jrmg

These laptops have a lot of life in them yet.

For example, try searching about what sort of nails you should be using to attach cedar lap siding.

On Google, you might find a few good results, but you’ll really need to scrutinize them to make sure they’re reliable. Most are slop on the ‘blogs’ of siding and roofing contractors.

On DDG, it’s even worse. Usually nailerguy.com ranks highly - it seems to be completely AI generated, complete with contradictions and impossible pictures. And, often, nailicy.com, a (seriously) nail salon in New Hampshire that I’m sure is confused about why all their web traffic isn’t translating into clients.

YouTube is about the only ‘reliable’ source for recent advice.

Two alternatives: - Trust our representative system and have our elected representatives make decisions (ha! Although perhaps people would pay attention to local elections more if they had more direct consequences…) - Randomly select people to comment, like jury duty.

It’s not impossible to think of systems that take public opinion into account that are not the exact system we have now.

With public comment, politicians will still just do whatever they want without accountability

This is very obviously not true to me. Is there really nothing in your area that’s been cancelled or interminably held up by the public comment process?

…although Amazon recently put an end to that…

With radio, you used to have to sometimes sit through music you didn’t like so much, with the upside that you often discovered things you didn’t know you liked.

Every other desktop platform has had self-describing hardware with loadable drivers for 30 years now.

Why is it like this?

I thought this was the crux of your argument. What did I miss?

But with the very latest models (like, Opus 5.5 class and up), I am now of the opinion that the output, in non-creative situations like code review and most software development, is fine. Great, even. Better than the reviews a lot of humans generate.

Honestly, if you’re at all open minded about this, get a $20 Claude Pro subscription for a month (they are easy to cancel) and ask Claude Code with Opus 5.5 to review your codebase or a PR or two. I was very (pleasantly? unpleasantly?) surprised.

I have complex emotions about this (‘sad’ on balance I think - although it’s definitely not all simply in that direction), but I can’t deny it to myself.

I still bristle at reading articles and even documentation that’s not just ‘reference’ documentation written by it - and even that can get a bit weird and circuitous. But for review and coding? It’s great.

Try rapidly dragging up and down to scroll a web page.

For some people, it’s motion sickness inducing of it gets too laggy

Does the page look and feel glued to your finger as you scroll?

People regularly blow through all their Claude Pro tokens every week. It’s relatively easy to do.

None of the assertions you made are backed by this 'research' which as far as I can see only shows that the TV is capable of detecting dog barks and baby cries.

You're just presuming that because the TV is capable of sensing these things (which Samsung advertises - links at end) this data is being collected and sent to Samsung - and then sold on.

So, some questions:

Is information about every time your baby cries or dog barks even valuable enough that this is plausible?

Is there any evidence that this is actually being sent over a network - for purposes other than the features they advertise?

Is there evidence that these are even being monitored if the dog bark or baby cry feature is not turned on?

Shouldn't the burden of showing things like this be on the people making the sensational accusations?

I could come up with more, but I think that these are enough. I'd love (well, hate, because I don't want it to be true) to see some actual proof of any of this.

https://www.samsung.com/us/smartthings/experience-smartthing... https://www.samsung.com/ie/smartthings/care-for-your-pet/

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map/five_minutes

(Not a comment on the quality of the submission - it's also fascinating).

I can almost see the "they're using it for advertising" or "they're selling information about whether you have a dog or a baby, of course!", but notifying every time they make noise?

There's obviously more to this story than these sensational knee-jerk reactions assume. They're just so non-curious for a supposed 'investigation'.

https://freedns.afraid.org/pricing/

[Edit: actually, I think I misread your comment! I guess this is extra context for the people arguing that expecting some sort of contingency planning is unfair].

And also has been trained or system-prompted out of any *actual controversial opinions. They’ve all got to have been set, up at many levels, to not insult the people using them, right?

If and when you open it during the day, leave it unlocked (and perhaps open if it’s a nice day) until one of those two things happen.

I’m sure it can’t run AAA titles - but those from a few years ago? And even modern indie titles surely?

Then we layered _another_ level of package management on top with Flatpak etc.

I don’t think anyone has _really_ been - in practice - able to understand how many versions of Python (or shells or ruby or Perl etc…) are installed on any system for a decade or two now.

[Edit to add: and I forgot entirely about venvs (and other language’s equivalents). We put package managers into packages! Now there can be a different version of every package for every script on your system. In every container. And Python even has more than one venv system to choose from!]

[Yes, I use all these things - it’s so hard _not_ to and still use modern software or participate in modern software development…]