If your security relies on a password, you will always be anxious that somebody, somewhere, has somehow figured out what it is and already has access to your bank account.

No I won’t. All my passwords are something like I0!2b6KJ!eA04WiJ&&MFToCQ7CN*4mvb and each is used for only one thing because I’ve been using a password manager for over a decade.

I see 2FA as mostly a mitigation for users reusing passwords between services, which users of password mangers usually don’t. Of course, the password manger itself can be a single point of failure.

I did once suggest that Claude implement a compiler directly in LLVM IR. It said that would be tedious,

People started doing that shortly after the addition of user-created subreddits. At first, it was usually for participating in comically horrible subreddits which have surely been banned by now.

Once, it was a shining example to the world of how cool Lisp was, and it had absolutely no inane comments. Then they rewrote it in Python.

That gets you sued.

Saying that your moderation team determined private messages sent from the account constituted a serious violation of the acceptable use policy does not. They should have said that much.

Mine just says I might like brands I’ve bought repeatedly and might own items I’ve bought accessories for.

The company said it regretted the impact and was offering affected nonprofits a free “concierge service,” a meeting with a Microsoft specialist to help set up a new Microsoft 365 environment and answer questions.

After that experience they’re going to do business with Microsoft again?

Any of the following are likely to work:

• Web search for “[model name] linux” and see if there are any results describing actual experience. A handful mentioning using it with none mentioning compatibility issues is usually good to go.
• Check forums for existing threads. Good options include https://forum.thinkpads.com/ and r/thinkpad. Less populous possibilities are !linux@lemmy.ml and !linux@lemmy.world.
• Make your own post on any of those places and ask about the model and distro you’re interested in.
• Use an LLM-based tool, but check its sources to make sure they say what the LLM claims they say and the author shows signs of knowing what they’re talking about. LLMs are bullshit machines.

Mine doesn’t have anything of a particularly personal nature, just obvious stuff from purchase history like:

• Likely favors Merrell brand for outdoor footwear (I have purchased the same model of Merrell shoe several times)
• Hikes frequently (a reasonable guess about someone who repeatedly buys hiking boots)
• Likely has a ThinkPad laptop (I bought trackpoint caps)
• Likely owns an Olympus camera (I bought a battery for an Olympus camera)

I guess then I would add to my advice that people should do a quick check to see whether others are having good results with a given model before purchase. I thought we were past that with Thinkpads.

I’m surprised to read that; I would have expected substandard build quality, not problems with Linux.

Ctrl should be on the key that says “CapsLock”, and for me, it is.

You can swap Ctrl and Fn in the BIOS.

My newer model can kernel panic as well as any model!

I had a T470 previously, and the mechanical build quality and materials of the P14s III are superior.

There’s a reason Linux on a Thinkpad is a meme.

You haven’t said much concrete about your requirements, use case, or budget, so I don’t have a recommendation much beyond whatever Thinkpad meets your requirements. The “serious” models in the T, P, and X series tend to be preferable to the others.

I love mine!

I’m used to people trusting friends and family members who they know are tech experts. That’s a really weird reaction that seems disrespectful toward your knowledge and judgment; you weren’t wrong to be mad.

Similar situation, except involving oldies (70+).

Every 70+ family member I have asked to install and use Signal has done so without any assistance or instructions beyond the name of the app to install. It’s one of the easiest tasks in modern information technology.

It always surprises me when anyone resists. It’s 45 seconds worth of effort to install and activate it, and anybody who knows me knows I’m not going to recommend software that will harm them.

When governments tried to regulate digital stuff 30 years ago, we got anti-circumvention laws that let corporations put digital locks on everything that are illegal to break. It would be hard to convince me governments regulating social media 20 years ago would have been anything short of a disaster.

Social media run by corporations based on algorithms designed to maximize engagement was a mistake. It may, however have been inevitable.

By that I mean I’m not sure a clever person with a time machine could go back 25 years and prevent it from having roughly the popularity and influence it does now even if someone with a quarter century of future knowledge tried to outcompete it with something that isn’t centralized or optimized for engagement. Those traits were evolutionary advantages over that time period.