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Comment Re:Reliability? (Score 1) 49

I'd want:
- Trivially replaceable battery. This means no glue, and ideally means a standardized battery approach to maximize chances of buying a replacement one down the line.
- Putting ports on a separate board than the CPU and ram and such. Physical damage comes to ports, especially charging ports. Having this delegated off board minimizes risk of having to replace something expensive.
- Replacable keyboard and screen. Again, at high risk of damage and should be replaceable
- Removable storage. If your mainboard does fail, smoothest if you can move your SSD over to the replacement main board.
- Commitment to consistent form factor. If 5 years down the line it breaks, I can accept if I can't get *exactly* the same board anymore, but it would be nice if I could just get a new generation board and replace it without letting perfectly adequate screen, keyboard, case go to waste.

So mostly Framework, Lenovo recently did a think with a Thinkpad also exhibiting most of these, except no indication of generation to generation consistency in parts.

Comment Re:ThinkPad? (Score 1) 49

Note that this report might be based on perusing websites more than hands on evaluation.

That said, "Lenovo" laptops include the non-thinkpads, which tend to be *terrible* for repair-ability. For example, in many cases they don't consider the keyboard to be a part worthy of keeping replaceable without replacing half of the laptop, despite it being one of the most likely things for a user to break. You can get third-party parts that is just the keyboard, but you have to destroy a lot of plastic welds to even try, and there was never a design to put it really back together after you did that.

The Thinkpads tend to do pretty well, though increasingly the cpu and memory are "just part of the board now", but honestly that's just the direction of that industry in general. We are pushing physics, it's harder for us to do modular RAM at the speeds we want to interact with the RAM, LPCAMM is a thing, but even then you just have a single LPCAMM and it's less about 'repair' and more about being able to have different memory amounts by swapping the module out.

Comment Re:Most Thinkpads Quite Repairable (Score 4, Interesting) 49

Couldn't find actual details on *which* models they looked at.

If you look at the non-ThinkPad Lenovo laptops... They are complete shit for repairability.

The ThinkPads on the other hand tend to be very very good.

But other issues make me wonder about their competency in writing the report. Notably they give Lenovo a "lobbying penalty" for being a member of a group that fights right to repair but gives Motorola a pass for not being in those groups.... Lenovo and Motorola are the same company, and they don't seem to realize that.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Signal, Whatsapp, Telegraph 2

Is it just me or are these three platforms the arena of bad decision making in startup businesses? When somebody tries to lure me off of social media into one of these three platforms, alarm bells start ringing in my mind. If you're leading your business with communications on Signal or Whatsapp, just know that I for one will not be taking your business seriously.

Comment Re:What I find amusing is... (Score 2) 38

It's not out of date, it's a simplification.

They don't innately understand their capabilities, but information about it's own capabilities may be fed explicitly into it by other means, just like any other data you want to endeavor to put into the context.

The concept of asking if it implements a certain behavior and either it's deliberately lying or it's not actually there relies upon a false assumption that of course it has innate knowledge of it's own implementation without any "help".

The core relevant issue is that the LLMs will generate an answer based on no data. Instead of "Information on that one way or the other is not available to the model" it sees the answer most consistent with the narrative to be "Those behaviors do not exist". LLMs tend to generate output that implies confidence regardless of whether there should be confidence or not. The workaround has been to try to do everything possible to make sure there is actual data in the context window and hope it just doesn't come up that much, but this is only so possible. Some coding has the opportunity to use test cases to add "the output given failed to work" automatically to the narrative to drive iteration and maybe get further.

Comment Re:Intel's political marketing has always been bad (Score 4, Insightful) 23

If you read this post it shows that AMD stole Intel's design and reverse engineered it.

If you dig deeper, you'll find that AMD originally reverse engineered the *8080*, not the 8086. The two companies had entered into a cross-licensing agreement by 1976. Intel agreed to let AMD second-source the 8086 in order to secure the PC deal with IBM, who insisted on having a second source vendor.

There would have been no Intel success story without AMD to back them up.

(That actually would have been for the best. IBM would probably have selected an non-segmented CPU from somebody else instead of Intel's kludge.)

Comment Re:Self discipline (Score 1) 128

Here's the thing, some folks do the discipline and keep a healthy weight, but they are basically always feeling hunger. Some people don't feel it but some people are having to constantly fight sensation of hunger, with a respite of a little bit after a meal, and almost never feeling 'full'.

If we had something to tame the rather depressive experience of constantly denying one's hunger because you know in your mind that you got the nutrition and caloric intake you need, but your body wants to eat your way to obesity.

Comment baffling (Score 1) 139

It baffles the mind that Microsoftware - known for decades for being unreliable shit - is allowed on space missions at all, no matter how uncritical the role. The potential for malware alone is ludicrous. "Hey, pay us 2500 bitcoins if you want your space capsule back".

Then again, I figure the days when NASA did the right stuff are long past.

Comment Re:Sounds like the lights might be going out on PO (Score 2) 26

Problem is that the only viable market for mainframe are current mainframe customers, who are so change averse that if you even hint at breaking compatibility they will be triggered to start evaluating *all* their options if they are faced with a potential migration anyway.

IBM may love the idea of shuttering their in-house stuff in favor of massively cheap commodity stuff, but they would absolutely no longer command mainframe margins.

Comment Re:Clean room? (Score 5, Interesting) 125

Even if you use an AI to extract an extremely condensed specification out of the source code, it's hardly clean room if the LLM was pre-trained on the source code any way.

I once worked at a place that had a clean room process to create code compatible with a proprietary product. Anybody who had ever seen the original code or even loaded the original binary into a debugger was not allowed to write any code at all for the cloned product. The clone writers generally worked only off of the specifications and user documentation.

There were a handful of people who were allowed to debug the original to resolve a few questions about low-level compatibility. The only way they were allowed to communicate with the software writers was through written questions and answers that left a clear paper trail, and the answers had to be as terse as possible (usually just yes or no). Everyone knew that these memos were highly likely to be used as evidence in legal proceedings.

I highly doubt that any AI tech bros have ever been this rigorous, and I'd bet that most of these AIs have been trained on the exact same source code that they are cloning.

Comment Re:Here it comes (Score 1) 71

You're confusing the importance of avoiding Kessler syndrome in LEO with the difficulty of causing Kessler syndrome. GEO debris can potentially remain there for millions of years before interactions between the gravitational pull of the Sun, Earth, and Moon sufficiently perturb it. LEO debris remains for weeks to months. You have to have many orders of magnitude more debris in LEO to trigger Kessler Syndrome, where the rate of collisions exceeds the rate of debris loss.

The fact that a LEO Kessler Syndrome would also be short is something that exists on top of that.

It's also worth nothing that not only are modern satellites not only vastly better at properly disposing of themselves than they were in the 1970s when Kessler Syndrome was proposed, but they're also vastly better at avoiding debris strikes. All of these factors are multiplicative together.

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