dlcarrier

Definitely stay away from anything Matt Mullenweg is involved in. Part of what led up to this was a feud he had with a plug-in author, that led to Mullenweg signing his own plug-in as an update to the original author's plug-in, in the official Wordpress plug-in repository.

There's been ~40% inflation accumulated over the last decade. On top of that, storage and RAM prices have recently doubled or even tripled, as demand has outpaced supply.

A quick look on Dell's web page shows an entry-level Core i3-14100T system with 8 GB RAM for $747.74, which would be under £600. A $2,230 system from their Alienware brand currently gets you a Core Ultra 7 265F, GeForce RTX 5070 and 32 GB of RAM.

I can't imagine most office workers would need more than the entry-level system, although corporate purchases are known for overprovisioning, especially so when it's a government body, so it wouldn't be unheard of to spend $2,300, especially so if that includes paying an IT worker to set it up.

That's usually a RAM limit, and only six computers had RAM swapped out of them.

Back then, if computers needed to be centrally managed, they'd give employees terminals and run everything on mainframes or X servers. Personal computers were often not even networked.

I've had the opposite problem, where I assumed shell scripts were cached, but an instance already running started using my modified version, while I was still working on it

I predict that in five years, half the businesses currently running in the US will be bankrupt or merged into another business, and in ten years, the same will happen again. I can pretty confidently make this prediction, because it's what has been happening for most of our lifetimes.

Most of the work new technology replaces is work we made up after we invented tractors and power looms and no longer needed to perform physical labor. Most of what humanity does isn't required to survive or even thrive. Even before LLMs, when jobs in our lifetimes have been lost to automation, it wasn't because a welding robot replaced someones factory welding job; it's usually an office job that's getting replaced because a company started using software to do something that an office worker had been doing by hand.

Walk into an accounting office at any small to medium sized business that has been around for a while and does their accounting in-house, and you'll find people looking at a number on the computer, typing it into a calculator to do the math, then entering the result into the computer. We switched from paper to computers a career lifetime ago, but that doesn't mean everyone, or even most people, have adapted their work flow. When that job is outsourced to a third-part accounting firm, it's cheaper because they're using spreadsheets and enterprise resource management software the way it was meant to be used, not because they're paying their workers less. Likely, they're paying more. For most companies, this could have been done in the 90's or even 80's, but they tend to adapt slowly, so change more often comes from old companies or departments being replaced by a completely new company that built themselves around the technology.

Pretty much every technology advancement has been what militaries call a force multiplier. It means that an individual or small group can do a job that used to take a larger group, but it doesn't mean that zero people can do what one person was doing alone. This increase in worker productivity leads to people doing things they wouldn't have been able to do before, which makes more room for us to make up new jobs.

Also, art is the fields most sensitive to income loss from this, because it decreases the barrier to entry, and gatekeeping is often the only thing making art expensive. A creative director can lead a group of artists to create a complex and expensive project, but as worker productivity improves, what was a creative director role becomes an individual role creating complex projects for cheap. It used to take a team of people to produce works like radio programs, game shows, documentaries, educational videos, and the like, but as technology has improved, a single person with a few hundred to thousand dollars of equipment has the capitol to produce a one-man podcast or YouTube channel that rivals what those teams did decades ago. Of course not everyone that tries will be good at it, but a lot more of the people that are good at it will try than would have tried in the past, and listeners and viewers now have far more options for a given quality of content, so the value of that content has decreased. That worker isn't worse off, because the income isn't being split between an entire team, but it does mean the workers that would have formed the rest of the team need to adapt.

Granted, the only reason that content has value at all is because we don't have to spend most of our waking hours plowing fields and weaving clothes.

It's the employment market waking up to the lack of value of the universities' credentialing. The universities themselves don't have a competitive market to speak of, because their customers are so heavily subsidized† that their income is still rising, despite the drop in value of their services.

The universities themselves may react to market demand, if subsidies for their services decline, but it's also possible for subsidies to increase, despite the lack of value, as is often the case for a declining industry with a significant political presence.

† Student loans may be repayed by the recipient, but they are not granted based on the market value of the loan, so they act as much like a subsidy as student loans paid by third parties.

The Apple Vision Pro was a rare early entry into a field. Usually they wait until the technology is established and the userbase is just starting to take off, as is currently the case with folding phone displays.

Samsung has already worked out the major kinks for folding displays, over dozens of products used by multiple phone manufacturers including themselves, and Android has worked out how to handle the various use cases between the outer screen and inner screen, when closed, open, or partially open, so Apple can pull from the current state of the art and launch with a more fully developed product, as they usually did before the Apple Vision Pro.

Is an inner screen camera really worth it? There's already a camera cutout on the outer screen, plus you can open the phone and use the full-size camera with the outer screen, which results in much more flattering imagery than the wide-angle lenses selfie cameras use. It's like taking the difference between an under-screen selfie camera and a regular selfie camera, and applying that again.

It makes sense to have one screen for an as-large-as-possible uninterrupted display, and another for maximum utility.

I like that Samsung doesn't cut as much corner off as Apple, but ideally I'd like to find a manufacturer that doesn't cut corners at all. Even though I'm not likely to buy another iPhone product, I am excited that Apple doesn't cut holes in their interior display, because that'll probably get other manufacturers to do the same.

I once bought an overnight train ticket from France to Italy, instead of spending more on a high-speed train ticket and a hotel night. It would have been a great idea, if the train didn't have its heater stuck on, in August, and a broken emergency pull cord in an unknown car, which resulted in multiple unintended stops that required the staff enter every cabin to reset the pull cords, before resuming. I learned to check the reputation of the train line, like I would a hotel.

Anyway, traveling efficiency is a factor of the speed and size of the vessel and the viscosity of what it's traveling through. It's non-linear, and scaling up the vessel size slowly adds efficiency, and speeding up the vehicle or increasing the viscosity quickly reduces efficiency.

Boats have an advantage by getting very big, but a really, really big disadvantage if they go fast, which is why huge boats going slow is their most common use, mostly for cargo, but sometimes for people, when the ship itself can be a destination. Trains can't get very big, but air is much less viscous than water, so they can go a few times faster without major losses. This is why rail is really popular for transporting cargo across the US and Canada, although it's not fast enough for long distance passenger travel.

The absolute peak in energy efficiency comes from a large vessel moving through a very-low viscosity atmosphere, which is what airliners are able to do, by traveling in the stratosphere, eliminating the majority of the drag, and allowing for effectively uncapped speeds. Really, the faster an airplane can travel, the higher it can go, further reducing drag and increasing efficiency. The limit is technological, not physical, but current airplanes traveling around mach 0.8 get very high cruise efficiency from both being large and being in a low-viscosity atmosphere.

Property damage is often explicitly listed by municipalities as a reason to call 911. They might not care in New York or San Francisco, but in most small towns they usually try to catch vandals in the act.

It's usually on the web page of the local police or sheriff department.

It mostly involves sorting out Python dependency version conflicts.

Also, it takes a lot of compute. It still involves training a model, which for a very small model requires a GPU with several times more ram than the final model size, which will need to run for days to weeks. Usually you're also running the model that is being distilled from, but in this case it would require a huge database of chat logs, instead.

I don't think they're accusing Chinese organizations of violating copyright or patent treaties, they're more so observing undesired behavior and pushing for domestic strategies to prevent it from happening.

They had three Sonic TV shows in the 90's alone, plus three more since, and four movies within the last decade, and that's just the Sonic franchise. Is he just now realizing that the people who watch it weren't all playing the games?

Hire an engineer and buy a beefy GPU. The foundation models aren't better enough to justify their high costs over open models.

The craziest part was that Google was pretty far behind other LLMs in development. Even the initial release of Gemini was one of the worst foundation models ever open to the public. I can't imagine how anyone could have communicated to it and thought it was sentient.

The terms customs uses are completely unrelated to normal human words for things. They have a 21-page document (https://www.cbp.gov/sites/default/files/assets/documents/202...) describing the difference between a bolt and a screw. It starts off by citing the regulation differentiating them by intended use, then spends the rest of the document differentiating them solely by looks.

Mostly because Canada is allowing Chinese vehicle imports, which US auto industry is not happy about. There's also some pressure from US video streaming producers and distributors, after Canada expanded regulations for television and movie production into streaming video platforms.

The company made famous by designing and manufacturing the Nazi uniforms currently has over a thousand stores, including hundreds in the US, and earns billions in annual revenue.

They don't in this case, because there's plenty of other airlines offering competing service, but when disruptions do prevent air travel, for example with the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull, travelers cruising to their destination will burn far more fuel.

Granted, the difference in emissions of either form of traveling are absolutely nothing compared to the emissions of Eyjafjallajökull itself.

It practically is, considering that "looks good on TV" seems to be a much higher priority than "usable".

That's a common source of bottled CO2 sold, for example, to carbonate soft drinks or make dry ice.

You can tell that the model was trained on images from real-estate listings, because what's visible through the windows looks like a picture of a house from a real-estate listing.

Being able to afford remodeling your house is one thing, but being able to get permission to remodel your house can be a far more difficult proposition.

Her lackey got more prison time than she did, even though he was following her orders.

Ocean liners use several times more fuel per passenger mile than airliners.

Something similar happened to someone in my area who was letting her kid play alone at the playground inside the apartment complex. She even had the door open so that she could hear her child playing, but CPS said that she should be able to see her child at all times. I guess it's illegal to have children, if you're blind.

The less useful biometric identification gets, the more we seem to use it.

My bank sent out an a announcement that they will support voice identification, right after a news story went viral of a scammer using a voice cloning model to steal millions of dollars. They pretty quickly followed it up with an announcement that they are aware of cucumbers' concerns and that they will monitor changing technology, but will still support voice identification. What I read from that is that they signed a contract and will keep using the service until after one or more of their customers are exploited.

Fun fact: It's expressly illegal to move around the cabin when the seatbelt sign is on while taxiing, but not when in the air.

Turbulence is probably the leading cause of injuries and deaths from modern air travel, but taxiing incidents at extremely rare and pretty much never result in injuries.