Jrockwar

joined 1 year ago
[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 10 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

How do people have the time to organise vigils and get into "coalitions" and politics in the workplace?

Granted I don't work at Microsoft, but I feel me and everyone around me is overworked enough that when we have the time to stop working... We head home (or close the laptop if WFH) and rest, not engage in additional activities in the workplace.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 3 points 4 weeks ago

Yeah, this sounds like a problem for only the 5% of the world who live in a specific country.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

That's not efficient enough, why don't we make them larger and carry over 400 people instead? And we can do special low friction routes where people want to go, so that there's even better efficiency!

Or, why don't we accept maybe that there's the need for different modes of transport and I'm happy commuting to work 8 miles in a bicycle but my 78-year-old mum sometimes physically can't walk half a mile to a bus stop to take her to the doctor's and she needs taxis to exist?

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

Then that might not be the model the previous poster is talking about, because I have to press perplexity really hard to get it to hallucinate. Search-augmented LLMs are pretty neat.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 18 points 1 month ago (4 children)

That's because it doesn't learn, it's a snapshot of its training data frozen in time.

I like Perplexity (a lot) because instead of using its data to answer your question, it uses your data to craft web searches, gather content, and summarise it into a response. It's like a student that uses their knowledge to look for the answer in the books, instead of trying to answer from memory whether they know the answer or not.

It is not perfect, it does hallucinate from time to time, but it's rare enough that I use it way more than regular web searches at this point. I can throw quite obscure questions at it and it will dig the answer for me.

As someone with ADHD with a somewhat compulsive need to understand random facts (e.g. "I need to know right now how the motor speed in a coffee grinder affects the taste of the coffee") this is an absolute godsend.

I'm not affiliated or anything, and if anything better comes my way I'll be happy to ditch it. But for now I really enjoy it.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 16 points 1 month ago (20 children)

What's the problem with hexbear, is it the same? Genuine question - I think the only community in hexbear I follow is "Gaming" and it's reasonably civil there.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You can't measure this, because it has drivers behind the wheel. Even if it did three "pedestrian-killing" mistakes every 10 miles, chances are the driver will catch every mistake per 10000 miles and not let it crash.

But on the other hand, if we were to measure every time the driver takes over the number would be artificially high - because we can't predict the future and drivers are likely to be overcautious and take over even in circumstances that would have turned out OK.

The only way to do this IMO is by

  • measuring every driver intervention
  • only letting it be driverless and marketable as self-driving when it achieves a very low number of interventions ( < 1 per 10000 miles?)
  • in the meantime, market it as "driver assist" and have the responsibility fall into the driver, and treat it like the "somewhat advanced" cruise control that it is.
[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

$700 million is the estimated development cost of the Falcon Heavy.

Not a game, not a space simulation, but the actual Falcon Heavy rocket. A rocket that can actually go into space.

I know they're different things but I thought I'd leave this here to put things in perspective.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 20 points 1 month ago (7 children)

There's a lot of context we're missing here. For example this happens with my company and the reason is tax implications - if they provided "free money" that would be additional salary and taxed as such, whereas "free meals" are taxed completely differently. There could be completely legitimate reasons. Maybe if they let people use it for whatever purpose, the $25 would turn into $15 due to tax.

What I won't defend is firing people for this reason. I don't see how that can be ethically acceptable...

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 11 points 1 month ago

Visibility is a very real problem in environmental measures that I rarely see discussed.

The example that comes to mind is Madrid. Over the past few years there have been many measures to divert the traffic from the city centre. At a "visible" level this is great, which results in less pollution in the city centre, less traffic, less noise. All amazing. If you delve a bit deeper though, this hasn't been backed up properly by additional public transport, or encouraging working from home, or anything like that. So people who work in the area are having to drive more kilometres, so that they can go around the city centre, resulting in more emissions and pollution overall. The catch? It's in the impoverished areas of the outskirts. Therefore invisible.

The governments look amazing at improving the pollution in the city centres not by addressing it, but by moving it somewhere else. Most times they opt for what is "visibly" good rather than what will actually result in a measurably better outcome. The negative effects of nuclear are very visible, so that weighs a lot in the decisions unfortunately.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 37 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (6 children)

Well what were you expecting? This is like when people install GrapheneOS on Pixels, because it's still the best platform to have a Google-free device.

It's entirely possible that someone wants to buy a Kindle because of it being a great device, but not want to be tied to Amazon's data mining exercises and/or buy books from them because of their behaviour as a publishing company.

[–] Jrockwar@feddit.uk 1 points 1 month ago

Yes, that there are no smartphone sized Intel Atom processors anymore.

The zenphone 2 performed similarly to much more expensive phones. https://www.anandtech.com/show/9251/the-asus-zenfone-2-review/4

I'm not going to be the person defending intel in 2024, but back in 2015, that atom was competitive.

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