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My father had bladder cancer, which was caught relatively early as the cancer had not yet spread beyond the bladder wall.

The doctor performed a rather uncomfortable surgery (the pathway for a man is not pleasant) and then injected the TB virus into his bladder, which is apparently an effective treatment for this type of cancer.

It's been 20 years now, no recurrence. Think he was treated at Dana Farber in Boston.

Having gone through what was likely a life saving treatment he has become, ironically, anti-western medicine -- don't blame him, having a surgical implement shoved up main street doesn't sound like a walk in the park :)


Was just in an Apple Store yesterday mulling over whether or not to switch back to macOS after 15 years on Linux PCs.

Both MacBook Pros and Airs are nice machines, but macOS, for me, it's a huge step back.

Unfortunately the Asahi project is underfunded (likely one of the reasons the project founder/lead jumped ship recently), and as a result M4 support is likely a year+ away.

Oh wells, let's see what Dell and Lenovo have on offer this spring/summer. Should be able to get a pretty decent PC laptop for less than the $4k+ an MBP 16" with 2TB/64GB will cost.


If you have a perksatwork account, you can get a thinkpad with those specs for about $1.2k. During national holidays it goes for under $1k.

https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/p/laptops/thinkpad/thinkpadp/le...


Might be worth taking a look at https://frame.work/.


Until now I'd only heard of Framework laptops, but am blown away by the build-your-own process -- incredible, spec the machine just as you want it.

Going to dive into the details now, thanks...


Just purchased a 13" framework with the 'old' AMD 7840u, 2.8k screen, and speced as you desire - 64gb , 2 TB (with ram and storage coming from Amazon).

It's only been a week but thus far it has worked very nicely and I think ended up running me around $1,500.

We see what the future brings, but for now, seems a very solid purchase.

(Edit: as someone mentioned below, the speakers are not very good at all. This was not super important to me. If it is super important to you, you'll be let down)


I would strongly recommend you _don't_ get a Framework.

I bought one. It lasted less than a year. One day I pulled it out to use it and it just stopped booting. It had been barely used up to that point. No drops or anything like that.

Support was giving me the runaround, too -- by not using info I provided them, not answering direct questions, and asking me to provide info I had already provided.

Do some research on Framework support. You'll find it is atrocious.

The idea is absolutely amazing and I hope it succeeds. The expansion cards are an AMAZING feature. The problem is that the quality bar just isn't being met, yet.


I love the idea behind Framework, but my admittedly old one is nowhere near comparable to a MacBook. It's really unpleasant to use, feels cheap, and performance/battery life are shockingly poor on Kubuntu. It's not a patch on a ThinkPad even, much less a Mac. Have they gotten considerably better since I bought mine (end of 2022)?


Framework started selling larger batteries in 2023 (61 Whr vs the base 55 Whr), and from looking through older reviews it looks like battery life significantly improved (>25% better) with the 13th-gen Intel upgrade [1]. I've got their 13-inch AMD 7840U but can't speak to the battery life as it mostly sits docked.

[1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/05/review-framework-lap...


Have the bigger battery, battery life is still bad.

It's just a bad laptop: has "hot bag" syndrome, speakers are terrible even with the upgraded kit, the hinge that turns the screen off is very temperamental.

Still no open BIOS, they've hired a “Linux guy” who is super condescending in their official forums and locks topics when he feels the heat.

Stay far away.


I love my Framework 14. I'm absolutely sticking with this company for all future PCs.


I’d love to try out their products, but as an European it could become a problem in the near future that they’re an US-based company.


Why? They operate via multiple subsidiaries (the EU one is registered in Eindhoven), most notably Singapore and Taiwan, and do their main manufacturing in Taiwan.


Many US companies operate via subsidiaries and manufacture their products in Asia. But that doesn’t matter if the main business is based in the US. The current US government, its seemingly random tariffs, and their plans to cut their country off the rest of the world make it hard for me to invest my money and energy into products from the US if I’m not sure if in a year from now I still will get support for them as a customer from Europe.


I was pretty much in the same boat recently. Pulled the trigger and got M4 MBP - no regrets, great machine! Blows Intel-based competition by far away, double the speed of my beefy desktop build from 5y ago. Yea, I wish it could run Linux, but Mac OS works very well as a hypervisor and I still do all my day-to-day work in a familiar environment in Linux VMs. With all the supply chain attacks lately, I don't usually dare to develop on baremetal host anymore anyway. Related discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42541508

In fact, it's even better than Linux as a VM desktop host - finally a reliable suspend on lid close, smooth graphics in VMs, easy context switching between VMs, no silly fiddling with virgl and GPU passthrough etc. It Just Works. I can even play almost all the Windows games I care about - and at totally acceptable frame rates despite x86/ARM translation layers and lack of discrete GPU.


If you don't need a discrete graphics card and want maximum battery life, LG gram laptops are totally worth a look. I could easily write code and develop all day without plugging in at all.


I got a Thinkpad T14 AMD Gen 5 a few weeks ago to use aside my MacBook Pro. Filled it up with 64GB RAM and a 2TB SSD for about 160 Euro each. In contrast to my previous Thinkpad experience 4 years ago, all the hardware just works out of the box. Even suspend/resume comes back without any devices lost, etc.


Don’t forget to make a donation to Asahi, maybe it will be ready in time for your next laptop.


ThinkPad P1 is fine, if Intel chipset works for you.

Great keyboard and touchpad and nice display.


Same boat, @6 year old Dell Precision 5540 here and am looking to upgrade.

Dell's latest offerings aren't particulaly inspiring, especially wrt pricing (absurdly expensive for what you get). Seems that PC laptop manufacturers have taken a page out of Apple's playbook and charge through the nose for memory and SSD upgrades.

To put in context, I paid $1,100 USD for this machine in October, 2019, and around another $200 for 2 X 512GB SSD and 32 GB RAM. So, $1,300 all-in. These days you're looking at least double the price.

And if you're going to blow $3K on a laptop, might as well go with a MBP; at least there you're getting high end hardware. Giving up Linux after 15 years is a bitter pill, hopefully Asahi Linux will come out with M3/M4 support in the next year -- in the meantime I'll migrate my current machine to a Fedora VM on the Mac.


Migrated a Scala 2.8(!) era codebase to Scala 3.

As OP explains, macros and abstract type projections tend to be the biggest pain points in complex applications; otherwise, with Scala Rewrite tool it's pretty straightforward.

I think it's more inertia than anything else that more Scala 2 companies don't migrate.

Unpopular opinion, but setting a Scala 2 sunset time would spur companies into action :)

As it stands Akka (previously Lightbend, previously TypeSafe) is the maintainer of Scala 2, and derives part of its revenue from Scala 2 support contracts so there's even less incentive to migrate when there's no EOL date as Python 2 (eventually) had.


While a bit late to the party, Akka on Scala 3 is perfectly viable nowadays, and they have a couple employees contributing to Scala 3.

The bigger issue comes from Databricks being the biggest Scala Center sponsor while holding the entire ecosystem back, for instance with their managed Spark runtime still on 2.12.


As someone who has done a couple of python 2 to python 3 migrations I'm still surprised that there isn't someone big selling support/security patches for python2. There must be a lot of giant corporate python2 code bases that were a lot harder to port and where it was much less acceptable to find random 2to3 bug I'm production then the QA and build system codebases I ported


$4 and change here for locally sourced eggs in San Diego, CA, at an organic food store no less.

Meanwhile, $9+ at commercial supermarket for bottom of the barrel factory produced eggs -- strange times...


See Esqueleto in Haskell, Slick and Quill in Scala, probably LINQ or some variant on .NET in C#/F#.

All support building up arbitrarily complex queries based on statically typed query fragments.

String fragment "composition" is like banging rocks together.


In the US, for schools that use this form of grading, it means your senior year; 3rd form is freshman year and so on.

We tend not to have a 13th grade, and when that does exist, a PG (post grad) is generally there because they excel at a particular sport.


In Britain the first high school graduation happens after 11th grade; attending sixth form is optional and is primarily done by students intending to study at University. In these years you specialise in a couple of subjects relevant to your intended course of study, and for university you apply and are accepted for and study exclusively one subject from day 1.

So arguably the US equalivalent is the freshman year of college.


Just to clarify this as well, while sixth form (17~18 years old) is optional in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18. you have the option to do this at an apprenticeship or skills based school but lots of people do just default to a levels.


> in the UK, education is still compulsory until you're 18

I've just looked it up because I hadn't heard this - it was only compulsory until 16 "in my day"! Turns out it still is, here in Wales, and also Scotland and NI. Only England changed it to 18. Our devolved governments love to make things confusing.

https://www.gov.uk/know-when-you-can-leave-school https://wcpp.org.uk/publication/raising-the-age-of-participa...


I guess some people in the US call someone beyond their 12th grade in high school, or fourth year in an undergraduate program a "super senior."


I've literally never heard or read that. So I would say no.


I'm American and I have heard "super senior" and seen it used in print. Go figure.


It's certainly a real term. The context is often student athletes that intentionally didn't play their sport for a season (called redshirting) to maintain their 4-year eligibility so that they can stay for a fifth year and compete in their sport.


I'm a college prof in the US and know that term.


Looking at the images and the price of eggs I can't help but think...

expensive toilet paper


Counterpoint, running Dell R430 rack server for nearly ten years -- in that time a single SSD in raid 10, 8 disk array, has failed.

Maybe I got lucky?

Similarly, my last three laptops have all been Dell Precision -- only issue until I switched to Intel integrated gpu was Nvidia on Linux (black screens, laptop attempting liftoff due to gpu heating issues) causing periodic grief.

Also, for the author, Dell Precision provides advanced BIOS options out of the box, something that their consumer line of laptops probably doesn't offer.


We had 4 Dell Itanium racks (circa 2003) all fail with the same exact power-supply overvoltage issue over the course of 4 months. Maybe we got unlucky.


8 years and still going on a Dell R430 rack server (8X SSD in RAID 10, 2X Xeon CPU, ...)

One of the drives failed last year, but used one of the hot spares on standby to put out the fire as it were.

Amazing longevity, perhaps I've just gotten lucky while avoiding obscene 24/7 cloud instance costs. It will die at some point, much like the HN server storing these very words.


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