Probably not if you lived on Pandora.

I think he thinks he’s Jack in The Pre-Sequel, but really he’s Jack in Borderlands 2.

Honestly, for me, it’s the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.

• notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.

• podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device’s 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)

• camera : I’ve chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I’ve got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don’t need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can’t afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn’t fit in my pocket anyway.

Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don’t think I could backfill with other things if needed.

Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I’d prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don’t really feel the need to.

The weird thing is that Windows 10 broke that model. It always used to be that the even-numbered Windows versions were worse (after, let’s say, Windows 2000): ME (#4)? Bad. XP (#5)? Good! Vista (#6)? Bad. 7? Good! 8? Bad. 8.1 (#9)? Good! But then Windows 10 came out and threw the whole rhythm off.

You could pretty reasonably argue that 8.1 wasn’t a true version, and thus Windows 10 was the 9th version of Windows, but that just means that 8 was the combo breaker by becoming good eventually. In either case, Windows 11 being bad restores the bad version/good version rhythm.

They want us to upgrade to 11 so they can do that when they release Windows 12.

Great point. Their strategy at this point is holding a gun up to your hard drive and saying “upgrade now or your data gets it.”

You just described most of my post history.

✅ Colorado

✅ Connedicut

✅ Delaware

❌ District of Columbia (on a technicality)

✅ Florida

But not

❌ I’aho

❌ Iniana

❌ Marylan

❌ Nevaa

❌ North Akota

❌ Rhoe Islan

❌ South Akota

I would assume it uses a different random seed for every query. Probably fixed sometimes, not fixed other times.

Oh, this is great news. I have Nova tweaked to work almost exactly like this. Excellent, thank you.

I don’t have a discrete graphics card on my laptop, but I can actually play games on Linux Mint that won’t run on my similarly-spec’d Windows box with a graphics card.

It’s not a great experience, but it makes stuff playable that otherwise wouldn’t be.

Yeah, I bet someone would do it for Youtube views, but you’re right, that’s too much.

I get it. In my opinion being made of plastic isn’t as bad as feeling plastic-y, but I realize that’s a personal thing

My experience with Framework is exactly one unit, but I would disagree with this. The Thinkpads I’ve used all felt more plastic-y and less sturdy than my Framework. The keyboard did feel cheaper until I wore the powdery texture off of the keycaps (took about a week), at which point it felt amazing.

They’ve had AMD for a few years now. No Intel one, but they do sell empty GPU module shells, so maybe someone could cut down a desktop Intel card to fit in one?

Yes, that’s the classic solution to the riddle.

I meant “if the goal was also to find out which one is which,” sorry; meaning that you’ve already asked the classic question. But yes, that would also be a great way to figure it out.

Correct. If he’s the lying guard and something happened, or the truthful guard and nothing did, then in either case he would answer “no” to all the questions.

It’s interesting, because it makes me think about the solution to the original puzzle. In that one, you don’t care about the individuals’ identities, you just care about the answer, so you actually don’t know which one lies and which one tells the truth at the end. If the goal was to find out which one is which, you would need one more question: “and which one do you think I should take?” If he gives the same answer, he’s the liar; if he gives the opposite answer, he’s the truthful one. (Or just ask a question with a known answer first.)

Who said anything about foresight? This is entirely historical. Thanks for actually reading anything I’ve said.

I’m saying they can only do it because the big innovation was “throw more money at it.” Yes, given a functionally infinite amount of hardware, electricity, legal free reign, and publicity, I could invent a machine that does at least one (1) impressive thing, too.

Remember, these models weren’t created to identify cancer in patients better than humans. They were created to do everything better than humans. And the fact that they are mediocre at everything except identifying cancer in patients (and a handful of other things) means that they’re failing at 99.997% of their goal.

That doesn’t mean that it’s innovative, or a breakthrough technology that deserves time to mature. It just means that you get more swings at the law of averages if you have a lot of money.