jerojero

I find the battery life on boox tablets to be pretty poor. At least with my usage.

Its kind of annoying to have to be charging every other day.

I think I've only had to charge the xteink x4 a couple times since I got it in March. But that's the case for any non-android ereader.

I'd be happy if the boox lasted a week with 2-3ish hours of use a day.

you'd have to take the DRM out of the books, convert them to epubs and then transfer them.

its an involved process but that's always going to be that way on any e-reader that's not a kindle (or android based, where you can install the kindle app).

They're working with the crosspoint team.

The official hardware (if you buy through their website or amazon) is not blocked. Only Aliexpress offerings.

But yes, they are coming with a FRONTlit option. Although it'll also have a touchscreen and no front buttons.

I'm hoping maybe in a year or so they make an actual successor with the same button layout, no touchscreen (or with a touchscreen but still with all the buttons) and a better chipset (though nothing major, what the X3 has is enough).

Agriculture is the most important set of techniques and technologies in human history, it gave us the possibility of staying in a place.

There's also fire.

Writing was very important, I'm not so sure about industrialization, maybe as modern men we might think that way. But human life was perfectly liveable and conceivable without it. Even writing. Big civilizations like the Inca empire didn't really have writing (although they had the quipu system for record keeping).

If there's a civilization collapse, we will still be doing fire and agriculture. We probably won't be doing industrialization and computers.

Theres a big problem, which has been described by many philosophers and political theorists (from socrates to Machiavelli) which is that politicians are first and foremost self-serving.

Most political work is not done for the population as a whole but for the own continuing of the political class and personal enrichment. Yes, sometimes these incentives align with the interests of the constituents. But if politics is about compromise and you have two groups with opposing views whose only common ground is "we are all politicians here" its most likely that a lot of the agreements are going to benefit the political class.

There's people arguing for sortition and sortition (at least as citizens assemblies, the way the OECD describes) tries to solve this problem. As people go into an assembly and don't have other incentives than to defend their own positions with regards to a certain topic of discussions. Its not a permanent body and that gets rid of some of the perverse incentives of politicians.

I think the problem I see with your argument is that people simply do not value reliable and secure consumer software as much as they'd value reliable and secure airplanes.

Of course, software that is in charge of things where people value security a lot, such as the software in airplanes, is much more scrutinized and adheres to better standards. This is the case precisely because when it goes bad people die in ways that attract a lot of attention.

You can't enforce those same policies on most consumer software because people consume it the same way they do food. You can have Michelin starred restaurants with the best practices but most people can't afford to eat there so instead they will buy hot dogs on the street.

The idea of "high quality hand crafted artisinal software" is closer to luxury products than it is to the engineering of planes, trains and bridges.

That's not why they're selling.

They're selling because people love to record other people, publicly, without shame. It's kind of like a go-pro, is the use case for these.

The creepers exist but they're not enough people to build a business around.

I think that's the whole selling point of lovable?

The first ai IPO is spaceX.

Its already not anthropic or openAI.

But there might still be some water in the well for the second one, there definitely won't be for the third one.

sort of sounds like "project tapestry" by Yann LeCunn. Build projected data silos of highly valuable information, train in a distributed manner and share the weights upwards where they're combined and fine tuned.

precisely, also, if you don't need to charge the device for weeks, months even, you're probably gonna lose the specialised cable.

a usbc is so easy to come by, you're never going to have to wait for amazon to deliver the cable you need to charge this one device you own.

I have a boox device (go Color 7 gen 2) and the battery life is not good for an ereader. For a tablet, it's fine I guess but I actually get more battery life from my actual tablet than this little ereader.

it lasts a day if youre reading all day, a couple days with lighter use. I couldn't finish a whole book on a single charge even if its a small book. Not at my reading speed anyway.

As a comparison, I've already read 3 books on the xteink x4 and still have 60% of battery left. So yeah, android is good but these things need much better batteries to compete.

Its not physically possible to have eink (based on inked beads, like the current e-reader has) and backlight.

only frontlight is possible.

if its still as open, I'm pretty sure the touchscreen can be worked out to work well.

but I really agree with you, I'd love to have a frontlight on it. That's literally all I'd wanted over the current device. No touchscreen necessary.

but between touchscreen + frontlight and neither, perhaps I'd be willing to have a touchscreen so long as the software is good (which something like crosspoint I'm sure would nail)

crosspoint has started developing a little slower now that its in a really usable state.

I've merged some working PRs onto my device and it's working great. I really needed a dictionary option because I like to quickly know the meaning of words as I read.

its fine. theres a few more things that could be nice (reading statistics for example) that other forks do have.

One thing I don't like about California based companies is how cringe the names always are.

"Jalapeño" is such a bad name, having an "ñ" already makes it difficult and annoying to deal with in so many little ways. Good luck with that.

But also, theres the sort of "yes lets use Mexican related things because we're California" thought that I just really hate. I don't know, its like corporate Memphis to me. You see a product like this, you know it's an uppity califonia based firm that came up with it.

its not very expensive for a company like Meta to create a platform like this that could see them extract value as a middleman passively for a while.

despite the ethics of it, business wise it pays for itself, and because of the complicated ethics of it Meta is the best biggest company for it too. Everyone hates meta, their own employees hate meta, who cares. It will probably make money.

not only that, but I think when a big platform comes into play it gets users from the other platforms easily. As the opportunities for market mismatch are abound being a smaller platform in the beginning.

anyway, I think this is a smart move by Meta. And I'm positive everyone in the gambling space is happy with it too, as Meta comes with a good lobbying effort.

this is reality, folks.

Open weight models from Chinese labs tend to be significantly cheaper.

I think theyre absolutely needed. I can't afford 200 USD a month for personal use of coding AI, and I don't think such prices are reasonable for most of the world economy anyway. Not to mention US firms might be giving their employees a lot more than that.

It's increasingly feeling, to me, that theres a gap building up between haves and have nots. But then, we get news of these open weight models that are reasonably priced in inference with reasonable capabilities. Yes, they take maybe 6-9 months to get there, tbh, that's not a bad trade off at all.

Its natural for companies to push boundaries for better and better profits. It's sort of their nature.

Things might be fine in Australia and NZ right now, but as the hydric crisis deepens we might see a need for government to step up.

I think a problem is that, if you have a market-first approach you run the risk of the businesses growing so large and powerful that when you do need to intervene, it has become an impossible task. This happened with banking, it is happening with consulting in the UK and big tech in the US. Not to mention big pharma pretty much everywhere.

So I think its a very careful balance of carrot and stick that the government needs to have over its industries.

these users are probably losing the company money.

the failure is in converting regular people into actual ai product consumers. Companies are realising that the money is not in regular consumers but in enterprise and they are not considering grok as a serious alternative.

if anything, the name, the branding and the x/twitter affiliation has hurt adoption from money makers rather than help it.

so yes, people know it, but no one is willing to pay for it

A country that is a thousand years old is obviously going to have to change its constitution.

European countries have gone from massive societal changes to massive societal changes (for example from monarchies to republics).

The USA is a new country, and its constitutional rigidity causes a lot of social and political problems that most likely will lead to big changes in the future.

Yes, some countries in Europe remained monarchies for 1500 years or longer. They didn't really have a constituion back then because they were not republics.

The stated goal is to "go to mars", the real goal is to make money.

He sold his failing but hype business to his soon-to-IPO successful but kinda boring business.

It's a way of laundering the debt and dumping into investors as he pitted different indexes against each other to force his way into one of them, and have people's 401k buy into them. Its a ton of money.

I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla is bought into spaceX in the future.

I wonder what price they'll target. For the specs I think its worth around the same as a PS5 so maybe around 600-650 but everything points out at this not happening.

I think in the end this will sadly be bought by scalpers, rich people and YouTubers. Sucks, I was really excited for it.

Because you look at the work from the perspective of a programmer, not the perspective of a regular person.

Normal people have never gone around automating their work. The most automation they do is dynamic tables on excel sheets.

I obviously know building a tool that can programmatically do something is a better solution, but I think that requires a fundamental shift in how people work. People need to be told by someone "this is how you should be using the AI" but right now they're simple told "use the AI".

I was arguing with a Chilean friend who moved a few years ago to the USA. He was telling me how Chile doesn't do good science. I challenged his claim saying Chile actually had great scientists that were severely underfunded (Chile's investment in science and research is ~0.4% of the GDP versus the OECD average of ~2.7%).

I think it's sort of a big consensus with people that have never been involved in science work, in Chile, that science is sort of a "lazy-man" type of work. Chilean universities put a lot of emphasis in foundational science research. It should be the industry, in my opinion, that helps bridge the gaps between foundational research and applied science. But the major industries in Chile don't need to do that, why put money into R&D when you can already be a billion-dollar industry by exporting rocks. Chile's main export is not actually copper, it's rocks that have copper in them. We (I'm Chilean) export the rocks and buy back the copper cables.

Recently the newly elected president criticized foundational research saying it doesn't "turn into jobs" and instead "ends up in an expensive book abandoned in a library". It really reminded me of my friend's words, it's the attitude of someone that doesn't understand the importance of foundational science.

This research is interesting, although the article is quite technical, and I'm very happy to see the involvement of Chilean scientists in it.

They bought out Instagram because it was shaping out to be a huge competitor, so I think that business would have grown to be a multibillion dollar one regardless.

It was definitely very smart to buy them out when they did.

I just think you're focusing on the wrong part.

Its a little bit of a balance act, they want to match you with someone that's good enough to date a couple times but not enough to date long term.

I think the mathematics work better if they match you with "mostly compatible" people rather than "not compatible at all". Success stories are important because that's how you build recognition.

Now a days though, match group owns all dating apps so they have a monopoly in dating. Whenever a new app comes to market that's "better" (which will be, in its initial stages) they acquire. Users migrate and then they ruin. Rinse and repeat.

They recently acquired sniffies (a gay cruising app) for like 100M. Go figure.

I can tell you they're not going to be buying "googlebooks" plus, Apple has never until this year offered an actual low-price machine.

Of course their market size is going to be smaller when you're leaving out the sub $1000 dollar market.

Pretty sure when they talked about "very high build quality" and such they're saying this is not a replacement to the cheap chromebooks (which I think the macbook neo is eating anyway) but a higher price point.

I think if I wanted a cheap laptop I'd probably get the macbook neo, and if i wanted a non-gaming expensive one i'd get a macbook pro.

I really don't see the market fit for this, I guess the android integration. But my god, I'd die of cringe if someone asked me about my laptop and I had to say "googlebook". Believe it or not, these things matter a lot, particularly if you're trying to target a young audience.