theopsimist

I’m trying really hard to avoid the snark. History provides ample examples and reasons to be deeply suspicious of movements that presented themselves as merely pursuing a program or cause - but that in practice turned out to be about control of political office

The only snippet with a statistically significant majority preference went to the AI. Shocking to me as AI writing always seems palpably inferior.

You a vc?

Typewriters work too. I’m toying with the idea of starting an online journal that only accepts submissions written by hand or by mechanical typewriters.

Is this included in the free AI tier for small developers? Big news if so

Well let’s say the real (non subsidized) token cost to create the app is $40 that’s 1/100 of a baby i’m saving just by not creating it!

Ah i see you edited your comment, i’ll leave mine as is though.

I mean i’d need to vibe code the damn thing but as a rule of thumb you can save one baby’s life for around $4k

Or as someone more elegantly phrased: https://x.com/tobytarrant/status/2065946761332486231

- So I would like you all to do me a favor please. I would like you to take out your phones and calculate a number. I know this may seem contrived, but I promise it will be useful for you.

I’m thinking of vibe coding a calculator app How Many Babies Died For This where you input your startup idea, life(style) goals and AI token usage and the machine spits out the Net Babies Dead for you to achieve your dreams

- 10-year history of Alzheimer’s

-monosyllabic speech

- chronic urinary incontinence, executive dysfunction, dysphagia, dependent mobility

- Approximately 19 h post-administration, spontaneous autobiographical speech emerged. Over subsequent days and weeks, functional improvements included restoration of urinary continence, improved ambulation, autonomous dressing, increased emotional responsiveness, sustained social interaction, contextual memory retrieval, preserved working memory for social context, and spontaneous conversational engagement.

Anyone who’s had a loved one with Alzheimer’s would take this in a heartbeat even if the effects are ‘transient’

-One screenshot of Nieta Aqila's Meta monetization dashboard, which she posted, showed she made roughly $14 US in a month when she was active in Alberta Facebook groups.

So brave CBC making this woman doing this to eke out a few bucks the star of this exposé while the fb executives enabling this get to remain nameless

One good thing about the (current iteration of) AI era is it’s getting people used to paying directly for data. Yeah, of course i’d prefer information to be totally free. But if that isn’t possible, paying directly is far superior to paying for it via ad exposure.

If truly 100% automation (including infantry/police) the most likely scenario is not any if the above; most people will be kept on some kind of minimum sustenance enough to keep them from rebelling (“UBI”) and those who disagree will either be coopted into the elite or eliminated.

Can we conceive the possibility of a Ben Lerner novel-reader who isn’t a member of his social milieu? Or aspiring to be.

Have not seen a counter to the what-seems-to-me trivial point that the condition of possibility of UBI is the elimination of manual labour - or otherwise slavery and slave labour like exploitation

I think different people will have one feature they feel should have been kept (other than the ram which is universal). For me not so much the Touch ID but the backlit keyboard.

I'll keep adding to the list:

* Only one external display

* No haptic trackpad

And of course the screen: 13.0-inch vs 13.6

Weight is the same incidentally.

I think the tradeoff would be worth it for a lot of people but many would be better off buying the apple refurbished 16GB M4 Air ($759 from apple right now)

List of differences from the MacBook Air:

* Only supports 8 GB of unified memory

* No MagSafe

* One of the two USB-C ports is limited to USB 2.0 speeds of just 480 Mb/s

* No Thunderbolt support means the Neo cannot drive either of Apple’s new Studio Displays. However, it can push a 4K display with 60Hz refresh rate over USB-C.

* “Just” 16 hours of battery life, compared to the 18 hours quoted for the 13-inch MacBook Air

* Display supports sRGB, but not P3 Wide Color

* No True Tone

* 1080p webcam doesn’t support Center Stage

* No camera notch

* Dual side-firing speakers, down from four speakers on the Air

* Does not support Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking on AirPods

* Dual-mic system, down from a three-mic system on the Air

* The 3.5 mm headphone jack does not have support for high-impedance headphones

* No keyboard backlighting

* Touch ID not included on base model

* Trackpad does not support Force Touch

* Supports Wi-Fi 6E, not 7

* No fast charging

* The Apple on the lid isn’t shiny

https://512pixels.net/2026/03/the-differences-between-the-ma...