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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 4th, 2023

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  • It depends what you’re using it for. If you want to old school mid to late 00s twitter that was just random anonymous people microblogging random thoughts and sharing links and pics then you’ll be happy to be back home.

    If you followed twitter because it was a way to get direct contact and access to industry professionals, celebrities, reporters, breaking news, specific niche communities that just dont exist or barely do on mastodon, then you will be unhappy with it. Mastodon will get you uh, George Takei, Zach Weiner, and the technologyconnections guy.

    For example of the difference and why many people just dont care for jumping into mastodon I’ll use My wrestling feed as an example. On mastodon it is mostly one guy who’s enthusiastic about womens wrestling(seriously if he stopped my feed would die), one news reposting site(which honestly isnt a bad thing cause wrestling news is awful), and a handful of other people. Twitter has lots of memes and clips from the fans after episodes air, lots of links to primary sources and news sites, and the actual wrestlers interacting cutting kayfabe online promos, promoting themselves, and interacting with fans.

    This applies to a number of niches, hobbies, and fan interests on twitter. Bigger isnt necessarily better but the size and adoption of twitter is a huge strength.




  • When compared to other professional level laptops the macbooks do put up a good fight. They have really high quality displays which accounts for some of the cost and of course compared to a commercial grade laptop like a thinkpad the prices get a lot closer(when they arent on sale like thinkpads frequently do).

    That said even then the m1 macbook is over a thousand dollars after tax and that gets you just 256GB of storage and 8GB of ram. Theyre annoyingly not as easy to find as intel offerings but you can find modern ryzen laptops that can still give you into the teens of screen on time for less with way more ram and storage space. The m1 is still the better chip in terms of power per watt and battery life overall, but then getting the ram and storage up to spec can make it $700 more than a consumer grade ryzen.


  • A demanding game on a macbook air m2 will still draw close to 30 watts and while that is actually still good for a laptop relative to what the output is, and you can probably do things to improve that by tweaking in game settings, it’s still going to suck power out of a 50Whr battery.

    Steamdecks also run an efficient ryzen apu that lets them play games for 2-8 hours depending on how things are tweaked. Likewise on my 39Whr ryzen thinkpad(intel got a 59whr battery dont get me started on that nonsense) I can get 8-12 hours depending on usage normal browsing as well.

    This isnt to take down the m1 & m2. They are definitively more powerful, theyre definitively more efficient, I’m not disputing that. But the gap isnt as huge as it was when the m1 launched.


  • They’re of course exaggerating a little and speaking confidently because theyre in the business of selling a product and not in the business of trash talking what they sell or reducing confidence in their product.

    That said the M1/M2 silicon battery life gains were a huge leap forward when they first launched but in terms of battery efficiency and power AMD has been nipping at their heels, and in due time intel will likely get it’s stuff together and join them. You can already get ryzen laptops efficient enough and cool running enough that the fan is off during most light usage, and they can get hours into the mid to high teens on some models.

    Likewise even macs will start to drain quite a bit when say watching an hd video 1.75x speed, or playing a video game, or encoding something using max CPU power. So while the Macs do have a power per watt advantage, you’ll still need to be plugged in.

    And thats BEST arm vs intel and amd as they catch up. Samsung, google, and qualcom dont really have anything like the m2 at play and while qualcom is rumored to be close the samsung fab’d chips definitely arent.

    So as things are the death Intel and AMD has been greatly exaggerated and in part due a combination of the usual apple hype combined with that hype being VERY VERY justified this go around.



  • Oh sorry, I meant the DVD mail era of netflix not dvds in general. But yeah its fascinating how fast it happened. We went from having no dvd players to having one, to our house being full of them. I remember I even wound up getting a dvd player that was divX compatible that let me watch my downloaded content on the big tube tv. That stupid dvd player caused me to learn the difference between container and codec. It’s also remarkable how much clearer those low quality downloads on a low res CRT.









  • Did a quick calculation and found that a 60$ game needs to be 35hrs to break even with movie prices edit: *where I live

    How much do tickets cost where you live? Even using older $10 per seat prices and an average run time of 2 hours I come down to $5/hr. Also probably not just going out to a theater alone so if you’re bringing a date or your family, or even going with friends for a collective experience that balloons quite a bit.





  • Yeah there are a lot of little usability things that give mastodon a lot more friction to use compared to twitter. Sure a tech savvy person can figure it out and breeze through it but for an average user being forced to choose an instance, having to figure out how to find people on other servers that arent coming in, and using other websites to search and browser addons is a lot of work.

    The site has gotten a lot more usable recently, but during the first few twitter exoduses Mastodon was very rough and it’s no wonder that average users bounced off of it.

    Thats not even getting into the network effect. Sure some people are there for the microblogs from anyone and building out the network effect. But twitter became mainstream with professionals. So for a lot of people the appeal of twitter was getting direct contact from celebrities and famous people, getting news from reporters as it was happening,Insight from industry professionals like writers, artists, and directors, and more! You could even get better customer service from companies because their twitter reps were more empowered to help you since your issue was more public.

    Then there were the niche subjects that being big leads to. Wrestling mastodon is like 70% one guy on my timeline who is just really enthusiastic about womens wrestling(and posts news and cards for men’s stuff too probably because he notices how little is out there). On twitter you have lots of people tweeting about it along with the actual wrestlers themselves!