I can recommend minifree.org - this is a shop from Leah Rowe, who is the lead developer of the libreboot project. That is a (more secure) bios alternative, related to coreboot.

I bought my Thinkpad T400 from there, some 6 years ago or something. I am still writing on it and i can highly recommend it. However, today i would buy a smaller form factor. so 12,8° instead of 14°.

So it is kind of heavy compared to a macbook air and not the fastest machine, but you can get your stuff done. And it is really really durable, which is the reason i bought one of the older thinkpads.

Around $300, there would be the libreboot 820: https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-820/

And with minifree.org you can be sure that the linux/libreboot/coreboot support is really great. Because: since Leah is a developer, she testes everything beforehand and fixes problems when she notices it. So i would recommend to describe what you would want to do. For instance, initially i wanted to use a encrypted harddrive and i had installed the grub variant, but later upgraded to libreoot with seabios. This was much better and fixed the problems with my encrypted harddrive. But i suspect leah would have found out and fixed that already, had i told her that.

Also for instance, seabios has better openBSD support.

yess!!

I disagree - i think only relying on green electricity is good, but it won’t solve the devastating status we are currently that is the climate catastrophe.

Scientists currently say we are on track of their worst predictions. We need radical change, and one such change is reducing our consumption of resources drastically, globally. Consuming less power makes it much easier to use green electricity for this power.

I think this is the wrong direction of trying to solve the climate catastrophe - as long as Big companies continue their egoistical greed for money, climate catastrophe will accelerate. As those big companies won’t choose inconvenient but necessary solutions, they have to be forced by the state. If money is even a small amount of motivation, it is greenwashing.

We have to kill capitalism. This is the only solution which lets society focus on society instead of money.

The biggest challenge humanity as a whole is currently - i am not exaggerating - solving the climate catastrophe. In this context, i don’t care if machine learning lowers barriers.

I don’t want it even - Because we don’t have that many resources available to solving this existential crisis of humanity. I want energy and resources to spent wisely with benefit to society. Much of how machine learning, AI and bitcoin, etc is used today does nothing (and is even harmful) in that regard.

I think i am hating AI this much is also due to the fact that we as humanity have big troubles fixing the climate catastrophe. And not only does AI in 99% not contribute meaningful things towards this huge challenge, rather it accelerates the problem with its huge energy needs. Needs which i call “waste” compared to the much more important problem of solving climate catastrophe.

It is the same reason i hate bitcoin.

This onion article captures my emotion much better than anything anybody has said in recent years. Because it expresses my Hate towards Managers which much power, much money - who could do lots of great things to society by being ousted. Those managers won’t listen to any arguments i could give, nor would they ever see my argument. They care only about money and greed. By not listing facts this onion article is much more to the point.

It is glorious satire, loving it.

As an IT Professional i hate AI, because many People favor AI in Situations where statistical Algorithms are already good.

• it has huge energy needs to train a model on thousands on input data, compared to simply having a concise statistical algorithm who does the thing you want to do. Think Spam filtering (usually an statistical Algorithm) vs Captcha (in Google’s case AI)
• It is much harder to debug and fixup after it has gone wrong. structrual Bias in the input data (think sexism, racism) is hard to remove on a big scale. Algorithms are easy to change.
• As Software Developer, i favor mimimalist but useful technology. Very few things AI can do (which Algorithms can’t) are actually helpful to society.
• I think of Software Development as an Art of Craftmanship - AI is far away from that, it is like searching for needles in a hay stack in terms of finding solutions. And when you found a solution, you don’t know why it works, you can’t adapt it to other Problems easily.

I agree that AI can be helpful and inspiring for new Algorithms but in many cases AI is used to replace Algorithms, wasting huge energy resources in the process - instead of just improving said Algorithms.

don’t think you can make a big difference as an individual, given that captchas are used by probably billions of users per day