Idk the Republicans seem to really want fascism.

I think it’s more the cloud being the issue here. Such an obvious and large and valuable target. Of course Microsoft also isn’t that secure historically.

Windows post 7 was and remains annoying and getting worse all the time. So I wanted an OS without telemetry and one that I could control the updates on. I also work with Linux a lot at work. I use Alma 9 for a LTS release. Don’t have to mess with it much.

I have found that you usually have to go to a specialist forum or the like and spend a few months reading it and asking questions etc. Rarely has a community steered me wrong. However they also usually point to expensive or specialty products. Mass market is usually mediocre at best.

Sometimes though there are deals like Harbor Freight hand tools or their higher end power tools.

It’s also the anti commodity stuff IP has been allowing. If Hershey makes crap chocolate, there is little stopping you from buying Lidnt say. But if Microsoft makes a bad OS, there’s a lot stopping you from using Linux or whatever.

What’s worse is stuff like DRM and computers getting into equipment that otherwise you could use any of a bevy of products for. Think ink cartridges.

Then there’s the secret formulas like for transmission fluid now where say Honda says in the manual you have to get Honda fluid for it to keep working. Idk if it’s actually true, but I l’m loathe to do the 8k USD experiment with my transmission.

You’d think the government could mandate standards but we don’t have stuff like that.

I am in NY upstate but travel around the east coast semi frequently, and was kinda thinking about online options too.

This seems like something the optimize charging tool could manage though. Starting the day at 90 percent or 80 percent or whatever is crazy to me - why am I going backwards to needing to babysit my phone when it’s charging, and why would anyone want to charge their phone when they want to be using it vs when they’re asleep?

Gaming - too much hassle for me, and I just wasn’t even using my PS4 much. I don’t know if I’d call it outgrowing it exactly though… this one is borderline to me.

What I have outgrown is cable news like CNN etc. Or they went way to clickbait for me. Maybe both happened. Similar with the NYT, they keep getting things wrong that they just shouldn’t and then the more history I read the less I really trust their reporting. The more boring the news source, like AP, the more likely it is to be accurate from what I can tell.

Similar things happened with certain influencers / podcasters. As I learned more I just found they were continually making the same mistakes on things that they should have known better / learned better by now. Sam Harris was a big one, and I narrowly avoided the beginnings of Brett Weinsteins Dark Horse and now it’s completely off the rails.

Certain “nonfiction” authors followed the same path - as I got older I realized how made up the Ancient Aliens thing was, I think I bought in hard in my late teen years and then when I was 25 I had an epiphany that it just has to be crap or more people would believe it, and when I re looked at the “evidence” I was like - oh, well if you just go by the book, sure it sounds compelling - but if you search alternative explanations all of a sudden you’re like, oh yea, that is far more plausible.

Consumer Reports happened about a decade ago. The reason was I always was a little annoyed by their biases that they didn’t really make clear. What really killed it for me though was comparing laptops primarily on screen size. Looking back now, it’s a little less ridiculous than I initially thought, but to not have separate Mac and Windows categories let to the Mac winning over the windows competitor when the Mac was like 3x the price. This all seemed like a crazy result to anyone who knew anything about computers, especially like in 2014 when for something like 95% of the population, the Mac would not run 99% of the software they could possibly want to run, or know about. A great build quality, performance and size doesn’t matter if the computer doesn’t do the computation you need.

In the last 3 years non anime TV shows - mostly because of a mix of already been done better, no FOMO with streaming, and because of all the channels etc no water cooler talk about the 3 shows that were on last night / this week / whatever dragging me to be up to date. Now that there’s so many choices, I don’t have to take “mildly entertaining” as my bar for watching a show, it’s way way higher now. And as the individual shows get longer on streaming for many - it’s harder to set aside 55-90 minutes depending on show. Even 42 minutes is harder as more is going on now for me. I think the only reason I do more Anime is it’s ~20 minute chunks, and I have less experience with it (for half my life I didn’t know it existed, and for the next quarter it was kind of hard to come by) so I am just starting to get more picky about the shows and the “this was done better before”. Konosuba for instance is IMHO a worse version of Slayers series in a lot of ways.

Magazines - I just got tired of both trying to keep up, the rising costs, and then the increase in ads so there was so little there there, along with what to do when I was done with the weeks / months issue? I get a lot of that kind of content now from online anyway.

Physical books - similar. Unless I want to get a collectors edition for the object, the content is much better as an e-book IMO, cheaper, less paper waste, less piles of stuff taking up space etc. I’ve really come back around on the novel contents though - lots of bang for you buck in time vs dollar spent, way more variety in stories than ever get made into TV shows, can be stored locally easily on the device so you’re not burning data like with streaming… Easy to keep place with a decent app, easy to read for 3 minutes or 3 hours.

Yes definitely. Many of my fellow NLP researchers would disagree with those researchers and philosophers (not sure why we should care about the latter’s opinions on LLMs).

I’m not sure what you’re saying here - do you mean you do or don’t think LLMs are “stochastic parrot”s?

In any case, the reason I would care about philosophers opinions on LLMs is mostly because LLMs are already making “the masses” think they’re potentially sentient, and or would deserve personhood. What’s more concerning is that the academics that sort of define what thinking even is seem confused by LLMs if you take the “stochastic parrot” POV. This eventually has real world affects - it might take a decade or two, but these things spread.

I think this is a crazy idea right now, but I also think that going into the future eventually we’ll need to have something like a TNG “Measure of a Man” trial about some AI, and I’d want to get that sort of thing right.

Yea, that was a bad way to phrase it - I just meant that from what I’ve heard tokens are very much not word by word. And sometimes it’s a couple words, but maybe that was misinformation. And I was trying (and failing) to make an analogy for a human - a concept is a compression of what otherwise would be a bunch of words, though I kind of meant more like a reference I guess.

I think it’s very clear that this “stochastic parrot” idea is less and less accepted by researchers and philosophers, maybe only in the podcasts I listen to…

It’s not capable of knowledge in the sense that humans are. All it does is probabilistically predict which sequence of words might best respond to a prompt

I think we need to be careful thinking we understand what human knowledge is and our understanding of the connotations if the word “sense” there. If you mean GPT4 doesn’t have knowledge like humans have like a car doesn’t have motion like a human does then I think we agree. But if you mean that GPT4 cannot reason and access and present information - that’s just false on the face of just using the tool IMO.

It’s also untrue that it’s predicting words, it’s using tokens, which are more like concepts than words, so I’d argue already closer to humans. To the extent it is just predicting stuff, it really calls into question the value of most of the school essays it writes so well now…

Well, LLMs can and do provide feedback about confidence intervals in colloquial terms. I would think one thing we could do is have some idea of how good the training data is in a given situation - LLMs already seem to know they aren’t up to date and only know stuff to a certain date. I don’t see why this could not be expanded so they’d say something much like many humans would - i.e. I think bla bla but I only know very little about this topic. Or I haven’t actually heard about this topic, my hunch would be bla bla.

Presumably like it was said, other models with different data might have a stronger sense of certainty if their data covers the topic better, and the multi cycle would be useful there.

I’m still sad about the day the real Opera with the presto rendering engine died. And while Vivaldi is getting many of the features and functionality, it’s still a chromium rebuild. I guess it just takes too much money to build your own rendering engine anymore.

This is so hard to specify because it really depends on a lot of factors. It’s usually more like there are specific models that are really worth getting, or pricepoints or brands depending.

Like, I don’t think cordless drill/drivers that are sub $100 are really worth it if you’re ever going to do more than screw into pre drilled or pre made screw holes. But a Bosch (blue), Dewalt, Milwaukee, Makita, etc are all pretty good. They’re just usually over $100.

You’re right about blenders - I never had a use for Oster blenders, but a BlendTec in 2008 changed my life (well, not really, but did do things that I have uses for at least).

Ohh, pressure cookers - I don’t want to risk it exploding, so I avoid the $70 and under crowd. Actually, I went Kunh Rikon which is pretty expensive, but also really hard to screw up (like 6 layers of safeties), and easy to get refurb parts for seals and such.

Lots of safety equipment - there’s all sorts of … “fake” in that it won’t actually work stuff at super cheap prices. I’m thinking like laser safety glasses or chain saw safety pants. Mid range is def worth it there.

Dishwashers IMHO. I’ve used cheap ones before and they clean poorly and are extremely loud. Depending on your house, you won’t want to be in the next room to them. OTOH, Bosch higher end ones, like the 800 series, cost a pretty penny, but are darn near silent and actually live up to the washing claims - shit just comes clean in them. I’m usually surprised in a good way. Oh, and that third tray for silverware - I’m never going back to the basket (though lots of brands have that now).

Stand Mixers - especially if you want to get into bread or attachments for grinding things. I strongly recommend the Bosch Universal Plus. That thing is like a power tool for the kitchen. We’ve abused it for over 10 years and it’s not slowing down. I know many people online who have had them for 30 years.

Vacuums - look into Sebo.

That’s usually actually down to technique - you need to fill “normal” blenders in a specific way to have enough liquid on the bottom to make the vortex.

You have to be very careful with KitchenAid mixers - I think the 700Pro is the only currently made one that’s worth very much - the gears strip out in most of the cheaper ones, and all of them made from like 2000-2014 or so. At least if you mix anything in there you couldn’t do about as easily with a hand mixer that’s $20 on Amazon.

Some of it is also going to be experience using it.

Like I have Rada and Cuisinart and Wustoff knives. The Rada is super cheap, and very sharp and holds an edge well. But its handle is pretty uncomfortable, and god forbid you’re trying to chop a large cabbage in half, you’ll hurt your hand on the top it’s sooo narrow. But I can hit it with something and it’s going to cut that cabbage the easiest because it’s a narrow blade. The Cuisinart were a gift long ago, and really were just overpriced worse Rada. They have thin blades and don’t hold an edge as well as the Rada. The Wustoff have the most comfortable handles to hold IMO, and nice thicker backs that make them hold up to lots of abuse - you can chop bones and such without worry. They also hold an edge pretty well, but also sharpen nicely. People also seem appreciative of Wustoff so you get some status when using them FWIW.

I actually think there are things that the cheap versions can work as well as the expensive ones, but in such a PITA way that you’ll infrequently use them. Cameras are one of these things - pretty much any camera can take a picture, but try a low end Motorolla phone camera vs a mid range OnePlus or high end Samsung / iPhone and you’ll have so much more frustration with the Motorolla you’ll get a different phone to get a “camera that works”. Same with ILC - you can get a Canon 4000D and it’ll be capable of taking better technical shots than the high end smartphone. It’ll just require quite a lot of skill. Put it next to a high end Canon R5 and you’ll see how the quality of life improvements and everything else will make it a lot more fun to use.

Some are expensive for filtering reasons. It can take some engineering to build HEPA or similar filtration along with seals that actually have the filters work, plus managing motors or filter designs that aid in the high speed airflow needed for a vacuum.

Sure, but I’d also avoid Shark at all costs because they’re not really made to be serviced. Also bagless, which generally suck in a bad way. I’d suggest something like a Sebo model with the electric brush head. Easy to service, last a very long time, use bags which are just cleaner and avoid needing to think about cleaning out dust storage areas to keep airflow up, and have great canister options.

I have to say, I think I was very lucky because College prepared me for most aspects of my job.I really can’t think of one that it could have prepared me for that it didn’t - like it didn’t teach me the specific bureaucratic processes for purchasing or getting approval from management etc, but how could it? I’m also lucky to be working in my field many years on.