I'm not disagreeing that the US health system is not the best example of "functioning" but it is still a major developed country with a lot of people who would probably prefer not to die gushing from every orifice.

It's called confirmation bias.

Premise: LLMs == bad

Premise: LLM wins competition

Conclusion: Judges == bad

Conclusion: LLMs == super bad

It did to cosmologists as well, so they studied that possibility. Evidence has mostly ruled it out, but there's still a window where it could be true.

https://www.frontiersin.org/jo...

"We don't know" is the most important statement in science. As opposed to "absolutely, this is true and if you don't believe it you're a bad person."

I just bought a used, reconditioned Surface Pro 7 for under $400 to have something small for international travel. It has 16 GB of RAM and a 1TB SSD. This is more capacity than the base model of the Surface Pro 12, and it was released in 2021. If you don't need the very latest processor, there are a lot of good options on Amazon and Ebay for reconditioned units at budget prices. The only caveat is that the batteries are extremely difficult to replace, so they have a finite lifetime. They could be so much longer lasting if the battery could be accessed purely by miniature fasteners rather than having to un-glue the display and various other components with specialized tools, risking destruction of the unit at every step. Most people aren't going to try this. I believe it's possible to engineer for thin and light without compromising that much on repairability. I'm happy to live with a few extra ounces or an extra ten to thirty thousands of device thickness if it means I can swap the battery out.

A friend had a perfectly good, almost unused surface book 3 with dead batteries (it has two, one in the detachable screen / tablet and one in the base with the keyboard) and after looking up the replacement procedure I decided there was no way I was not going to fuck it up, and that it wasn't worth the trouble. We ended up sending it to the recycler and I kept the docking station and charger to use with my reconditioned Surface Pro. Planned obsolescence strikes again.

Other than the repairability issues, they are neat devices, well designed, and run full windows for those of us who need it. Probably the best hardware offering MS has ever churned out.

I was going to make a joke about the Surface Laptop being a different form factor than a Macbook because of some small detail, but about the only thing different is the logo on the lid.

Microsoft still makes money on Windows. This isn't Microsoft Linux Home, it's a server version of Fedora with some Microsoft stuff intended to be run on Azure.

They did.

No one ever mentions that this is an option. The tech media just screams, "Your computer will be useless after they stop supporting Win10!" For a lot of people, sure, I wouldn't recommend using legacy OSs. For a small group of us, it's perfect. Once I got a substantial number of updates, I disabled automatic updates via the policy editor, before it started installing nags to upgrade to Win11 and trying to trick you into it. If it ain't broke...

CERN has a pretty big open hardware library. Have you looked through it?

You're being pretty disingenuous though. CERN is basically a facility that provides services. Most of the scientists who "work at" CERN aren't actually employed by it. They're employed by home universities in many countries, including ones outside Europe. Many of the people who actually do the work and make the inventions are grad students who may well be paying to be there, not the other way around.

Again, "publicly funded" doesn't automatically mean the public owns everything any more than your employer, public or not, owns you. Slavery is illegal, yeah? Many (most?) universities leave IP ownership with the inventors. It's an important part of academic freedom. It's also in line with typical public funding objectives which are:

1. do the most research as cheaply as possible

Sometimes there's a #2 which is:

2. commercialize as much as possible in order to stimulate economic development.

Open sourcing is typically done because scientists think sharing freely is an important part of science, and it's typically done with their own time, money and effort, often in conflict with their best career interests.

Realistically you need both

One of the criticisms of phonics is that reading comprehension suffers. You two don't need to reinforce that point quite so much.

Realistically you need both

If you're only ever exposed to phonics how do you know what words mean?

There are lots of people who have lots of different motivations. "Will" isn't usually a problem. "Ability" is. Or "capacity" is maybe a better word. The pattern repeats over and over and has been studied over and over, in exhaustive detail.

Yes, it gets in the way of all that delightful Victorian "the savages are savages because they want to be," manifest destiny, chosen people bullshit. Good.

I make heavy use of the quick launch feature on a double height taskbar in Win10, and no it's not the same as 'pinned apps'.

There are some workarounds and third party options to restore that functionality, but again, why did you take it out? When it's disabled it's not bothering anyone who doesn't want it.

Movable taskbar....putting a feature back in that's been there since windows 95, until you deliberately removed it for no good reason.

You can keep your ads and B.S., I will keep using Windows 10 as long as I can. It works great and doesn't harass me.