I use it on my laptop because it doesn’t nuke my laptop’s battery like all other browsers. So it’s a bit of a shame.

Of course, but it’s entirely unrelated to the body of the article.

Absolutely. This has made me acutely aware that my days with MS are numbered.

For existing customers, the price hike won’t be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the “Classic” or “Basic” Microsoft 365 plans.

Thankfully we can roll back to the “Classic Family Plan” without the AI features. But annoying that they automatically switched plans and I had to switch back. If I didn’t see this article I’d be up for a big price hike when it renewed.

Everyone’s hating but honestly fair enough move.

On the whole, nobody uses Bing or takes it seriously anyways and so I guess they have to find their niche. It’s certainly not aimed at us (Lemmy/Fediverse users) who are generally more privacy conscious. If it can attract some mainstream users (e.g., Google users, people like your parents, etc) or stop some users from immediately switching their search engine to Google, then it might be a good decision for them.

Bing providing the exact same service as Google but worse clearly wasn’t working for them.

Ok then. I’ll echo what some others are saying about 16GB being sufficient. If you were in engineering every now and then it’s not enough but I don’t think its the case for comp sci. I’d leave the door open and get one in which you can upgrade the RAM though.

One thing to look out for is CPU performance. I find the laptop CPU market is a disaster right now in which you really don’t know what you’ll get. LTT has a recent video on the topic. For most courses it won’t actually matter that much. Some examples of the ones where it could make a difference are numerical linear algebra courses, machine learning (classical, not neural networks), and computer vision (again, classical). In some of these extra RAM might also be helpful but I’d prioritize a better CPU over the RAM. You may look at CPU benchmarks to get an idea of their performance.

In terms of GPU… I don’t think you’ll get anything capable enough for training neural networks at this price point, which is the only thing you may need it for in comp sci. But it’ll help with light gaming (but I imagine integrated graphics is good enough for minecraft these days—but dont quote me on that).

Also lastly, I would still recommend finding something with decent Linux support even if you dont want to use it (yet), you may choose to install it down the line. My Dell XPS/Precision has pretty poor linux support with buggy trackpad issues which has caused issues for me in the past. Many comp sci students end up switching to Linux/dual booting for a good reason.

I expect to be able to code in it

What kind of student? Computer science? Engineering?

Great read. Even in STEM research as a grad student I’m very tired of every saying “let’s try machine learning on this problem” to get something that works marginally better than some conventional models but requiring huge amounts of computation and data.

Sadly I’ve been at this thread and done this already, did not work :(

People think it’s just due to the trackpads being crap (and somehow Windows gets around it). I’ll probably never need to buy another laptop, but if I do I will probably not buy a Dell again regardless of how much I love every other aspect of this laptop.

Still sad because my Precision 5560 (same as XPS 9510) has this floaty trackpad bug on Ubuntu and Pop OS for whatever reason! (I haven’t tried any other distro). Much easier for me to swap to Linux on my laptop than my desktop because my laptop is just for Python, LaTeX, and MATLAB.

Dell even sells a 5560 with Ubuntu preinstalled, but they don’t make it available for users. But I have not for the life of me been able to get the track-pad bug to go away.

There are users that complain about it from over a year ago. Maybe it’s a slow rollout, or some game of cat-and-mouse where my ublock isn’t updating for some reason.

But I can still search from the browser search bar and I get results. It’s when trying to edit my search that I get problems.

Qwant is a privacy-focused search engine that puts your needs first while protecting your personal data. By blocking trackers and advertisements, Qwant helps your search results remain unbiased and comprehensive. Just like Firefox, they are committed to protecting your privacy and preserving the decentralized nature of the web, where people have control over their online experiences.

Except starting this week, Qwant has started blocking me for using an adblocker. I’ve had to block Javascript to get around it.

Cool that average FPS is better but:

The impressive FPS deltas aside, it should be mentioned that, with the exception of Arch Linux, average frame times (measured as 1% lows, in this case) on Linux were generally behind what Windows managed by up to 20%

I feel like worse 1% lows makes this title misleading. Hopefully with time this gap will close.

Yeah it’s a bit awkward, but infuriating? Even mildly infuriating is a stretch.

I dont see the problem

Yes this! If I microwave my milk to heat it up or if I use a steam wand, it ends up very different.

Technically I believe 900% increase is 10 times (compare that 100% increase is doubling = 2x). To me this makes these hundreds of percents reporting even more annoying.

In my experience PiHole doesn’t stop YouTube ads on the mobile app. I imagine that it won’t fix on a TV either.