Oh yeah I didn't know that one. I do know Logitech has some ultra-thin ones too though. Very good keyboards too. They'd do nice in a laptop as well.
I'd very gladly sacrifice thinness for a decent keyboard. The Thinkpads had an OK compromise for a while but since the Thinkpad T14s gen2 or so they have been horrible as well. My old T490s was still serviceable.
One space that I don't think I've seen explored is building a laptop around a tiny, ultra-low-power passively cooled SoC board that can easily fit beside the keyboard instead of under it in a 12"-16" chassis and saves space that'd otherwise need to be dedicated to cooling. That'd buy a substantial amount of Z-budget for a quality keyboard without blowing up chassis thickness.
Naturally this laptop wouldn't be suited for some types of work due to lack of horsepower, but there's always tradeoffs somewhere.
We're kinda there already. Most recent laptops I've seen have a tiny motherboard not even taking up the whole width of the device. Under the keyboard there's usually the battery.
Don't forget a significant part of the weight has to be towards the front edge so you can tilt the screen back without flipping the whole laptop. Some of my cheaper atom based laptops (with tiny motherboard and batteries) even have a metal bar in there for that purpose.
Right, but my idea was to do something like shove the mainboard up into the bezel above the keyboard and battery into the palm rest, with nothing sitting under the keyboard except maybe ribbon cables. That’d get you a laptop with a thickness of under an inch that still has a keyboard that’s not compromised and keeps weight shifted to the front. It’d simplify repairs to some degree too since there’d be very little stacking.
Framework has stated that it asked AMD if there were any way to make the RAM on Ryzen AI Max APUs (like used in the Framework Desktop) socketed, and AMD said no due to the stability hit that’d entail — the physical distance from the CPU that’d be required with RAM sockets reduces signal integrity too much for it to function.
Which is weird. The entire point of [LP]CAMM[2] is to be able to make that work.
The Framework desktop clocks the memory at 8000MHz. That's well within the limits of the interface. Something is flawed or omitted in those CPUs if they can't handle it.
The thing I don't get about the framework upgradability is that, what are you honestly going to do with the old system board or graphics card? I guess you could sell it. Who's going to really buy it?
I tend to upgrade my laptop every 6-8 years and by then there is nothing to upgrade well, frankly the technology has moved on, new PCIe standards DDR screen tech etc. One of the reasons I did not buy a framework (was very close to it) is the screen. I value having a decent screen attached to my laptop. I think some of these newer laptops with Tandem OLEDs will be a real improvement over what was out there previously.
I thought about the port configuration as well, and that's all cool you can have 6 ports that can be anything you like, but really they are just two USB controllers controlling all that. One on either side. What would be my ultimate port configuration? Well probably like some USB-C and an audio port and a HDMI port. The network adapter sticks out so that's going to be super annoying. The newer Lenovo and Dell laptops have replaceable USB ports, which means if I wear one out I can replace it easily.
What I also realized is you can do some really cool things like PCIe passthrough with Thunderbolt that of course you don't get on a Framework. Want to have an awesome GPU? Well you can use an eGPU or perhaps an flash a firmware to your NVMe (you can't do that over USB), but you can over PCIe passthrough where the device shows up as /dev/nvme0. I've always had problems with disks over USB, sometimes they'll drop from the system, and things like eSATAp were always more reliable for 3.5" disks, but that's only available on desktop with a special bracket.
In the end I'm just going to spend a little on a T1g Gen8 probably. I can upgrade the RAM in that because it's CAMM2. It may cost a little more than the framework but on special I should be able to get it for a nice price.
If I had less money I'd probably just go for previous gen.
I already have a server at home server. I used a MZ32 motherboard with a bunch of disks 3.5" in it as it's mostly a storage server.
My HTPC is an old ATX desktop computer on its side in a Phanteks P400A case. On it's side it just looks like a black speaker grill front to back cooling it has three Noctua NF-A12x25 fans that are barely even visible.
The good thing about using standard parts is if the GPU died I could buy another cheap one to replace it.
But I guess that case is a cool idea if you didn't have those things.
> For conviction I agree, for suspicion not so much. Suspicion isn't guilt. The authorities should suspect people based on probable cause, courts should presume innocence and require the state builds a flawless argument beyond reasonable doubt.
Except it doesn't work like that in practice. It would be nice if it did. Often a person can be found guilty simply by jury in a trial based on what they think a person might have done. That's reality, and it is the case in western would countries not some obscure dictatorship.
By your logic, we shouldn't arrest murderers? Even if they're caught on video, it could be a deepfake. It all comes down to people testifying something is real. it always comes down to convincing a jury or a judge that the defendant is guilty.
This is a common pattern I'm seeing in recent discussions. There is a practical problem, so instead of fixing the problem, let's not use the system entirely. Perhaps for victimless crimes I would agree with you, but it is not for you or I but for the victims or whoever is survived by them to relinquish their demand for justice.
For serious crimes, suspicion must be corroborated by evidence. hear-say, accusations or eye-witness testimony alone can't be used to even begin a trial.
> The solution to authoritarian regimes is to not have one
The solution to not being poor is being rich. You could apply that logic to a lot of things. Have this thing instead of that thing. Using your example above of "differential privacy scanning"
Differential privacy is a property of a dataset meaning you can’t tell an individual was part of a dataset. If it’s traceable back to the individual device it’s not differentially private.
I think at this point you're just trying to say "don't have this thing have that thing instead" as a response to anything.
Certainly you can. The solution to being poor is not being poor. how? that is a different story, but ultimately, the solution to being poor must be not being poor, otherwise it isn't a solution right? And of course it is a reductive take, but it is nevertheless correct. Solutions that don't result in poor people no longer being poor are not solutions. Solutions that don't involve in not having an authoritarian regime are not solutions to that problem either.
Your solution to authoritarian regimes is not fighting CSAM, you made the CSAM problem worse, and it does not prevent authoritarian regimes. An authoritarian regime does not need your permission to scan your phone. And most human governments in history qualify as authoritarian, and they didn't need phones let along scanning of phones.
> I think at this point you're just trying to say "don't have this thing have that thing instead" as a response to anything.
I'm saying: "If you don't like apples, don't eat apples. Don't talk about how we need to kill all the bees and worms that help apple trees reproduce".
> Differential privacy is a property of a dataset meaning you can’t tell an individual was part of a dataset.
Yeah, that's correct. And that's a violation of individual's privacy..how?
What would it take for you to consider scanning of phones a valid solution. Would mass murder, global nuclear war, pandemic containment? Is it a question of not understanding the harm being done? My frustration is that, ok, let's not scan phones. what's your solution? You have none. Your solution is to do nothing and accept things should be the way they are. If I said let's verify everyone's ID before they can access the internet, is that acceptable? Let's ban Tor and VPNs instead, is that acceptable? What is your solution? Can you at least agree what we should aggresively be working on a solution? We have people training LLMs to generat CSAM and you hear not a peep out of all these companies and devs working on the tech. Just slap knees and declare "welp, that's unfortunate".
I don't care what governments do. If it takes an authoritarian regime to stop this insanity, I'm all for it. I'll be royally screwed, it will be a nightmware. But if that is the cost, so be it. This is how authoritarians gain power by the way. You have the apathetic educated and ruling classes, and the masses crying for change, and they will actually solve the problem but destroy everything else along the way. I'm tell you that if I, someone who is relatively aware and informed of the risks of privacy loss, of tech underlying the systems we use, if I am saying this, imagine what the majority of people would say.
it took one 9/11 attack to get us the patriot act, if someone used Tor on their rooted android phone to do something worse, phone scanning will be the least of your concerns. And the public would support it. You need a solution because the public demands it, at the cost of privacy if required. But it is for technologists to device a mechanism that solves the problem without costing us privacy.
> There are solutions for anonymous payments using homomorphic encryption. Things like Zcash and Monero exist.
The main problem is there are no products that solve the problem Chat Control aims to solve without infringing massively on everyone's privacy, (including children). Any suggestions that do exist come with serious risks or have complexities, eg homomorphic encryption is a generally new area that has expensive computational requirements.
The reason for that is because it's easier to encrypt data than develop some kind of system with a magical key only authorized people are able to use under certain circumstances.
What Mullvad highlights is that the whole chat control proposal is mired in corruption. A particular individual with an agenda to sell something has adjacent financial interests to being part of the solution. No doubt they will want funding for "research", because they don't actually have a solution everyone can use. They try to make it appear as if they do (grift) to get the politicians on board. Then there's a harassment campaign component (specifically the EU Survivors Taskforce) portion which aims to apply public emotional pressure on any remaining politicians who have concerns.
In the end everyone else (companies, developers etc) will have to do the heavy lifting to try to find some way to comply by their legal interpretation with whatever vague brain fart is passed into law.
Make no mistake about it, this proposal has nothing to do with child protection but rather is all about demonizing the use of encryption. Law enforcement would love to be able to simply argue the presence of encryption means there is likely to be offending. This is why they fight so hard in the UK in regard to Apple having default encryption on ADP. You can't make the argument to a court owning an iPhone means you're a criminal for instance.
The end game, and goal post movement will simply be to argue they used non-compliant software/products. If they do have something on the person then this will be used to argue that further offenses were likely concealed, (even if that is not the case) and they went to effort to do so (premeditation). It's a gift that keeps giving all along the trial process.
> EDIT: Here is one idea I had: Sign images/video with hardware-secured chips (camera sensor or GPU?) that is traceable to the device. When images are further processed/edited, then they will be subject to differential-privacy scanning. This can also combat deepfakes, if image authenticity can be proven by the device that took the image.
And there obviously will be totally like no way to like not do that and then have an anonymous photo. What are you going to do, confiscate all the computers, phones and cameras that already exist and don't have this special "hardware secure chip". Honestly at this point I think you're a troll.
> If your position is that governments (who represent us,voters) should accept the status quo, and just let their people suffer injustice, I don't think I can support that.
Things can be always worse, and you shouldn't assume that the powers that be will use these things to prosecute the things you find morally offensive. Which is another problem as well.
> Mullvad is also in for a rude awakening. If criminals use Tor or VPNs, those will also face a ban. We need to give governments solutions that lets them do what they claim they want to do (protect the public from victimization) while preserving privacy to avoid a very real dystopia.
The space will innovate regardless of what governments want, so that's the rude awakening. Criminals always will be criminals and they'll just get better at doing what they want to do regardless.
> Freedoms and liberties must not come at the cost of injustice. And as i argued elsewhere on HN, in the end, ignoring ongoing injustice will result in even less freedoms and liberties. If there was a pluralistic referendum in the EU over chat control, I would be surprised if the result isn't a law that is even far worse than chat control.
Okay then guess we can all "think of the children" whenever anyone is worrying about the injustice caused by abuse of these new powers.
> I understand that you seem to think that adding systems like this will placate governments around the world but that is not the case. We have already conceded far more than we ever should have to government surveillance for a false sense of security.
Placation of government and law enforcement is never complete. For them every goal post moved is perceived as making their job easier. They only have one job, and that's to convict people of things. That is the only metric they care about. That includes making up new offences to charge people with, including "the defendant used non compliant products to hide their offending which may or may not exist" - not a crime in the EU right now, but you can bet that will be the next step if people refuse to use compliant products.
> Let me post a longer reply later. But for your last point, we do have automated machine generated alarms in form of smoke detectors. We're legally required to have them in our homes.
A smoke alarm has very little room for abuse as it only does one thing which largely aligns with the occupant's interests. A more comparable argument would be that you must have cameras in every room in your house to record burglars, home invaders and potential child abductors. We need not look any further than the abuse of door bell cameras in the US to see how that plays out.
iphones are pretty secure against theft unless they get your pin or some such. I have two friends who forgot their own pins and the data was unretrievable in spite of their best efforts.
That's why I've been thinking of paring my desktop-replacement 16" laptop with a Pocket Reform or something like that.