Never use Amazon for expensive electronics. There’s too much nonsense going on.

I tried to preorder a phone once. Sony offered a pair of earbuds as a preorder gift and I wanted that specific phone anyway so hey, why not. Unfortunately, their fulfillment partner happened to be Amazon.

Instead of my phone I received a book about Lemmy Kilmister. Oh, and they couldn’t correct the error; all they could do was to have me send the book back and get a refund and buy the phone again – which of course took me out of the preorder program.

Yeah, no. There’s too much bullshit with Amazon to trust them with expensive gear.

AI isn’t taking off because it took off in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then. Same as in the 90s when they actually got them to be useful in a production environment.

We got a deep learning craze in the 2010s and then bolted that onto neural nets to get the current wave of “transformers/diffusion models will solve all problems”. They’re really just today’s LISP machines; expected to take over everything but unlikely to actually succeed.

Notably, deep learning assumes that better results come from a bigger dataset but we already trained our existing models on the sum total of all of humanity’s writings. In fact, current training is hampered by the fact that a substantial amount of all new content is already AI-generated.

Despite how much the current approach is hyped by the tech companies, I can’t see it delivering further substantial improvements by just throwing more data (which doesn’t exist) or processing power at the problem.

We need a systemically different approach and while it seems like there’s all the money in the world to fund the necessary research, the same seemed true in the 50s, the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the 10s… In the end, a new AI winter will come as people realize that the current approach won’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. Ten to fifteen years later some new approach will come out of underfunded basic research.

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

Ever since the BE200 debacle I don’t know if I can trust Intel to deliver. Sure, the stuff that’s already out there works but who knows if any of their future stuff will?

AI usually got better when people realized it wasn’t going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.

Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.

Of course you wouldn’t use an existing database engine as the foundation of a new database engine. But you would use an existing database engine as the foundation of an ERP software, which is a vastly different use case even if the software does spend a lot of time dealing with data.

If I want to build an application I don’t want to reimplement everything. That’s what middleware is for. The use case of my application is most likely not to speak a certain protocol; the protocol is just the means to what I actually want to do. There’s no reason for me to roll my own implementation from scratch and keep up with current developments except if I’m unhappy with all current implementations of that protocol.

Of course one can overdo it with middleware (the JS world is rife with this) but implementing a communication protocol is one of the classic cases where it makes sense.

Now the big question is how many patents are relevant and who owns them. And even if it turns out to have cheap licensing, beating HDMI won’t be easy, as DisplayPort demonstrates. Technological superiority doesn’t mean shit if you can’t overcome HDMI’s network effect.

It depends. “Donald Trump wants to annex Wisconsin as the 51st state” wouldn’t be funny. Pocketpair launching a Steam store page for the Palworld dating sim (which was last year’s April Fools joke) was.

But yeah, this isn’t the time for political humor.

Holy shit, that’s much better! Thanks; I didn’t know about that package.

Unfortunately, it follows the current Gnome design language. Gnome’s approach to UI design doesn’t click with some people, me included. I feel that while the main UI has not changed much since GIMP 2, the dialogs have become far less intuitive to use.

Depends on your keyboard layout. On Macintosh-like keyboards it can be as simple as AltGr+dash. On smartphone keyboards you can just long-press the dash.

On Windows you’re expected to hold down Alt and enter some code.

I find that LLMs also tend to create very placative, kitschy content. Nuance is beyond them.

A mITX or µATX case with 4+ 3.5" bays and a little flip-up display would be excellent for a home server.

The display could be the cheapest TN junk they can find as long as it works – you rarely need it and when you do you care about seeing the recovery terminal and not about visual fidelity.

Alternatively, a little combination screen/keyboard world also work for me. A little clamshell device the size of a Nintendo DS that attaches via HDMI and USB for maximum compatibility. When it’s not needed I can just stash it next to the server and it won’t take up a lot of space.

Maybe I’d try building something like that but I have no idea where even to find a keyboard for it. It’d probably have to be a custom job.

Not everyone needs to talk to everyone. But many people need to talk to many people.

Microsoft had to abandon the initial Vista project and start over because they couldn’t manage a team of 1000 developers. People working on adjacent features had to go through so many layers of management that in some cases the closest shared manager was Bill Gates. For something like getting a change in the shutdown code reflected in the shutdown dialog.

Huge teams become exponentially harder to manage efficiently.

There are several brands. I personally go with Leguano, a German brand – they happen to have a showroom in my city.

You might want to give barefoot shoes a try. I went from an EU 48 to an EU 45 when I switched to barefoot shoes because some of the size just came from having to accommodate the width of my feet. Barefoot shoes tend to be more flexible in that regard.

Welp, there goes the neighborhood. If they want to do an IPO they’ll probably enshittify the hell out of the platform and jettison all remotely raunchy communities. Because nothing says “good investment” than a service that just drove out a fair chunk of its user base.

Mind you, enemies of encryption have claimed that backdoors or encryption bans would’ve prevented attacks where it’s known that the perpetrators have been communicating with bog-standard unencrypted email and text messages. Most of the time there problem is not encryption but insufficient collaboration between agencies.

Often enough, going for encryption is an abstract power grab wrapped in security theater. Plus, “we need to been encryption” or its modern counterpart “the police need a universal backdoor key” are simple solutions to complex problems, which is a common approach for scoring with voters who have no idea what’s going on.

Encryption is simply on the list of acceptable targets.

I hadn’t heard about Copilot telling people how to activate Windows 11 without a license, though. So I’ll thank OP for that bit of levity.

It’ll be marketed as Skyrim with all LLM text and end up as Oblivion with prefab text chunks.

Even disregarding the fact that current LLMs can’t stop hallucinating and going off track (which seems to be an inherent property of the approach), they need crazy accounts of memory. If you don’t want the game to use a tiny model with a bad quantization, you can probably expect to spend at least 20 gigs of VRAM and a fair chunk of the GPU’s power on just the LLM.

What we might see is a game that uses a small neural net to match freeform player input to a dialogue tree. But that’s nothing like full LLM-driven dialogue.

Because giving answers is not a LLM’s job. A LLM’s job is to generate text that looks like an answer. And we then try to coax framework that into generating correct answers as often as possible, with mixed results.