Quick, get in contact with the physicists, they need the insight that you got from thinking about a sentence in a pop sci article for 30 seconds.

It was a huge revelation to me ~10 years ago that words literarily don’t mean anything to them at all, they’re just noises they make to get what they want.

You might as well be arguing with chatgpt.

lol you call me hyperbolic after your “arbiter of the funny” comment?

Here, I’ll say what I guess I should have said instead of trying to make a joke: you’re allowed to have an opinion but other people are allowed to have one too. People posting differing opinions in a comment section that reflect their own subjective perspectives is what comment sections are for. And yes that includes comments like “I don’t like posts like this and I think we should try to have less of them”. Nobody is censoring you or acting as an “arbiter” by voicing that perspective; and, in fact, there’s nothing I or anyone else you were arguing with could do to that effect.

“You have to admit” is a very common figure of speech.

I’m sorry that made you think I was going to come to your house and beat you up if you disagreed with me.

The situation presented in the comic is true, but you have to admit that this is the millennial equivalent of a boomer comic.

Thanks for the cannibalism tips.

For awhile now I’ve been thinking about how nice it would be to have a something like a modern version of the Poqet PC.

The Poqet PC had a much nicer keyboard than the laptop in the article, and between the simplicity of its software and a very aggressive power management strategy (it actually paused the CPU between keystrokes) it could last for weeks to months on two AA batteries.

Imagine a modern device with the same design sensibilities. Instead of an LCD screen you could use e-ink. For both power efficiency, and because the e-ink wouldn’t be well suited to full motion video, the user interface could be text/keyboard based (though you could still have it display static images). Instead of the 8088 CPU you could use something like an ARM Cortex M0+, which would give you roughly the same amount of power as a 486 for less than 1/100th the wattage of the 8088. Instead of the AAs you could use sodium ion or lithium titanate cells for their wide temperature range and high cycle life (and although these chemistries have a lower energy density than lithium ion, they’d probably still give you more capacity than the AAs, especially if you used prismatic cells). With such a miniscule power consumption you could keep a device like that charged with a solar panel built into the case.

Such a device would have very little computing power compared to even a smartphone, but it could still be useful for a lot of things. Besides things like text editors or spreadsheets, you could replicate the functionality of the Wiki Reader and the Cybiko (imagine something like the Cybiko with LoRaWAN). You could maybe even keep a copy of Open Street Map on there, though I don’t know how computationally expensive parsing its data format and displaying a map segment is.

Does a larger MRI produce more data than a smaller one (same data density over a larger volume), or is it the same resolution spread out over a larger space?

I think his general style was really good, how his buildings could look futuristic and naturalistic at the same time, but FLW kinda didn’t give a shit about structural integrity or insulation.

It is from 2018, but how do you imagine that this was written by AI given that LLMs barely existed at the time and weren’t accessible by the general public?

Yeah, I’m not an expert in construction but I don’t really know what this buys you vs using, for example, insulating concrete forms.

There is a religion called Jainism that actually tries to avoid harming even tiny organisms and plants. As such they avoid eating things like root vegetables that require the entire plant to be killed in order to harvest them.

Interestingly they are not necessarily against drinking milk, as milking an animal is viewed similarly to harvesting a fruit. Though its my understanding that they may still object to industrial milk production.

Take a look at the spray spout on the watering can in the top panel and the hand holding the tomato plant in the bottom panel.

This is AI generated.

Modern day chemists have succeeded where the alchemists of old failed by finally isolating phlogiston.

It might be less the quality of the research and more this:

(This comic is a bit outdated nowadays, but you get the idea).

Except the headlines say “scientists report discovery of miraculous new battery technology using A!”.

Also i think people don’t realize how long it takes to commercialize battery technology. I think they put them in the same mental category as computers and other electronics, where a company announces something and then its out that same year. The first lithium ion batteries were made in a lab in the 1970s. A person in 2000 could have said “I’ve been hearing about lithium ion batteries for decades now and they’ve never amounted to anything”, and they would be right, but its not because its a bunk technology or the researchers were quacks.

With electric cars you might not even need a special charger so much as a special charging cycle. Its already the norm for cars to tell the charger what voltage and current they want, and its already the norm for cars to carefully control their battery’s temperature during charging.

That’s not to say you’d necessarily be able to do this with just a software update, but its not too far off from the current paradigm.

I’ve seen videos of people running Damn Small Linux with a GUI on Pentium 1s.

None of them are very recent, so I don’t know how well ‘modern’ DSL would fare on a P1, but there are a few recent videos of people browsing the web using Dillo on Pentium 3s.

In addition to what groet said, I’ll add that this is a little bit like asking “what’s the difference between a public library and Amazon?”.

Yes, there are other public libraries you could go to if the one you subscribe to didn’t have something you wanted or ‘went bad’ somehow, but the most important difference is you don’t have an antagonistic relationship with your public library. Your public library doesn’t have a financial incentive to try to trap you or screw you over.

An antivirus is mostly just a blacklist of known malware. Sometimes heuristics are used such as ‘this piece of software isn’t installed on many PCs, and it appears to be doing shady stuff like, monitoring keystrokes or listening to your microphone’. But unless your antivirus is actually sentient there’s no way for it to really distinguish between a chat application that listens to your microphone so you can talk to your friends / monitor your keystrokes to know when you’ve hit the push-to-talk key, and a piece of actual malware that intends to spy on you and blackmail you.

What you have with a package manager is a whitelist of programs that have been selected by your distro maintainers. Is it completely impossible for someone to sneak malware into a distro’s repository? No, but its a lot easier to maintain a list of known good software than it is to maintain a list of known bad software. And in that situation your antivirus isn’t going to help you anyway, since the people maintaining its malware list aren’t going to magically know that something is malware before the distro maintainers do.

So, generally, just using your package manager instead of running random shit you find online is going to be a lot better than any antivirus. With things like Wayland and Flatseal becoming more common we’re heading towards a situation where fine-grained per-package permissions will become the standard way distros do things, making antivirus even more unnecessary.

We should have done that a long time ago, as the security model of ‘any program you run can do anything you can by default’, then blacklist the ones that inevitability abuse that privilege, is completely backwards.

[Person shitting in a public pool]

“Its called a public pool for a reason. I have a right to this water as much as you don’t like it.”