Jrockwar

joined 1 year ago
[–] Jrockwar 50 points 1 month ago (7 children)

We really need to think about a better name than "Early access". At this point I think I've used Lawnchair for about 5 years, 5 years after the initial event is only "early" in the context of geological eras.

[–] Jrockwar 11 points 1 month ago

It's not a waste of resources if you learn something. Think of this as research rather than product development. You can try many things (from VR, to miniaturised computers, to cloud gaming, controllers with wonky form factors...) to see what results in a good experience. You don't need to get anywhere near a full fledged product to understand those things, so the waste of resources isn't massive anyway.

I'd bet at the moment people decided "this is useful, I even want this for me, so let's turn it into a product" the steam deck looked more like a screen, a gamepad and a raspberry pi all taped together or jammed into a 3d printed prototype chassis.

If people have spare capacity to work on these projects, the material cost at such a point can be under <5k which is peanuts for a company like Valve.

[–] Jrockwar 4 points 1 month ago (1 children)

To be honest I get your point. We use it at work for summaries of 70-page lists of software commits, and with adequate prompting to "understand" what's what in our codebase it works remarkably well.

Granted it doesn't work near as well as a person who spends a month working on such a summary, but it does it in seconds. Then a person can work for a day on reviewing this and tidying up rather than wasting time trying to summarise 100k lines of code by hand.

[–] Jrockwar 18 points 1 month ago (4 children)

It seems OpenAI should learn to use it correctly first.

[–] Jrockwar 1 points 1 month ago (6 children)

What are detached tabs? Sandboxed? Dragged out into their own window? Genuine question

[–] Jrockwar 12 points 1 month ago

Oh wow that's terrible. I did think the poem was AI generated. The author (of the blog post) is right, this does an excellent job... at degrading the art.

[–] Jrockwar 25 points 1 month ago (3 children)

It's not exactly this but have you considered barefoot shoes? They have a super-thin sole so they naturally take some height off you, compared to "normal" shoes. I wear them for completely different reasons (as a cis man who has found these to help with feet pain and posture after being a kid with flat feet), but I thought you'd appreciate the tip.

Groundies make them with "normal" looking soles, but it's all an optical illusion - they have a strip around them so the sole looks "thick", "normal" and "fashionable". Essentially a less exaggerated version of that drawing:

Caveat: they're more niche and therefore expensive. Also not everyone enjoys the idea of walking without cushioning and feeling the texture of the ground.

[–] Jrockwar 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 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 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 6 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

What size does it need to be?

I would do something with the butterfly from the "is this X" meme.

Maybe just the butterfly, with "FM" in white/black IMPACT font as a good meme

[–] Jrockwar 3 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The US government wouldn't let Boeing fall. As much as I'd love seeing that happen, the strategic importance of having a US-based manufacturer for large commercial airplanes is too large to let them go bust. The US as a country would buy themselves a lot of dependency on other countries through potential tariffs, etc.

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