice upgrade, a laptop that I could daily drive for years, easily refurbishing when needed. It’s been a while since I built my desktop, and the DIY version seems fun. It would also be a nice gift to myself for my last year of high school, shipping late Q3 of this year.

But the ThinkPad is excellent, and the more I use it, the more hesitant I become to preorder a Framework. This thing works pretty well! And if it stops working, I can cheaply repair or replace it. That also means I don’t have to worry too much about it: I can just throw it in my bag without worrying. Of course, the easy repairability of the Framework might have the same effect, but it doesn’t seem the same.

I guess we’ll see. The Framework improves on almost every one of my gripes with the Thinkpad, but they’re mostly luxury, quality of life improvements.

If you’re looking for a laptop, don’t get one from Best Buy for $300: it’ll almost certainly be terrible. Look for ThinkPads for that price; there are plenty, and they’ll probably actually work. There’s a prolific ThinkPad community⁵ on the internet, and it’s fun to see their passion.

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¹It was a Lenovo IdeaPad, which cost 3x as much as this thing, and was much worse.

²jvscholz on YouTube makes different, interesting videos. I think he has a few other channels, too. Definitely worth a watch.

³ The screen is 14″ (perfect size!) and 1080P, which, coincidentally, evaluates to the same PPI (and, thus, same perceived sharpness) as my 28″, 4K desktop monitor. (I actually don’t miss the high refresh rate as much as I thought I would, but the higher resolution and much better colors always make me glad to be back on the desktop.)

⁴I try to vary my entertainment — games, books, movies, TV, podcasts. I like to feel multifaceted in that sense. It’s often difficult for me, though; maybe I’ll write about this.

⁵Reddit and YouTube are good starting places.