Humanity is so fickle, it’s impossible to tell.

In the US, we went from overwhelming opposition to gay marriage to overwhelming support in less than a decade.

On the other hand, we went from aggressively eradicating CFCs and fixing the ozone hole to dragging our feet on renewable energy for several decades.

Even further back, we went from back-to-back world wars and economic collapse to a tentative global peace and prosperity.

Monarchy seemed inevitable for ages, and then multiple democratic revolutions all sprang up in quick succession.

Equality was fundamental to the Constitution, but we still haven’t healed the wounds of slavery.

There seems to be no telling. Some problems languish for a long time, but then see massive improvements in the blink of an eye. Some obvious fixes lay dormant for an offensively long time.

When I think about this stuff, I get a weird mix of hope and despair and guilt and frustration and impatience.

It seems unfair that we got stuck with these particular crises, with no guarantee that we’re actually prepared to handle them. (Maybe that’s the entire story of humanity.)

And then I remember what Tolkien had to say about such things:

“Done is better than perfect.”

Everything is political.

I thought that was the free space.

If my time consulting is anything to go off of…

The agency provided several options. The client liked 3 of them and wanted them all smooshed together.

Client opened up the agency’s .pptx and moved some things around until they had this monstrosity and said “There! That’s what I want. See how easy that was? Why do we even pay you?”

The designers quietly held back the urge to quit on the spot, but the lead said “Absolutely, that’s a great decision, we’ll have a final version for you tomorrow!” And the designers took great joy in delivering precisely what the client asked for.

Return to freakin sender!

He and Trump deserve each other.

They’re all towers. But the buttons are all pretty shallow with very light actuation force required.

And they all happen to be situated such that the corner which has the button is the corner furthest away from the desk, so when she jumps up onto the PC as a platform to get ready to jump onto the desk, her feet are all grouped up right in that corner.

And you can imagine that if she’s crouched down ready to jump, and I put my arm out to prevent her from jumping from the tower to the desk, that’s a lot of pressure all applied to her little toe beans.

It’s an unfortunate coincidence. But that experience, together with seeing this Mac Mini design, has made me wonder why we tend to put a button with such drastic effects right out in the open like this.

That sounds…

Easier to get almost right than actually learning the subject.

Much, much harder to get completely right than actually learning the subject.

So yes, basically the archetypal use case for LLMs.

I was using the mobile app.

A couple months ago, I logged into an old Reddit account. It only took a few minutes of scrolling before it happened.

I had to scroll back up and try again, and record my screen so I could doublecheck my count later.

35 ads or “recommended” posts (i.e. not from anything I subscribed to) in a row.

I’m curious what that means for the overall percentage of the average user’s feed.

Edit: Okay yall… I appreciate all of the free technical support, but it’s really not needed. I was just documenting some findings.

But since everyone is so concerned about improving my Reddit experience, here are a few things to consider:

• I’m a mobile dev, so I don’t mind enduring a shitty UX for the sake of finding out what other companies are doing with their apps. If I’m going in with a mindset of curiosity, it really doesn’t bother me. In fact, I want to see the worst parts.
• Even if I had been going in just to have a pleasant scrolling experience, the reason I opened Reddit at all is because my wife had my phone for a while (due to toddler nonsense, we had swapped phones and she was stuck sitting in the hallway for a few minutes) and she had decided to open the app, so the decision of app vs. website was kinda made for me already.
• Even if she had considered using the website instead, I wasn’t logged in because I only use private browsing (again, mobile dev, so when testing web flows I like to make sure there is no saved web data).
• Even if I was already logged in, it’s an iPhone. While I do use an ad-blocker, the ad-blocking capabilities of Safari are pretty limited, so I’m not sure it would’ve improved much.
• Even if I was on Android, I’d probably still not have any extensive ad-blocking enabled, because I want to stay relatively vanilla in my setup to reduce confounding factors when testing.
• Even if there was a genuine opportunity here for my setup to be improved… I didn’t ask for that, and swarming people with “have you considered doing it the right way?” when they’re just making a basic observation doesn’t create a great atmosphere for the overall Lemmy experience.

I’ll just stick with covering it up. Without fail, if I leave it uncovered my cat will press it. She’s even held it long enough for a forced shutdown twice that I can think of.

Yes, but even pushing it will bring up a prompt, which is annoying. And also my cat has held it down long enough to force a shutdown on my media server before, as well as on my wife’s PC during Overwatch.

This is the dumbest timeline.

As someone who has to use heavy/taped-on little toys to cover the power buttons on my PCs or else my cat invariably opens a shutdown dialog in the middle of something… Thank you.

Sure. And you can buy a dirt bike cheaper than an ATV. Yet people still buy ATVs.

I’m not gonna do iOS dev or ML on a GMKtec no matter how cost-effective it is, just like I’m not gonna play x86 Windows games on a Mac even if I win a maxed-out unit in a giveaway.

Is there even a better ARM SoC? All I know of is the Snapdragon X Elites, which are either on par or slightly below the M4. And you can only get them in a laptop form factor at this point, cuz they cancelled the mini-PC dev kit.

True. It was just the first comparison I saw when I searched for M4 benchmarks.

Really, AMD isn’t even a fair comparison because we’re talking about an ARM SoC here. So maybe the Snapdragon dev kit that ultimately got cancelled?

It was supposed to be $900, for a special Snapdragon X Elite, 32GB RAM, and 512GB SSD.

cpubenchmark.net has comparisons to other X Elite chips, putting them pretty much on-par with the M4 or maybe just below it.

With the same amount of RAM and storage in a Mac Mini, you’re talkin $1200. So, $300 premium for a device that’s maybe 2-8% better, has retail support instead of being a dev kit, and… well, actually exists. It’s not a slam dunk for the Mini, but it’s clearly not a rip-off either.

M4 reportedly outperforms Intel’s Core i9-14900KS by 16%. That CPU alone is over $600.

The only thing I hate about Winter is not Winter’s fault, and it’s basically what you said:

Work is somehow perfectly scheduled so that you’re inside, staring at a brick wall for 90-100% of the daylight hours for 5 out of every 7 days.

Winter is beautiful in ways that are completely unlike the other seasons, but unless you’re very fortunate you only get a few glimpses of it.

I feel like if you were designing a society to make people suffer, that’s how you would do it.