To be fair, eBooks have just gotten that big in recent years because the publishers are lazy and cram uncompressed embedded fonts into them.
I always strip out embedded fonts from my eBooks with calibre and I have seen books being reduced from 20MB to 400KB. 🤣
This won’t make this a good device due to a myriad of other reasons, though.
The specs are an absolute joke. Even my Sony PRS from 2008 comes with 64MB RAM and physical buttons.
This thing will choke on epubs with embedded fonts, if it doesn’t just plainly ignore them (which it seems like it will, since they’re talking so much about their own custom font).
Neat idea, but I fear it’s destined to fail. I also think it’s too small. The PRS-505 is six inches and I wouldn’t go any smaller than that for comfortable reading.
You can just do CTRL+R (in bash at least)
I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.
One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.
It also has basically the same plot with the same enemies. Except they added a red lady villain that is weirdly sexualized and a kid gets magic powers - because nature.
A bicycle will transport me in the same manner every time I use it. A calculator will always give me the correct result of 2+2.
What was your point about AI again?
From the guy that brought us: “All the CPUs in the past were built for humans, this CPU is built for agents.”
Dude just invented fictional customers by selling directly to the AI. 😅
Doesn’t have to be a Mac, my GPD Win Max 2 has 64GB as well for a much lower price and it can somehow use 55GB on the integrated NPU (AMD 780M) for running models with ollama. I can even combine that with an external GPU on the Oculink port to increase the total memory.
It takes between 30s to 5min to get a reply, but it does work and it’s mainly useful for going over my project asking how to improve the codebase.
Quality-wise it’s good enough for boilerplate code and small improvements. Wouldn’t trust it to work on big features in larger projects, but I don’t trust LLMs in general for that. I don’t see a big difference to ChatGPT and Gemini (which is a win for local hosting and putting the freedom of computing back into our own hands). But the usual caveats always apply. All models have their problems and people tend to overhype the capabilities of LLMs in general.
I worked in a callcentre for many years and had changing shifts every two weeks. Having to come in at 6am and then getting that switched to 4pm wreaked havoc on my body and after doing this for quite a while, I just crashed and got burnout.
Recovery took me two years, where I basically just slept. Five days a week are just too much, it’s a system designed to squeeze the last bit of labor value out of you and I fucking hated it. Nowadays, I’m not able to physically work for more than four days, or else I’ll crash again.
I had a lot of luck, so I can now work entirely from home. No commute, Fridays are off. Sounds super cozy and amazing, but the thing is: I need that Friday for myself. A lot of times I’ll just sleep so I can have some energy on the actual weekend.
When it comes to doctor’s appointments, I just tell my boss I have one and that’s it. As it should be. We are humans, not machines.
Same here. Sometimes I need the Friday just to sleep, but it’s nice.
Camo & Crooked - Afterlife (BCee Remix)
Every time I have to do something in a Microsoft admin interface at work. Worst software on the planet, fuck SharePoint, fuck Teams, burn it all to the ground.
I’d say this whole case is way more than just mildly infuriating.
From a lot of posts here I get that working as a dev in the US is now a total shitshow. But to give you my European perspective (I work in Germany): AI adoption hasn’t been as rapid here. People and companies are more skeptical about it, compared to the US.
I work as a web developer for an employer that is cautious about AI. I can use it, but I am not forced to. Tried it excessively for a few months (agents writing my code, playing a glorified manager and all of that jazz), but I noticed my own skills atrophying and me losing the general grasp of what my code actually does. And even though everyone and their dog claim that the models get better with each new release, I still run into hallucinations way too often. If you are very experienced in a field and you’ve been doing it for over a decade, you notice all of the small inconsistencies and bullshit answers - much quicker than a junior dev who didn’t have that experience yet.
So nowadays I only use Gemini for tool and library research or really simple boilerplate code. For everything else my own brain is the better solution. I am not actively against AI as a technology, but extremely opposed to paying a subscription to some techbro billionaire’s company to keep doing my job. Fuck Altman, Elon, Jensen and the Zuck.
If Ed Zitron is correct in all of his calculations, the frontier models will get so expensive they’ll become unprofitable for a lot of companies, so it would be a stupid decision to rely on them. I am looking forward to one day host good models on my own machine - though that day is not today, when capable GPU’s still cost thousands of dollars.
Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.
I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.
Maybe he bought that RAM before the crisis. I got a 64GB netbook last year, shortly before it became unobtainium.
Ghost Rider. First one was goofy action, but still kinda cool. Second one was boring, confusing and lame. But at least it had an exploding bucket-wheel excavator in it, which was the only good scene.
Were you homeschooled? That’s the only way I can imagine a kid could escape homework
Disclaimer: I’m from the EU, I don’t know if it’s more difficult in the US. But I escaped homework by simply not doing it. I got yelled at, there were a lot of talks between my parents and the school, teachers made fun of me in front of the whole class…but that just made me more angry and more unwilling to do them. :)
Ultimately, there was nothing they could do, except giving me bad grades, but I didn’t much care about those. I’ve been a little shithead.
What also helped was my parents not giving much of a fuck either, they trusted me to do what’s best for me.
I’ve been running some Linux servers for fun, at my last job we also had quite a few. The only admin quit, no documentation. Guess who got a big salary increase because he was the only one with the knowledge required to keep this shitshow running? Yep, that’s me.
Thanks to past me for installing every distro under the sun and sinking years into the commandline, shell scripting, web and mail servers just for the thrill. Linux is awesome.
They’ll come crawling back to us once the bubble pops and I hope gamers will remember.