Note that those are deepseek, not chatgpt. I've largely given up on chatgpt a long time ago as it has severe limitations on what you can ask it without fighting its filters. You can make it go on hallucinated rants just as easily - I just nowadays do that on locally hostable models.

Which reputation? I used to work for a dell heavy hoster with thousands of dell servers almost 20 years ago - and apart from them being cheap I have nothing good to say about them. Worst is the remote management - several generations of DRACs all broken in new and interesting ways, and support is useless. You just get better discounts at that scale, which for a business owner drowns out the complaints of the tech people.

Notebooks also have similar bugs over generations - and nowadays they also feel even cheaper than they used to be.

Displays were somewhat acceptable - given you're fine to work around the DPMS bugs they have in pretty much every display for the last two decades - but their display selection page is unusable and lacks most interesting details. So it is better to just get something you can check out in a shop.

If you can afford it see if Eaton has a smaller tower UPS suitable for you.

There was the 386DX and significantly cheaper SX - first was full 32 bit, second just 32bit instruction set with smaller external busses.

Then you could add the math coprocessor. And of course RAM and disks were expensive. 16MB RAM was way above normal for that time.

That's bullshit. Microsoft wanted to force others to use an API, while keep using kernel level access for Defender (which for enterprise use is a paid product). That's text book anti competitive. Nobody ever had a problem of Microsoft rolling out and enforcing an API for that if they restrict their own security products to that API as well.

And as soon as I learned about that I stopped using it. Turns out it was the right choice - since then more then one company had breaches where authenticator seeds extracted from a google account were used to bypass 2fa.

It's a similar thing with four leaf clovers - I never in my life found one, even during periods where I've been scanning every bit of green while hiking. But then we had a friend who isn't really paying attention to her surroundings, and just randomly goes 'oh, moment', and picks up a four leave clover from a few metres away.

Seems my daughter is also developing that talent - last summer she picked up a few while playing outside.

This level of paranoia isn't really compatible with modern hardware, and requires a lot of effort.

You're pretty much limited to stuff that has open firmware available, and even then you have to hope there are no bugs or backdoors in the hardware.

For the intel world almost everything with open firmware is pretty old - some nowadays unsupported, which means no longer microcode updates. And those microcode updates also are a problem - you can't mitigate everything in kernel space, so usually you'd want them, but they'd also be an attack vector against you.

And even if you manage to trust the computer itself there are a lot of attack vectors surrounding it. Do you have anything capable of recording audio in the same room as your computer? If yes, not a good idea - it has been proven possible to extract passwords from audio recordings of a keyboard. Does the room have windows? That counts as an audio recording device.

If you got rid of that, do you have some other hardware with sensors? There's a high chance that a device placed on your desk containing an accelerometer would also be capable of extracting your password.

low profile

that is a problem

easy to type on quickly

not really, doesn't have a clear pressure point, so leads to keys not registering surprisingly often. I also get pain in my hands if I'm working on it for several hours.

I only can do something like 70-80 WPM on that, on a proper keyboard I'm doing slightly above 100.

lights up

Don't care about that.

Additionally half the useful keys (pgup/pgdown/end/home/insert/delete/...) are hidden behind FN combinations.

In IT contracting (at least the fields I'm around) it's quite common that "being able to acquire new skills quickly" is one of the skills you get paid for, and the time needed for you to do that is accounted for in the project planning.

I just stripped half the screw head in my steam deck because none of my bits would fit just exactly right. I'd have been thrilled about finding torx there.

In case you're already using emacs I wouldn't bother with a separate pdf viewer - pdf-tools for emacs is imo the best PDF viewer nowadays available on linux.