bigpeopleareold

When I saw this headline, I thought "I bet it's an old Thinkpad" :)

I have 3 personally, one for work. My T470p is probably the best one, given some tradeoffs (some annoying pressure points on the screen which happened on two replacements and some occasional flakiness with power) I got a cheap T480 when I thought the T470p was a lost cause (thankfully just a screen replacement) and one of the USB-C ports is dead. I can still charge with the other one, but that's annoying. But, the square plug remains to be fantastically reliable.

There is a certain odd interest I have in these, but that died off. Buying capable but older and much cheaper equipment, particularly when I don't have niche needs, has become the best option for me (particularly if I can update the software on it)

I introduced myself to this space a couple of weeks ago with a PineTab2. I bought it for reading but some tinkering. I am running Plasma Mobile on it. It's rough, but OK (and can't expect much from the hardware.) I don't know what the user experience out-of-the-box though. While I can run some 'important' apps in Waydroid (e.g. bank app in Norway), smartphones are not that interesting. I never wanted one, but it's increasingly something you have to have anyway and I usually don't realize it became so integrated in life (funny this comes up - I had a dream forgetting my phone and not knowing what to do next)

I have been developing a collection of rather poor AI slop describing something technical, but nothing lately has been coming up on my feed!

As an aside, something that would get posted on LinkedIn from an external source of some salespeople or something I knew or have connections with having an article written up about them changing jobs. I fear I might have mentioned once I changed a job (not with the eye-sore of the standard images they provide though), but the long stories of how people spent X years, living the best time of their life, now needs to come to an end because they want to move to the next best time of their life, is tedious. I get it, you are enriched in your worklife. Don't rub it in.

But I am staying for the AI slop. It's just a stream of jokes, if they can come up in my feed again!

... or Ada.

In my employment from the last 3 years, I saw twice that there were two migrations from internal systems to GitHub. I would think that companies are doing this for cost-cutting measures. It's not like something I am going to research but it'd be interesting that their recent issues are related to large migrations from in-house installations to github and doubly, if that is related to how large companies might be tightening up their spending in the past few years.

I know you are being facetious that there are a few that are a little bit too persnickety with old ThinkPads, but if they used a known distribution on the said 13-year old ThinkPad (that would probably be in the T430 territory), would it be better? I have a T430s and that is still a fine computer, even if my primary one is an 8 year old ThinkPad.

Maybe those same people can just prefer using OpenCode. It's at least free software, particularly if that old computer is running only free software with free firmware, and OpenCode can run free models.

While time consuming, I would gladly use my otherwise underused but decent enough handwriting to carefully write out job applications. Can get really good pens to do it too. However, given my own network, that's probably not necessary anymore either way.

My mother had insanely superb handwriting, in part because her mother pushed good penmanship on her. While I can be sloppy, it was for me a challenge when I was young to copy her perfect handwriting (not for forging signatures though!) Handwriting is influenced by which hand is dominant. I am left, she was right handed... so not exactly close :)

Whatever I might agree or disagree with, this is annoying to look at, but his stuff keeps coming up in my YouTube feed. Even it looks slightly interesting, I know it will be some rant involved about a thing not related to technology, but some developer's personal opinions on non-tech ideas. I get it - people are horrible! Sheesh!

FWIW, probably not much, he said he had a Jewish background ... in, like, the one video I watched and eventually gave up on.

I'll add that my P14s (gen 3) keyboard sticks up in one place. It's not the biggest problem, but this an odd fit problem I never saw on my older ones. Typing on it is not as great either than my other TPs or external, which at least have a longer travel. (the old layout was OK, they key feel was nice, and the T430s felt like the best laptop keyboard I had used)

I got mine just for the Trackpoint too :D I just use it on my desk though. But I am waiting in the mail for the new Shinobi. There are very few other keyboards on the market with this feature. There is the HHKB Studio, but it's much more expensive and not full-size. But, I didn't look far either. I am not obsessed with mechanical keyboards, so the only thing for me was guessing what switch to use (cherry-mx silent red, they are fine enough :) ) I just hope for no more hacking around to get a stable keyboard. It's been a nuisance.

While my projects have not touched agentic AI yet and the type of code I have been writing is produced like back in the day (read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code ...) I expect that my next project will tether me to agentic AI systems more. I still have my hobby projects, which I code the old-fashioned way. Hey! at least it costs me much less that $100/month to tinker on projects ... more like the cost and wear on running my laptop!

There are people here "I can finally get all my ideas done!" Sure, if they are really important enough, I guess. But high technology is much, much less important to me than my employer or probably others here on HN. I can only be concerned with the paycheck at this point. And at this point, they are happy that I can read documentation, write code, read documentation, write code, and don't care how it gets done. (For what I am working in though, I'd just skip the AI training step.)

With that in mind, I like to use PLs as tools to clarify thinking. There are others that think using PLs and their accompanying tools as friction to their goals, but my friction is understanding the problems I am trying to solve. So, while taking the adventure into automated tooling might be interesting, it doesn't replace the friction (just the feeling I have to read more potential garbage code.)

Whoops, looked him up. Growing a big moustache out and changing my political affiliations as I write this.

I appreciate all the innovations that him and his team brought to the ThinkPad, since this is my main set of laptops.

Lenovo, on the other hand, has been a hit or miss for awhile. I had a T570, which was horrible; one problem after the next. It's just a source of parts now. There are some design issues with the T480 (no center screw in the front/bottom). Also with the T480 is, what it seems to be, the slightly flaky USB-C connectors. The external keyboard (non-bluetooth), while very useful for 2 years, has always been a struggle with the flimsy micro-usb, leaving me to hack that. But now, I somehow now lost an important key on it, I just gave up and bought a nice Tex Shinobi. The only stable-ish one is the one I am on now, a T470p. It's not been perfect, but it's the best designed TP I had (my T430s is overall good, except for battery power, but the internals for those old machines are a chore to get through.) I have a P14s at work. It's OK, but nothing to write home about.

If all these TPs die, and Framework has a trackpoint version + delivers to my country, I would like to get that instead.

Everything I see on this topic involves gaming. The last game I played in a long while was Cities Skylines on my laptop (which was taxing, but ran it fine). I used to use Macs, but for a long time, until up to 2013, I decided that since I look at mostly text editors, terminals and a web browser and some other common things, I'd rather spend less for equipment and get used to some desktop UI on a Linux. I have had reliable ThinkPads (procured used) for years as a result. While there were bumps, it's been fine. Since I am in the vicinity of financial applications, I have to use Windows about 30% of the time, and I hate it every time. Can someone be the Steam for Excel, please? :)