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Comment Re:Netcraft Confirms (Score 1) 80

It took me under 3 minutes to get my Canon 702 working perfectly on Arch, while the wife's MacBook took 10x more and was a pain in the ass.

This is particularly noteworthy given that CUPS was developed by Apple. But it's still not surprising how a big company can screw things up compared to "hobby" projects.

Printing is a good example how Linux works well with standards. Traditionally, if the printer understood Postscript, you wouldn't need much of a printer driver. Meanwhile, Windows users were instructed to download a very specific driver for that printer model, even if it would just pass PS through.

Comment Re:Criminal activity in the crapto space. Who care (Score 1) 45

Their value has already peaked. Get out now while they still have some value.

Slashdot introduced me to bitcoin in 2010 and, as a result, I turned a few hundred dollars into a few hundred thousands.

Umm.. Unlikely. $100 worth of bitcoin in 2010 (0.39) would be worth over $15M today. It would have been over $30M last October. Your claim of "a few hundred" multiplies that by some unknown amount. If you actually had $90M in bitcoin last year you wouldn't be bragging about it here.

It looks like the GP did exactly as you suggested: he got out early while he was sure the coin still had some value. Maybe he needed the money for something at the time — something he values more than money. I personally sold a considerable amount of bitcoin in the mid 2010s to buy my own apartment. I know I could have made more money by holding it, but that would have meant renting someone else's apartment, which means higher running costs and less control over my life. So I remain quite happy with this decision, even if I'm not filthy rich.

Comment Re:Well yeah (Score 1) 137

In the US, you can get about 1kw/hr on a standard plug w/o burning the breaker too hard. I've had EVs since 2011 and they've all been about 3-4miles/kw.

In Europe, we use kW for power and kWh for energy, so we count things like km per kWh.

Seriously, though, it looks like your standard outlets are fused for 10 A current, which is what we use here too. But we use double the voltage, thus doubling the power to about 2.3 kW.

Comment Re:Learning another language is fun, too. (Score 1) 100

+1 for "Language x isn't just for country x". In my favourite example, I spent a week in Hungary where nobody spoke English (this was a smaller town in the 1990s) but everyone knew German. So my rarely used knowledge of German came in handy, probably more than ever since. It meant I could hang out with the local teens in my off days, instead of hanging on to our guide for translation.

Comment Re:Ok cool (Score 1) 104

Machine learning/AI models to help with this are quite common in this field, and have been around for decades to help with spectral library lookups - long before the current LLM hype phase.

Yep, I once worked with NIR spectrometry in the paper industry around 2000. The company developed a kind of robot that measured various qualities of pulp and paper in realtime at paper mills. I was more on the hardware side, and I was kind of annoyed when they wanted to switch to spectroscopy for everything and ditch our nice old mechanical robots, parts of which I'd developed earlier. But at the same time I was excited about the ML and pattern recognition bits.

Comment Re:Today's AI is just Automation! (Score 1) 104

I've also been thinking along the same lines. To me, using computers is all about automation, and people in the know have been doing it since before the mainframe era. But to a lot people who got into personal computers in the 1980s and later, a computer is just a fancy word processor, fancy calculator, or a fancy tool for making art. Nothing wrong with those, but it's not exactly automation. To me, automation is something like telling the computer to edit 1000 pictures in a certain way, instead of editing them manually one by one. So in a way, AI is making the scripting/programming part more accessible (though it usually does so very inefficiently).

Comment Re:No commercial applications (Score 1) 59

Are you suggesting that Shor's and Grover's are the only possible quantum algorithms? I'm not holding my breath for commercial QC either, but I don't like being overly pessimistic or conservative either. Quantum computers now are a bit like the early electronic computers of the 1940s — proofs of a concept but not exactly commercial success stories. Sure, with those computers people could do the same old calculations much faster, but the really interesting and useful applications involved a bit more vision, and those didn't appear overnight.

While many people associate QC with breaking cryptography, in the end it's just a faster way to do classical math. There's a whole world of pure quantum problems that are more naturally solved with quantum computers; this is what Feynman meant when he conceived the idea of QC in the early 1980s. So instead of getting hung up on the number of qubits, consider for example what D-Wave is doing.

Comment Re: Standing Desks (Score 1) 88

I started using a standing desk soon after I quit teaching, and I guess there's a connection. But I also have some level of ADHD traits, and I find it easier to work on a computer if I can move around. I guess the commenters that don't understand standing desks have never used one extensively; the idea is not to stand in attention for 8 hours straight, but to allow your body some natural movement.

It also feels nice to sit down for a break, or for things like reading. I don't like the idea of moving the desk down to a sitting position, I'll much rather move myself somewhere else (undocking the laptop if necessary).

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