Ember's recent activity

  1. Comment on NYT Quiz: Who’s a better writer: AI or humans? in ~tech

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Yes. After I finished and realized I had mostly picked AI writings, I realized it was because I was judging based on what felt more cohesive, instead of what told the better story. The human...

    Yes. After I finished and realized I had mostly picked AI writings, I realized it was because I was judging based on what felt more cohesive, instead of what told the better story. The human writings have a momentum, a direction to where they're moving, and re-reading the same paragraph over and over exposes this rawness.

    9 votes

  2. Comment on Amazon Web Services crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright in ~tech

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Like so many software platforms, I doubt it's intentional design; it's just easier. A company pressed for time and resources will take every shortcut possible, and AWS is convenient and industry...

    Like so many software platforms, I doubt it's intentional design; it's just easier. A company pressed for time and resources will take every shortcut possible, and AWS is convenient and industry standard. Why bother implement an offline mode when you're drowning in a backlog of other feature requests and investors are demanding results? It's rare to find a company that actually takes the time to think through every corner case; most are just racing to capture their market. It's so rare that I'm unreasonably happy every time I find a (usually small) company that seems content on building a tiny perfect product.

    6 votes

  3. Comment on How we're designing Audacity for the future in ~tech

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Didn't the video address this in the "Building Audacity 4" section? It looks like all those DAW features (tempo, tonality, effects) can be hidden via the Workspace feature. He discuses a Music...

    Didn't the video address this in the "Building Audacity 4" section? It looks like all those DAW features (tempo, tonality, effects) can be hidden via the Workspace feature. He discuses a Music workspace which would contain those features, but emphasizes that it's not the only way their new UI can present itself.

    Note: I rarely use DAWs, so maybe I'm missing what makes these v4 changes alarming.

    4 votes

  5. Comment on I am new to Mac OS, give me your favorite or preferred settings/ tools! in ~tech

    Ember
    Link
    By default, when you hold down a key, macOS will pop up a menu to select an accent, instead of just repeating the letter. You can disable this with terminal command defaults write -g...

    By default, when you hold down a key, macOS will pop up a menu to select an accent, instead of just repeating the letter. You can disable this with terminal command defaults write -g ApplePressAndHoldEnabled -bool false.

    5 votes

  6. Comment on Stop Killing Games petitions hit the target for both UK and EU in ~games

    Ember
    Link
    Louis Rossmann also posted a video about the movement, which I found interesting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dibEZ9-Psss Rossmann has been one of the big YouTubers in the Right to Repair...

    Louis Rossmann also posted a video about the movement, which I found interesting.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dibEZ9-Psss

    Rossmann has been one of the big YouTubers in the Right to Repair movement for years, so he's got real experience in this flavor of activism. He had some tough-love comments toward Ross Scott about how the priorities in your personal life will conflict with a movement's needs.

    13 votes

  7. Comment on Explain Linux controversies to me in ~tech

  9. Comment on Linus Torvalds weighs in on the Rust for Linux controversy in ~comp

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Actually yeah… who’s next in the line of succession to run the project? I know Linus has handed off projects just fine in the past, like git, but I wonder if something more monumental like Linux...

    Actually yeah… who’s next in the line of succession to run the project? I know Linus has handed off projects just fine in the past, like git, but I wonder if something more monumental like Linux would be harder.

    3 votes

  10. Comment on Installing an aftermarket radio in a old car in ~transport

    Ember
    (edited )
    Link
    I installed an aftermarket radio into a Ford Taurus 2003 during Covid. It took me an entire Saturday, after researching the right parts. Things I learned during the process: I needed certain radio...

    I installed an aftermarket radio into a Ford Taurus 2003 during Covid. It took me an entire Saturday, after researching the right parts. Things I learned during the process:

    • I needed certain radio removal "keys", looking like a set of prongs. I grabbed them from a nearby parts store.
    • Using the prongs to remove the radio was tedious. The prongs have to reach deep inside the dash and depress some plastic tabs simultaneously, so I had to wiggle the whole setup for a long time before it clicked and came apart.
    • I didn't know the plug for the speakers was in the trunk of the Taurus. So I had to run wires from the trunk up to the dash. The Internet told me to hide it under the carpet trim, which is only attached with plastic clips; so again, it was extremely tedious, careful work to pull up the trim along the driver's side of the car (without breaking it!) and hide the wire underneath. Some of the trim is still a bit warped from my impatience and yanking too hard.
    • I needed some cable ties to tidy up the wires as they crossed from the trim to the radio. Otherwise, the wires would be hanging down into your gas&break pedal area, which is super dangerous.
    1 vote

  11. Comment on Seeking suggestions for Windows virtual desktop (for Photoshop schoolwork) in ~comp

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Yes, there’s practically zero upgradeability in a MacBook. The memory, GPU, and CPU are all unified on the same chip, and MacBook storage modules are proprietary. So if your student will need 16GB...

    Yes, there’s practically zero upgradeability in a MacBook. The memory, GPU, and CPU are all unified on the same chip, and MacBook storage modules are proprietary.

    So if your student will need 16GB RAM and 1TB storage, make sure you buy it in advance. I’ve suffered a lot of headache from running out of space on a 256GB SSD while editing video on a Mac.

    When it comes to buying used Apple products, the Apple certified refurbished store is pretty great: https://www.apple.com/shop/refurbished/mac/macbook-air-macbook-pro . I’ve never had a problem buying it there; it’s practically brand new, including new packaging, charging cables, etc. It’s pricier than other used markets, but that’s the cost of certified.

    If you don’t want to go with Apple certified, I’ve also used Swappa for cheaper used Apple products. I’ve also sold my own Apple products back on Swappa, because you can fetch a higher return than trading it into Apple.

    2 votes

  12. Comment on What long book series is worth its page count? in ~books

    Ember
    Link Parent
    While Redwall is a really great series, I personally wouldn’t say it’s all “worth the page count”. I remember thinking (as a late teenager) how many of the books felt like just re-tellings of...

    Redwall series by Jacques

    While Redwall is a really great series, I personally wouldn’t say it’s all “worth the page count”. I remember thinking (as a late teenager) how many of the books felt like just re-tellings of previous entries. Main characters with tragic or idyllic backstories, struggle against a tyrant, journey across the wilderness, vast hordes of evil enemies… all fantastic and enjoyable as a kid but a tiny bit repetitive once I recognized the pattern.

    18 votes

  13. Comment on The iPhones 16 in ~tech

    Ember
    Link

    The facile take is that Apple has run out of hardware ideas and now just adds a new button to the iPhone each year — Action button last year, Camera Control this year, maybe they’ll finally add those green/red phone call buttons next year. But that’s underestimating just how radical it is for Apple, in the iPhone’s 18th annual hardware iteration, to add a hardware button dedicated to a single application.

    After over a week using several iPhone 16 review units, my summary of Camera Control is that it takes a while to get used to — I feel like I’m still getting used to it — but it already feels like something I wouldn’t want to do without. It’s a great idea, and a bold one.

    Also, none of the Apple Intelligence features currently in iOS 18.1 are game-changing. The Clean Up feature in Photos is pretty good, and when it doesn’t produce good results, you can simply revert to the original. The AI-generated summaries of messages, notifications, and emails in Mail are at times apt, but at others not so much. I haven’t tried the Rewrite tool because I’m, let’s face it, pretty confident in my own writing ability. But, after my own final editing pass, I ran this entire review through the Proofread feature, and it correctly flagged seven mistakes I missed, and an eighth that I had marked, but had forgotten to fix. Most of its suggestions that I have chosen to ignore were, by the book, legitimate.

    Type to Siri is definitely cool, but I don’t see why we couldn’t have had that feature since 2010. I have actually used the new “Product Knowledge” feature, where Siri draws upon knowledge from Apple’s own support documentation, while writing this review. It’s great. But maybe Apple’s support website should have had better search years ago?

    These are all good features. But let’s say you never heard of LLMs or ChatGPT. And instead, at WWDC this year, without any overarching “Apple Intelligence” marketing umbrella, Apple had simply announced features like a new cool-looking Siri interface, typing rather than talking to Siri, being able to remove unwanted background objects from photos, a “proofreading” feature for the standard text system that extends and improves the years-old but (IMO) kinda lame grammar-checking feature on MacOS, and brings it to iOS too? Those would seem like totally normal features Apple might add this year. But not tentpole features. These Apple Intelligence features strike me as nothing more than the sort of nice little improvements Apple makes across its OSes every year.

    I might be underselling how impossible the Clean Up feature would be without generative AI. I am very likely underselling how valuable the new writing tools might prove to people trying to write in a second language, or who simply aren’t capable of expressing themselves well in their first language. But like I said, they’re all good features. I just don’t see them as combining to form the collective tentpole that Apple is marketing “Apple Intelligence” as. I get it that from Apple’s perspective, engineering-wise, it’s like adding an entire platform to the existing OS. It’s a massive engineering effort and the on-device execution constraints are onerous. But from a user’s perspective, they’re just ... features. When’s the last year Apple has not added cool new features along the scope of these?

    If not for the AI hype wave the industry is currently caught in, this emphasis on which features are part of “Apple Intelligence” would seem as strange as Apple emphasizing, in advertisements, which apps are now built using SwiftUI.

    Every phone on the market will soon be able to generate impersonal saccharine passages of text and uncanny-valley images via LLMs. Only Apple has the talent and passion to create something as innovative and genuinely useful as Camera Control.

    15 votes

  15. Comment on Yarn, React, and Udemy. Help requested. in ~comp

    Ember
    Link
    I’m on mobile so can’t confirm, but it’s possible web-vitals removed ReportHandler or renamed it. You could look through their changelog for breaking changes....

    I’m on mobile so can’t confirm, but it’s possible web-vitals removed ReportHandler or renamed it. You could look through their changelog for breaking changes.

    https://github.com/GoogleChrome/web-vitals/blob/main/CHANGELOG.md

    Then you could either downgrade that library or fix the breaking changes.

    7 votes

  16. Comment on Heat death of the internet in ~tech

    Ember
    Link
    A lot of this is less depressing if you use the Internet as a tool instead a source of life. Watching a YouTube trailer, enjoying an online magazine or social media site, online streaming...

    A lot of this is less depressing if you use the Internet as a tool instead a source of life.

    • Watching a YouTube trailer, enjoying an online magazine or social media site, online streaming services:
      • These are all modern Internet luxuries for entertainment. What about using word-of-mouth from your friends to judge which movie to see? Reading real print magazines or books over lunch? Getting DVDs from the library?
    • Coworkers using ChatGPT to produce garbage:
      • Hold them responsible. Just like the old days when normal human coworkers were being lazy, if someone's producing bad work, then it's their fault. Don't take the fall for them.
    • Recipes filled with ads, useless search results, getting mistaken for an American:
      • Do more stuff locally. In your neighborhood, town, city. Get a cookbook from the library, ask a friend for their favorite recipe. Spend more time talking to real people, learning from experience and advice.
      • (Admittedly, Wikipedia is hard to beat.)
    • Airbnb and Uber being terrible:
      • We all knew these companies were just propped up by VC cash. It was never going to last, and hotels & taxis haven't died off.

    We don't need the Internet to live happily.

    28 votes

  17. Comment on VR gaming is reawakening my enthusiasm for games in ~games

    Ember
    Link
    Half Life: Alyx is an awesome game that will always be a highlight in gaming for me. It’s such an incredible opportunity to experience truly immersive gameplay; so many other games and graphics...

    Half Life: Alyx is an awesome game that will always be a highlight in gaming for me. It’s such an incredible opportunity to experience truly immersive gameplay; so many other games and graphics cards and hardware companies claim to sell immersive experiences, but Alyx is the only thing that’s come close. The visceral churn in your stomach when a headcrab jumps at you or a fully armored soldier charges with murderous intent… it’s an instinct that no 2D game can trigger.

    Sadly I think it’ll be unique in the gaming industry for a while. Nobody makes games like Valve, and it feels like no one’s trying either. Maybe that’s just pessimism, but I don’t expect another experience like Alyx for a while.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on Zendaya-Palooza box office weekend pushes ‘Dune: Part Two’ to $700M WW; ‘Godzilla x Kong’ to half billion as Legendary Warner pics count $1.2B WW in ~movies

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Why? Why does this have to be a rule? Stories aren’t a computer program written to be executed and return a single output. There’s nothing sacred about the pages of a novel. Why should we deny...

    A movie adaptation of a book should attempt to change as little as possible to make the original story work for film. If you wanted to tell a different story, then tell a completely different story.

    Why?

    Why does this have to be a rule? Stories aren’t a computer program written to be executed and return a single output. There’s nothing sacred about the pages of a novel.

    Why should we deny generations of storytelling techniques, where narratives are retold and altered to suite the audience and the medium and recounter’s tastes? Like musicians before the digital age, performing variations and creative interpretations instead of getting trapped in a Spotify definitive MP3.

    4 votes

  19. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tildes

    Ember
    Link Parent
    I know old forum etiquette was “no necro posting” but I’ve enjoyed it here on tildes. Usually the revival has something new to add and isn’t spam. Also tildes is good about collapsing what you’ve...

    I know old forum etiquette was “no necro posting” but I’ve enjoyed it here on tildes. Usually the revival has something new to add and isn’t spam. Also tildes is good about collapsing what you’ve already read and highlight what you haven’t.

    12 votes

  20. Comment on <deleted topic> in ~tildes

    Ember
    Link Parent
    Yup tildes is perfect for my post-Reddit needs. It’s more in-depth and slower, so I can spend 15min on the site and feel just as “caught up” as hours of Reddit browsing would take.

    Yup tildes is perfect for my post-Reddit needs. It’s more in-depth and slower, so I can spend 15min on the site and feel just as “caught up” as hours of Reddit browsing would take.

    75 votes