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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • I don’t think anything with the word “intel” can be taken seriously in value comparisons…

    When I got my last laptop I ended up with a MBP because there were no high end options for Linux laptops with AMD. Now the options are better, but back then, the only realistic alternative to a MacBook Pro would have had a third of the real-world battery life if not less, even if I decided to spend £3k. That didn’t seem like an acceptable compromise so there were virtually no laptops in existence that could compete with an M2 MBP.







  • That’s because it doesn’t learn, it’s a snapshot of its training data frozen in time.

    I like Perplexity (a lot) because instead of using its data to answer your question, it uses your data to craft web searches, gather content, and summarise it into a response. It’s like a student that uses their knowledge to look for the answer in the books, instead of trying to answer from memory whether they know the answer or not.

    It is not perfect, it does hallucinate from time to time, but it’s rare enough that I use it way more than regular web searches at this point. I can throw quite obscure questions at it and it will dig the answer for me.

    As someone with ADHD with a somewhat compulsive need to understand random facts (e.g. “I need to know right now how the motor speed in a coffee grinder affects the taste of the coffee”) this is an absolute godsend.

    I’m not affiliated or anything, and if anything better comes my way I’ll be happy to ditch it. But for now I really enjoy it.



  • You can’t measure this, because it has drivers behind the wheel. Even if it did three “pedestrian-killing” mistakes every 10 miles, chances are the driver will catch every mistake per 10000 miles and not let it crash.

    But on the other hand, if we were to measure every time the driver takes over the number would be artificially high - because we can’t predict the future and drivers are likely to be overcautious and take over even in circumstances that would have turned out OK.

    The only way to do this IMO is by

    • measuring every driver intervention
    • only letting it be driverless and marketable as self-driving when it achieves a very low number of interventions ( < 1 per 10000 miles?)
    • in the meantime, market it as “driver assist” and have the responsibility fall into the driver, and treat it like the “somewhat advanced” cruise control that it is.

  • There’s a lot of context we’re missing here. For example this happens with my company and the reason is tax implications - if they provided “free money” that would be additional salary and taxed as such, whereas “free meals” are taxed completely differently. There could be completely legitimate reasons. Maybe if they let people use it for whatever purpose, the $25 would turn into $15 due to tax.

    What I won’t defend is firing people for this reason. I don’t see how that can be ethically acceptable…


  • Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.

    The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a “visible” level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn’t been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It’s in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.

    The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is “visibly” good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.


  • Jrockwar@feddit.uktoTechnology@lemmy.worldHow to make an Amazon-free Kindle
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    17 days ago

    Well what were you expecting? This is like when people install GrapheneOS on Pixels, because it’s still the best platform to have a Google-free device.

    It’s entirely possible that someone wants to buy a Kindle because of it being a great device, but not want to be tied to Amazon’s data mining exercises and/or buy books from them because of their behaviour as a publishing company.