HAHAHAHA King Boo and Kirby. In that order. Annoyingly it works well.

Probably not. But that’s what happens when you buy Things as a Service.

Uhhh what? They might as well turn to reporting on finance news, that’s even less contentious! Ridiculous.

My partner and I got invited to a wedding with a funky, everything-goes sort of dress code. For £50 we bought enough clothes for two blade-runner-esque outfits (we added some bits of our own so the ensemble wouldn’t look too cheap) and a big goose plushie (bigger than an individual pillow). The goose was £14 and not cheaply made at all! That one was genuinely a nice suprise.

The reason is better is because a number on its own doesn’t provide any representation whatsoever of the passing of time. It represents the current observed time, but it does nothing to represent graphically how much of the day is left.

The arguably best representation of the passing of time is a 24h analogue watch/clock, even if that has its own set of issues which make it a terrible way of displaying the current time.

Absolutely not comparable to floppy disks. The hands are a representation, not a technology. Technology-wise, most modern “analog” wristwatches are quartz, and therefore digital, not actually analog. Yet we choose to make them with hands because that provides a better representation of the passing of time.

Re: security: I imagine many women being more comfortable getting a waymo than an Uber/Taxi. It’s anecdotal and from a different country, but most of my female family/friends have had an uncomfortable interaction in a taxi, like unrequested sexual advances or things like that.

The problem I have is that this covers a very niche use case for me. I want it to be a tablet - lightweight etc, but not be constrained by mobile apps. I don’t want iOS’ version of lightroom, I want to have Darktable and Rawtherapee and a full fledged Visual Studio code, and well, you get the picture.

I don’t need a laptop because I also have a MacBook Pro - I went this way because Apple’s processors are too far ahead to ignore. So I can take AMD but my opinion is that intel’s offerings are just not competitive and I’m not buying any of them.

This leaves me with very few options - I’d be keen on buying an AMD-powered Ubuntu tablet but they don’t seem to exist.

And also my surface works perfectly fine, so spending a non-trivial amount of money and ewaste just to change OS seems rather silly. I’m sticking to that one for now.

That’s a nice project, but the last update was from 2 years ago and it needs way too much work to be close to usable. Windows 11 might be getting ads but at least audio works…

To be Done:

Support for Audio Subsystem #21
Support for LTE/Modem #22
Support for Webcams #23
Support for External Display Ports #27
Support for Suspend #29
Support for TrEE Services #37
Support for Sensors #38
Support for GNSS/GPS #39
UEFI ResetSystem() crashes #41

Various other issues can be expected, see the issue tracker for details.

If only I could install it on the Surface Pro X…

Damn, they worked so hard to gain goodwill in the last few years and it seems they’ve set out to destroy it in record time.

WSL and WSL2, Android Apps, working with Qualcomm to get their ARM computers to a credible state, the new Powershell and the push to open source so many things…

And in the past 12-18 months they’ve been crashing and burning, either backtracking on those things or by starting new initiatives to become scummier and scummier. TPM, Copilot, the ad situation, abusing their position of power with office/teams, the giant safety holes in the Recall feature… But it seems every day there’s something new in the news. It’s never ending.

Take a train instead of a flight. Cycle to work or take public transport instead of driving. Install a heat pump or solar in your house. There are a million things people can do to cut down their emissions that can be as effective as becoming herbivores, depending on each one’s personal situation.

Plus, I don’t have the numbers in my head but I’m pretty sure a locally grown fillet of chicken is more environmentally friendly than an avocado that has travelled across the Atlantic, so “buy local” would be probably better advice.

In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).

No, because in Russia there are no gays according to Putin.

That middle paragraph is very misleading. It’s Generative AI as a service that is actively harmful to the environment. Having a 15 W chip to do tasks like erasing objects from a photo is not any more harmful to the environment than a GPU that uses 15W. In fact, NPUs can be more efficient at some tasks than GPUs.

The problem is opening your phone/browser, and being able to call on demand GPT-4 to wake up a cluster of 128 Nvidia A100s operating at around 300-400W each. That’s 51.2 kW.

Now you can draw some positives and negatives from that figure, such as

• Given that an iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 has a thermal design power of 8 W, GPT-4 on the server is about 6400 more energy intensive than anything you can do on an iPhone. 10 seconds of GPT need a similar amount of energy to an iPhone 15 Pro operating flat out at maximum power for 18 hours. Now in those 10 seconds, OpenAI says they “handle multiple user queries simultaneously”, but still - we’re feeding the machine.
• 51.2 kW is also roughly how much power a large SUV needs to roll at constant speed on a motorway. Each of those large clusters uses a similar amount of energy to a single 7-seater SUV, but serving many users at the same time. Plus unlike cars, a large portion of their energy usage comes from renewables. So yes, I agree that it’s a significant impact but largely overrepresented and we have bigger fish to fry; personal transport is a way bigger issue.

Which country?

Yup. Loads of them! https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hallucinations+llm&btnG=

Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what’s happening.

I agree with the philosophy, but not with the approach.

If you own/make the OS, and you know that the registry can get orphan entries which slow down the system, don’t wait for the user to open an “optimisation app” to clean that up. Just make sure the registry is cleaned transparently and in the background.

This seems to me like a tactic to get less tech-savvy people to accidentally set Edge as their browser and ensure their Ads and Microsoft’s tracking is working as the mothership mandates. Worst part is we have evidence to think I’m not being the slightest bit cynical here…

I’m talking about TV ads, magazine covers. General models (not the super-skinny runway models which don’t necessarily follow typical beauty standards) or porn (which follows its own set of trends I’d say, like over exaggerated bodies, breast implants…).

I don’t know if it’s the best example but I’m talking generally about the difference between people like Jennifer Aniston in 1997 vs Scarlett Johansson in 2020, for example.

You don’t have to go that far - if you look at 90’s female models, or actresses that were considered “hot” at the time, they had a significantly different body type from today. They were a lot skinnier, there was more diet and less gym involved in the female bodies of the 90s and early 2000s.