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Re:Tailwind Labs is joining Shopify on Thursday September 10, 2026 @04:47AM (#49640476)
Using AI for design will always be derivative. For many cases that is good enough but for good product design, a human element will most likely always be necessary. Until the machine gains the ability to do just that
Re:Tiny $70 Xteink X3 e-reader puts Silicon Valley to shame on Monday September 07, 2026 @11:45AM (#49599671)
If you want to buy them legitimately, there aren't a lot of options

Illegitimately, there are tons of options

Re:Air Conditioning Is Not a Luxury, It Is a Necessity on Thursday August 27, 2026 @08:27AM (#49463707)
They have very good thermal coeffiency: ground source heat pumps will typically generate 3-6kWh of thermal energy from 1kWh of electricity. By reversing the flow you can also use ground source heat pumps for cooling as well.
Re:AI 2040: Plan A on Saturday July 11, 2026 @02:58AM (#48869482)
If we can solve 99% of the world's problems with current non-AGI models then nobody besides a select few will care about AGI
I would call them market economies instead of socialist governments
Re:Bun Has Been Converted to Rust. Now What? on Wednesday June 03, 2026 @09:00AM (#48383437)
Why can't you just publish the prompt instead? Do you not see how LLMs subtly alter your original message and erase your voice? They fill gaps that didn't exist, they create syllogisms that make no sense, and the voice is now so ridiculously AIdiosyncratic that it makes my eyes boil!

If you have a message that takes 100 words to say, do not use a LLM to add 400 words to it, this isn't a school assignment! Stretching a spaghetti does not yield more spaghetti, it just makes a mess!

Where is the value the LLM adds? Grammar? Vocabulary? The price you pay is you sound like everyone else and your original message is lost in the noise.

Do the research yourself, the old fashioned way? Search things, write them down, summarize?

The problem with LLMs outputting English is that they're very good at bullshit and it can be really hard to see through the nonsense. The output can be skewed by the model parameters and this can be really hard to spot.

The compiler analogy doesn't work: compilers are (mostly) deterministic and I can verify their output if I wanted to, just ask the compiler to output assembly.

With code generation I can also more or less instantly see if the code is correct or not, because code has less words than human language. The same would apply to images: it would take even less time to see if a generated image is correct or not. That said, I don't use AI for image generation, since I have no use for it.

Why not just write it yourself? We can all have ChatGPT regurgitate the same information. You're supposed to add value, editorializing isn't enough.

Just like I don't want to look at AI art or listen to AI music, I don't want to read AI written blogslop.

The web is now full of shit. What a waste.

Re:If AI writes your code, why use Python? on Monday May 11, 2026 @05:20PM (#48100834)
Java?
Re:Heat pump sales rise across Europe on Monday May 04, 2026 @05:25PM (#48015211)
A heat pump is not necessarily dug into the earth. Rather, the flow of the heat pump is moving heat (thermal energy) from outdoors to indoors or the other way around in an air conditioner.

Depending on the direction of the coolant flow, you get either a indoor heating or cooling unit. This is best demonstrated by going in front of the outdoor unit of a heat pump, when they are cooling, the outdoor unit generates heat because it's compressing gas, which then is then expanded when it reaches the indoor unit, generating cold. Exactly like a refridgerator.

Depends what you make it from. If you distill eight litres of wine into about a litre brandy without removing methanol, it has the same amount of methanol than eight litres of wine did. Given the average of 150mg/l of methanol in red wine, this puts it to about 1g of methanol in that amount. That is not healthy, but you need to keep in mind ingestion of alcohol slows down the metabolism of methanol through competition and the methanol will be excreted by your kidneys instead of being metabolized.

So, just like you won't go blind from a bottle of brandy, you won't go blind from distilled wine. However, you're likely to have a serious headache the morning after.

Re:The happiest I've ever been on Sunday March 01, 2026 @06:58AM (#47205939)
It is a good reminder that most of us that work in software engineering will never build anything remarkable and will fade into history. Even if you do brilliant engineering work for a company, said work was commissioned by the company and the intellectual property rights belong to said company. It wasn't yours to begin with.
Re:Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model on Thursday February 26, 2026 @01:40PM (#47170200)
I am also glad the commercial niche illustration markets like Magic the Gathering are extremely hostile to AI art, though of course I would think Wizards of the Coast, the company that publishes MTG, probably see artists as a cost. Maybe.

Perhaps in the future artists will be used to train models that can output a certain style of art and the artist will receive royalties based on their influence on the trained model and its popularity.

Re:Elephant trunk whiskers exhibit material intelligence on Tuesday February 17, 2026 @07:23AM (#47046742)
Makes sense, though, doesn't it? An elephant's trunk is the fusion of its nose and upper lip, wouldn't that be the location where the mystacial vibrissae (whiskers) be located on any other mammal, making these homologous to e.g. cat's whiskers, which are highly sensitive?
Re:MMAcevedo aka Lena by qntm on Friday February 13, 2026 @03:46AM (#47000489)
I loved There is no Antimemetics division. I haven't read the new updated to the end but the prose and writing is greatly improved. The idea of anomalous anti-memes is scary. I mean, we do have examples of them, somewhat, see Heaven's Gate and the Jonestown massacre, though they're more like "memes" than "antimemes" (we know what the ideas were and they weren't secrets).
Re:Microsoft's Azure Linux on Thursday January 29, 2026 @01:32AM (#46806564)
Now it is. In the late 90s/early 00s it wasn’t. MS is quite different today from what it was back then.
Re:No traffic deaths in Helsinki for a year on Sunday August 03, 2025 @02:43PM (#44778693)
Never been more scared in my life when I drove through narrow country roads in Ireland
Re:A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That's a Problem on Saturday August 02, 2025 @01:38PM (#44769590)
Could you elaborate on the subject of the foundations of a curriculum (of what?) being entirely fake? That's a bold statement to make!
Re:Apple Violated Antitrust Ruling, Judge Finds on Thursday May 01, 2025 @02:08AM (#43854198)
Refers to corporate personhood. You can't jail Apple Inc.
Alex, the bird mentioned in the article, is also the first animal ever to have asked a question. When shown its reflection in a mirror, it asked what color it was.

We've trained chimps and gorillas for decades and they have never asked a single question

Re:No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation on Tuesday April 08, 2025 @01:31PM (#43624313)
Depends on the niche. Original physical art for trading card games or comics is a significant chunk of the income of your typical artist. Digital art in those niches does not have this source of income. But then again digital art has other niches where the actual commission rates are high enough to not make this a problem.
Re:I Wrote a Game Boy Advance Game in Zig on Tuesday December 31, 2024 @02:27AM (#42557129)
Indeed, as a kid of 10, I remember learning C/C++ thanks to DJGPP, a DOS port of GCC, being free software. I didn't have any money to buy a commercial compiler, though I never asked my parents. I wasn't sure how to frame the question, I guess. Well, regardless, getting your hands on a commercial compiler wasn't that difficult in the late 90s/early 00s. Soon after though small non-commercial indie games kinda died out and everyone was using DirectX using MSVC on Windows, until SDL came out.
Re:Enigmatic Writing from the Republic of Georgia on Saturday December 14, 2024 @12:28AM (#42414893)
Your sentence makes it sound like Yeniseian languages are language isolates, but what is absolutely astounding is that Yeniseian languages seem to form a family with the Na-Dene languages of North America. Two language families separated by the Bering strait over 15000 years ago!
Re:Northvolt goes from Europe battery promise to crisis on Tuesday November 26, 2024 @02:23AM (#42243301)
Battery cell production alone is massively expensive. The expenses in setting up a production line is counted in the billions.

So the only way to start fresh here is to raise billions in capital. Unless you're Volkswagen or something, when you could invest billions in an enterprise like this one.

Re:My Resignation from Emacs Development on Wednesday November 20, 2024 @04:44PM (#42198421)
GNU Emacs is not the first Emacs, but Lucid Emacs is a fork of GNU Emacs. Lucid Emacs eventually renamed itself as XEmacs (the "X" meaning "something" because they didn't know who owns the trademark as Lucid Inc went out of business.

Here's a timeline of Emacs https://www.jwz.org/doc/emacs-timeline.html

Re:The all-new Kindle family, including the first color Kindle on Thursday October 17, 2024 @02:23AM (#41866932)
I have been using Send to kindle[1] for years to upload epubs directly to Kindle. It even syncs the position in the books so that if I read it on my Kindle, it syncs the position to the Kindle app on my phone.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/sendtokindle

Re:Traveling with Apple Vision Pro on Wednesday October 16, 2024 @02:34PM (#41862234)
Is the third movie supposed to be Elysium?
Re:Hal Hickel on Creating Tarkin for Rogue One on Saturday August 10, 2024 @02:26PM (#41211312)
They could've used Guy Henry's likeness as-is. He already looks a lot like Peter Cushing. And his accent was impeccable
It's also curious how a variation of the CCR5 gene, CCR5-Δ32, which gives increased immunity to HIV, is thought to have been selected for by smallpox in Northern Europe. While giving increased immunity to HIV and smallpox, it makes the carriers more suspectible to serious versions of flavivirus infections (tick-borne encephalitis, West Nile virus). This might be a pretty bad thing in the age of climate change!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5#CCR5-%CE%9432

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