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Joined 8 months ago
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Cake day: November 29th, 2023

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  • Guess I should stock up while I can huh?

    I’ve been a RPI fan since the beginning and have used their boards for all sorts of projects and tinkering. But it’s hard not to feel like it’s losing sight of what made it attractive in the first place: low power and low priced computing. It had its charm in buying a Pi Zero and just chucking emulators on it and handing them out to folks who might want to have a go.

    But with the more expensive, more powerful hardware you just can’t really use them for things like that anymore. Just too expensive and too much oomph for the use case.

    We’ll see if the company finds its way. But this usually isn’t a good sign…




  • This fucking dingbat. Even if he was just a random citizen, he should know by now that you need to bring ID. And it’s always good to check if you have it when going to your polling station.

    Here in the Netherlands, we’re VERY strict on ID. No ID, no vote. I’ve been witness to a fair few elections as a reporter, and it always gets drilled into the people who run the polling stations: even if the King himself walks in, you ask him for his ID and tell him to bugger off if he doesn’t have it. I’ve seen city mayors turned away at polling stations in their own council buildings for failing to produce ID. And they all perfectly understand why those strict controls are necessary.


  • Pretty much this, yes.

    There’s also the complexity of approach procedures that they need to follow in order to mitigate noise complaints. Back in the old days, they’d just fly from radio beacon to radio beacon, with look-out-the-window navigation for the final approach.

    These days, lots of airports are within or close to cities, which means a much more complex routing and specific altitude and speed restrictions. GPS made that possible; they’re simply too much workload for pilots.

    So yeah, in emergency situations where GPS fails completely, there’s going to be some changes to procedures needed in order to make that work. They’d also need to increase separation between planes in order to prevent problems.

    The simple solution is: nobody should fuck around with GPS since we literally all benefit from it.





  • He does excellent reviews and stuff in general.

    I actually watched it before the ‘controversy’ and I think it certainly was a fair assessment. He clearly states the goal of the product and where it falls short. None of his criticism seems unreasonable.

    Clearly, it’s trying to be an always-online communication, assistant and logging badge. Like a Star Trek commbadge on steroids. In theory, that’s a product that I’m very interested in. But when features are structurally unsound or actively annoying to use, well, I’m going to stick with the phone I’ve got.

    Ironically, his ‘bad review’ got me interested to see what a version 2 will be like. Assuming they make it that far.


  • No single bad review ever killed a product. Because we all know that some things are just a matter of opinion, user error, etc. Opinions are like assholes: everyone’s got one. If I’m interested, I’ll read several positive and negative opinions.

    But if your product is bad enough to warrant several bad reviews, that’s on you. Should’ve done better research, should’ve made a better product.






  • Well, the tech is of course still young. And there’s a distinct difference between:

    A) User error: a prompt that isn’t as good as it can be, with the user understanding for example the ‘order of operations’ that the AI model likes to work in.

    B) The tech flubbing things because it’s new and constantly in development

    C) The owners behind the tech injecting their own modifiers into the AI model in order to get a more diverse result.

    For example, in this case I understand the issue: the original prompt was ‘image of an American Founding Father riding a dinosaur, while eating a cheeseburger, in Paris.’ Doing it in one long sentence with several comma’s makes it harder for the AI to pin down the ‘main theme’ from my experience. Basically, it first thinks ‘George on a dinosaur’ with the burger and Paris as afterthoughts. But if you change the prompt around a bit to ‘An American Founding Father is eating a cheeseburger. He is riding on a dinosaur. In the background of the image, we see Paris, France.’, you end up with the correct result:

    Basically the same input, but by simply swapping around the wording it got the correct result. Other ‘inaccuracies’ are of course to be expected, since I didn’t really specify anything for the AI to go of. I didn’t give it a timeframe for one, so it wouldn’t ‘know’ not to have the Eiffel Tower and a modern handgun in it. Or that that flag would be completely wrong.

    The problem is with C) where you simply have no say in the modifiers that they inject into any prompt you send. Especially when the companies state that they are doing it on purpose so the AI will offer a more diverse result in general. You can write the best, most descriptive prompt and there will still be an unexpected outcome if it injects their modifiers in the right place of your prompt. That’s the issue.