They’re pervasive in an annoying way, and the boosters are using them for utterly ridiculous things.

They have their very limited uses. For short things they can be useful, within reason. “How do you take these results and transform them into X in Python” then take a very squinty look at it and figure out where it went wrong. Then, try asking a couple follow-ups and the code just scrambles.

For writing I’ve found they’re pretty useless, because I can’t figure out how to prompt them to not sound like they’re in the marketing department and blowing smoke.

But they can be a good starting point for finding information when I’m looking for something that’s really a Reddit question, rather than something I can summarize into keywords for a search engine. Still, too often useless.

I recently had someone send me “is it cheaper to air bnb or get a hotel at $destination” and it was absurdly incorrect, as in off by a factor of two. When it would have taken mere seconds more to get correct information. I have relatives who work in professions which literally define accuracy (accounting and law) and they rely on them for stuff like that, and it’s so provably incorrect

Well, that just makes sense. Cyclists usually travel at less than half that speed.

They opened cycle ways to compensate, right?

Right?

Scheiber traces the deterioration to the transition from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. Jobs built Apple retail around a permanently employed, generously compensated workforce, on the theory that any worker who felt second-class would make customers feel the same way. Under Cook, that model was progressively unwound: contractor numbers grew, training shifted from multi-week instructor-led programs to brief self-guided modules, and leadership rotated toward cost control.

You don’t say.

It’s also a ridiculously complex demo. I don’t think Jobs would have released it. Even the watch didn’t need a 25 min script; if it’s not obvious after an elevator pitch, I don’t think there’s a mass market retail product fit.

It’s specifically a problem because the mentality is that it’s fine to drive 30 min for food, but not fine to ride a tram for 30 min. It’s an incorrect mentality, but there it is.

I hope it remains a long term success to point to. It’s a fight that North American urbanists will be fighting for decades to come. If one or two retailers become unavailable (ie groceries) it can all fall apart. A bunch of restaurants and quirky gift shops do not make a community.

My feelings about the existence of the super-rich class aside, it seems crazy to move to Dubai if Milan is an option.

But I suppose that what I prefer in a city is antithetical to the preferences of the super-rich who just want to be surrounded by their kind and those who venerate them.

Well, that’s a lot more sensible but still rather fat. Good reminder not to install Ubuntu then.

I’m not up on the flavours of Ubuntu, but I assume the LTS version is more server oriented and what in the name of whatever you hold holy is there that needs 6 GB to boot an OS? Have they ported bash to electron?

Fuck John Forester.

Who says one person can’t make a difference?

Same, but Gemini was the best of the lot about six months ago and it’s where I go these days for brain dead searching.

I’ll give Claude a go next week. I do try to avoid them, but sometimes I have a question that just isn’t keyword search-able.

To be fair haven’t tried that one. Gemini started bringing in unrelated, previous shit to a recent conversation, which is the first time I’ve experienced that.

Less grass.

I have kids and dogs. Native plants don’t work - they can’t handle the traffic, the poop, and they don’t cover the mud.

But I don’t need to fertilize it. I certainly don’t spray. I don’t need to water. I mow it, but it’s mechanical. And I plant native perennials around it.

This morning

Yeah, they have “memories” but they make Donnie look nearly competent

It’s confusing to me. When I use chat boxes they inevitably “forget” the first thing I told it by the second or third response.

How are people having conversations with them? It’s like talking to a 5 year old that’s ingested Wikipedia.

Subsidizing cars by making transit free because cars suddenly got expensive is the most ass backwards way to get people out of cars and it might just work.

(Subsidizing cars because transit riders have been pay in for the transit fares forever but now that car owners can’t afford their cars, it’s ok to make it free.) Transit should be free.

[citation needed]

They spend a ton of money but they don’t get much in return.

My suspicion is that they spend a lot of money on non academic endeavours like football and marching band. Heres a current example of a school district spending $21m on a sports complex.. Search “Texas High School Football” on your favourite engine.

Attempts are made to solve the problem with standardised testing, which is incentivised, which simply leads to teaching to the test.

I think the 8GB RAM may be a decision made in light of the ram shortage. However, no matter how good OS X is with RAM, a simple workload is going to be bouncing off the limits constantly and i think that will be a frustration factor. Too many electron and webapps.

The local storage is pretty light too, but I think that’s manageable for a couple years. Apple is pretty bad about sucking up storage though; my phone has about 25% or 32GB used by iOS and system data.

I think it’s a perfectly serviceable device for technology averse (seniors) but probably not great for high school or university kids. Is it worth the extra money for 16GB RAM and a MacBook Air? Probably.

No chipsets from that era that handle 96GB are going to be affordable to run - unless you’ve got excess solar or something.

The issue with serving urban is that they need more satellites with narrower beams to handle the higher density and resulting load. Yes, they fly over, but they don’t have the capacity.