“There are some bad things on the internet”

“Just… Don’t use the internet?”

I think the biggest problem with AI is that people expect it to fully do the work for you rather than be a tool. Imagine we live in a world without cameras and someone introduces that as something that will make paintings for you. Then users dislike it, expecting cameras to frame, aim, zoom and shoot for them.

I use AI for coding and it’s amazing… at giving you an 80% correct boilerplate code that you then finish up editing yourself. There’s real time savings there. I don’t ask it to make the whole code because then I’m going to have to find the mistakes.

I use it also to summarise 3000-commit changelogs, which after some refinement it does way better than I could do in any reasonable timespan.

A colleague with dyslexia now writes without worrying that his grammar isn’t making much sense, then an LLM fixes it for him.

The problem is when you use the result of the AI as a final product, because the reality of the technology is that then you get slop. There are so many people that just can’t see past this and either use AI directly as an unattended slop generator, or don’t use AI because they don’t think it can be anything else. But I’m convinced you can use it as a tool with an input in less than 20% of a creative process (by this I don’t mean “art” but any type of creation) and still save a real and significant chunk of time.

The ads for apps, Xbox games, trial versions of Office preinstalled, the minesweeper and solitaire collection that are preinstalled but actually ad supported or non-free, depending on the region spotify/TikTok/Facebook also come preinstalled, “Movies & TV”, Bing/MS News…

I think all of those count as bloat. I haven’t included Edge because I guess having a browser is a necessity, or copilot/cortana because you said “excluding AI features”.

Even though there is a LOT more to a person than productivity and that can never be the thing that defines us, I’m going to focus exclusively on that because that’s what this post is about.

I had one of those days today. Absolutely awesome. I almost had no meetings and the software changes kept coming in. I nailed it. I’m still on a rush, I feel unstoppable!

However yesterday, I came home and I was almost crying to my partner because I couldn’t take the laundry off the rack and I felt useless.

But hey, so is the life of ADHDers. I accept it. Yesterday it took me a while to get out of that emotional state. I knew that rationally I’m not a useless person and I have a good handle on my life. However emotionally it was way harder. It took me a lot of processing to synthesise that knowledge into feelings.

So I know the rational part, and I lean on that and on a very understanding, loving partner (who is also neurodivergent) who helps me stay grounded when I panic. Our productivity is not constant. That is fine - on average, there’s nothing wrong with our output!

I’ve only started using Storygraph recently (which I also like) but I’d consider a federated alternative. Does anybody know whether its possible to migrate the history from SG to Bookwyrm?

Excellent in which specific sense? Most competitors offer better everything (performance, range, build quality) for a given price point.

The fact that Tesla has managed to make EVs that consistently rank below most ICE brands in terms of reliability is mind blowing.

Over the past 5 years, I’ve installed ubuntu about 30 times on different computers. Not once has an install on an SSD taken me more than an hour, with it typically taking me 30 minutes or less except for rare occasions where I’ve messed something up.

PREGANANANT

It’s the other way around, an Apple Silicon Mac would be able to run an intel binary through Rosetta (I think there’s almost no exceptions at this point). It’s intel macs that can’t run Arm specific binaries.

I thought a few days ago that my “new” laptop (M2 Pro MBP) is now almost 2 years old. The damn thing still feels new.

I really dislike Apple but the Apple Silicon processors are so worth it to me. The performance-battery life combination is ridiculously good.

Op, I’ll try to remember to comment here about what the doc/nurse says tomorrow after that review.

Perfect timing! Yes, I feel the exact same thing.

I’ve been on titration with medikinet XL with 20 mg for a month which was ok, then after a review got told to try 30 mg for two weeks and 40 mg for two weeks.

30 mg made me feel a bit stressed at work, but nothing that bothered me. Like having 3 coffees when you have a lot going on and you need to get things done quickly. As you say, this feeling only lasts for a while only.

Now I’ve moved to 40mg and I hate it. Roughly 2-3 hours after taking it, I get exactly what you describe. I’ve been trying to explain it as a 7-coffee panic. Same situation as the above but with so much coffee in my body that I’m at the edge of having a meltdown and bursting into tears.

This, of course, comes with high blood pressure and heart rate. My understanding is with extended release you get a first “peak concentration”, then lowers slowly, and you get a second peak at about 4h or so, depending on formulation. Yesterday, at a time I think matched the second peak roughly, I was watching a stress-free TV show on the sofa, in a stress-free environment with no tasks to do… And suddenly this feeling came in and I had almost 90bpm resting heart rate for no reason when I’m normally in the low 70s.

I hate it and on Monday (I have my next medication review) I’m going to ask for alternatives or to get put on 30mg. That made me productive and motivated but without feeling like I’m being motivated by panic.

Mine is Clippy, but it’s constantly retrieving information from the wrong word document.

“Hey, it looks like you’re on holiday abroad. Would you like to take your car to the garage? The MOT expires tomorrow.”

“Hey, would you like some help researching this really interesting camera equipment during working hours?”

“Hey, I see you’re going to the gym. Let me remind you of all the tasks you need to do at home and now you won’t have time to do: (…)”

It’s UE in Spanish, from Unión Europea. (Non-doubled letters because it’s a single Union, there’s no plural like in “States”).

Sometimes people in Spain do use the English acronyms for both EU/USA, but I don’t think I’ve seen it often. Both UE and EEUU are more common from what I’ve seen, and also people rarely say these out loud, it’s exclusively a written language problem.

Well, be it because he is good, or because he got lucky, SpaceX has been doing things right. It’s refreshed the space industry like nobody ever has before.

I struggle giving that clown any credit whatsoever but the end result of Space X is undeniably successful, regardless of how they got there.

I did a masters on composites manufacturing while working at Airbus. One day I was talking to one of the lecturers after the class (a very senior engineer in Airbus Defence and Space), and I asked them what she thought about the SpaceX attempts (back then on their very early stages) at reusing rockets.

She ensured me that reusable rockets could never work. Just the cost of inspecting the rockets to ensure they hadn’t gotten damaged would outweigh any savings from reusing them.

People have a habit of getting their predictions horribly wrong, so I’m not implying that she was a bad or short sighted engineer, even if she hyperfixated on one of the industry challenges at the time. My point here is that that anecdote illustrates pretty well what was the mindset in Airbus (and by extension, the European space programme) back then, and explains perfectly why Europe is behind on this.

Airbus has a history of making good or very good aircraft but they usually happen after Boeing has taken a leap. The A350 is great but it arrived almost a decade after the Dreamliner. Its development was reactionary, not visionary.

Although the A380 was a visionary solution for problem there wasn’t a business case for. Not sure if that’s any better…

Well, it has 10x more speakers than German, but it still has fewer speakers than English and most of them are localised in a single country.

I’m talking about running them in GPU, which favours the GPU even when the comparison is between an AMD Epyc and a mediocre GPU.

If you want to run a large version of deepseek R1 locally, with many quantized models being over 50GB, I think the cheapest Nvidia GPU that fits the bill is an A100 which you might find used for 6K.

For well under that price you can get a whole Mac Studio with those 192 GB the first poster in this thread mentioned.

I’m not saying this is for everyone, it’s certainly not for me, but I don’t think we can dismiss that there is a real niche where Apple has a genuine value proposition.

My old flatmate has a PhD in NLP and used to work in research, and he’d have gotten soooo much use out of >100 GB of RAM accessible to the GPU.

If it’s for AI, loading huge models is something you can do with Macs but not easily in any other way.

I’m not saying many people have a use case at all for them, but if you have a use case where you want to run 60 GB models locally, a whole 192GB Mac Studio is cheaper than the GPU alone you need to run that if you were getting it from Nvidia.

So the lack of apple-branded AI Slop is slowing down the sales for iPhones but not for Macs?

Edit for clarity: I’m aware sequoia “has” apple intelligence but in a borderline featureless state, so it’s as good (or as bad) as not having anything.