Skip Navigation

Posts
1
Comments
307
Joined
12 mo. ago

  • Yes, I did make a Mistral account. Forgot to mention that I tested all of the mentioned chatbots on free plans, except Copilot, which I had the highest tier plan for, as part of my job. Needless to say, even on the highest tier Copilot performed the worst. Congratulations, Microsoft.

    I do appreciate Mistral being European and maintaining better values than American competition. That's why I feel bad rating it so low. Although as you said, many tasks that LLMs are useful for don't require the cutting edge at all.

    In fact, Mistral Vibe (I preferred the name Le Chat, but oh well) is probably more than enough for most people. It's just that availability of much better models makes it look worse than it is.

    There's also the question of system prompts. ChatGPT has been known to work considerably better with a good prompt setup, to the point where it's not one of the worst chatbots anymore. I was only testing the defaults. It's entirely possible that setting the right system prompt for Mistral improves it noticeably.

    At the end of the day, however, if I can run a small, open-weight model locally with comparable results - using a huge, cloud-based and closed model makes no sense to me. I'm not connecting to any cloud unless I really need to.

    Alibaba is releasing Qwen 3.8 27B in a little over 3 hours from now, so I'll have to try that too. Though I'll probably wait for fine-tuned community releases to make a more detailed comparison.

  • True, it's always important to be careful with chatbots, even when used for simple tasks.

    From my experience, they work fairly well when asked to explain code or error logs. For reference, I mainly tested Gemini and Deepseek. Apparently Claude is the best for coding, but I haven't really tried it yet.

    Personally I'd avoid both Mistral and Copilot. I used to work on Copilot, so unfortunately had a lot of exposure to it. Tried Mistral for a while too.

    These two are the worst LLMs I've used so far. Honestly probably worse than local Qwen with 27-35B parameters. I feel a little bad hating on a European company, but unfortunately it's way behind competition. At least from my testing.

  • My 8 years old Kobo has a browser too. Not a great experience, but it works.

    I'd expect all Kobo e-readers to have this feature.

  • If you really want to contribute to some projects, the first step would be to take a course in that project's programming language. There are many decent free courses on YouTube, and even more fantastic courses for very cheap on websites like Udemy or Skillshare.

    Next, you'd probably want to keep learning the language (e.g., by solving LeetCode challenges), read more about programming and software development in general, as well as check out another course or a tutorial about the specific frameworks/libraries or even just paradigms that the project works with.

    A good starting point is FreeCodeCamp on YouTube. Courses there are excellent for the proce of 0€. If you have difficulties with anything - you can always ask a chatbot. If you opt for courses on something like Udemy - you can always just ask the instructor and they'll usually respond within 2 hours, timezone permitting.

  • Most Germans were okay with the nazis until it was clear they're losing the war.

  • Nvidia, willing or not, is now a defendant in an unjust war, and must be subpoena'd by the ICC.

    Subpoenas only exist in the US. Since it did not sign the Rome treaty, and since Nvidia is an American company - the ICC has no power here.

  • That's actually a lot more recent than I expected. Was guessing something fairly ancient and pre-sanctions, like 2018. Interesting.

  • "Why does this food smell like somebody died shitting themselves?"

  • This, and probably clearing the license from BIOS. Otherwise you keep the license. Not sure how Asus resolves this. Maybe they just don't care.

  • Bro would literally ignore a child dying next to him, even if all it took to save it was a pat on the back.

    Unless there were cameras, of course. In that case - phenomenal opportunity for good PR.

  • Japanese workers are overworked and underpaid, as opposed to... American workers being well paid and relaxed?

  • There are only a handful of things billionaires hate more than dropping prices of anything.

  • Even assuming perfect conditions - where the caller very clearly states what's happening and the AI agent understands everything properly - this is a waste of resources. Just hire more operators dawg. It's really not that complicated.

    And then think about what happens outside of those perfect conditions. So pretty much most calls.

  • Personally I feel like that reddit post is terrible and nothing but PR. They did not 'refute a lot of accusations', as you claim. They cherry picked a grand total of two, one of which got twisted, and responded with largely irrelevant and misleading info.

    Which is pretty much what The Hated One responded to them. Not to mention even the response to the two (out of what, 12?) points was full of holes and manipulative statements.

    Naturally, no further comments were made by anyone from Kurzgesagt's team. Just like corporate PR. Publish a meaningless statement that provides no new information whatsoever -> pretend it answers everything -> refuse to elaborate -> act like people are evil for asking questions.

  • A perfect example is Veritasium's now deleted video about self driving cars. Entirely sponsored by Waymo, featuring exlusively data provided by Waymo (which coincidentally contradicted all other available data), and the guy acts like the video being fully sponsored means nothing.

    Once people called him out, he started acting like a victim targeted by everyone for no reason. Just read his comments under videos on the topic. It's just pathetic.

    Many other channels, like Kurzgesagt, completely source their data from billionaire-sponsored websites like OurWorldInData. Sometimes the data matches other, more reliable and trustworthy sources, and other times it's just plain made up.

    In addition to portraying various subjects from only one perspective, which, suspiciously, always seems to be the one that makes billionaires look better.

    YouTube videos about the two cases I mentioned:

  • Youtube's system sucks, but I don't feel bad for many of these channels. They used to be great. You could learn a lot while eating, or just entertain yourself without brainrot.

    For a few years now, however, increasing numbers of their videos have been sponsored by billionaires (or their chains of companies or foundations), either in part or in full. Some extreme cases are just plain propaganda.

  • Unless the end goal is entirely different.

    The following areas have seen insane increases in both interest and spending lately:

    • AI data centers (capable of more than just LLM training and operation)
    • Flock and other surveillance cameras
    • Online identity verification

    You could probably write several more items to the list, but add just these three and what do you get?

    It's becoming clearer and clearer, with more and more irrefutable evidence that this AI craze is going nowhere. Sure, it's pretty useful for a handful of tasks. Not nearly enough to justify even a fraction of money spent on it though. And yet both governments and oligarchs keep pumping more money into it.

    Is it unreasonable to suspect an ulterior motive? One that is sure to benefit them tremendously if successful?

  • While this definition isn't necessarily wrong, it [purposefully] leaves out important context, namely that the so-called Luddites opposed technology and automation due to cuts to their incomes and rights, which were very obviously coming.

    If industrial corporations guaranteed to keep all employees, to not lower their salaries, and to maintain the quality standards - the people we know today as Luddites would have never protested.

    It was never about technology itself, despite what top Google results or AI summary will tell you. It was about people's livelihoods, rights and freedoms, as well as quality of the craft.

  • But when I tell it to form an elaborate plan to assassinate the US president, Gemini says it's against its safety guidelines.

  • Technology @lemmy.world

    Microsoft builds its ultimate MacBook Pro rival with the NVIDIA powered Surface Laptop Ultra

    www.windowslatest.com /2026/06/01/microsoft-builds-its-ultimate-macbook-pro-rival-with-the-nvidia-powered-surface-laptop-ultra/