To be fair, eBooks have just gotten that big in recent years because the publishers are lazy and cram uncompressed embedded fonts into them.
I always strip out embedded fonts from my eBooks with calibre and I have seen books being reduced from 20MB to 400KB. 🤣
This won’t make this a good device due to a myriad of other reasons, though.
The specs are an absolute joke. Even my Sony PRS from 2008 comes with 64MB RAM and physical buttons.
This thing will choke on epubs with embedded fonts, if it doesn’t just plainly ignore them (which it seems like it will, since they’re talking so much about their own custom font).
Neat idea, but I fear it’s destined to fail. I also think it’s too small. The PRS-505 is six inches and I wouldn’t go any smaller than that for comfortable reading.
I get the feeling Microsoft often starts modernization projects and abandons them halfway through. That’s why we still have the modern and the classic control panel. Even their web apps have this problem - there is an old version of the Exchange administration panel and a new one. And it’s been like that for a decade.
They’re just piling new junk on top of old junk and it shows.
I’ll just block you here too.
Oh no, don’t threaten him with a good time.
You’re trusting unsigned, reverse engineered, and amateur developed drivers in ring 0
Up until 2025 most of the software for controlling your periphery like mice and RGB controllers used a driver called WinRing0 which had been discontinued for years. Its author even actively discouraged people from using it, but due to convenience and cost cutting it was bundled with software left and right.
I rather trust a Linux kernel developer developing a WiFi driver than some shady manufacturer selling cheap mice and bundling it with closed-source software that never gets an update.
You can just do CTRL+R (in bash at least)
I’m at a point where I gladly pay for my search engine just to get good results.
One could argue we were always paying, with our data. But now we get less in return.
It also has basically the same plot with the same enemies. Except they added a red lady villain that is weirdly sexualized and a kid gets magic powers - because nature.
A bicycle will transport me in the same manner every time I use it. A calculator will always give me the correct result of 2+2.
What was your point about AI again?
From the guy that brought us: “All the CPUs in the past were built for humans, this CPU is built for agents.”
Dude just invented fictional customers by selling directly to the AI. 😅
I worked in a callcentre for many years and had changing shifts every two weeks. Having to come in at 6am and then getting that switched to 4pm wreaked havoc on my body and after doing this for quite a while, I just crashed and got burnout.
Recovery took me two years, where I basically just slept. Five days a week are just too much, it’s a system designed to squeeze the last bit of labor value out of you and I fucking hated it. Nowadays, I’m not able to physically work for more than four days, or else I’ll crash again.
I had a lot of luck, so I can now work entirely from home. No commute, Fridays are off. Sounds super cozy and amazing, but the thing is: I need that Friday for myself. A lot of times I’ll just sleep so I can have some energy on the actual weekend.
When it comes to doctor’s appointments, I just tell my boss I have one and that’s it. As it should be. We are humans, not machines.
Same here. Sometimes I need the Friday just to sleep, but it’s nice.
Camo & Crooked - Afterlife (BCee Remix)
Every time I have to do something in a Microsoft admin interface at work. Worst software on the planet, fuck SharePoint, fuck Teams, burn it all to the ground.
I’d say this whole case is way more than just mildly infuriating.
The tail placement is optimal.
From a lot of posts here I get that working as a dev in the US is now a total shitshow. But to give you my European perspective (I work in Germany): AI adoption hasn’t been as rapid here. People and companies are more skeptical about it, compared to the US.
I work as a web developer for an employer that is cautious about AI. I can use it, but I am not forced to. Tried it excessively for a few months (agents writing my code, playing a glorified manager and all of that jazz), but I noticed my own skills atrophying and me losing the general grasp of what my code actually does. And even though everyone and their dog claim that the models get better with each new release, I still run into hallucinations way too often. If you are very experienced in a field and you’ve been doing it for over a decade, you notice all of the small inconsistencies and bullshit answers - much quicker than a junior dev who didn’t have that experience yet.
So nowadays I only use Gemini for tool and library research or really simple boilerplate code. For everything else my own brain is the better solution. I am not actively against AI as a technology, but extremely opposed to paying a subscription to some techbro billionaire’s company to keep doing my job. Fuck Altman, Elon, Jensen and the Zuck.
If Ed Zitron is correct in all of his calculations, the frontier models will get so expensive they’ll become unprofitable for a lot of companies, so it would be a stupid decision to rely on them. I am looking forward to one day host good models on my own machine - though that day is not today, when capable GPU’s still cost thousands of dollars.
Thinkpad L390 Yoga. They crammed a 4.6 GHz CPU into a cooling system that was not designed for it, so the machine ran hot and throttled all of the time. The keyboard keys rubbed off after a few months of use. The Thinkpad logo was just a sticker that one day decided to stick to my hand because Lenovo used really cheap glue. It had a MicroEthernet port with a passive adapter that did nothing but break it out to a regular ethernet jack. The adapter cost 30€ and its cable turned into oil after a year.
I was able to undervolt the CPU and make it barely passable, then Microsoft released a Windows update that prevented undervolting. Gave it to a friend afterwards and got myself a GPD Win Max 2.
Maybe he bought that RAM before the crisis. I got a 64GB netbook last year, shortly before it became unobtainium.
LLMs are only useful because Google has deliberately made their search engine worse. Since I pay for Kagi, I don’t need to consult a chatbot anymore, I can just search again like I did before the AI hype.
So we technically don’t need LLMs for search. But we are nudged extremely hard into that direction.