europeanNyan

A refurbished Macbook Air M1 with 8GB of RAM (which works wonderfully for day to day stuff, even development with VS Code) is $849 directly from Apple. I never felt any slowdowns. The thing is chugging along nicely and I don't feel a need for an alternative any more. Apple Silicone has turned the industry upside down IMHO.

I agree with you completely and yet it's practically impossible finding a worthwhile alternative. I've tried finding alternatives on my last upgrade cycle and it's like having to live with endless amounts of compromises just to get away from Apple.

For the iPhone, I tried looking at the Pixel for the Vanilla Android experience and long support, yet it seems like people are fighting battery life issues all the time. Not to mention the polish of the software, app ecosystem and stability.

Also, couldn't find anything coming near the value of a baseline Macbook Air M1 as far as build quality, battery life, stability etc. is concerned.

I like to also read comics and magazines on the iPad and that's also a market where I have no idea what an alternative would be. And that's the state of the tablet market for years now.

Maybe I could get rid of my Apple Watch, but it just works and has endless amounts of third party accessories. I've been looking at Fossil Hybrid Smartwatches and it seems like they are a hot mess of instability and bad support.

At the end of the day, it's about stability and ease of use. I'm way past the time where I had the time and found it really cool to try every new ROM coming out ("daily driver", "What isn't working? You tell me") and it seems like Apple still can't be beat at this front. Sadly.

I tried that once and was really perplexed as how Gandalf found the time to wash his robe in the middle of such an important quest.

It seems like it's only important to bring out a paper to fill a quota somewhere. The researchers probably don't care because no one (e.g. a perspective employer) is going to be actually reading the paper, just the amount of papers they published. That's why linking to something on Arxiv trying to undeniably prove a point ("Look, researchers confirm my point!") most of the time makes me cringe.

Plus, I've mostly given up on journalists. I get clickbait, that's why titles are there for. But clickbait doesn't have to equal badly researched. They could have just as well gotten clicks if they wrote an article "Researchers fail to prove ChatGPT is bad at coding because of this lazy mistake". But they mostly either have no idea of the field they are reporting about or are pushing an agenda. Research? Ain't nobody got time for that.

That wasn't their point at all.

The question always is if we can even do something about the climate now or if we should spend the energy and resources into preparing for a potentially inevitable future.

Humans have always been champions of handling change. Why should this be different?

There is a cool website where you can blind judge the outputs from LLaMa 2 vs ChatGPT-3.5: https://llmboxing.com/

Surprisingly, LLaMa 2 won 5-0 for me.

Don't forget the ads. They have gotten obnoxiously long. The last time I went, the ads for products and trailers went on for 45 minutes with an intermission so they can sell ice cream and snacks. I haven't been to the movies since.

ChatGPT was made for this. Here is a link to a conversation I just made so anyone can test it: https://chat.openai.com/share/807fddd2-4628-4052-9e65-096317...

Here are some examples:

Normal English: "My boss needs this report by 5 PM"

Death Metal English: "THE OVERSEER OF OUR TOILS DEMANDS THE MANUSCRIPT OF ACCOUNTABILITY ANON UPON THE QUINTESSENTIAL HOUR OF THE SOLAR DECLINE"

Normal English: "That sounds like a win-win situation to me!"

Death Metal English: "UNTO MINE EARS, IT RESONATES AS THE DUAL FACETED TRIUMPH OF FATE'S INEXORABLE CONFLUENCE!"

And, for those of you trying to explain the Single Responsibility Principle to your colleagues for the umpteenth time:

"THE SOLITARY OBLIGATION DOCTRINE THUNDERETH FORTH THE DECREE THAT EVERY CONSTRUCT, STRUCTURE, SEGMENT, OR SERVITUDE MUST BEAR A SINGLE, UNMISTAKABLY ETCHED DUTY. IN THE TONGUE OF THE MORTALS, EACH CLASS, FUNCTION, OR MODULE SHALL BE GUIDED BY ONE AND ONLY ONE CATALYST OF TRANSFORMATION."

I'm not Vlad (the person you asked), but I use Lenses almost all the time. They have changed how I search for user generated content completely. I used to add "site:reddit.com" to at least 2/3 of my searches and the Forum Lense does the same for me while including many other discussion boards. I love it.

As an example: I'm playing Diablo 4 at the moment and getting info about the convoluted systems can be a chore. For example: I didn't know that I have to do at least a Tier 3 Nightmare Dungeon to unlock Sigil Crafting. None of the usual pages mentioned that. The Forum Lense saved me a lot of time because users discussing it mentioned it quite a lot.

I'm completely the same as you so I did the following: I took the $10 plan and watched my usage for a week. I seem to hover roughly at about 30-40 searches per day on average so I upgraded to the Family plan. Yes, I know, it sounds weird but now I've got 1400 searches and just didn't invite anyone. And I don't have to worry about if it's going to be enough because my own data says that it's going to easily be enough.

Lenses are actually why I subscribed mostly. I search for organic data often while trying to find help for a product or the opinions on a service or something like that. Regular search is ok, changing to the Forum Lense is mind blowing because I only get discussions from real people.

You can turn it on in Settings under Lenses.

Hey Vlad, I share the same sentiment as the person you replied to - I keep checking my Billings page wondering if the 1000 searches are going to be enough, but decided to just give it a month with the hard limit set to $25 which would be the point at which I should have just paid for unlimited and see how I do. I love what Kagi is standing for and, while I really understand that the business has to be kept afloat, $25 feels like a lot to get better search results.

What did you mean with that that is where Kagi is headed anyways? Will you offer the unlimited package for a price which is a bit lighter on the wallet?

I have been struggling with the same problem while trying to learn about human history because I wanted to first get a good 10000 foot view. It's really hard grasping what happened when, especially when things get really complicated after the fall of the Roman Empire.

It's also interesting that there is no (or I couldn't find) readily available (free or paid) web app which would allow us to sort of slide over a timeline of history and show events which happened at that date/week/month/year. Even better if that could be filtered by event and importance.

The best I could find are various timelines od history which try the parallel rivers approach, but they are mostly huge and unwieldy.

I don't care what happens to Reddit. The platform has been riddled by insane people since the great Tumblr Exodus and has been a strictly political space since Trump won the presidency.

What I do care about is a possible Reddit Exodus and them coming to Hackernews to censor the living hell outside of their world view. Not every comment section has to spiral into "republicans bad", "boomers bad", "cars bad", etc.

This is missing any semblance of nuance. When the article makes a point that "the wrong side" is using children to push their beliefs and does the same at the end of the text (think of the kids!), you know that it isn't worth the (digital) paper it was written on.

This sounds like a lot of gatekeeping. QWERTZ types need not apply for serious computer use. Even worse are those ones who would prefer to write a proper e-mail using umlauts.