flurpitude

Using an LLM as a live runtime would always be a wildly inefficient and less reliable way to perform routine, deterministic tasks compared to traditional code.

Should also be fighting for that.

Note 4 user here. Not sure what to do when this one dies. The pen is a great feature that hugely expands the uses of the device. I hope Samsung doesn't feel the need to stop producing phones with a pen.

Meh, my experience was the opposite - S2 died quickly, S3 was slow and with bloated software, Note 4 was and still is great. But anecdotes about one or two people's experience don't prove anything.

It would be interesting to see the "deep dream" treatment of ordinary images using this neural net.

The only thing in that picture I want is the radio business controller. I would set the dial to BUSINESS and wait for the money to roll in via radio.

I don't see much value in published file hashes when they're hosted on the same site that hosts the files. If someone compromises the download link they're probably in a good position to update the hashes too.

Also found in an HP DV7 4087CL from 2010: https://twitter.com/al3xtjames/status/749063556486791168/pho...

In my experience, having installed Windows 10 on 7 computers so far, Windows 10 has been unstable and full of small bugs. From blue screens and freezes to missing drivers to blurry fonts to the File Explorer failing to open or taking a couple of minutes to open, there seem to be common bugs at all levels and not much movement on Microsoft's part to fix them. The design is opaque, with settings scattered between two quite separate areas (Control Panel and Settings), and the start menu is less functional than the one in Windows 7 (for example, the frequently used programs don't really seem to be your most frequently used programs, and the tiles are a waste of space and hard to organize). The upgrade advisor will recommend that you upgrade even on machines where crucial components will be missing drivers after the upgrade. In several cases the upgrade has taken me from a stable, functioning machine to an unstable machine with some non-functioning hardware. Windows 7, by contrast, has felt stable for years, and even Windows 8.1 felt more stable than Windows 10. Add the concerns about MS's spyware and it's not hard to see why users don't want to upgrade.

As with addictive drugs, the real problem doesn't wholly lie on either side. You can't blame the users entirely for the fact that people choose to supply a harmful product for profit, but neither can you wholly blame the suppliers for being tempted to do so when users lap it up. Regardless of the blame question, it will improve when (if) both sides change their behaviour, or when either side changes unilaterally and forces a change from the other side.

It feels like the Steorn of car companies. Or a dodgy Kickstarter. All designed to create a buzz with no real evidence of a product.

See also Ken M:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=us4Eti0UmDI

"whatever is announced will essentially be an irrelevance since a year from now it won't even have hit double-digit usage share."

I don't get the logic there. Why is it "essentially an irrelevance" just because it takes time to reach a wide user base? Today's releases will have tomorrow's wide user base and be as relevant as last year's releases are today.

*hoard. Horde is zombies.

Pay money to the Wall Street Journal.

Has anyone tried both this and Crashplan? My Crashplan 10-computer subscription comes up for renewal soon so I'd be interested in people's experiences of how they compare. Generally I've found Crashplan to be pretty good. I like the way it backs up in frequent small increments and I like the backup destination options (cloud, folder, other PC, etc.). Does Arq compare well?

Well, there's your answer. "As thin as an AAA battery" is about twice the thickness of an AAA battery. Simple.

It's nice to see PC laptops taking advantage of lower power chips to improve their external design. But from online reviews of previous Spectre 360 models, it seems many users complained of overheating and poor wifi reliability. I wonder if HP have done anything to address those in the new thinner version? Aside from that it looks like an attractive machine (golden swirls and jewels notwithstanding).

100% of excrement is crap. Therefore this law is false.

To purchase the software you have to go through a bunch of screens, enter payment info, download, install, and then enter a serial number. For pirating software you just search for it and it's usually easier to install, with some cracks even bypassing steps.

For me that's counterbalanced by the fact that you never quite know what you're getting with pirated software. If I just buy it, I know I'm not infecting my main music computer with something nasty. Also, as a software developer myself I like to pay my peers for their work. And how much effort is it to enter a serial number?

My only anxiety is: what happens if I lose the serials? (I try to keep them backed up.) And will it be a huge hassle to move this stuff to another computer? If a company sells me software that's hard to move and reinstall when I change computers, I'm not likely to buy from them again.

I have never found a form, but I have found forums where people complain about persistent issues and nothing gets done. They seem to go out of their way to make it difficult for users to report issues. In addition they seem to have contempt for user experience, or they're incompetent at it, or they are under weird nonsensical licensing pressures that require them to make things difficult for their users. Their front ends need an overhaul and they could easily introduce a "flag this track as having a problem" feature.

Now how about Spotify fixing their front end so that Premium customers on Android can just hit "play" to play the album they want to play, in the right order? And how about an app in the Windows Store so that you can use it on a touchscreen? And how about some improved metadata that work for classical music? And a way to report corrupt or mistagged tracks and get them fixed?

/rant

It has been stable and reliable for me too. But the concern is not about reliability so much as security: some patches are not delivered due to the way Mint (apparently) mixes binaries from Debian and Ubuntu. It may be quite reliable but still insecure.

I tried upgrading when I found there was no upgrade path. Upgrading Mint means reinstalling Mint.

I don't think that's true any more. I think they allow you to upgrade in place.

I have an old netbook that came with Windows but runs Lubuntu now. Why the excitement about Chrome OS compared to other resource-light Linux distros? I can run Chromium on Lubuntu, so doesn't that give me access to all the Chrome OS software plus a bunch of other Linux software too?

I don't understand why Chrome OS is considered to be something revolutionary.

Asus also often has many sub-models specified by a suffix to the main model number. And what they show on their many inconsistent marketing websites often won't match what's actually available in your country. Not to mention that it appears on the website months before the product (well, a slightly different, less attractive product with a similar name) becomes available. Asus are bad for this.

To his credit, Sanders has explicitly said that a president can't change the country singlehandedly and a grassroots political movement is needed to achieve any meaningful change. Any supporter who thinks electing him is the end of it isn't listening to his message.

The cookie would tend to be for one session only. The login credentials can be used to create subsequent sessions.

But we know that these same corporations may be legally obliged, secretly compelled or financially incentivized to give or sell the information they have about you to the government. And if the government cannot get hold of the data through these means, they can simply steal it from the privately owned data centres where it has all been so conveniently aggregrated. Especially since Snowden we have seen that private corporations function as a funnel through which intelligence agencies amass data on private individuals.

This reddit thread discusses the donations these senators have received from telecoms companies:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/42nia3/senators...