Imo it’s both overblown and very impressive. Deep neural networks are capable of many things that we didn’t even imagine 10 years ago. We’ve made huge leaps.

The problem is that every company is putting “AI” in everything and techbro’s and managers are heavily overvaluing the technology. Most companies don’t need AI. In many cases there are way better methods to do the thing they want to do. The fridge or washing machine doesn’t need AI, the website of whatever company doesn’t need an AI assistant, and most people don’t need an AI accelerator in their laptop or phone.

Mood

I work as a Java programmer, which means that I spend about 50% of my day complaining about Java. Why doesn’t it have enums like Rust? Why are there no tuples? How many goat sacrifices do the Java gods require to support named optional arguments to functions like Python? In the remaining time I have meetings, write docs, write tests, and sometimes even code. Nothing to complain about though, seeing how we are treated compared to people I know who work as taxi drivers or in elderly care, we programmers are basically treated as gods.

As for music, I like Hardstyle and Drum and Bass primarily. Examples: “Phuture Noize & Devin Wild - Waves”, DnB: “Telomic & Susan H - Underwater”. I’ll be visiting the DnB festival “Liquicity festival” this weekend so I’m very hyped right now

Crikey. You could run a marathon after that and still have a calorie surplus. Is this actually real?!

My Thinkpad almost turns 10 this year and I still use it. It’s still quite snappy for normal browsing and programming work on the go. Because I had 2 batteries for it that were easily switchable, the battery that I’m using now is not yet completely dead and will take me 1-2 hours of programming.

It has had its screen replaced due to someone kicking my bag and breaking the screen, and I’ve had to replace the keyboard at one point after showering the laptop in tea. But the ease with which you can replace stuff like the keyboard is awesome. The thing is definitely built to last

Okay this is disgusting. It’s only gonna make people’s money problems worse. If you can’t pay for a domino’s pizza out of the pocket, maybe it’s a better idea to go for something cheaper like a freezer pizza from the supermarket. Most people picking this option will be making a mistake.

Oh I never knew, but it seems true. On his Wikipedia page both researches are mentioned. It’s so impressive how these researchers are behind so many different but interesting papers.

Machine learning and compression have always been closely tied together. It’s trying to learn the “rules” that describe the data rather than memorizing all the data.

I remember implementing a paper older than me in our “Information Theory” course at university that treated the creation of a decision tree as compression. Their algorithm considered sending the decisions tree and all the exceptions to the decision tree and the tree itself. If a node in the tree increased the overall message size, it would simply be pruned. This way they ensured that you wouldn’t make conclusions while having very little data and would only add the big patterns in the data.

Fundamentally it is just compression, it’s just a way better method of compression than all the models that we had before.

EDIT: The paper I’m talking about is “Inferring decision trees using the minimum description length principle” - L. Ross Quinlan & Ronald L. Rivest

Uhm, not sure where I lie on this scale I guess. Is this the real scale or some abstract representation? Personally it’s a 1 or 2 for me, but the image constantly changes and is never quite stable. There can be quite some detail, but it’s only very temporary. Once I focus on some other part of the apple and go back everything is different

Maybe it’s just my “golden touch”, but like 70% of the games I’ve tried to play have had some kind of issue. I recently got a steam deck and I regularly have crashes where the whole deck just does a full restart. Usually while I’m already gaming for a while. On the deck most games do generally start though, which is better than my own PC. On my PC I tend to have to hack around a bit before it works. For now I’m still gaming on Windows because of this instability, but I will have to switch at some point due to Micro$oft’s ever growing greed

• Actually being the owner of my phone. Apple decides everything for their users and allows them little freedom. I want to be able to put random apps on my phone, including maybe even my own.

• Price. Shit’s expensive. I now got a Pixel 8 for less than 500 euro’s. Before that I had phones around the 300 euro price range.

• Their ecosystem. They try to lure you into an everything Apple ecosystem. Stuff like iMessage is horrible for consumers. With an Android phone I have choice of apps, smart watch, earbuds, etc. Apple will always try to force you into buying their fancy but expensive things.

• No benefit, there’s plenty of cool Android phones.

Etc etc.

I’m on Arch (actually a converted Antergos) and I have an NVIDIA card as well. My first attempt a few months ago was horrible, bricking my system and requiring a bootable USB an a whole evening to get Linux working again.

My second attempt was recently, and went a lot better. X11 no longer seems to work, so I’m kinda stuck with it, but it feels snappy as long as my second monitor is disconnected. I’ve yet to try some gaming. My main monitor is a VRR 144Hz panel with garbage-tier HDR. The HDR worked out of the box on KDE Plasma, with the same shitty quality as on Windows, so I immediately turned it off again. When my second monitor is connected I get terrible hitching. Every second or so the screen just freezes for hundreds of milliseconds. Something about it (1280x1024, 75Hz, DVI) must not make Wayland happy. No settings seem to change anything, only physically disconnecting the monitor seems to work.

It’s not like I totally didn’t enjoy it, but Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was good in many ways, and I totally get why it’s so we’ll loved, but I just have nothing with the setting. I don’t like cowboys, I don’t like playing as an asshole who makes bad decision after bad decision, and I also don’t like a setting where women are basically property. Just not really my vibe. I just came from Cyberpunk 2077 and the contrast was quite big, even though Cyberpunk is supposed to be more dystopian

My 10 year old laptop (which has been running Linux for 9.5 years now) has an SSD, so it’ll restart in a normal amount of time. Even old laptops no longer have HDDs only

Not sure about satisfactory, considering the map is always the same. So the only sources of randomness are starting at another location in the same map or playing differently yourself

I mean, yes and no. The festivals I visit and my gaming PC are also a complete waste of energy when you view it like that. I hate the dangerous situations we have every year in the Netherlands with fireworks. The heavy fireworks and loud bangs, the vandalism. But I’m okay with the people who send a lot of nice colourful fireworks into the sky around new year’s eve, and the farmers with their loud “carbid” launchers.

I like it. It’s sort of a follow up to Rollercoaster tycoon 1 and 2. Same kinda play style, but then in a modern game. I had some good fun with it. Personally I like it more than Planet Coaster, where I found the customization too overwhelming.

Block out the heat and sun during the day. Have everything open during the night, with a tactical fan placed wherever it helps the most.

But this only really helps the first few days. After that it’s down to accepting the situation and being so tired that you fall asleep anyway.

2K per year, subsidized by the Dutch government afaik, because International students pay way more.

Maybe it’s the same thing I recently had. After running a half marathon in April this year and cycling another 20km from and to the course, I also had some weird muscle cramps when finally taking a rest. It was almost like something was crawling under my skin. My muscles felt like they were cramping together and releasing very quickly and very locally in tiny spots all over my calves. It was such a surreal feeling. Kinda creepy and weird, but at the same time also kinda nice and satisfying.