The problem with chromebooks is that the base specs are pretty shit. A lot of them have 4 GiB of RAM and maybe 16GiB of disk if you’re lucky.
They were designed to be thin clients to connect students to the internet, and little else. Maybe they could be hacked into something useful, but I don’t think it’ll ever make a good PC. They were always destined for the landfill.
Meanwhile, the best thinkpads were quality machines back when they came out. IMO, that’s why they’re still so versatile today. Free software can’t fix bad fundamentals.
Despite using a version of the Linux kernel in ChromeOS, Chromebooks don’t always have the best hardware (ie. driver) support from the mainline kernel used by most distributions. That’s why there are niche distributions like GalliumOS which provide tweaks to support the touchpad and audio devices in many Chromebooks. It’s similar to how Android is Linux, but it’s not standard Linux as we are familiar with (so the hardware support is different).
Many Chromebooks have really poor specs: low-wattage CPUs, small amounts of storage, low amounts of RAM. While they may be newer, they are actually probably less performant than older laptops. This has changed in recent years with the new Chromebook plus program (or whatever it is called) which mandates a reasonable set of baseline features, but that is talking about current Chromebooks and not the ones from the COVID era.
Related to the previous point, many Chromebooks are not serviceable or upgradeable while Thinkpads and some recent laptops are. You are unlikely to open up a Chromebook and be able to replace say the RAM or SSD, which would be a show stopper for a lot of people that like Thinkpads.
So… unfortunately, I think this take is a bit of a miss and I dont’ really see it happening. I would be happy to be proven wrong though since my kids have two Chromebooks from the COVID era :}
This is not an idea I came up with, but I haven’t seen it anywhere else and I don’t remember where I heard it.
Basically the rules are:
Every vote on every question is handled by direct democracy
But, you can assign your vote to another person at any time. ie Give them your voting power so now they have two votes on any topic
Furthermore, a person to whom you’ve assigned your vote can in turn assign it to someone else.
You can always see who’s wielding your vote power, you can see who assigned it to whom
Any time you want, you can take your vote back
So basically I can assign my vote to Bob because I trust his judgment. Bob can assign mine and his own to Alice, because Bob trust’s Alice’s judgment.
I can check what’s happening with my vote, and see that it’s been assigned to Bob, who assigned it to Alice, etc.
There is no limit to the number of reassignments that can happen.
Basically it’s direct democracy by default, but with an infinitely and dynamically scaleable structure of delegation layers in between.
A person can be as involved or uninvolved as they want. Their minimum involvement would be choosing which friend they trust to handle their vote. Maximum involvement could mean seeking to convince millions of others to trust you with their vote. Or getting thousands of intermediate delegates to delegate all their voting power to you.
I feel like we’re in the garbage-age of MMOs, but when the next golden age of MMOs happens, I want to see worlds where these experimental forms of government are attempted. At least digitally.
The problem with experimenting with government in video games is there’s no death in video games, and handling death is one of the most important roles of government.
That is an interesting thought. If humans were immortal, would we have any government?..hm, yeah, I believe we still would. I think it’s less about the threat of death for an individual and more about the management of resources for a population.
But the intent would not be to see what works in a video game and try to use it IRL, the intention is to see where these systems breakdown in unforeseen ways when implemented at scale.
But mostly, I just want to see new fun ideas in the genre. There are no new MMOs willing to take the risk of letting one player’s experience be dependent on the behaviour of another player, let alone allow a fully player-managed government. For now we live in a world where Destiny 2 is what qualifies as an MMO. But I digress.
I think that one of the basic laws that “governs” people is that if you hurt someone, they’ll get mad and be motivated to hurt you back.
But if you kill someone, they can’t retaliate.
Then it’s up to their kin, their friends and family, to avenge them.
I think government somewhat becomes necessary when societies get large enough that one’s kin network can’t find their cousin’s killer. Then we get police, whose job it is to find that killer and punish them.
I know that’s an oversimplified, single-dimensional model of government. But I feel like when people are facing, en masse, the horrific void of death, not just in terms of murder but also in terms of war, that government really becomes a compelling idea.
Death is like a black hole that nothing echoes back from. Government helps us deal with that void by creating a virtual person who can still play their “next move” even after they’ve passed through that doorway.
Of course video games have their own forms of “death”. Spawn camping for instance takes a player out of the game. Surrounding a person’s bed with lava can “permakill” them in Minecraft.
It’s just that video games sort of have “government” built into the game mechanics. Respawning is a solution to the “no retaliation after death” problem. Anti cheat stuff. Inventory that literally cannot be accessed by anyone other than the player solves theft.
Games are designed to be fun, which is kind of what government does to reality. It redesigns reality to be a playable, balanced game.
I would love to see more games with less balancing, where the balancing comes from player experimentation with governing agreements.
But government’s largely a solution to aspects of reality that are truly, horribly, “not fun”.
I’d say that’s definitely one aspect of a justice system, which is definitely one aspect of a government. But I don’t think you even need “lives” to create a simulation of a government. Just agents and resources.
I would love to see more games…where the balancing comes from player experimentation with governing agreements.
100% agree. I’ve wondered how an MMO with permadeath + “reproduction” could work. Basically, every new avatar in the game has to be “made” by two existing avatars, and would be granted semi-random stats based on genetic contributions of the parents. This would mean spots in the game are limited, and you’d have to wait for existing players to “create” you, which would rate limit the number of people who can start playing your game, which limits the profits from running the game, which limits the number of studios willing to ever try it…
I won’t fire you if you give me your vote. Or only rent an apartment to you if you give me your vote. I will also lobby for “common sense” limitations on who can see the vote delegation (i.e. hide it from the plebs).
Also, my buddy owns most of the media, so expect them to fear-monger about the dangers of making the votes public.
Semi-liquid democracy plus confederalism. The votes that delegates bring are multiplied by some function of the votes assigned to them as well as the soldiers and funding they commit.
The good news: there is a tool built to solve this exact problem: regular expressions (aka regex)
The bad news: regular expressions are famously frustrating to read and write
Depending on how badly you want the problem solved and how patient you are, using online resources to craft some regular expressions would be the ticket
hmmm “famously frustrating”, presumably to people who know what they’re doing, very likely translates to “WAY outside of my skill level”. Worth some digging though, especially now that I have a keyword! Thank you!!
There are regex tutorials online, and you can test your regex there.
I’d say, since you’re learning, this could be an opportunity that may be useful later.
Just start with one relatively simple thing, like maybe copyright stuff. Work on getting regex to match that properly throughout a doc, and enjoy the improvement. Then when ready, tackle the next thing.
I wish I had asked this sooner. I don’t know really any code at all, but this might be the thing that pushes me to learn some. This looks crazy useful. Time is the enemy right now though - I’ve only got a few free evenings left before class starts, and I don’t trust that I’d know it well enough not to shoot myself in the foot.
When the next break rolls around though, I think regex will be my project. Any foundation you’d recommend learning first? From the bit of searching I’ve done, regex seems to feed straight into conversations about Python or Java - I don’t know any of that. Would it even make sense to try to learn regex without first knowing the basics of a coding language?
I did manage to fine-tune MS Word’s find and replace commands… I’ve got a list of 10 or so find-and-replace searches that does close-enough-for-now to what I want it to do.
A lot of Chromebooks can have Linux natively put on them.
I see a lot of pooh-poohing of the idea in this thread, but I think there’s people who are willing to do so.
I just took an old Lenovo ThinkCentre Chromebox 10H5 and modified the UEFI firmware with the walkthru from MrChromebox to put Xubuntu on it. It’s actually pretty snappy despite its limited hardware.
Also, I upgraded the 16gb M.2 SSD into a far more sufficient 256gb size.
The shortage of RAM is rough, but it can still be a workhorse in a lot of ways. I plan on replacing Xubuntu with a server version to get a little boost out of running it headless to drop the RAM going to rendering a GUI.
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