radicalbyte

It's not "perfectly suited", it's EXPLICITLY DESIGNED TO do that. And it's very well designed and very effective.

But hey it's OK because Meta only want to record everything to train their AI, who cares if some of their friends use it to create CSAM material, their third-world country workers upload it to PornHub and the NSA secretly pipe all of that through their servers (or servers managed by MI5 in the case of Americans).

People use Chrome in 2026? O_O

Oh that's who Mullenweg is? I had a bit of an argument with him on one of the socials, I was making the argument that Zuck has very much jumped the shark but he seemed to be a big fan.

He didn't have particularly good arguments though, given the abject failure to create anything interesting since the original Facebook site (they've been making also-ran clones before buying the competition OR going into new markets and failing since the early 2010s). He has obviously ran the core money machine ruthlessly once he won social.

The training data and knowledge is the edge, you need to build that up and maintain it. And of course mine everything you can from the American and Chinese models, like they mined everything from the internet / films / music / games etc.

Specifically we have American models which were built on extremely crappy data in insane quantities. What happens when you use same models to build a corpus of extremely high quality training data. Say for Math, coding etc. Then use that to train models. Can you get the same performance from models 10% of the size? Or 1%? Or 0.01%?

From what I've been seeing we're clearly getting to a position where models are getting "good enough" for some tasks to be really cool assistants to skilled people. And they're limited more by being extremely slow and expensive to run. What happens when they're not?

I can't see the model providers winning enough to make their valuations real.

I have a $40 head-mounted thing with integrated light and it's awesome for modern boards.

You can buy a whole lot of practise kits on Amazon. Start with push-through components and move on to surface-mount if you fancy that.

I'd recommend checking out one of the many youtube channels who do repairs for an idea of the tools and stuff you need. Many have links and most use similar tools.

For $300 in tools from AliExpress you can have a pretty complete setup.

Impossible Mission for me; didn't realise that it's actually a good game. Very very good for the time too.

I'm loving my C64U.

The original C64 got me into tech. The most accessible way to get into assembly / machine code. Those of the engineers who skipped that (including most in their mid-40s like me) just don't have that level of understanding of computers. It's a shame. I think that everyone should start on machines like this. Or even a level lower.

There are an army of people using SPAs for problems best served by a simple and more traditional website. It has been a thing since SPAs started showing up so you have a whole generation who think that Next.js is just how you build for the web.

Then HTMX is to them what the micro-ORMs were for me (and, if you've been in .Net for a couple of decades, I suspect you too).

They're not able to spy on all the other websites I visit or apps I use via the browsers in the way they are by forcing me to install spyware on the spyware machines from Apple and Google.

Might want to take a look at the news channels you're following as none of them describe the Democrats, outside a bit of performative "socially left" things (like keeping the government out of bedrooms - though as a libertarian I don't consider it a "left" issue at all, more a basic freedom).

The two main US parties are firmly right wing, although the Democrats do have a small number of centralist (like Bernie) and centre-left people (though I dunno if any are actually in the Congress).

The lawmakers are: in the EU you have a block of right-wing parties. The large part are funded by large companies and make laws which favour them. Same thing as in the US.

There are other right-wing (and left-wing) blocks who are funded by the Kremlin and Kremlin-supporters who just try to break things.

At the EC they're not corrupt, they try their best, but they're often given bad advice and are themselves not experts. And their power is limited (they can nudge but not push).

Having worked on the inside: this is by design. You know for 100% that Pepsico and Coca Cola unleashed an army of lobbyists to make sure the laws were written in a way where the single market only worked for large business.

Erm I've been talking about this for 4 years now. So I'm not sure how it can "come out of nowhere" unless you're paying 0 attention to really important regulation in your field.

There will be a post in 9 months from software companies crying about the PLD and CRA because their leaders were asleep at the wheel for the last half decade.

It reads like the white papers companies publish on their websites to build legitimacy. Or anything from those IBM / SAP / Deloitte / etc consultants who write technical papers despite having little to know understanding of the technology.

That's why the business and government people love it, they spend their entire careers reading this nonsense.

They were too busy dying from typhoid, cholera, "consumption" (TB + other lung diseases) and probably lung cancer caused by all the coal / asbestos.

The whole push behind .Net Core was to get .Net running on Linux well and natively and was being lead largely by those of us using .Net for web. We were being murdered by other languages at the time; mono was an option but Microsoft shops usually needed to target something blessed/backed by MS.

Largely the same market (Enterprise) but not the different segment (web as opposed to Windows/WinForms).

I ported about 15 years of projects from various versions of .Net to .Net Core whilst they were developing (and sent feedback to the team - they were asking us to do that) and the process was pretty reasonable. You were only really stuck if you were using something very very Windows specific (certain image processing libraries iirc) and even then it was largely manageable.

The old full-fat framework is, AFAIK, still supported, as there's a whole lot of legacy code which is Windows specific which is still expensive / hard to port over.

Our intelligence services have capabilities, it's not just the US. The Patriot / Cloud Act increase the scope outside of intelligence agencies. I'm of the opinion that for military intelligence there is a legitimate need to have some - black - capability. It should just be highly limited in scope.

This is the EU Commission. Yesterday was the Christian nutjobs and right-wing ghouls in the European Parliament who undemocratically pushed through their crackhead Chat Control.

EU Commission = US Senate, EU Parliament = US Congress. Kinda.

Some of the early models - either the Chevvy or Nissan Leaf - had battery packs which would degrade very quickly. This was causes by the charging system which seemed designed to destroy them.

The expectation in the EV fan world was that modern (> 2019) battery packs were very likely to retain 80% of their charge for well over the time anyone expected with the drop to 80% itself taking most of the car's expected lifetime. This was because the standard extrapolations ignored improvements in charging algorithms and that real-world usages were expected to be better for the battery than the models.

Another prediction we made is that range under cold (or very hot) weather would be significantly reduced and that seems to be the case too.

They benefited greatly from the FTC not doing their job. Google too. Overall it has been extremely damaging to the industry but I suspect that it is the main reason for a small part of California (it not even American exceptionalism, it's Silicon Valley exceptionalism) completely dominating tech.

Venture Capitalists are now even worse than the marketers.

Claude Code are slopmaxxxing and you're considering their "judgement"? :-)

No they weren't, 50 years ago is when they were working very hard to get people in from Turkey/North Africa to do those jobs because they wanted to pay peanuts and the natives had options.

These are all hyper exploitative industries based on capital exploiting the poor. Which is something we both agree on.

They still are. My kids haven't watched a single Simpsons or Family Guy episode but are quoting both regularly.

Facebook et al also quite literally stole email contact lists and installed spyware at kernel level on mobile phones which they used to spy on all Android users. Via the phone manufacturers.

The Samsung with parental control does the same thing as this phone only you don't have to beg Commodore to install the apps your kid's school requires them to install.

It's at most a $200 smart phone (doubling the prices for the DAC + IEMs) being sold at > $500 with a funky design, interesting OS and their own app store.

I hope that they sell millions of these things, enough so that they can afford to buy the Amiga IP... just don't see it happening.

It has the same core spec as a $120 (delivered) Samsung phone and will cost between $500-$600 (delivered).

The C64U is an amazing achievement but it seems too early to go for the smart phone.

Hopefully there is a niche and their business plan is viable for a small number of sales.

Keeping Linux-based devices up and running and somewhat reliable is horrible. I'm 45, I've spent 25 years doing that. Time I'll never get back. Time I'm spending with my kids instead of dicking around with an obscure bug caused by some random dude who is spending his free time doing thankless work maintaining some C code he wrote 40 years ago.