Funny enough, I actually have tried with chatgpt. The problem is the same one with all these LLM based tools: Training data.

And if you actually google this yourself, the vast majority of what you find are people not understanding what is being asked or referencing a REALLY REALLY old UI (possibly dating to the open or even star days). And the LLMs are effectively scraping that so you get the equivalent of “This was already answered HERE. Closing duplicate question” response.

(I usually DO end up figuring it out after a bit of deep diving when I really care but I go through so much FUD in the process that I inevitably forget a month or two later).

Its worth understanding that microsoft, like most companies, is rapidly rebranding most of their existing stuff as “AI”. A couple weeks (months?) back at work we managed to convince the boss that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to put all of our sensitive internal data into Teams and convinced him to turn off copilot. Literally minutes later he lost his shit because auto-transcripts no longer worked and IT turned it back on.

But that is what we are seeing with a LOT of companies. ANYTHING that can be sold as “AI” is getting re-branded as it. So it makes perfect sense that MS will rebrand it as “installing copilot AI” rather than “not removing clippy”.

That said: MS have also been ahead of the curve on adding even more bullshit and spyware to everything they do so… have you heard the good word about Linux? Libre Office gets personal users most of the way there (and if they worked on their documentation, all the way there. I STILL don’t fucking know how to get row/column headings to work in Calc…). And for business/power use, the browser/cloud based solutions are probably what you want anyway since none of that data should live on your laptop/desktop and should instead live in the company approved data store.

I didn’t read this comment because it’s a bunch of gaslighting bullshit.

Got it, pointing out common phenomena and referencing a very well established and (mostly) respected consumer information group (Consumer Reports. Would link to the data but I always forget what is and isn’t paywalled with them) is “gaslighting”

And everyone who points out an alternative to your conclusions is mentally ill.

(Actually this is more of a worldwide phenomenon but Donald Glover is just too good to not post. And… it was shockingly hard to find an easy to grab image from that song that is not gun violence or way more intentionally minstrel-y than anyone would get without an even longer explanation of the joke than this).

And I am trying to explain to you why your “experience” is very limited insight on a heavily biased sample.

If you sell 500 widgets, some percentage of those customers are going to have problems. If 450 of those widgets are from Innertrode, a majority of that percentage are going to be with Innertrode widgets. That doesn’t mean Innertrode makes worse widgets. That just means you, like most people, could do with a primer on statistics.

I haven’t seen fans of Apple act this irrationally…

Yes. Pointing out that (mostly) independent consumer information groups have drawn opposite conclusions to you and pointing out this is a very common phenomena in sales is “irrational”. Who needs facts when we have feelings, amirite?

And people wonder why there are so many complaints online about hating sales people.

I am not going to say people should buy a Samsung appliance especially with this nonsense.

But you’re falling for, and propagating, a pretty common fallacy. it isn’t that Samsung appliances are significantly worse (Consumer Reports puts them in the bottom half of the ranking but they are very much “fine”). It is that people buy them a lot.

You see this with all kinds of brands. “Never buy Shark. Everyone who buys a Shark comes back and return it or buy a new vacuum in a few years”. It isn’t that Sharks are failing more than others (they are actually #1 or #2 according to CR, depending on the metrics). It is that they are what sell the most.

Homie? I want you to know that while I am going to be inflammatory, I am not insulting you. In a slightly sane world, that should be fine.

NEVER work with children. “Hey kids. You can go home or you can stay with me and a few others and learn how to use a computer!”. At best you are setting yourself up for some awkward phone calls when Little Jimmy gets caught looking at something his parents don’t approve of.

If you are a close family friend and the parents understand what you are going to be teaching their kid (and obviously want you to teach it), go for it. If you are just watching them while they eat orange slices? Don’t fucking go anywhere near that. Let the teachers who actually train in how to handle these situations do it.

And the other aspect: Kids (and most adults) are not rational or intelligent. They aren’t going to take “Hey, if Susie sends you nudes don’t put them on this server because it will get me sent to prison as a diddler” as education on why they should not fucking do that.

If you ever want to get scared straight as it were? Take a teacher out for drinks (and you better pay for them!). You’ll hear LOTS of horror stories and get even a glimpse into the kind of hell they have to put up with.

The show Black-ish (like a lot of Kenya Barris’s work) has a LOT of problems. But the number of times teacher friends have shared https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jqmj0ILwfM. And it is not at all exclusive to black people (or even men).

Just a general warning:

It is one thing to provide something for family. It is another thing to be a person in authority providing one for an org. And kids are horrible and basically all have cameras everywhere they go. They WILL do something horrible and, depending on what that something is, you might now be liable for a lot of stuff you don’t want to be.

You don’t want that smoke. They can use google drive. Or you can talk to one of the companies that host next/own clouds for people and ask for a discount since it is the boy scouts.

… Almost like it would be more viable to film in higher resolution if more consumers had higher resolution displays?

Which, for all intents and purposes, means there is no point. Because no news network is going to respond to “Hey boss, I want us to buy a bunch of really expensive cameras that our audience will never notice because it will make our tape library more valuable. Oh, not to sell, but to donate to museums.” with anything other than laughter and MAYBE firing your ass.

Not familiar with NHK specifically (or, to be clear, I think I am but not with enough certainty), but it really makes a lot of sense for news networks to push for 8k or even 16k at this point.

Because it is a chicken and egg thing. Nobody is going to buy an 8k TV if all the things they watch are 1440p. But, similarly, there aren’t going to be widespread 8k releases if everyone is watching on 1440p screens and so forth.

But what that ALSO means is that there is no reason to justify using 8k cameras if the best you can hope for is a premium 4k stream of a sporting event. And news outlets are fairly regularly the only source of video evidence of literally historic events.

From a much more banal perspective, it is why there is a gap in TV/film where you go from 1080p or even 4k re-releases to increasingly shady upscaling of 720 or even 480 content back to everything being natively 4k. Over simplifying, it is because we were using MUCH higher quality cameras than we really should have been for so long before switching to cheaper film and outright digital sensors because “there is no point”. Obviously this ALSO is dependent on saving the high resolution originals but… yeah.

Which puts you ahead of the curve. But you are still depending on enough other people to be watching every update and so forth.

I am not saying I am much better. But it is one of those things where anyone considering the selfhosted Fun should REALLY spend some time dealing with software supply chains and the like. Too many people just figure “it is open source so it is safe” or, even in this thread, assume something is more or less safe based upon what app pulls it.

If anything it is easier to self audit the script.

But nobody ever actually audits the stuff they run so…

If data has handling requirements it 500% should not be something people are storing on their “personal” devices.

I personally hate the idea of storing corporate data in “cloud” storage, but MS et al have gotten approval from many governments to do exactly that. So if that is your corporate data store? Then that is where it goes. And if someone is making a new document with additional restrictions then they better damned well have training on how to pick which folder in onedrive it goes into.

Not sure on the policy for this (and too lazy to read through the TOS) but the usual standard is:

You have read only access to your data in some form for N months. Sometimes individual, sometimes grabbing the whole dump. If you haven’t renewed your license within N months, that data is deleted (but not really).

MS Office is increasingly only sold as part of “Microsoft 365” which already involves paying for cloud storage and copilot and the like.

20 seconds of googling gets me the pricing page for their family (which I think is the same as single seat personal?) plan which is 130 USD a year for

    For one to six people
    Sign in to five devices at once
    Use on PCs, Macs, phones, and tablets
    Up to 6 TB of secure cloud storage (1 TB per person)
    Productivity apps with Microsoft CopilotFootnote1
    Identity,Footnote2 data, and device security
    Ad-free secure email

There may still be some corner case “just MS office” releases that are targeted towards legacy machines in certain regions. But if you try to buy MS Office for whatever reason, that is what you are gonna get.

With my user/increasingly crazy man in the woods hat? Fuck that noise.

With my corporate stooge hat (that is the one that pays for the previous hats)? This actually is a really good idea. Way too often we have people saving documents to their laptops or losing them when they break a desktop enough that IT has to reimage it. Everything corporate should live in the corporate data store by default.

And… at this point, any individual user using MS Office is an idiot who probably also needs that extra layer of protection. Why spend money when Google Drive (which is already cloud native) works just as well? And for those who care about offline use? Get Libre Office where stuff is perpetually 80% as good.

And when GN responded to all the sniping over the months… LMG came out ahead. Rossman is a manipulative libertarian prick, but he really nailed it with Linus exhibiting all the signs of being a gaslighting abuser. And… it works.

Because the general consensus, outside of their subreddits (although even in GN’s…) was that Steve was in the wrong for responding to all the “some people are out to get us” style sniping and should just let the “drama” drop. And then LMG immediately pivoted to “Dude, just let it go. We improved our practices and are better for it. Maybe you should too. Oh, and if anyone mentions Madison’s name we’ll sue the fuck out of them”. And it worked.

If only because LMG is an order of magnitude larger (17M versus 2.5M subscribers) and most people likely never even heard GN’s arguments on why not lying about your testing to support corporate sponsors/interests is bad. They instead just see some guy “whining” (and probably get fed a lot of sock puppets from the companies GN has burned bridges with…) and move on.

LMG is nowhere near as untouchable as they used to be. But they are still probably the single biggest influencer in the PC/“tech” space. And… just look at this thread for the people who, with a straight face, are talking about how Framework will be their saviour from some nebulous threat.

Define “millionaire with his own PR company and a history of using them for his own personal needs is a significant investor” whichever way makes you happy.

Mobile GPUs have already been a thing. They are generally soldered for structural purposes but that isn’t a requirement of the tech and some of the htpc form factor devices that used mobile GPUs have had them as swappable. Also, the old framework 16 already had non-soldered GPUs?

It is just that this isn’t an avenue that most system integrators care about. Because there is already a MUCH better solution in the form of external GPUs which… still sort of exist. The idea that you focus on power efficiency and convenience for the laptop and plug it into a dock/big ass box when you want more GPU power. And even THAT is mostly a novelty since onboard GPUs/APU systems/whatever are actually REALLY good these days and more than capable of driving what people generally want/need on a laptop display.

But either way: This is “an industry first” in the same sense that it was an “industry first” when I figured out where the fricking map of my motherboard was while building it. A very big accomplishment to solve a problem that bothers a lot of people (fuck the shorthand maps. Gimme the real one) but also only a “first” if you narrow things down massively. You know… like with PR.

a company that is so far the best chance we’ve had since IBM came up with the ThinkPad.

1. You… seriously should read what you post. Like… wow.
2. Okay. What do you think framework is going to be your savior in?

Because honestly? Framework is cool as hell. But most of what they are “innovating” are not soldering things and making people not realize they are still just using a usb c port and a shit ton of dongles. The former tending to have very little utility for end users but be INCREDIBLY useful for assembly line workers.

And, generally speaking, the people who are swapping out their GPUs every other year… aren’t the kind of people who will care if they buy a new laptop or reuse their old one except for all the parts they wanted to replace or upgrade. Let alone heat concerns (which is why I would LOVE a benchmark of the different paths towards the same SKU in a framework).

Framework is partially owned by Linus Media Group.

They got their PR game on lock.

So… “the ignorance of the masses” should be combatted by willful ignorance and nonsense that falls apart the moment anyone looks at it?

Get angry. I sure am. Look for alternatives. Graphene sure ain’t it but I hope it will be in the next four or five years. But this is something google are willing to futz with for a reason: The vast majority of users don’t care about it and even with the changes it isn’t significantly worse than the competition.

Yet everywhere I see “Well, I guess I have to buy Apple now” which is just… buy it if you want to but don’t pretend this shit is why.