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Zak

@ Zak @lemmy.world

Posts
7
Comments
872
Joined
3 yr. ago

  • Asus Co-CEO: MacBook Neo Is a 'Shock' to the PC Industry

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  • because they “care about environment 😉” the €99 charger (which is almost mandatory for a new user) is sold separately.

    It's because they're required by law to offer it without a power supply. See Article 3a, section 10.

    Apple's first-party power supply isn't "almost mandatory", and doesn't cost 99€. The 20W model shipped with the Macbook Neo in other markets costs 25€ on Apple's German store, and a generic 8€ power supply from Amazon will work. The power supply most people already have for their phone will usually also work.

  • One in four CEOs say AI is a bubble but will continue investing

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  • It's changing rapidly, but handing automation tools to people who don't understand the underlying concepts just gets you a bigger mess. There are no well-established best practices for how to use it safely and effectively because it's too new and changing too fast.

    It will settle down eventually, but a lot of people will do a lot of dumb things first.

  • One in four CEOs say AI is a bubble but will continue investing

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  • LLM-based coding agents have become useful to the point that people are building large software projects without humans writing or reviewing code directly. The naive approach to that will result in disaster if used in a production environment, but practices to improve reliability are evolving.

    Popular opinion seems to be that Claude Opus 4.5 was the tipping point for this.

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  • Right. They are not yet domesticated to the level of companion animals and trying to keep one as a pet now is a bad idea.

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  • Raccoons are cool. They seem to be in the early stages of self-domestication, which is probably how we got cats.

  • After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes

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  • AWS is not a simple web page.

  • What kind of car do you drive, and what kind do you wish you did?

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  • Most of the time, I don't need a car, nor do I have a good place to put one. When I do need one, I rent one. When I can, I rent a fun one (last: 2018 BMW M4 Competition convertible).

    If it made sense to own a car in my current situation, I really enjoyed the C7 Corvette I rented. I thought it was more fun to drive than the C8.

  • Trump more popular than Harris, Newsom: Survey

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  • Less unpopular would be a better way to put it. They're all well under 50%.

  • Locked

    How can I make my laptop a little faster?

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  • Download more RAM. A 4GB DDR4 SODIMM, which would double it, is $15 on US Ebay. Check what that costs where you live.

  • What is your least favourite thing about the fediverse or lemmy?

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  • To a datacenter, tens or hundreds of thousands, which is my point about scale. One person using an LLM isn't wasting any more power than they would be gaming on a PC, but a lot more people are using LLMs at any given time than are gaming.

  • What is your least favourite thing about the fediverse or lemmy?

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  • Both use a lot of energy, but operation accounts for the majority not training.

    Running a (relatively) large model on your own PC's GPU is energy-intensive compared to typical household electronics, but not compared to driving a car. People don't usually object to someone playing a AAA game at 2K240, which burns energy just as fast as running inference on the same GPU.

    A typical prompt and response uses maybe a quarter to half a Watt-hour. That's like using an LED light bulb for a few minutes; it's the scale that makes these things problematic.

  • What is your least favourite thing about the fediverse or lemmy?

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  • What is your least favourite thing about the fediverse or lemmy?

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  • Unsolicited photography tip: your phone camera's sensor has a 4:3 aspect ratio. By setting it to something else, it crops the short side of the image, which is probably not what you want in this case (the cats barely fit in the frame, but there's lots of background on the top and bottom).

  • What is your least favourite thing about the fediverse or lemmy?

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  • Unsolicited photography tip: your phone camera's sensor has a 4:3 aspect ratio. By setting it to something else, it crops the short side of the image, which is probably not what you want in this case (part of the cat is cut off, but there's lots of background on the top and bottom).

  • I built a self-hosted period tracker because I couldn't find one worth using

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  • Why?

    It makes sense to try to give users an idea of how robust a project is, but the exact details of the tools involved in its creation rarely add much to that. It gets a little weird with LLMs because they allow someone with no programming skill to create software that appears to work, which ought to be disclosed; "I don't know what I'm doing and I asked a robot to make this" does indicate unreliable code. A skilled developer having an LLM fill in some extra test cases, on the other hand can only make the project more robust.

  • Are users data protected on the fediverse?

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  • Well-behaved server software honors delete requests, but there are a bunch of ways for that to fail without anyone doing anything malicious:

    • If your instance shuts down, there is no way for you to generate delete requests
    • If a server admin has to restore a backup from before your request, the deleted data will be restored
    • Immature or experimental software may not work as designed; Lemmy itself has a version number starting with 0
    • Archiving services may keep snapshots of pages from fediverse servers; here's your user page on lemmy.world on archive.org
    • Fediverse servers often make content available by RSS, and RSS clients may store that content; there's no way for them to receive a signal that it should be deleted

    And then there's malicious activity. It wouldn't be hard to run a server that speaks ActivityPub, subscribes to a bunch of stuff, pretends to honor delete requests, and actually keeps everything.

    Deletion will always be unreliable on the fediverse as long as it runs on technology that looks anything like current implementations.

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  • Some people have specific long-term goals in mind for relationships; some just enjoy living in the present; most are somewhere between. Nobody else can say which is right for you.

    Another commenter wrote that you're probably about 18 years old. You may not know which of the above best describes you, and that's perfectly normal at that age. I hesitate to tell anyone else what to do in their personal life, but if a compelling opportunity comes along that conflicts with your relationship, whether it's another prospective relationship or moving away for school or work, remember that your boyfriend won't prioritize your relationship when his parents find an Arab girl for him to marry.

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  • You are not going to find a satisfying answer to this question. It's one I've been asking for a long time.

    I could say "sadism", but that's almost tautological. The obvious follow-up is "but why are they sadists?", and I don't know that. It's likely people who aren't sadists can't really know that, and people who are would probably fail at explaining it, were they inclined to try.

    The best explanation I can manage is that someone who's feeling bored and powerless might feel a little less bored and powerless for a moment if they can make someone else sad or angry. A person who actually gets off on that sort of thing is likely not all that intelligent or creative, so they fail at finding better entertainment.

    If you're still left wondering "but why?", good. You're probably not a sadist.

  • UK fines Reddit $19 million for using children’s data unlawfully

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  • I must also point out that he did not work at Reddit between 2009 and 2015.

    I'm not going to try to talk you out of hating spez, but maybe try hating him for something he actually did.