Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Reliability? (Score 1) 42

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) 42

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 3, Interesting) 42

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.

Comment Re:Sounds like a good problem to have (Score 1) 128

the Mac mini being the rare exception, which was just a little too nerdy (needing your left over keyboard, mouse, and monitor)

If that's a barrier to entry, it's one that is shared by 90% of the (non-laptop) PC market, and it never seemed to bother PC users. It's not like Apple won't happily sell you a keyboard, mouse, and monitor along with your Mac Mini, if that's what you want to do.

Comment Re:Costly status quo? (Score 4, Insightful) 57

it's using horrendous amounts of power and causing untold environmental damage

Comparable to, say, a 787 airliner, whose environmental damage we tolerate without thought or comment simply because we're already used to it.

while maintaining the existing overall parity between the bad guys and the worse guys.

Consider the alternative, then. Anthropic does nothing, and sooner or later OpenAI or some other less responsible company delivers an AI with similar capabilities, but just throws it out to the public without much thought about the consequences. Both the black hats and the white hats start using it, of course, but the black hats have a field day compromising anything and everything before the white hats have a chance to find, fix, and distribute all the necessary patches to defend against all the newfound exploits. Not a great situation to be in, but probably unavoidable at this point unless the white hats are given a head start.

Comment Re:Go Vegan and Nobody Gets Hurt (Score 1) 87

Correct, Google AI was mistaken by sticking that word "Domestic" in there along with "USDA". Only 94.2 million cattle In the USA, which the maximum number of Bison was somewhere around 30 million. This matches the 3x to 4x increase that I expected. I am surprised that the USA has such a small portion of the world total however, but the 1.5 billion number was backed by multiple sources.

I have also heard that both Bison and grass-fed cattle emit less greenhouse gasses than most farmed cattle, not sure what the factor is.

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.

Slashdot Top Deals

Disraeli was pretty close: actually, there are Lies, Damn lies, Statistics, Benchmarks, and Delivery dates.

Working...