this post was submitted on 17 Mar 2025
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I think the big disconnect with that is government laptops....
If someone told me their government laptop caught fire when they joined a Teams call where two people had a camera on. I'd believe them.
But no government employee will tell you a story like that, because it is completely unremarkable and expected. It's like a Park Ranger of 15 years losing his shit when he saw a squirrel...
If you're used to using a gaming laptop to edit text files and suddenly you have to use a shitty $300 government issue laptop, it's going to shock you.
But the solution to that is funding the government. I'm not a big Obama guy, but at least he gave agencies money for laptops. trump and Biden love cutting corners though, which just translates to paying people to watch a screen scroll by slower because of a slow laptop.
My CPU was mid range when I bought it five years ago and I use it process a 300gb+ database of price history. My day job is working jupyter notebooks hosted on raspberry pis. Not being able to process a 60000 row database is definitely a skill issue. Bad hardware should encourage good software.
Don't get me wrong, they're idiots.
But people are drastically underestimating how shitty government laptops are.
But what do I know? What's decades of direct experience when someone online has a Jupiter laptop?!
Clearly you know more than anyone who actually deals with it
Speaking of, it's my mom's b'day coming up, you clearly know more than me so what would a thoughtful and bespoke gift be?
Get her a Thinkpad with 64 GB of ram and a server-class CPU that blasts enough heat to make the laptop hover. That's what I had the last time I worked on a project for the government. Company took it back though 😞
Idk. If it's your mum that you take after, you can get her nothing and let her make the excuses for your failure.
The issue with your comments are not how bad government laptops are.
The issue seems to be you don't understand how little work processing even a million rows is.
Yeah. Who needs decades of experience when people on the internet know better?
Not like it's ironic people people are doing the same thing Elon is or anything...
Mate, I've worked with government computers. A dacade old, take a half hour to boot up, a lag time of a few minutes to open files. The problem with what Elon's "expert" said is that 1. 60k rows of data is nothing, even for a computer like that. It wouldn't fail on that much data, even on decade-old computers. And 2. If something were to fail on that computer, it wouldn't be that the hard drive overheated. Even if the hard drive got hot, it would just slow things down, not prevent data access or stop a query.
My personal guess is this: The kid started a query on a table of a few million records. Not a lot, but enough to make a very poorly optimized query take a decent bit of ttime to run on trash hardware. Most databases put timeouts on connections as to not let a runaway query run forever. I'm guessing that after like, 20 minutes or so (pretty high for a cutoff, but if they are expecting garbage computers to be running these queries it could make sense) it times out, returning the partial result of the query. "Expert" thinks that his laptop overheated because the laptop is in fact hot.
Flowers, her favorite unless her favorite is roses then go for something nice and in season. If you have the time bake her homemade cookies as well.