I've not bought a new router since 2010 because I try to physically wire everything in my house so it's pretty much my phone using Wifi.
However, I've found great use for my Steam Deck as a streaming platform on my TV using Moonlight and I'd like to get a new, good router to support it.
I think the Steam Deck can support Wifi 6, but I'd like a Wifi 7 router if possible so I can future proof the possibility of getting a new wireless VR headset too. Though I'm not 100% sold to the idea if there's good argument to just buy Wifi 6 today.

Long story short, I'm finding it really hard to choose what router to buy. There's so much "gamer" junk.
Reviews are all over the place too, site A will give a router a top recommend and site B will list off a huge range of cons.

Does anyone have any advice? I just want a good, reliable, high throughput router and I can't be bothered with the returns process to try and buy if possible.

Curious to know if we have a current morphometric based system that can detect with the same accuracy as DNA testing, if two people are related, without a priori knowledge that they are related, if that makes sense.

Meaning, if a system is fed 100 random photos of humans, but is not told "there are definitely related people in here" can it match it as accurately as a DNA test of those same humans' DNA samples?

So I am considering switching to a dumb phone. All I really need it to do is call and text. However, the texting part might be slightly tricky. I am fine learning how to text using a numpad, but being able to do group chats would be something I would want to keep. Using Google Messages as my texting app even on an older Samsung has worked to get effective group chat functionality, so being able to access the Google Play Store to download it would be beneficial. Other than that, I don't have any other tasks I need to do on my phone. Does anyone have any recommendations?

A list of requirements:

• Available in Canada
• Can handle group chats or can download and install Google Messages
• Ideally not too expensive

As the years go by, I’ve become increasingly annoyed (I choose that word intentionally) at the thought that there’s some “record” of my activity on the Internet somewhere, which was probably put together by my ISP. I “don’t have anything to hide” (other than perhaps the one or other ROM or movie that I download), but I also don’t want to randomly get fined or put in prison if, in a few years, our governments decide to retroactively criminalize certain activities (I’m thinking mostly about piracy).

I’m not tech savvy though. That’s not because I haven’t tried. I have. I spent countless hours reading about how one can keep one’s activity on the Internet “private”. To my knowledge, it isn’t actually possible. I mean, even if I didn’t use my real name anywhere, or didn’t have any social media accounts (thankfully, I don’t), just the fact that I have to use an ISP to surf the web means that at least they are “spying” on me.

So, I’m approaching all of you wonderful, tech savvy people (rather than ChatGPT or a search engine) to ask you if there’s something that I’m missing, and if there is a way (preferably a fool-proof one) to stop my ISP (or “anyone” for that matter) from collecting data on my activity on the Internet (particularly when I download ROMs or movies, which is the only “illegal” thing that I ever do).

As per title this is inspired by my recent problems with a Latitude 7320 notebook.

I can't use my desktop right now and so wanted some cheaper nb for normal usage and eventually settled on this model due to being able to get it at an acceptable ratio of price to age and seeing it as compatible on Ubuntu, not noticing the disclaimer until later.

The problems started right after installing Fedora KDE - the nb was running at absolutely abysmal performance and this problem affects several models.

Running passmark I've got above 2000 on cpu, on Windows I had 11000. The cpu was throttling to 1500Mhz and lower for no reason. Switching a BIOS setting of power management to "ultra performance" got me to twice the score.

Eventually using throttled from github for various Lenovo and Dell models and thermald I was able to get to twice that again, still a fifth less than on Windows. Also the repo has potential of security concerns due to how it works, also potential to just stop working due to them later.

Mainly I'm posting this to just say that there is zero legitimate technical reason why this should happen, it works on Windows and on Dell tampered Ubuntu images. The hw is fine but for some reason someone somewhere decided to artificially limit the hw for whatever reason.

Right now I am still indecided if I should write off the several hours I've spent on this and return the machine to play the dice with some other model.

Edit 5.4.: it turns out I was not using the throttled package correctly and now have roughly equivalent performace in Linux as in Windows up from the 4/5 or so after all the other workarounds. All of the points still apply though. I also heartily recommend s-tui as a nice utility for cpu monitoring and stress test.

The popular online discourse on Large Language Models’ (LLMs’) capabilities is often polarized in a way I find annoying and tiresome.

On one end of the spectrum, there is nearly complete dismissal of LLMs: an LLM is just a slightly fancier version of the autocomplete on your phone’s keyboard, there’s nothing to see here, move on (dot org).

This dismissive perspective overlooks some genuinely interesting novel capabilities of LLMs. For example, I can come up with a new joke and ask ChatGPT to explain why it’s funny or come up with a new reasoning problem and ask ChatGPT to solve it. My phone’s keyboard can’t do that.

On the other end of the spectrum, there are eschatological predictions: human-level or superhuman artificial general intelligence (AGI) will likely be developed within 10 years or even within 5 years, and skepticism toward such predictions is “AI denialism”, analogous to climate change denial. Just listen to the experts!

There are inconvenient facts for this narrative, such as that the majority of AI experts give much more conservative timelines for AGI when asked in surveys and disagree with the idea that scaling up LLMs could lead to AGI.

The ARC Prize is an attempt by prominent AI researcher François Chollet (with help from Mike Knoop, who apparently does AI stuff at Zapier) to introduce some scientific rigour into the conversation. There is a monetary prize for open source AI systems that can perform well on a benchmark called ARC-AGI-2, which recently superseded the ARC-AGI benchmark. (“ARC” stands for “Abstract and Reasoning Corpus”.)

ARC-AGI-2 is not a test of whether an AI is an AGI or not. It’s intended to test whether AI systems are making incremental progress toward AGI. The tasks the AI is asked to complete are colour-coded visual puzzles like you might find in a tricky puzzle game. (Example.) The intention is to design tasks that are easy for humans to solve and hard for AI to solve.

The current frontier AI models score less than 5% on ARC-AGI-2. Humans score 60% on average and 100% of tasks have been solved by at least two humans in two attempts or less.

For me, this helps the conversation about AI capabilities because it gives a rigorous test and quantitative measure to my casual, subjective observations that LLMs routinely fail at tasks that are easy for humans.

François Chollet was impressed when OpenAI’s o3 model scored 75.7% on ARC-AGI (the older version of the benchmark). He emphasizes the concept of “fluid intelligence”, which he seems to define as the ability to adapt to new situations and solve novel problems. Chollet thinks that o3 is the first AI system to demonstrate fluid intelligence, although it’s still a low level of fluid intelligence. (o3 also required thousands of dollars’ worth of computation to achieve this result.)

This is the sort of distinction that can’t be teased out by the polarized popular discourse. It’s the sort of nuanced analysis I’ve been seeking out, but which has been drowned out by extreme positions on LLMs that ignore inconvenient facts.

I would like to see more benchmarks that try to do what AGI-AGI-2 does: find problems that humans can easily solve and frontier AI models can’t solve. These sort of benchmarks can help us measure AGI progress much more usefully than the typical benchmarks, which play to LLMs’ strengths (e.g. massive-scale memorization) and don’t challenge them on their weaknesses (e.g. reasoning).

I long to see AGI within my lifetime. But the super short timeframes given by some people in the AI industry feel to me like they border on mania or psychosis. The discussion is unrigorous, with people pulling numbers out of thin air based on gut feeling.

It’s clear that there are many things humans are good at doing that AI can’t do at all (where the humans vs. AI success rate is ~100% vs. ~0%). It serves no constructive purpose to ignore this truth and it may serve AI research to develop rigorous benchmarks around it.

Such benchmarks will at least improve the quality of discussion around AI capabilities, insofar as people pay attention to them.

Update (2024-04-11 at 19:16 UTC): François Chollet has a new 20-minute talk on YouTube that I recommend. I've watched a few videos of Chollet talking about ARC-AGI or ARC-AGI-2, and this one is beautifully succinct: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWHezX43I-4

Background:

I've been using a 9-year-old 13.3 inch Dell Latitude 7370 laptop running MX Linux to stream games via Moonlight from a beefier desktop machine. It is SO good and works flawlessly. My only complaint is the smaller screen size.

I would like to upgrade to a larger computer, and given that the computer will literally only be used for streaming games, it doesn't need to have great stats. I'm looking at used/refurbished models -- both for price and because buying something new feels like complete overkill for my needs.

My only requirements are:

• 17 inch screen
• USB-C charging

That's it! I'm assuming that literally anything I can get with that will work for what I need given that my small, decade-old laptop is already doing the same job perfectly. USB-C charging is a must-have for me. I already have USB-C power cords in all the places I plan on using it, and I don't want to have to use a separate charger for it.

My Situation:

Because I'm searching for used/refurbished models, I'm limited to what's available rather than going for any specific model of computer. I can easily find listings for computers with 17 inch screens. What I can't find easily is whether or not they support USB-C charging. Most sites don't have a filter for that, and a lot of the listings don't specify the type of charger used and just list "AC adapter" (or don't mention it at all). Many sites don't have pictures of the ports, or the pictures they do have are stock photos that aren't of the exact model.

Is there some easy way to find these that I'm missing? Some keyword, or a site that does have a filter for that, or brand knowledge that can point me in the right direction?

Also, if anyone has any recommended sites for used/refurbished laptops, let me know. I have had success with Backmarket for used tech before, but I'm open to recommendations.

I just got bit in the ass by this.

I had my firefox open with all my open tabs as per usual. I notice that one of the tabs that I expect to exist is not there, so I went into my history and noticed for some reason, it covers only 2 days of history.

ducking told me to open firefox in troubleshoot mode to see if that would get me more of my history back. It did not but what it wound up doing is losing the session that had my open tabs. I closed firefox and re-opened it, all my open tabs gone. I power down my machine and started it back up, same story.

long story short, I am now following the recommendations on here to create regular backups of my firefox session cause apparently that is something that can be lost.

Btw the fact that is not a default feature of firefox to create multiple backups of your open session and deletes backups if you close and re-open is the dumbest logic imo

Lately there's been a rash of people ripping apart AC units on small business' so they can sell them for parts (mostly the copper). Tends to take days to months to discover, and by that time they're long gone and the police are rarely interested in it (in my experience even when you figure out who's actually buying stolen copper, or car parts....but i digress).

I was asked as a friend to help with this for a couple of small business locations that otherwise don't need normal security. To start it's just one large, 60x300', roof with a couple of units on it. They're willing to spend money, but also don't want to get scammed, so I've been looking into it for them.

They're getting a quote from one of the big security companies like ADT, but didn't feel they were getting it right since they just wanted a camera pointing at the access ladder, when it sure looks like the first time this happened it was someone who brought their own, so they really do need some good coverage and not just one camera pointed at a ladder while they pay for some 24/7 person to stare at the feed.

The rough requirements are:

1. Some decent weatherproofing, as this will be on a roof all day. We can put an enclosure around it but trying to keep this simple.

2. Easy remote access to footage, ideally with notifications that can be setup for things like human motion, or lost connection.

3. Ideally fewer cameras. Not exactly because of cost, but because of the difficulty of getting the power/network up there. Be a lot easier to do one drop in the middle of the roof than say a drop at every corner.

4. Probably not wifi cameras. I figure we need to run power up there anyways, so it might as well be POE if at all possible. Added bonus being that you don't need to worry as much about wifi signal and the rare enterprising criminal with a jammer/scrambler/whatever?

and the tricky one
5. No on site storage. Likely they'll want cloud.

My first thoughts:
I have ubiquiti at home, and this seemed fine for it as a nice in-between since they probably need 2-4 POE cameras max (was going to see if i could get away with 2 in the middle of the roof, one looking each way). Was going to mess around and see what level of alerts they give and make them a couple of accounts (basically one alert to the person who'd call the cops and one to the person who'd look at it if the feed went down).

The no on site storage thing however, complicates stuff....i think?

The short version is there's no way to do even a basic NVR there (i've been over this thoroughly, and it's more a drama thing than a business thing). I figured that wouldn't be an issue, they'd just have to pay extra for some cloud storage and host it there, and it would probably scale well for them if they liked the solution and rolled it out anywhere else. Rather than having a bunch of NVR's they could just have one cloud based one, neat.

buuuuut it seems ubiquiti doesn't really do that. The people i'm helping are somewhat technical but i'd like to keep this turnkey as possible. I don't think there's any clean/easy way to accomplish this with ubiquiti, or at least that I can find?

In theory I think there might be some clever network way to host the NVR at some other physical/central location (with less drama) and then route all the traffic there, but that's beyond my current ability, and i'm skeptical that even if I learn how, i can keep it simple enough that i'd feel comfortable suggesting it.

The followup research:
So there's huge professional companies like verkanda/axis. I did some basic pricing research and it looks like $2kish, minimum, a year for these things. That might be within their budget (i'm told the damage done was easily into the 5 figure territory), but it also feels like extreme overkill for something that should be easier to solve?

Another one i've come across before is Reolink, but I have 0 experience with it and haven't found much in either direction that makes me think it'd be a good solution or a terrible one.

I'm pretty against ring/nest just due to a mixture of "fuck em" and also feeling like you don't get what you pay for.

Overall-

Anyone have any experience or guidance with this sort of thing? I really feel like my own home network/camera setup has me right on the edge of being able to say "ah yeah here's what you need...." and yet i've fallen at the finish line. Is there some easy way to make ubiquiti work (seems to meet all the needs except the cloud storage)? Or some system you're familiar with that does have that feature?

I feel like i bump into these kinds of problems more and more where the options are "make it a second hobby/job" or "pay through the nose" when it feels like there should be a reasonable inbetween.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GyVHrGLiTcc (46m20s)

Transcript: https://medium.com/what-to-build/is-anything-worth-maximizing-d11e648eb56f (10,314 words with footnotes and references)

Excerpt:

...for simple maximizers, its choices are just about numbers. That means its choices are in the numbers. Here, the choice between two desserts is just a choice between numbers. We could say its choice is already made. And that it has no responsibility, since it’s just following what the numbers say.

Reason-based maximizers don’t just see numbers, though, they also see values. Here, there’s a choice between two desserts — but it isn’t a choice between two numbers. See, it’s also a choice between two values. One option means being a seize-the-day, intensity kind of person. The other means being a foody, aristocratic, elegance kind of person.

My personal thoughts about this talk: it's a kind of strange, kind of dubious philosophical and multi-disciplinary reflection on metrics for organizations, especially metrics for tech companies, and on the pitfalls of optimizing for metrics in what the speaker argues is too "simple" a way.

I don't entirely trust the speaker or the argument, but there was enough in the talk to stimulate curiosity and reflection that I thought it was worth watching.

Oldest doesn't have to mean absolute age and can be relative to that tech's particular "lane" (e.g. your "old" cell phone might be newer than one of your game consoles, but it still "feels" old when compared to cell phones exclusively).

And "tech" can be, well, anything you think counts as "tech!"

I've tried DDG for some time, but I keep finding myself using !g to find better results. I read a comment on Reddit that you just need to get used to searching things differently, but I'm starting to think that DDG just isn't very good. Kagi works well and I use the free version a bit for academic stuff, but I don't see myself paying for a search engine. Anyone have long-term reviews of search engines like Brave, Qwant, etc.?

So this may be weird, I just got a new set of pixel buds pro 2 and they work great, except if I'm not playing audio on my phone they frequently disconnect and reconnect from my bluetooth - I can tell because I can hear the tones. But if I'm playing a podcast or YouTube video, no issue. Phone is a Pixel 7a and it doesn't do this with my old A buds, my car, etc. haven't tried pairing the buds to anything else yet.

I've updated firmware, restarted everything, checked settings, turned off the adaptive sound, with no change. Help?