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Comment Re:Silver linings (Score 1) 92

we no longer live in First World countries where you can rely on the power to stay on

Speak for your country, not the rest of the First World. I haven't experienced a power outage since I left N. America in 2008. Given the lag in grid investment here in the UK to reshape it with all the changes, that might change. But for now, it's been incredibly stable.

Comment Re:Concorde was LOUD! (Score 1) 130

Maybe I wasn't clear: Concorde was loud, irrespective of whether the throttle was fully on and afterburners lit, or not.

I'm also glad we don't get any 747s anymore, which were quieter than Concorde. 777s are definitely the ones I've noticed to be loudest these days, especially when planes are coming over every three minutes from 04:30-05:00 in the morning. They're offensively loud compared to the 787s and A350s, and even A380s. But this is a different story.

Comment Re:US senators ae shiteaters who swallow (Score 1) 130

I've heard this theory too, including from my own father. Maybe that's how it was portrayed in the British media at the time? I can't really find much evidence for it on the internet though. As far as the written history on the Internet goes, it's mostly about the noise. Maybe hysteria about the topic was whipped up for political reasons, but where's the evidence now?

There certainly were bans put in place for political reasons, such as India and Malaysia banning Concorde because they couldn't get the access they wanted in terms of landing slots:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Concorde was LOUD! (Score 4, Informative) 130

It wasn't just the sonic booms, this plane was just all around loud. It was a civilian plane afterburners! As somebody who lives about 500m directly under one of Heathrow's landing flight paths, I'm happy it's not coming over anymore.

I've always liked this video though. It starts off so quiet, suburban and banal, and then Corcorde roars over and shatters the scene, setting off a car alarm.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Of course, there are lots of videos like this one too, also setting off car alarms:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Comment Re:Raises hand (Score 1) 70

No, forwarding doesn't work either. For both reply and forward, all you get is the dividing line and the header info of the original message (sender, recipient, date, etc).

Switching to new Outlook works, but then that comes with the bunch of other issues that makes me stick with legacy Outlook. That said, the previous update to this broken one also seems to have resulted in a bunch of missing emails, even after rebuilding my profile in a different folder and verifying that I can see them in new Outlook and in the browser via OWA. An older version of Outlook on a different Mac that can't be upgrade due to it running on Big Sur has no such problems. I think Microsoft just aren't testing legacy Outlook properly anymore and rolling back to known older versions is difficult with their continuous delivery approach (or at least I don't know where to download the installers from for older versions).

Comment Re:They need to stop sucking before they add featu (Score 1) 24

You can't switch to an older version? That's what I did with Lightroom when they introduced a bug with GPU rendering.

I'm not going to replace an old but perfectly good Mac so that I can install even newer versions. It's disgraceful that they charge a monthly fee to customers who can't upgrade and won't fix bugs they introduced. Where's the value in that?

It's their pricing model that's killing them more than anything. It made them rich for a bit, but they've successfully pissed off every one of their users in the process.

Comment Who is this for? (Score 1) 124

It's got a butt ugly design, it's roundy, transparent, plasticy, has the commodore logo on it, primitive, and it's got a SIM card.

You know what that means? It's still fully trackable, it will give you false feelings of safety, a phone without the bloat for sure, and maybe it's best as a 30$ Nokia simple-phone (yes they sell those), but this is a 500$ simple phone in disguise, and with a design that is so ugly that I can't even see it sell to people like me who actually used and coded Demoscene stuff back in the 80s.

Comment Re: comms (Score 1) 174

Yes, and there's another reason to it as well (old fart ranting here):

When you do suggest that LLMs can be terrific and explain why they CAN be useful, old professional coders will often chime in, chop your head off and absolutely hate on you, every move you make, everything you say with passion.

I'm old so the last time that happened I just said "oh you're right, I didn't think about that, my bad" and they were happy.
Do you think I stopped experimenting with the tools? Not in any way. In fact I run my own local LLMs now on (I feel kinda super lucky) hardware bought the last few years before pricing became absolutely insane, so I have some hardware to do that, glad I did not sell those, but that's getting offtopic, I did warn - I'm an old fart so I do rant a lot.

But I do experiment a lot too.

For anyone who cares, here's the skills you do need:

- Your prompting needs to be god-tier level, it's like in the olden days we used to say "Google it", well most people had no clue WHAT to google, because they often didn't have the initial skills to know what to look for. LLMs are the same, they have various training, you need to know their limitations and ask questions sharply and very focussed, not like you'd ask a human (because they're not), but kind of extremely specific, like you would with a computer.

- Have thousands of hours with AI prompting, experimentation, build and learn to scaffold your code. Build frameworks with your AI, compartmentalize your code so you don't have to ask LLM to re-code everything from scratch every time, saves tokens, saves on context memory (especially important if you run locally). The thousands of hours with using the models will help you become an expert in using it as a tool, surprise - just like any other tool.

Just because you can prompt and get results, doesn't mean you'll get good results, you need to get good at recognizing the failure points, what it responds to well and where it fails, and learn to tighten your scaffolding skills. The more direct, focused you are, the more NOTES you take of your project, such as naming the items in your apps, naming the tasks in your app (accurately, not loosely like this), the more high quality your results will be.

- You also need to be a great project manager and note taker. Take tons of notes, document the hell out of everything you do, and have your LLM document EVERYTHING. Make things tight so an Idiot (me) could understand it even with meager coding skills (I might be humble here, but in my world everyone is better than me, it helps because you anticipate you could be wrong, this is good!).

Learn the above well, be humble, use several approaches, learn from that, and you'll be surprised how dangerous and amazing these tools indeed are. I've honed my local model skills to become so damn good I code actually good games today with the help of ONLY local models, we've reached that point - we were NOT at that point just 9 months ago.

No joke!

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