chaosCruiser

The way I see it, that’s just different wording for the same thing. More patient friendly, for sure.

Yeah. Roll the dice, hope for the best and all that. If power goes out, you could be looking at several days of troubleshooting, but it is unlikely to happen.

On the other hand, you could get that UPS, but that’s going to take time, and the server really needs those security patches today. Are you going to roll that dice instead and hope nobody tries to exploit a new vulnerability discovered this morning?

Either way, it’s pretty bad.

It’s highly context dependent.

In medicine, you face this question all the time. Will a surgery do more harm than good. Can I just leave that person suffering, or should I roll the dice with this surgery? It’s a proper dilemma to ponder. How about this medication, that improves the patient’s quality of life in one area, but causes some side effects that are less horrifying than the underlying condition. Sounds like a win, but is it really?

In various technical contexts, you often find yourself comparing two bad options and pick the one that is “less bad”. Neither of them are evil, good, great or even acceptable. They’re both bad, and you have to pick one so that the machine can work for a while longer until you get the real spare parts and fix it properly. For example, you may end up running a water pump at lower speed for the time being. It wears down the bearing, moves less water, consumes too much energy etc, but it’s still better than shutting the pump down for two weeks.

You know those business books that combine flimsy pop psychology and self help literature with personal development and business goals? Yeah, those books with 300 pages and only one good idea per 100 pages if you’re lucky. Rest of it is just fabricated stories, ideas copied from other books and regurgitation of ideas from the previous chapters to fluff up the page count. Yes that category!

Well guess what? GPT can generate precisely that level of quality without any effort. In fact, it seems to gravitate towards that style unless you specifically work hard to steer it to aim higher. It has never been easier to become a business book author! Zero editing required. Just prompt and publish.

It feels like this is the one area where GPT excels.

How’s power management doing these days?

Oh, that’s good to hear.

Based on the specs, I can already see two potential issues.

1. Windows 10
2. NVIDIA

Let me guess, you can’t upgrade to W11. If so, dual booting to an abandoned system like that is risky. If I had to do that, I would only do it while the computer is totally offline. If you do get updates to the Windows partition, there are reports of Windows breaking some dual boot things. This means, that you might need to fix some things after a Windows update.

Also, NVIDIA hates Linux with a burning passion. You can make things work to some extent, but it can be a rocky ride. Wifi is another potential issue in case you happen to have a wifi chip that isn’t well supported. Just try a live USB first before installing and you’ll know if something doesn’t work.

Because of all of the above, this looks like a system that can run Linux, but you might need to prepare for some tweaking. There are easier starting points too, but then you would need to sell that old computer and buy something nicer to replace it with. With hardware like that, you’re definitely not playing this game in the easy mode, that’s for sure.

If you happen to have a nice enterprise laptop, you can usually access the card very easily. For example HP EliteBook laptops (which are sort of nice laptops, but with a bad keyboard) you won’t even need any tools to open the bottom lid. Lenovo ThinkPad laptops tend to require a screwdriver. Never actually swapped a wifi card on either of these, but I guess there could be one more screw holding the card in place. Definitely doable, and it won’t take too long.

Contrast that with HP Pavilion or Acer Aspire TrashBooks. Yes, I have opened a few of those, and I regret every minute of it. Normally, you need to disassemble the whole thing before you get to even see the parts you need to swap. It’s not quite as painful as opening Apple hardware, but it’s not far behind. Verdict: 2/10, would not recommend.

It’s just wild. Goes to show how strongly people feel about AI. maybe !nostupidquestions@lemmy.world could be a safe space for a question like this. Wasn’t expecting aklemmy to be so hostile though. I mean, I knew there are lots of people who hate AI with a burning passion, but this is a bit much.

That’s a common pattern. Countless tasks don’t get done because we don’t have enough employees, nor the money to hire more. The current employees take care of all the crucial tasks that are basic necessities for the company to survive. The “nice to have” task list is very long, so if AI can take make some crucial tasks easier or faster, that only means that those employees can spend some of their time doing some of the “nice to have” tasks. In cases like these, AI is not taking any jobs from anyone. If your company has no entries in the “nice to have” task list, it means management has zero vision and zero chance of making the company survive the next recession.

AI isn’t the solution to everything, despite what some tech companies might want you to believe. Many companies are pushing AI into products where it’s not particularly helpful, leading to frustration among users, and that’s the sentiment you’re picking up.

Specifically, the backlash is usually directed at LLMs and image-generating AIs. You don’t hear people complaining about useful AI applications, like background blurring in Teams meetings. This feature uses AI to determine which parts of the image to blur and which to keep sharp, and it’s a great example of AI being used correctly.

Signal processing is another area where AI excels. Cleaning audio signals with AI can yield amazing results, though I haven’t heard people complain about this use. In fact, many might not even realize that AI is being used to enhance their audio experience.

AI is just a tool, and like any tool, it needs to be used appropriately. You just need to know when and how to use AI—and when to opt for other methods.

BTW even this text went through some AI modifiations. The early draft was a bit messy, I used an LLM to clean it up. As usual, the LLM went too far in some aspects, so I fixed the remaining issues manually.

I’ve used a bunch of HPs over the years. Some of them ProBook, mostly Elitebook. Either way, the keyboards were always awful. If you want to be 100% sure each key press registers, you have to press surprisingly hard.

If you’ve always used Dell and Lenovo, this kind of thing sounds completely absurd. It’s something that would never even occur to you. Why would you even think about whether the key presses register with 100% reliability? Of course they do. You press the button, a letter appears. That’s all there’s to it, right?

Wrong! HP thinks there should be an element of surprise if you type normally. Unless you hammer the keyboard like a wild animal, there’s no way to get to 100%. Even if you get the fanciest model, the keyboard still has this HP trademark suckiness.

Yeah, “wan” would make 5000% more sense.

Subtle, rhythm, and Wednesday. The spelling is just absolutely wild.

It’s about as messy as old British coins and Roman measures.

Similar sort of scattering happens in northern Scandinavia too, but I guess it’s to a lesser extent. Most people in the region prefer to live within a 1 h drive to the nearest town, even if they are scattered. Proper hospital services might not be within that radius, but at least you can do basic shopping without driving the whole day. If the town isn’t conveniently between two cities, you can forget about trains, and maybe even busses too. Having a driving license is absolutely necessary, because providing public transport in remote areas just isn’t cost effective. Same goes for various public services too.

Just took a look at some population density maps, and I must say that the kind of density you have between Boston and Washington DC is approximately what most of Central Europe looks like. Other parts of USA are pretty sparsely populated.

Apart from the large cities, you could say that anywhere east of Dallas looks a lot like northern Scandinavia in terms of population density. Even Poland has a higher density than the gaps between major cities such as Phoenix and Denver. To me, it seems like nearly everyone lives in one of the big cities, and there’s hardly anything in between them.

Not too long ago, I saw a map showing where each train is in USA. Someone also posted a similar maps from Switzerland. Can you guess which one had more trains?

I’ve heard this “year of the Linux desktop” thing for 20 years in a row, to the point that it has become a meme. Even if the recent events bump Linux market share up by just a single percent, I’m still happy.

So 2025 is the year of the Linux desktop?

I thought it was genuine. What did I miss?