maxbrt

For anyone interested in the background, I've written a detailed post about it as well as provided the code:

https://www.brt.fyi/posts/prime-flow-field/

Hello, I've written a more detailed post about it https://www.brt.fyi/posts/prime-flow-field/

and also put the code in a public repo for anyone to use https://github.com/brtmax/prime-flow-field

Relevant repo https://github.com/brtmax/prime-flow-field

True, storage wasn't really a concern, my M4 has 512GB. Enough for my everyday tasks, and anything larger I store on my NAS anyways. I got it in April 2026, but afaik they also raised prices since then again. Also yes as far as gaming goes, I really only need it to run Factorio well so that also was not a concern.

Thank you!

Can't name any concrete place but maybe try a local Hackerspace? They often help with that for free and you can give a donation

That reminds me, I should have mentioned an even more backwards design which is that of the vent placement on my older Thinkpad X1. It has the air intake vents on the bottom, they relied on the little rubber feets to lift it up for correct airflow. I pretty much could not use it on my lap because of that, it got too hot even during smaller tasks. But to be fair, I've noticed similar placement on several HP/Dell laptops (or notebooks?) that I had at work too.

So I've weighed it with my cheap kitchen scale, that says it weighs 1222g now. Sadly I did not weigh it before. I did look online and saw 1240g for the same model/specs.

Take of that what you will, but I can't imagine that I filed off that much. I'm assuming my kitchen scale is just not well calibrated

Thanks for sharing that story! That is a nice way to think about it.

I've read online that some people use the corners near the indent for opening the lid for "pain stimming", so you are definitely not alone with that :D

Oh interesting, thanks!

I get the point there and it does make sense, however I think there are certain limits to where it applies. I use it on the go a lot, crammed in small seats in the train for example. In those cases, it's just not always possible to have proper ergonomics and IMO this should be kept in mind when designing a laptop.

I think I'd also go with the debur tool next time, glad it worked well for you!

Definitely, thanks for the reply! :-)

That's a very creative approach. How does it attach?

I have to disagree with you on the price. The cheap price was one of the reasons I ended up going with it. It's an M4 Air with 24GB of Memory. I got it for around 950 Euros, and at the time I could not find anything close to it that combined the same amount of processing power, memory, battery and overall built at that price.

The compatibility yes I fully agree. This is sort of a trial for me to see how well it works with Linux VMs and a comparable setup, but if I cannot get it to work as well then I will switch back. So far it is working well though

What frustrates me is that there seems to be no in between with Apple. Some of the components very much do feel like they are designed with function over form in mind. Both software and hardware.

For instance, there was a great article here in the past weeks (can't find it right now sadly) that highlighted how the file name preview works in Finder. It does it in a very intuitive way and without covering any of the other files listed. You wouldn't notice it visually, but it sure is useful. A lot of the hardware also feels really polished as a tool, like the trackpad (although I admit it's probably not as difficult to make this look good).

And then you have these edges again and it feels like it was done by a completely different design team without any communication to the rest.

That would have been a good reference, shame I didn't think of it. Blades definitely is the better term.

This reminds me, the backplate of the Mac is also sharp as heck. I actually cut myself once when I was replacing a motherboard on an older Intel Mac. You don't really expect it to be this sharp when you lift it up.

Ah right, thanks for the hint. I try to be more precise in more wording, but English isn't my first language so comments like these are really useful.

I know I know :D I have not done any optimization yet. Maybe I should also add some toggle to disable it or reduce the number of particles

That contains mostly placeholder stuff from Wikipedia and does not go much into detail, I didn't get around to finishing it yet. I'll try to write it up in more detail

Thanks for the encouragement, glad you like the background :-) Yeah I phrased it a bit badly initially. But what I meant was pretty much what you stated!

You are correct, that was phrased badly. I've tried to update it, thanks for the comment.

Sorry you did not like that part! All I was trying to express was that even though this thing is nice and shiny, it is a tool in the end so if modifying it would make it serve that purpose better, one should not be scared to do so. I wasn't trying to give a definition, but perhaps I should rephrase that. Thanks!

Yeah that's been a major headache. I ssh into my server/desktop most of the time anyways, so there is no friction there. Then also I was surprised by how well VMs with OrbStack on Mac run. With yabai and skhd I've gotten it pretty closely to where I previously was with i3.

Even still, I'm looking forward to the day where I can run Asahi on this

I'll try to do some updates after a while!

I was at an (academic!) conference about Crypto recently with a friend. I am an outsider to the whole topic and wanted to "expand my horizon" and see if maybe my expectations of if it being mostly a scam were wrong.

In one of the first talks we went to, the panel speaker mentioned that Trump pumping-and-dumping his memecoin was a good thing, because that more or less justifies their own position in doing so, and that it would maybe lower their legal fees in the future. This was followed by a big laugh from the audience.

These people fully know what they are doing.

1984, George Orwell

Permanent Record, Edward Snowden

My Early Life, Winston S. Churchill

Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

Edit: To some extent probably also:

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas

Don Quijote, Miguel de Cervantes