And you can’t tell when something is active/focused or not because every goddamn app and web site wants to use its own “design language”. Wish I had a dollar for every time I saw two options, one light-gray and one dark-gray, with no way to know whether dark or light was supposed to mean “active”.

I miss old-school Mac OS when consistency was king. But even Mac OS abandoned consistency about 25 years ago. I’d say the introduction of “brushed metal” was the beginning of the end, and IIRC that was late 90s. I am old and grumpy.

Say all you want about hallucinations, but AI will never be able to outperform humans at bullshitting, so sales and marketing is safe.

“It’s popular so it must be good/true” is not a compelling argument. I certainly wouldn’t take it on faith just because it has remained largely unquestioned by marketers.

The closest research I’m familiar with showed the opposite, but it was specifically related to the real estate market so I wouldn’t assume it applies broadly to, say, groceries or consumer goods. I couldn’t find anything supporting this idea from a quick search of papers. Again, if there’s supporting research on this (particularly recent research), I would really like to see it.

If there is any research from the last 50 years suggesting this actually works, I’d love to see it.

I haven’t seen this movie in like 25 years, but I still read this in Marisa Tomei’s voice.

Wait, isn’t it the other way around? You should arrive in NY earlier than you left London, since NY is 5 hours behind London. So if you leave at 8:30 and arrive 1.5 hours later, it should only be 5AM when you arrive.

You might need a third breakfast before your elevenses in that case.

Interesting read, thanks! I’ll finish it later, but already this bit is quite interesting:

Without access to gender, the ML algorithm over-predicts women to default compared to their true default rate, while the rate for men is accurate. Adding gender to the ML algorithm corrects for this and the gap in prediction accuracy for men and women who default diminishes.

We find that the MTEs are biased, signif-icantly favoring White-associated names in 85.1% of casesand female-associated names in only 11.1% of case

If you’re planning to use LLMs for anything along these lines, you should filter out irrelevant details like names before any evaluation step. Honestly, humans should do the same, but it’s impractical. This is, ironically, something LLMs are very well suited for.

Of course, that doesn’t mean off-the-shelf tools are actually doing that, and there are other potential issues as well, such as biases around cities, schools, or any non-personal info on a resume that might correlate with race/gender/etc.

I think there’s great potential for LLMs to reduce bias compared to humans, but half-assed implementations are currently the norm, so be careful.

After all these years, I’m still a little confused about what Forbes is. It used to be a legitimate, even respected magazine. Now it’s a blog site full of self-important randos who escaped from their cages on LinkedIn.

There’s some sort of approval process, but it seems like its primary purpose is to inflate egos.

It was an SEO hellhole from the start, so this isn’t surprising.

Do Forbes next!

It says:

Available Architectures
aarch64, x86_64

And it uses Android Translation Layer. Interesting. I’ll give it a shot on my desktop later.

Yeah, they were able (and thus legally required) to hand over the user’s recovery email address, which is what got them caught. You don’t need to enter a recovery email address, and you can of course choose to use an equally-secure service for recovery.

One big technical issue to note is that Proton doesn’t use end-to-end encryption for email headers, which includes recipients and subject lines, among other things. So that’s potentially exposed to law enforcement as well. I believe Tuta does encrypt headers.

I don’t think the free accounts cost them a whole lot. You only get 1GB of mail space, and the free versions have minimal features (e.g. you can only create one email filter). They make their money on paid accounts, which seems legit to me.

Who thought it was a good idea to let an internet ad company control our internet client?

It seemed a lot more reasonable 15 years ago. The default on Windows at the time of Chrome’s rise was Internet Explorer.

I am watching Ladybird with great interest. The world needs a new-from-the-ground-up browser.

There’s a way to say this that isn’t so gross: good working conditions are valuable. Quality of life is valuable. Work-life-balance is valuable. Mental and physical health is valuable. Not having raging shitbags in management is valuable.

The problem is that you can’t focus on secondary factors until the primary factor is taken care of. And the primary factor is that people need a living wage. Rent is expensive. Food is expensive. God help you if you need to pay for childcare.

If you’re already paying your employees a fair living wage, then yes, you should absolutely think about how you can improve working conditions.

As an example, if my company gave me the option to switch to a 4-day workweek for the same pay, or stay at a 5-day workweek for a 25% raise, I’m honestly not sure which one I’d prefer. But we all know that’s never going to happen; instead the choice would be to take a 20% pay cut or maintain the status quo. I wouldn’t take that deal because I’m not making enough money to live on 20% less.

simply logging out or using an alt account

It is increasingly difficult to use X without an account. Not sure what the signup process is like nowadays. IIRC it used to require phone number verification in the Twitter days, but perhaps Musk relaxed the requirements in order to better pad the usage stats with spambots?

Yeah, AMD is lagging behind Nvidia in machine learning performance by like a full generation, maybe more. Similar with raytracing.

If you want absolute top-tier performance, then the RTX 4090 is the best consumer card out there, period. Considering the price and power consumption, this is not surprising. It’s hardly fair to compare AMD’s top-end to Nvidia’s top-end when Nvidia’s is over twice the price in the real world.

If your budget for a GPU is <$1600, the 7900 XTX is probably your best bet if you don’t absolutely need CUDA. Any performance advantage Nvidia has goes right out the window if you can’t fit your whole model in VRAM. I’d take a 24GB AMD card over a 16GB Nvidia card any day.

You could also look at an RTX 3090 (which also has 24GB), but then you’d take a big hit to gaming/raster performance and it’d still probably cost you more than a 7900XTX. Not really sure how a 3090 compares to a 7900XTX in Blender. Anyway, that’s probably a more fair comparison if you care about VRAM and price.

Basically the only thing that matters for LLM hosting is VRAM capacity

I’ll also add that some frameworks and backends still require CUDA. This is improving but before you go and buy an AMD card, make sure the things you want to run will actually run on it.

For example, bitsandbytes support for non-CUDA backends is still in alpha stage. https://huggingface.co/docs/bitsandbytes/main/en/installation#multi-backend

Assuming nominal voltage of 3.7, that’s about 60Wh. For comparison, the 14" MacBook has a 70Wh battery.

That’s not good battery life but it depends on what kind of usage they’re assuming with that 7H number. I’m not sure a MacBook runs that long under high load. If it’s 7H on a heavy load, that’s respectable.

Edit: not sure what class of device is the best comparison here. Laptop? Tablet? Phone? 🤷

Borg via Vorta handles the hard parts: encryption, compression, deduplication, and archiving. You can mount backup snapshots like drives, without needing to expand them. It splits archives into small chunks so you can easily upload them to your cloud service of choice.