I’m no expert and don’t care to become one, but I understand they generally trained these models on the entire public internet plus all the literature and research they could pirate.

So I would expect the outputs of those models to not be some kind of magical correct description of the world, but instead to be roughly “this passes for something a person on the internet might write.”

It does the thing it was designed to do pretty well. But then the sociopathic grifters tried to sell it to the world as a magic super-intelligence that actually knows things. And of course many small-time wannabe grifters ate it up.

What LLMs do is get you a passable elaborate forum post replying to your question, written by an extremely confident internet rando. But it’s done at computer speed and global scale!

The tech companies are doing a great job at making me uninterested in the hottest new phones. I used to follow the news about them and know the tech specs and stuff, because I’m a nerd and gadgets are fun and smart phones in particular are the intersection of SO much technology and engineering. Moore’s law was alive and well during all my formative years, so I am even conditioned to expect the excitement.

But lately, not only have I been ignoring what the big players are offering, I have been ignoring the phone I already have! Instead I have a PC at the end of the couch with a monitor on an arm that s swings right over my lap.

I use my phone pretty much just for music, web browser, Voyager (Lemmy on the go), and occasional texting. When I am at home I will sometimes misplace my phone for hours and just not worry about it.

I have already pushed the megacorp phone + social media experience so far out of my daily life, that if future options for open linux phones are rough around the edges and don’t have tap to pay then oh well I don’t think I care.

It’s much easier to live without the shiny new thing once you see how well your brain does when separated from it. (and you have some loved ones who are still hopelessly addicted to the scroll)

Yeah, they seem to think we are like the drug addicts who will seek out the batch killing people with ODs because it must be strong.

Should we tell them that the free first hit is supposed to make the user feel GOOD? Meh, let’s watch how much money they can burn before it all crashes down.

The importance of open & interchangeable hardware and software goes way beyond the upgrades you may or may not make, or even saving money & reducing e-waste.

You get better products that way. Having complete control over your system benefits you even if you never exercise that control. It is literally a constraint on enshittification.

Cool story, goog.

I’m just going to keep waiting for a linux/foss phone so that its features and capabilities are actually predictable year to year.

But maybe I’m just too picky about what features and capabilities I want. I admit I’ve gotten used to some pretty outlandish stuff like… lemme check my notes here… “the device does the things I tell it to do.” Real galaxy-brain shit!

Yeah, there are good places and bad places everywhere. That’s why we invented statistics, to figure out the differences (or lack thereof) between big messy groups of data points.

I live in a very pleasant suburban neighborhood in the US. I don’t ever see addicts zoning out like in the OP. But that doesn’t mean I should pretend that the problem doesn’t exist. That’s what my conservative family members like to do.

I didn’t say there were no issues.

My 4-monitor setup at work functions considerably better in both ubuntu and debian based Linux Mints than it does in Windows. Just your standard corporate Dell laptop & docking station.

No computers have zero weird stuff wrong with them. But over time the design intent has mattered more and more versus just the bugginess of the execution.

In my experience though, Linux has pulled ahead in both. And by a lot.

Go install Linux Mint and you might just realize that line is already way behind microsoft.

Your use case sounds perfect for using LibreOffice as a drop-in replacement. Opening a Word doc or an old Excel spreadsheet is effortless. You don’t sound like the “I use Excel every day for my job and there is no replacement” folks with very specific needs.

And I will echo what the other reply said: try Linux on your laptop! Not only will it probably work fine, it will probably also feel much faster and more responsive.

Trying most of the big Linux distros is super easy and zero commtment, too. When you boot from the install media, it loads directly into the OS desktop running natively on your hardware! Then once you’re ready to install it, there’s usually a shortcut on the desktop or something.

I recommend trying Linux Mint. It is so simple to install and full featured out of the box, plus being based on ubuntu and being very popular itself, information and help is everywhere.

I think that’s still a valid argument since perfection will probably never happen.

For me it’s more like, remember when the expectation was that Tesla would ever produce a version that didn’t suck ass?

Yeah, LLMs are interesting tech products to play with and find some niche uses for.

But for the love of god they are not “prop up the entire stock market and numerous multi-trillion-dollar companies indefinitely” good!

This is one reason I’m so glad we devs can install linux at work. I have LibreOffice installed sure, but if I need to use the Microsoft Office suite for some reason, it all works great as webpages in librewolf!

From Wikipedia, here is the article snippet that originated the term.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a “two-sided market”, where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Totally, and I think that’s why they thought it was worth a press release. In the article they go right to how they’re setting a new power density record with this design.

Electric motors are just really power dense. The article says they managed a short term peak of 1,000 hp with that little flat 12.7kg motor and the continuous output could still be half that.

Just the cooling must be crazy.

Out of curiosity I looked up something comparable. It looks like high-performance integrated drive units that have other stuff like the single-speed gearbox, differential, and inverter are still only in the dozens of kg.

The voltage/hp comparison there doesn’t really fit.

Power is in watts or horsepower. You multiply the torque with the RPM and a scaling factor to get power.

A higher voltage system could probably be expected to produce more torque and power from the same size motor, but a lot depends on the design of the motor.

Then to answer “how much torque though,” I haven’t looked into it but electric motors have a very nice torque curve across the RPM range. If a motor made all that power with low torque, then it must spin at super high RPM and need to be geared down.

It’s funny you mention the office side of things in addition to gaming, because I have remarked about the same thing.

Using Librewolf(firefox) on Linux, all of the M365 applications work fine in the browser. Probably even better, since I can actually close them when I want to. I use Teams the most, which is obviously a very connected thing. But for a word processor, which seems like the most local thing ever, the web app lets me share in MS format and accept comments and all that.

I could absolutely see Microsoft’s execs planning out the most efficient way to grind every bit of value out of the windows brand on their path to subscription everything.

Games work great in Linux!

And that’s not like “oh, about 3/4 of my favorite old games work without too much trouble.” It’s more like opening steam and “holy crap, half of my old favorites have native Linux versions and everything else just works using proton.”

Remember, the Steam Deck and the general shittiness of Microsoft has directed a lot of Valve’s resources towards gaming on Linux.

If you want to play some brand new AAA multiplayer thing with rootkit type anti cheat, then maybe you’d be stuck dual booting into windows.

I’d argue that those games could be abandoned, because there is SO much choice out there that I am certain I already own copies of dozens of games that I will never play. But if it’s a matter of playing what your friends are into, then yeah make the computer adapt to the human needs and not the other way around.

In my very limited knowledge of the household appliance market, Samsung has been a no-go for a long time. Like, the most expensive but also the most disposable.

And that’s before we even get to the enshittification and ad invasion.

It’s incredible to think about trying to explain the problem to my younger self 30 years ago…

“Yeah, computer hardware continued to scale pretty well so now even this refrigerator here has a computer inside it, a high resolution flat panel monitor, and even multiple ways to connect to the internet for remote control and feature updates.”

“wow, that’s amazing!”

"Yeah but nobody uses it. At least, nobody who understands tech and reads the news. You don’t even connect it to the internet in the first place. "

“What!? That seems totally backwards. What’s the problem for educated users? Are there hackers everywhere just waiting to connect to this iffy computer embedded in your home?”

“Oh no, it is much worse. The company that made the fridge could connect to it like they designed it to do!!! And to make it even more frightening, they usually have the infrastructure to be able to connect to EVERYBODY’S fridge at the same time!”

(begins playing spooky halloween music)

Smart phones are simultaneously such a wonder of human engineering and have become such a disappointment of human greed.

This whole situation has made me just care less about my phone, and use it less in my life while I use Linux PCs much more.

I don’t see my phone as a “computer” at this point, really. It’s more of a communication appliance. If I’m launching an app that’s not texting, calling, GPS, or music, it’s probably a replacement for a website I’d normally use on a PC.

Linux phones could change this though. The idea of your PC being your docked phone would work great for most use cases. Unfortunately though, even though I would love it I don’t really see the general public jumping at the chance to get back to the desktop experience. I could maybe see a little traction in the business world.

I think I am just done with the whole concept of the convenient prepackaged tech product, and especially staying “connected” with them.

For example, I stopped wearing a smart watch this summer and it’s been a positive. I was the type to wear it 23 hours a day and track my sleep with it and everything. It turns out that not instantly seeing every notification or knowing the exact minute of the day are not a big deal, sans are even good for me.

Part of what I’ve also done is use my phone a lot less and my linux desktop a lot more. I use it as a mobile communication device and not my computer for everything. I guess the next time I need to replace it I’ll either get an iphone since everybody in my family has one, or I’ll see where these wonderful Linux phone projects end up.