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basch

Re:My Favourite Laptop on Monday November 02, 2026 @04:29PM (#50344051)
It would be amazing to have somebody put together a modern laptop kit build around the x220 keyboard with a modern screen. it didnt last long, but the dimpled texture on the x220 trackpad was something I really liked, and i still miss having a middle click scroll button on trackpads. it was so nice to hold down a button and put slight pressure on the trackpoint to slowly scroll a webpage.

I'm not 100% on it but I believe an ips x230 is considered the pinnacle. the x240 is slower than the x230 because it was when strong optimization for power savings started to occur.

Re:GPT-6.1 Terra on Sunday November 01, 2026 @01:04AM (#50323079)
counterpoint https://static.simonwillison.net/static/2026/openai-pelicans...

look at the bicycle not the pelican. only astra low made a bicycle that resembles a functional bicycle in the low/none category. luna needs xhigh to make a bike. the legs are still wrong, on the wrong side of the bike, in all but like four of the outputs.

Re:LLM Voice on Friday October 30, 2026 @11:56AM (#50305772)
I didn’t really specify whether the regression to the mean was from data or tuning. It’s just happening. They are creating neutral average language instead of varied expressive.
Re:Binance-hacker-1029 – $5.6B stolen from Binance on Thursday October 29, 2026 @06:35PM (#50297203)
It’s always been that the voters determine reality.
Chef Watson was 2012-2018, and a really fun product while it lasted. There’s multiple books published from its output and insights available on Amazon.
Re:LLM Voice on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:30PM (#50293767)
I suspect it’s partially an average / regression to mean.

If you built a model only based on long form journalism and The New Yorker voice, including both the template structure of the article and the grammar and syntax, the model would replicate the patterns it is built upon. You could do the same for high vocabulary rap.

When you stuff all of English or all of human thought into it with somewhat equal weight, including very technical writing the sum is a lack of style and elegance and personality.

The second problem is that writing often doesn’t happen linearly. You write bookends and fill in, edit and revise. You sort of know where you’re going and can then make decisions how to get there. Language models may benefit from being redesigned to perform passes. Select a template of some sort, fill in the mad lib, then run a detail pass, then run a persuasion / emotion pass, then run a style pass. Current model writing very much sounds like I would expect autocomplete to.

Maybe generative AI. Chef Watson was chemical and flavor pattern matching used to discover unexplored combinations.

If you were building Cooking AI from the ground up, the chemistry and physics would be more like formal logic than plausible word vomit.

Re:GPT-6.1 Terra on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @12:48PM (#50261951)
staggering has to be a better use of resources, and I would think most workflows can accommodate using a 6.0 of one model and a 6.1 of a completely different one without balking.
It's interesting that you took my ambiguity and lack of conviction regarding a right and wrong side as me picking one.

>Private industry should be able to profit off the sun and it's disturbing that you think asserting this is a dunk.

It wasn't a "dunk", you added that interpretation yourself.

Im sure theres an element of "private industry should profit off the sun because I'm a temporarily embarrassed millionaire and the government cant be trusted to run efficiently" vs "the government should build and maintain communal infrastructure so everyone can benefit and profit isnt extracted" with both sides thinking their version keeps things cheaper in the end for the customer.
But they are monetizing the export button you press before the api call is made.
That Banking website is a good example of GPT-Image-2.5 having absolutely no self control, to a point I am just shocked they havent been working to fix it. It's like the first thing the model does is "generate 100 slogans" and then try and figure out how to cram them all into the image.

You see it constantly, and its worse with GPT than Gemini models, but they both do it. They seem to think they need to tell not show. They cant not annotate their thoughts into the image. A lot of the time you see either random signs on posts added, tshirts with text describing the story, or hand written annotation over the image.

There's really no reason this should be a problem anymore on default settings, or that everybody should still be getting the exact same style of edgy poster out of GPT with icons for bullets, and lists that add nothing jammed into the image. They need to have some kind of seed library of templates they start from, and higher temperature on selecting different styles.

Re:AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:28PM (#50090336)
Like crypto, the "I dont like AI" is more "I dont like HOW people are using the tools." It's the people the author doesnt like.
Re:AI is mass decompiling games. That's both awesome and scary on Wednesday October 14, 2026 @12:23PM (#50090226)
at some point you can simulate decompiling a game purely from enough video footage of the game being played.
why? Microsoft used Vista to test Windows 7.

seems completely normal to release free beta software and ask for feedback.

did you test it? the photo application opened a photo, pinch to zoom worked, the menus are full of buttons. it seems like the features i tested worked. they are mostly in similar spots as photoshop/photopea.

its a little impressive that models have a compressed approximation of photoshop inside that works with minimal tinkering.

the icon for windows doesnt work.

Re:Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free on Saturday September 26, 2026 @11:58AM (#49857751)
They also develop the OS and development platforms that the apps are built upon. The apps don’t exist on islands.
Re:Can AI Shopping Agents Be Trusted? on Saturday September 26, 2026 @09:21AM (#49856294)
a future cheap agent will outperform a current frontier agent
and unrelated to Windows Autopilot which part of device deployment and intune succeeding sccm.

Mindboggling.

Re:The new CC, an AI agent built for families on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @02:28AM (#49812411)
Its not even a new google service. its a google labs service. its experimental so they can learn and they will shut it down.
Re:The new CC, an AI agent built for families on Wednesday September 23, 2026 @02:20AM (#49812363)
>multiple sources

how about when a kid has 7 classes, and each teacher says to just check the google doc within google classroom where they each type daily notes into unstructured tables that are each different for each class oh and parents dont actually have their own google classroom login they are just supposed to log into the kids account.

Also, family management is so *fundamentally broken* that it's disheartening and almost laughable that priority is ai over global acl management. There should not be a separate parental control dashboard for roblox, fortnite, instagram, tiktok, etc etc etc etc. Every app should be REQUIRED to expose all parental controls in a standard protocol upstream to identity management that is manageable by multiple management accounts in a family unit. I should be able to go into settings, click a kid, turn off chat for a child, and it instantly updates on my partners phone without needing an account at the service itself to manage it and knowing the ins and outs of how their parental controls are evolving weekly. Family settings should exist ABOVE any single user account and apply to all accounts to any service linked within the family.

Re:I don't want to read what you didn't write on Monday September 21, 2026 @11:42PM (#49796567)
>but the AIs slowly start to drift.

It's essentially the tower of babel. Each person will devolve to speak their own internal language only they understand. Each language will need to be encoded down to its meaning to be reinterpreted. None of us will know if the transformers are accurately decoding, or if the other person is accurately interpreting the decoding (which is arguably already a feature of human language without the computers in-between.)

Re:Bill to Ban Private Equity from Owning Medical Practices on Monday September 21, 2026 @12:48AM (#49783174)
a business can be sold to a younger generation.
Re:Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington on Sunday September 20, 2026 @04:51PM (#49779950)
I dont have to be an expert to recognize when something is said with authority and confidence. Any time a model says something with conviction, my instinct is to double check.

Now if they taught them to express uncertainty and speak in terms of probability, I might be more likely to be blindly fooled by some kind of uncertain conviction.

It's also not necessarily implausible that AI/we decide that performance is better with humans in the loop somewhere, even if its reduced to something like mechanical turk.
Re:AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible on Sunday September 20, 2026 @09:56AM (#49775935)
youve got to get rid of the list with the icons as bullets. vertical or 3-4 of them horizontally is a dead giveaway.

your posters also dont suffer it, but most of the ones in the wild have 3-7 extra catchphrases or taglines thrown all over the poster. same but different. this but that. not this that. chatgpt just really likes to add phases and annotations all over posters.

“Good enough to replace humans” isn’t necessarily the benchmark.

The question is is a computer with a human stronger than a computer without a human. At what point does the hybrid go from being stronger, to the human getting in the way, or steering the computer in more wrong directions that right ones, or the human not being able to keep up. Does the human add enough extra randomness to be of value for a while, even as a minor co-processor.

Re:I don't like passkeys on Saturday September 19, 2026 @12:50AM (#49763407)
put it in your password manager?
Re:I don't like passkeys on Friday September 18, 2026 @01:18PM (#49757389)
but you can type anything in the recovery box.

its just three additional passwords.

should you type the same brother name in each time? should you even answer with a name?

don't get me wrong, they were insane, but they can be repurposed.

Re:I don't like passkeys on Friday September 18, 2026 @01:17PM (#49757369)
When was the last time you tried to log into something like Google, Apple, Microsoft etc without your phone nearby, on a fresh computer?

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