“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: […] like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.” —Jonathan Swift

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: July 25th, 2024

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  • Nor batteries externally removable like used to be.

    This would be a major sacrifice to form factor and would be strictly detrimental to 99.999% of users. Regarding benefits outside repairability, basically nobody in 2026 is going to think to carry around a second, fully-charged laptop battery. Regarding repairability, you might have to replace the battery once during the laptop’s lifespan, and the procedure is extremely straightforward.

    With an external battery, you end up with a laptop that’s not only substantially thicker, but which – because it’s stuck with a large battery either on the back or on the bottom – likely has worse airflow.

    Notably for this repair, there are seven captive Phillips-head screws (seen plenty of hexalobular etc.), you can just use your fingers to remove the base cover (seen plenty where you need/want a pry tool), removing the base cover already removes the battery’s screw(s), and most importantly, you just pinch to disconnect instead of lifting a fragile connector off the board. Swapping the replacement external battery once you have it is probably about 30 seconds; this is about five minutes – practically no difference accounting for how infrequently it’ll need to be done. There’s an exception for people with a physical disability like Parkinson’s, but if you can phone a friend, the process is straightforward enough for basically anyone else to do it on your behalf.


    Edit: On a whim, I decided to look to Framework for a comparison. It’s worse there for battery replacement.

    • You have to first undo five captive hexalobular screws on the bottom.
    • Then you have to lift the magnetic top panel, being sure not to damage the ribbon cable while you disconnect it.
    • You have to pull out the connector for the battery using a small, black flap.
    • Then you unscrew three more captive hexalobular screws.

    As far as I can tell, the T14 is the easiest battery replacement you’re going to find being sold today. If you’re able-bodied enough to use a screwdriver and it not being external is somehow still a serious concern for repairability, I don’t know what to tell you.


  • “The Strongest Jedi” definitely isn’t right. At best, he’s evenly matched with Obi-Wan. If you apply stupid “power scaling” rules, then sure, Obi-Wan got ganked by Dooku during their fight while Anakin handily beat him. But at the same time that Dooku pushes Obi-Wan, he easily kicks and downs Anakin who’s behind him; Obi-Wan was just the one he subdued by crushing him, ostensibly seeing him as the greater threat.

    We’ve seen Anakin lose to Obi-Wan at the (inherent) height of his combat prowess, and it was his own fault. Windu and Yoda probably also take Anakin one-on-one. (Windu, of course, was totally defenseless when Anakin severed his arm.)

    If we’re talking about things like the Force, Yoda is clearly much more powerful. There’s an argument Anakin was the most powerful pilot, but that combined with being very Force-sensitive and a very good duelist doesn’t make him “the most powerful” overall. Most potential? If he could keep his emotions under control, probably.








  • Less time than you take to discredit this can copy/paste the search terms yourself and choose

    What the fuck are you even talking about? I provided the PC Gamer source because I personally have no trouble finding good sources but know some people do (nor should people have to go look for them in lieu of a content farm anyway), and the GameRant article linked in the OP credits PC Gamer as its singular source. I broke down why it’s preferable after reading both sources.

    I don’t feel like being lectured on going out and finding better sources when 1) I did and 2) the lobotomist would’ve had to accidentally leave the ice pick in your head for you to be fucking stupid enough to find and present the LLM slop that you did. It’s pathetically clear you have no idea how to find good sources of information, and you should work on basic media literacy skills. (That’s a rude but real suggestion. If you want polite, you can start next time by not suggesting I have sinister ulterior motives for trying to help.)




  • I think you’re in the same boat I am where I fucking haaaaaaate the culture on link aggregators (and probably other social media) where people will bitch and moan to no end that their preferred format (publicly reacting to disconnected headlines whose articles they haven’t read) isn’t giving them literally all the information they need to form a cogent opinion.

    • “I had time to write a 300-word short essay about this headline, but I’m going to whine if I get called for something in the first paragraph that invalides everything I said.”
    • “I can’t believe this headline mentioned a pretty common thing I’m not personally familiar with but the publication’s target audience obviously is.”
    • "Headline didn’t answer every single question I could possibly wonder? Uh, clickbait much?
    • “The headline writer didn’t account for this batshit non sequitur I drew from it, so they’re basically lying.”

    They genuinely think that the article body should be effectively superfluous to the headline – not just to have a basic gist of but to discuss and debate current events, which is insane. It reminds me of people who think they can learn math and physics by passively watching somebody else do it – which is true only to an utterly incosequential extent.

    Speaking as someone who’s read thousands of articles for research, I feel confident saying that reading the article is an insane force multiplier to understanding. Any time you spent reacting to the headline would’ve been 3x as effective put into reading even just part of an article. This doesn’t just apply to current events, and even I haven’t thoroughly learned this lesson; so many times I’ve been editing Wikipedia and arrived at a point where reading one goddamn article for three minutes would’ve saved me half an hour of fucking around (“two hours of debugging can save you five minutes of reading the documentation”).

    This is my way of pleading with you (you, the non-CombatWombat reader): it’s enriching once you can steel yourself and work through the initial dopamine drought, and it quickly becomes enjoyable. It’s not your fault it’s so hard psychologically; this was done to you by formats that value engagement with the platform over engagement with the material.

    But if you don’t, please at least accept that headlines cannot always contain everything you want.