kweingar

It depends on the use case. Linux often works well on desktop computers without too many fancy peripherals, but I generally do not recommend Linux as a laptop OS for “normies.”

I have installed various flavors of Linux on various laptops over the years, and 100% of the time there were tough-to-diagnose issues with hardware components. With one laptop, the brightness level could not be changed. With another, installing Linux caused the battery to drain three times as fast and hibernation didn’t work properly. With another, I accidentally played music so loud that the speakers broke.

These are all things that I was able to figure out using my Google skills and general knowledge of Linux, but it is not an experience I’d recommend for a “regular person.”

> Apple users have been plenty happy without them for years, too.

As an iPhone owner I have been annoyed at the walled garden for years.

Total victory for sama, it seems. The company is his to run.

Let’s hope he is a good steward of our emerging new world.

I’ve been saying this since DALL-E was released three years ago: image generation is going to be a can of worms, forever.

Google was clumsy here (in the same way that OpenAI was with DALL-E) but no amount of patches are going to fix the culture wars. Taking a text prompt and turning it into a picture is always going to be contentious. There will always be some amount of real bias and some amount of perceived bias on top of that.

And it’s incredibly cheap and easy for users to find real or perceived bias if they’re looking for it.

Even the plain notes of The Star-Spangled Banner are ostentatious, occupying over an octave and a half. The song lends itself to soloists rather than collective singing.

I would go further and ask for changing the national anthem to a song that anyone can sing. God Save the King is a good example of what a country should go for.

I’m tired of the extremely tenuous analogies that tie computer bugs to human behavior.

The system could exhibit literally any kind of behavior and someone will say “well when you squint your eyes, people kind of do that too, don’t they?”

> I won't hire or work with or for googlers or any DEI people ever.

I’m sure they’ll be very sad not to work with you.

I would be very surprised if it said "nonbinary indigenous American woman" considering that nonbinary and woman are different categories

Curiosity is a classical vice, I think it works

Obviously incredibly cool, but it seems that people are incredibly overstating the applications of this.

Realistically, how do you fit this into a movie, a TV show, or a game? You write a text prompt, get a scene, and then everything is gone—the characters, props, rooms, buildings, environments, etc. won’t carry over to the next prompt.

But you don't pay for GPT-4, you pay for a product called ChatGPT Plus, which allows you to write 40 messages to GPT-4 within a three-hour time window, after which you need to switch to 3.5 in the menu.

I definitely leave a lot on the table in terms of outputting work as efficiently as possible. In the past I’ve used personal wikis, time tracking software, personal project management software, etc. and it was a boon for my productivity. These days I don’t bother. I’m sure some people view chatbots the same way.

You may be interested in an article posted to HN a few days ago that argues against the conception of DNA as code and of cells as computers or machines.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00327-x

Lock up the people calling in the fake threats, of course. But there also has to be a conversation about how anyone can summon armed men to anyone else’s house. Seems like it’s a bad enough problem that police departments should reconsider how they respond.

Police departments will of course respond that all of this is necessary as a precaution, but at a certain point it’s unsustainable and produces worse outcomes.

It’s interesting that throughout history we have tended to characterize the behavior of biological systems in terms of the dominant technology of the time. At one point, it was mechanical automata. Then it was hydraulics. Then it was electrical circuits. Now it is computers.

It seems that some people have become overly attached to the computer code explanation of DNA, viewing it not just as a convenient analogy to current technology but as a fundamental truth. They will ask questions like “if DNA is code, then what corresponds to functions? or exceptions? or data structures?” and end up working backwards from the analogy instead of observing what DNA does and building a mental model from there.

(It doesn’t help that the code analogy is very flattering to the programmer’s ego.)

> There are a lot of developers who look at the iPhone as just another Von Neumann machine: I should be able to do whatever I like, however I like and Apple shouldn't be part of the picture after they sold the phone to the user.

I don’t view the iPhone as a Von Neumann machine: I view it as a product that I bought.

Out of all of the physical goods in my home, I am hard-pressed to think of any that require an exclusive ongoing relationship with the original manufacturer.

The piano tuner makes a living because companies design and manufacture pianos, but I do not see anyone arguing that he ought to pay fees to the designer because they “allowed” him to sell me that service.

That didn’t happen on Android, why would it happen now?

But a Chromebook and you can avoid the malware problem that Mac/Windows have

I think you have a different interpretation of “hidden” than Andy.

He is talking about control flow that is not visible to the programmer at all. In Zig, you can understand the control flow of a particular code snippet just by learning Zig. In some other languages, operator overloading means that when you are reading unfamiliar code, you can never be sure what functions might be called.

Is there any tech company, big or small, with the same kind of dynamic engineering culture that Google once had?

If blood oxygen is disabled in a software update, will there be any recourse for Apple Watch owners?

Customers aren’t the ones who violated a patent, and yet they’re the ones who might get screwed. The burden should be on Apple to figure this out for their customers.

Important to note that community involvement is not core to FOSS. Many FOSS projects do not accept outside contributions.

The thing that bothers me about the whole situation is that OpenAI prohibits using its model output as training data for your own models.

It seems more than a bit hypocritical, no? When it comes to their own training data, they claim to have the right to use any/all of humanity’s intellectual output. But for your own training data, you can use everything except for their product, conveniently for them.

According to StackOverflow’s 2023 Developer Survey, TypeScript is the fifth most popular language, beating C, C++, Java, C#, Rust, Go, etc.

In this case, we are far from AGI

If LLMs can replace 90% of your queries, then you have very different search patterns from me. When I search on Kagi, much of the time I’m looking for the website of a business, a public figure’s social media page, a restaurant’s hours of operation, a software library’s official documentation, etc.

LLMs have been very useful, but regular search is still a big part of everyday life for me.

It can be realtime while still having more latency than depicted in the video (and the video clearly stated that Gemini does not respond that quickly).

A local model could send relevant still images from the camera feed to Gemini, along with the text transcript of the user’s speech. Then Gemini’s output could be read aloud with text-to-speech. Seems doable within the present cost and performance constraints.

The video itself and the video description give a disclaimer to this effect. Agreed that some will walk away with an incorrect view of how Gemini functions, though.

Hopefully realtime interaction will be part of an app soon. Doesn’t seem like there would be too many technical hurdles there.

That’s totally valid—you can base your usage of a product on your view of the vendor’s values. So why are so many people blasting Duke’s library for doing the same thing…

You are allowed to stop doing business with a vendor for ideological reasons. What is the issue?