• 0 Posts
  • 113 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 9th, 2023

help-circle

  • I’ve been using my MX Master 3S for three years now, and while I love it, the right click recently got really wonky. It only registers the click like 6 out of 10 times, which is unacceptable for my job.

    Doubt it’s still in warranty, but I plan to try to get them to replace it. I was thinking about trying the vertical MX Master instead, but I love the magnetic scroll wheel on the normal MX Master too much. I don’t think I can go back to a mouse with a “normal” scroll wheel.



  • I come back to this problem every year or so because I’m never satisfied with my music metadata. Years ago I had my musicbrainz picard settings dialed in really nicely, where I could drag folder over and it would spit out the right thing like 7 out of 10 times. It still required a lot of doubled checking and manual oversight though, so I was never satisfied.

    I tried mediamonkey for a while, because it has decent metadata support and plugs into most of the expected APIs. But when all is said and done, all these tools use the same data sources, and none of them are exactly consistent with each other so matches aren’t as straightforward as they should be.

    Lidar never quite did it for me, so I haven’t looked at my install in a couple years. But based on @skoberlink@lemmy.world’s recommendation I’ll try a fresh install and see if get I better results this time. I’m always happy in the arr interfaces.






  • Wow, this is awesome. We have very similar tastes. I’m currently working my way through Le Guin’s bibliography, and I’m consistently impressed by her style and timelessness. She was a master of the craft.

    I think I like Banks a lot more than you do. It’s been a while since I finished the Culture series though, so I might need to do a reread of some of the earlier ones. But his post-scarcity concepts, technology/ship design, and the way he tackles such massive stories, are my absolutely favorite. I loved every single book in that series. Though I do agree some of his main characters can come off as a bit dull.

    There’s quite a few on there I haven’t heard of before, so I’ll definitely be saving this for my To Read list. Thank you!!




  • Casey Newton founded Platformer, after leaving The Verge around 5 years ago. But yeah, I used to listen to Hard Fork, his podcast with Kevin Roose, but I stopped because of how uncritically they cover AI and LLMs. It’s basically the only thing they cover, and yet they are quite gullible and not really realistic about the whole industry. They land some amazing interviews with key players, but never ask hard questions or dive nearly deep enough, so they end up sounding pretty fluffy as ass-kissy. I totally agree with Zitron’s take on their reporting. I constantly found myself wishing they were a lot more cynical and combative.


  • That’s an interesting article, but it was published in 2022, before LLMs were a thing on anyone’s radar. The results are still incredibly impressive without a doubt, but based on how the researchers explain it, it looks like it was accomplished using deep learning, which isn’t the same as LLMs. Though they’re not entirely unrelated.

    Opaque and confusing terminology in this space also just makes it very difficult to determine who or which systems or technology are actually making these advancements. As far as I’m concerned none of this is actual AI, just very powerful algorithmic prediction models. So the claims that an AI system itself has made unique technological advancements, when they are incapable of independent creativity, to me proves that nearly all their touted benefits are still entirely hypothetical right now.


  • The article explains the problems in great detail.

    Here’s just one small section of the text which describes some of them:

    All of this certainly makes knowledge and literature more accessible, but it relies entirely on the people who create that knowledge and literature in the first place—that labor that takes time, expertise, and often money. Worse, generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate. Generative-AI companies say that their chatbots will themselves make scientific advancements, but those claims are purely hypothetical.

    (I originally put this as a top-level comment, my bad.)



  • Your description of those desks totally knocked some of my old memories loose. I remember going to a friend’s house in the late 90s when the first smallish “all-in-one” PCs started coming on the market (before the iMac claimed that space in ‘98). They had their new all-in-one PC set up on a tiny desk in the hallway outside their office. It was there so everyone in the family could use it, but I remember being shocked at how small it was, and so impressed that it didn’t need the whole corner of a room.



  • Oh boy, this makes me nervous but cautiously excited. This is one of my favorite books, and is the first in my absolute favorite series of sci-fi novels. Banks’ Culture series represents the apex of space opera narrative for me, and it was the one series I was totally fine leaving on paper since it’s so dear to me.

    I’m usually less critical of TV adaptations than most, so they’d reallllly have to fuck it up to ruin it for me. I’m an Asimov fan for example, and I didn’t hate the Foundation show…I know, I know, the heresy! So we’ll see what happens. There’s a lot they could do beautifully, and a lot they could really mess up.