I borrowed a dyson vacuum once from a neighbour. Despite using it to vacuum my apartment after already having used my own vacuum, it filled up almost instantly with stuff my personal vacuum left in the carpet.
My current vacuum is a V15, and I like it a lot. It was expensive (and a gift), but it's very effective, has a lot of attachments to make it easier to clean upholstery/the carpet/a computer/drawers/hardwood/the window frames/whatever, comes with a wall mount that the cable connects to so you can just put it in the mount and it charges. The one issue I had seems to be a relatively well-understood issue with the electronics, which resulted in me having to spend another $100+ on a new housing - the electronics + motor + LCD screen + etc., basically the whole 'vacuum' part of the vacuum. Given how well it's treated my so far, though, I'm not too miffed.
Our last vacuum (which we still have) was a Miele, and while it was also fantastic it was far more of a pain in the ass since it's a plug-in with a bag vs. a cordless canister. The quality is similar, I think the Dyson is a bit better, but I use it exclusively because it's far easier to go get it, vacuum up a spill, and put it back. I know that's more of a comparison between canister and bag vaccums, but the fact that they're around as effective despite the dyson being a canister is I think a point in its favor.
Whether all of their stuff is as good, or only the more expensive stuff, I can't say.
I bought a Dyson vacuum, or rather I was given one as a gift from my wife after she saw a joke twitter post about a man being happier about a new vacuum than the birth of his own kids. She gave it to me on Christmas Eve because I was about to vacuum the entire house with our old vacuum - which was also a fantastic vacuum, for the record.
My feedback:
1. It works great. I had to empty it several times because it was picking up so much more stuff than our existing vacuum did - mostly pet hair and the like.
2. It's the one with the little laser thing, which is a dumb little gimmick until you see it in action and then it's life-changing - if you're like me and find satisfaction in picking up every invisible crumb anywhere.
3. After a year and a bit, maybe less, it started misbehaving. It would suddenly turn off, then you'd have to let go of the trigger and pull it again; then it would work fine. Then it would happen a few times until it worked fine. Then it almost never worked fine. I kind of tolerated it for a while until I got fed up and googled the problem, and it was suggested to buy a new housing - the electronics plus the motor, basically the whole 'vacuum' part of the vacuum, which was only just over a hundred dollars direct from Dyson. Irritating to have to spend an extra hundred bucks to get my five hundred dollar vacuum working as expectred, but expected it to cost far more.
Would I recommend it? Not sure. It's very expensive, it works very well; it has a nice wall mount that charges it and which holds a small subset of the attachments it comes with. I'm glad I have it and I use it often.
Yes, it's plastic, but if it were, for example, steel or aluminium then it would be too heavy to use for any length of time. As it is, it feels very sturdy and has held up physically very well, but I'm obviously also not rough with it so there's no reason it would have any issues unless it were, in fact, cheaply or poorly made.
I've had this issue a few times. Took it apart and soaked/scrubbed anything without a pcb or wires coming out of it, and it worked fine after. Eventually the filter on the motor crumbled into dust (not suitable for picking up the dust from sanding paint off indoor walls). I tried to get the right one from Dyson but I ended up just grabbing something that looked like a distant cousin of the right filter off eBay and cut it into the right shape. It stopped working again after a few months, I was going to do the cleansing ceremony again, but then I dropped it and it started working fine again.
The trigger has a deliberate defect where it has the least possible amount of material right at the weakest most leveraged part.
It's a cheap part to replace. It also means a complete disassembly! A lot of it isn't hard but there are some wires that have to snake around, and popping out certain things requires some scary use of force. It took like 3 hours to do for mine.
Also these things don't seem to be great at battery maintenance. I forget how long that took me but it didn't leave any scars, I think it was easy. Just, more expensive. Less so now that batteries are cheaper. But I have my suspicion that their float charge mode is maybe not good & injured batteries. I specifically avoided that but still had issues.
The trigger really made me mad when I finally dug it out of mine. It was such a blatantly obviously designed-to-fail system. It really makes me super distrust this company.
I'm in favor of removing 32-bit dependencies from steam-the-application, except that you still need 32-bit libraries to run 32-bit games in Wine.
Having steam depend on those libraries directly means that when you install you get all the libraries you'll need and you won't run into issues later on when you go to run a 32-bit game and it can't load the appropriate 32-bit system libraries for you. It's annoying for sure but it simplifies the user experience dramatically (especially if you're just installing Steam directly on Ubuntu or something).
While I agree with a lot of what he says (complexity and layers of abstraction impact performance), it's probably worth noting that his examples are not necessarily relevant to all software.
Does my web browser feel slow because of pointer indirection or virtual function calls? Or is it because I have to download 15 MB of Javascript to load this page, which then goes out to 35 other domains to fetch other Javascript and ads and CSS?
In the insanely tight compute loop that he's looking at all of those things definitely make a difference, but a lot of software is slow not because it's inefficiently written (which it probably is) but because it's inefficiently designed and it's doing too much.
In a game engine, where you have 16ms to do 100% of your simulation work, update all your state, and then send all the data out to be rendered, definitely this sort of thing is an issue. In an Electron app? There are a thousand other things that are wasting far more of your time and responsiveness than the misguided 'cleanliness' of your code.
Counterpoint. I have a Dell laptop from 2017 at work. I keep it around for plugging in to network equipment and that sort of thing. I've had Win 11 on it for the last few years, and it was getting unusably slow. Also, the battery, even though replaced in the last year, would only last about an hour of normal use. I had a similar belief about browsers and the web. No matter how light your OS, the browser and web experience is the bottleneck. But then a couple weeks ago, I installed Arch and IceWM with Firefox. What a difference. The thing is snappy, even in the browser. And the battery lasts all day. I was blown away.
Did the same in 2012 with hp 2510p that had windows vista pre installed on it. I could literally brew a cup of coffee and make it halfway through while this poor boy was booting up.
Bit the bullet, installed arch and dwm. I remember my initial impressions on how fast the boot went, how silent the hdd is, how the whole things works reporting just a fraction of RAM in use(right after boot).
It was the first hands-on YAGNI experience. Windows(and macos and the likes of ubuntu) loads and starts everything it has and keeps the system busy at all times in terms of cpu, disk io, network io.
Barebone linux without beefy desktop environment was like “I boot into essentials and will lazy load anything upon request”.
Part of the reason a Chinese invasion of Taiwan seems more realistic is Trump being a sycophant towards any dictator who will give him the time of day, including Xi Jinping.
It's not impossible, but I feel as though if Trump decides that China is friends and Taiwan is enemies (as he seems to have done with North/South Korea lately) then Taiwanese refugees might not be as eager to move to the US as, say, Canada, Australia, or Europe.
A few years ago I decided I was going to get some fresh air by going and working on the (south-facing) deck. Put my phone and drink outside, went back to get my laptop, brought it outside.
Outside was too bright for me to see my laptop screen even at full brightness, but by the time I had it outside and had discovered that my phone had overheated so much it refused to turn on until it cooled down.
There are so many apps out there which take every shortcut they can to make it easier for developers regardless of the impact on users. On iOS, using things like react native instead of actually native code; on desktop systems, using Electron instead of any other toolkit.
I understand why, mind you; would VS Code or Slack have as much velocity of improvement if they had to individually manage GUI toolkits for each platform? Would VS Code be as extensible if the UI were built in Swift or Qt?o But the results are still there.
There are projects to try to make this /better/, like Tauri - Electron but using your system's built-in browser engine rather than shipping a new one, so that you don't have to have eight separate copies of Chromium loaded into memory - but they still need to reach feature-completeness and projects need to do a non-trivial migration, and then they need to test across multiple browser engines, etc., so it's still not the same.
Regardless, this is the situation we have right now; everyone figured that RAM capacity would continue to increase at the same rate as RAM usage, "it works on my machine" but it's a 32 GB Macbook, Chromium optimized for performance and not memory usage by assuming that each 'page load' would be short lived (browser behavior) rather than having one 'page load' run for hours or days (Slack, VS Code, Spotify).
Looking over the actual killer feature for Electron: running your existing web code with native features layered on top. I mean yeah Tauri does this too, but I think it's relatively rare for someone to decide "I'm going to build a standalone native desktop app in Electron because it's easiest," they're thinking "I already have this PWA that i can repackage with native features without maintaining a whole second UI."
The main argument against these fonts is that you are removing accessibility for humans permanently in exchange for removing accessibility for scrapers temporarily.
It might raise the cost for some scrapers, to some degree, but it raises the cost to, effectively, infinity for anyone who needs to use a screen reader, a browser's 'reader' view, or any other assistive technology.
Things like this just remind me of EA's Spore; it released with DRM so draconian that legitimate players were getting locked out of the game during the first week, while people who pirated the game had no problem whatsoever and were playing the game without issue even before its release. The legitimate users of the thing were the only ones punished by the technology designed to stop everyone but them.
This is going to be the same thing; a website which AI will be able to read in short order but which assistive technologies will not be able to read ever.
So scrapers are using those people as hostages. So let's have something like a HTML meta tag to link to an accessible version of a website and hard jail for using it for scraping.
It's not a technical issue, it's a social one, people behave differently given the same set of possibilities and incentives, and we can and should target those who fuck it up for everyone.
You can just as easily say that people using these fonts are the ones holding accessibility users hostage, since they are willingly choosing to use exclusionary tools.
If an ISP blocks an entire apartment blocks internet in response to one users activity, it's pretty clear the ISP is holding the neighbors connectivity hostage because they made the move. It's the same thing, except the little guy role happens to be flipped.
I also see no virtue in stopping an AI from reading something to begin with. If anything, I find it anti-social - hide your work from the machine trying to learn from it, taking nothing away from you in exchange for benefiting all of mankind?
That seems like an unfair equivalence. Lots of things you enjoy, including this very forum, benefit already wealthy private companies. That doesn't seem like it's a very good litmus test for whether something is overall a benefit to humanity.
I'm advocating for a litmus test that can't be easily abused, and I'm advocating against unfair equivalences. I also am not calling "overall a benefit to humanity" a metric, it's more of a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.
> a conclusion we could arrive at by an application of relevant metrics.
That’s dangerous ground because of how you can arbitrarily change weights of different metrics. If the goal is the “overall benefit of humanity” then that’s what’s important not metrics.
Number of successful outcomes reported (e.g. with disabled students, cancer patients). Labor costs. Latency of services. Scientific discoveries found. Etc.
I'm not trying to discount the qualitative approach, but I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.
> I think it's not impossibly hard to find metrics we can associate with "overall benefit to humanity" from a quantitative viewpoint.
One would hope for the slightly higher ambition of metrics that are causally connected to "overall benefit of humanity", settling for merely correlated has that unpleasant risk of the association breaking as you try to optimise.
Qualitative metrics are also metrics. You have to have a spectrum in order to weigh things against each other qualitatively, even if the spectrum is just a 2-point binary.
The important distinction is it covers a wider range of analysis than qualitative metrics alone.
This matters due to the difference between a hypothetical perfect analysis covering every possibility and one than can actually take place in the real world.
I feel like both viewpoints are valid ways of determining what you personally view as "good", and I don't want to take away from that diversity of opinion
So jealousy is the argument? If someone reads my work am I worse off? Why would I post it to the web? If someone indexes it so others can find it am I worse off? Should I complain they also make money helping others find it? If someone build on it in a way I did not do, never planned to do, and found really neat new tech from reading lots of works, why should I get so upset?
I don't think we should hold our relations to big corporations to the same moral standards we invented for interacting with people, like "don't be jelous" or "don't be petty", because corporations won't reciprocate. They banned my account, so fuck them, simple as.
That is the problem. I believe web is long overdue for a torrent like model where hosting is shared among all users (and ISPs instead of 'cloudflares').
Well, as a user of LLMs I also find it annoying, the agents gather information on my behalf, they save me time and money. Are we splitting humanity? Those with info accessible to agents and those who only use their human sense directly?
This whole distinction is futile imho. And no, I'm not Sam Altman.
I mean training is one thing, you should honor people's licenses, but browsing and gathering information? Why force me to do it with my biological neural net?
My biggest fear with AI is that it basically devalues the production of knowledge. They’re a continued march away from actually showing people the original information, and the people doing that writing get less and less credit.
The companies themselves know they depend on this knowledge but have no plan to fund or replace the work done on sites like Wikipedia, stack overflow, or blogs like acoup.blog
Honestly, I'll take it a step further: what's wrong with training?
Having principles means applying them uniformly -- even to large entities or those you hate (it's fine if the principles themselves have size bounds in them, though -- versus them being implicitly glued on -- but then you need a universal justification for why that size. Which is possible and valid.)
I think that one should use the best algorithms, the best information, the best knowledge they have access to -- period. I don't like using gimped machines, I don't like making gimped machines, and I certainly don't like being sold them.
So I'm not going to turn around and say LLMs need to be gimped via arbitrary restrictions on their training data.
I agree. As soon as I understood the gist of how modern models do what they do, I found it unreasonable to apply any stricter standards to their "learning" than we do to humans. Humans learn by reading ideas and looking at images, then go on to have ideas and draw images based on that training.
We have definitions of plagiarism and copyright infringement that apply to people based on what they put out into the world, not how they trained themselves to get there[0]. Artists literally trace art and study specific examples in detail to learn, and that's not a bad thing. Humans can also accidentally plagiarize or make things identical to past works - it's easy to think a great guitar riff just came to you when it was really based on a song you heard years ago that stuck in a part of your mind but you don't even consciously remember the influence, for example.
It would certainly be nice for AI output to provide citations if it realizes it's using a significant chunk of an idea from its training that has a clear source (or many), though this is difficult in the same way it would be difficult for me to cite where I learned about the Towers of Hanoi. The AI frequently does web searches for specific resources to get ideas from these days, which are easy for it to cite.
However, it would have a chilling effect on progress as a whole if we all started jealously guarding our ideas so close to our chest that machines couldn't read them and only a select few humans who passed some kind of gate (or even paid us) were allowed to see them. We would be nowhere close to where we are if we had always had such a mindset.
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[0] We use proven absence of viewing certain material as a legal shield against copyright infringement e.g. clean room engineering, but this isn't strictly necessary, and possibly even discouraged with modern precedent: https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740
If the comment baited you, maybe it's because you're holding onto a popular but nonsensical belief system, and you're experiencing painful cognitive dissonance.
It is not rude to point out that an insubstantial comment, which in particular falls foul of Hackernews guidelines, likely comes from a sublogical mental process. I regret my apparent failure to promote introspection or further inquiry into the issue, but I suppose the rockheadedness to which I reacted would prevent this anyway for the foreseeable future.
My current vacuum is a V15, and I like it a lot. It was expensive (and a gift), but it's very effective, has a lot of attachments to make it easier to clean upholstery/the carpet/a computer/drawers/hardwood/the window frames/whatever, comes with a wall mount that the cable connects to so you can just put it in the mount and it charges. The one issue I had seems to be a relatively well-understood issue with the electronics, which resulted in me having to spend another $100+ on a new housing - the electronics + motor + LCD screen + etc., basically the whole 'vacuum' part of the vacuum. Given how well it's treated my so far, though, I'm not too miffed.
Our last vacuum (which we still have) was a Miele, and while it was also fantastic it was far more of a pain in the ass since it's a plug-in with a bag vs. a cordless canister. The quality is similar, I think the Dyson is a bit better, but I use it exclusively because it's far easier to go get it, vacuum up a spill, and put it back. I know that's more of a comparison between canister and bag vaccums, but the fact that they're around as effective despite the dyson being a canister is I think a point in its favor.
Whether all of their stuff is as good, or only the more expensive stuff, I can't say.
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