davidovitch's comments

davidovitch | 3 years ago | on: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

I have an EliteBook 845 G7 and also that one is top notch, minus the screen and driver bug on the WWAN modem. I whish HP did not include a keypad though on the bigger screen sizes since your hands are always towards the left instead of the middle of the machine (Dell and Lenovo have 15/16 inch options for which the keyboard does not have a keypad).

davidovitch | 3 years ago | on: Poll: What's the best laptop for Linux these days?

At work I am limited to using HP but I have to say that I have been very pleasantly surprised by the HP EliteBook 845 G7 (Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U). When I bought it new in 2020 it had initially sleeping problems but later kernels improved the situation. Other driver problems where with the finger print reader (easily fixed with LVFS firmware upgrade) and the Intel WWAN card (that still doesn't work due to a bug). The display with privacy filter works but generally, when privacy mode is off, the screen viewing angles are terrible (I will not buy a build-in privacy filter on future models).

Personally I would recommend laptops from shops that give you a Linux option right from the start. From the big manufacturers I could see that this is the case for the Dell XPS and Precision 7670, while Lenovo offers it on various Thinkpad models. I could not find that for any of the HP models (except Dev One).

Although I have not used them, I am not a big fan of the Clevo based machines that System76 and Tuxedo have. I think the Librem and Framework machines look nicer (even though I prefer 14+ inch sized machines).

A good resource to check for Linux compatibility of specific components and laptops is https://linux-hardware.org. I whish this resource was used more often by reviewers.

I would also give a laptop bonus points if its firmware is supported by easy upgrades via LVFS https://fwupd.org/lvfs/devices/.

davidovitch | 5 years ago | on: Why is the latest Intel hardware unsupported in libreboot? (2017)

There are modern alternative systems with an open firmware stack, for example the Talos II running Power9. Granted, it is not available as a cheap, slick and slim power efficient laptop, but it is real, only twice as expensive and very capable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER9

See performance benchmarks incomparison with AMD/Intel at: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t... https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=power9-t...

davidovitch | 7 years ago | on: The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine

These generator+gearbox combo's operate at efficiencies (mechanical to electrical power) in the order of 80-90%. I would assume it will be quite challenging to do that with a 100m long mechanical transmission system handling 5-10MW. I wonder how much maintenance such a system would require too.

davidovitch | 7 years ago | on: The Troubled Quest for the Superconducting Wind Turbine

Exactly. Other concept studies have looked at driving mechanical pumps to feed hydraulic pressure into a network [1], or (at a very small scale) mechanically drive a desalination unit [2]. As mentioned in the article, the problem is not figuring out if these concepts can work (usually they just do). The question is always: what will it cost compared to what we have now, and how much more complicated will the wind turbine become?

[1] https://www.tudelft.nl/en/2017/tu-delft/possibility-of-hydra... [2] https://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/drinking-with-th...

davidovitch | 7 years ago | on: Zotero: An open-source tool to help collect, organize, cite, and share research

I agree with what others have mentioned here: I really like your elegant workflow (thanks for sharing!!). I also like that it is generally applicable to any collection of PDFs.

However, to be fair, you can follow a somewhat similar workflow with Zotero in combination with the Firefox plugin: download pdf by adding it to the Zotero database in Firefox and Zotero takes care of the indexing. Zotero misses the fancy interactive fuzzy searching you have in your workflow thanks to fzf, but I've added it as a feature request for Zotero [1].

You don't have to organize your papers into folders (or collections in Zotero parlance since a single item can appear in multiple collections). For most academic papers the Zotero plugin will also grab the pdf's metadata as a bonus without additional costs.

[1] https://github.com/zotero/zotero/issues/1536

davidovitch | 7 years ago | on: Ask HN: Favorite note-taking software?

Other features I use often are:

* manage to-do-lists based on the page they occur, and/or their tags, deadlines and priority level.

* table of contents for a larger one page note

* auto git add/commit upon application start

What I would love to see is:

* automated and robust git push/pull with GUI based conflict resolvement so I could collaborate with colleagues who are not too comfi with git using zim

* organize pages using a nested tag structure (like gmail lables) instead of folder structure.

davidovitch | 10 years ago | on: ODROID-C2 Compared to Raspberry Pi 3 and Orange Pi Plus

I participated in the crowd funding phase (waiting for my router to arrive later this year), and they have just updated their IndieGogo project page: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/turris-omnia-hi-performan... saying:

  At the same time, we will discontinue the "Board only"
  perk. The demand for this version was very low and it
  presents a complication for handling and logistics.
Just to be clear, it is the board-only option that is being discontinued, not the router+case! The case looks pretty cool to me.

davidovitch | 10 years ago | on: Adhocracy: open-source cooperative discourse, delegation and voting software

There's also LiquidFeedback [1] maintained by the Public Software Group of Berlin, difficult to judge how actively developed it is since they use their own Mercurial hosting [2].

It is a bit confusing, adhocracy is maintained by Liquid Democracy B.V. in Berlin, but then there is LiquidFeedback maintained by the Public Software Group of Berlin...

[1] http://liquidfeedback.org/

[2] http://www.public-software-group.org/mercurial

davidovitch | 10 years ago | on: Adhocracy: open-source cooperative discourse, delegation and voting software

There is not too much information on their home or github page. There's more hints an pointers in the documentation http://adhocracy3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/, but it would be interesting to see some kind of an overview with features, work flows etc.

It seems that they also have an older version running on Python2: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy, docs: http://adhocracy.readthedocs.org/en/latest/

Would love to see tools like this and/or others [1][2] come more widespread and commonly used in the democratic decision making process. I am naively hoping it will help engaging more people in the democratic process again in Europe. Transparent democratic discussion and decision making is a hard problem to solve that doesn't scale well in real life. Figuring out how to scale-up the number of participants with the help of tools like this is democracy's only hope for a bright future.

[1] https://www.loomio.org/ [2] https://consider.it/

edit: typos

davidovitch | 10 years ago | on: Hierarchy Is Detrimental for Human Cooperation

Exactly, the paper also expresses hopes that people continue to study of human social interaction:

>> Moving forward, experiments in artificial social contexts like ours appear to be a very powerful tool to examine strategic behavior in socially relevant situations. We hope that our work will stimulate further work along these lines.

It is clear it will be nearly impossible to account for all the factors in one controlled experiment. Note that such "total experiments" in the other scientific fields is challenging as well. Usually one first tries to understand certain fundamental processes, then they move on to the interactions between them.

davidovitch | 10 years ago | on: Hierarchy Is Detrimental for Human Cooperation

Ultimately, what this paper means to me is that there is evidence (based on simplified conditions, granted) that people collaborate better when they believe they will receive a fair share of the outcome. This makes a lot of sense to me, especially when comparing to real life.

For example, why is it that in many cases it is the small startup that creates innovative new technologies compared to large and well funded established players? I guess there are many factors at play, but I would argue that at least one factor relates to a more successful collaboration within the smaller environment, which in part is sourced upon the fact that there is promise of a higher payout in the case of success (equity as part of the salary).

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