I am looking to buy a new laptop soon because of the holiday deals.

I am looking for a laptop with:

1. high performance (most important)

2. high battery life (i dont mind carrying a charger around, but I would like not to).

3. does not overheat too much (not much of a problem since I will be living in basically a tundra for the next few months, but it might be a problem around summer).

My current laptop is a Macbook. I don't mind buying another one but I prefer Windows so I can game. My one problem with Windows is that every time I buy a Windows laptop, it gets slow as fuck for no reason after a month of use, which isn't a problem I've had with my Mac.

Cost isn't much of an issue. And feel free to get into the nerdy details. I don't know much about hardware and would like to learn.

Thanks!

EDIT: If you have any recs for cool accessories, let me know about those as well.

Edit: Some interactions with the bot I posted in the comments, if you are curious about potential prompts: https://tildes.net/~tech/13lj/lets_talk_about_chatgpt#comment-7lw6

I have been obsessively reading about ChatGPT since it came out. I'm going to skip introducing it for those who don't know yet (please go ahead and click the link, and do some googling), because I just.. need to vent.

I have experimented with it. A bunch. I'm also pretty familiar with GPT's capabilities from before. And ChatGPT still took me by surprise.

Still, as of four days ago, I did not believe we were there yet. Hell, I didn't believe we would get there within my lifetime, and now, it's there.

"But Adys, you don't understand the limitations!"

Yeah, no, see, I understand the limitations. I understand this is the version that is still in its infancy, is crippled by stupid decisions from OpenAI, is not running on GPT-4 yet, and doesn't yet have things such as some layer of eg. checking correctness.

But I also understand the potential. HN has been full of people crying out how we're not at AGI yet but DOES THIS MATTER? Planes are still decades away from displacing most bird jobs.

I think anyone who isn't currently in utter shock at how good ChatGPT is, is either:

• Somehow woefully misinformed (eg. the less tech literates I've shown it to have asked me "Can't Siri do this?")
• In complete denial about the potential of the technology
• Utterly thick

I want to cry on every corner of every street that we are at the edge of the AI revolution.

The "problems" that are left are not necessarily easy, but they're also not necessarily hard. For example, GPT's tendency to bullshit is problematic but there are ways to verify output, and those ways can themselves be automated and feed back into GPT.

I have never, in my life, been so taken aback by a technological advancement. I'm flashing back to the scene in Westworld: "It's not possible. Technology isn't there yet."

Like, no, this isn't skynet, person of interest, westworld, or anything like this. But it is something. Something very different, very unique. The world is about to completely change. And I want to stress this: EVERYONE I've seen argue against this has been in very obvious denial. I'll be happy to hear you out if you disagree, but if your only argument is that this isn't exactly the AI you expected / it can't solve the exact problem you throw at it, I'll refer you to better birds and faster horses.

So, next year, I will spend two 3-month periods at a place that is 1400km away from my home. Because of my somewhat large, superfast dog, with a tendency to run away and topple people, I will have to go by car, dog in hand (don't worry, I won't be driving :P). Each roundtrip amounts to 42 hours on the road.

At the same time, I'm budgeting for a new desktop workstation for gaming and video editing (so both fun and work). I could get a much inferior gamer laptop with the money, but I wanna have a good machine for things like Adobe After Effects, and the inferior part bothers me quite a bit.

Hence the question: how can I safely transport a desktop PC plus monitor for an 84-hour car trip? Should I take it "whole"? Disassembled? Or not at all? I really don't wanna screw up my brand-new PC!

I started studying again this semester, and have to read a lot of stuff because of it.
As we get nearly all our Books as PDF and reading on my notebook or my phone gets tiering quite fast. So I'm thinking about getting myself an e-reader to make things go easier.

So i tried to find some ressources to learn about e-readers, but the internet (or search engines) these days seem to suck.
So maybe my lovely tildes can help.

must haves:
can read PDF
needs to make reading this "shitty" two colums pages my PDF have good and easy

nice to haves:
FOSS
Backlight

can somebody help me out? or do you know about a resource where I can learn about the pro and cons of the different e-readers, I'm starting with close to 0 knowlege as I never thoght I will need one, I generally prefere to read proper books.

My child (who does not live with me) has a PC. He's pretty good at sorting problems out for himself, but he sometimes needs extra help. We've tried doing this over phone and video calls, and it's an unfun experience for both of us.

Is there a remote access software that would fit our needs? I want to be able to connect to his computer over the Internet and have some level of control when he's logged into his account. I'd need to be able to open files, I wouldn't have to be able to save them. He's using Windows 11. I think he's using the home version. I'm using Windows 10 Pro. We both have reasonably good Internet speed.

I wrote the following as a Twitter thread first but I think this idea could work for Reddit/Tildes/Mastadon and would love to know what you folks think of it.

Here is how I would monetize a social network that could work for Twitter.

First of all, don’t charge your most valuable users - the power users that create the content for you. Instead focus on the users that get more value from your system - the consumers of the content.

The idea is simple - introduce a small time delay before content gets seen from the time it is published. For example, on Twitter it could be 1 minute. On Reddit it could be 10 minutes.

Paid subscribers would have no delay. Importantly - lift the delay for the users that generate a lot of views.

You can do revenue share with your content creators in proportion to how much time paid subscribers spent on their content.

And you can also identify your most valuable audience - the paid subscribers. This will help prioritize content moderation decisions, identify abuse, and prioritize appeals.

The delay would allow you to prioritize which content needs to be indexed instantly (ie from creators that paid subscribers are following) and which you can process on a best effort basis - saving on production costs.

You can gift subscriptions to your friends and family.

As with many Twitter users, I'm finally at the point where I want to leave and join Mastodon. About a year ago I set up an account after seeing some people on Tildes talk about it, but I found it confusing and ultimately closed the account. I want to give it another go, but I'm a bit confused about all the different instance options, what the practical differences are, and more. Are there any comprehensive getting started guides? Does it matter which instance I join? How did you choose for yourself?