Honestly, for me, it’s the one-two-three punch of easy notes taken anywhere + podcasts + camera.

• notes : before smartphones I carried a notebook in my pocket. And sometimes I still do; writing longhand is still pleasant for me, and being able to sketch and doodle with my notes is still clunky with a touchscreen, amazingly. But the experience of losing my notebook, or not having the right one with me when I need it, is disproportionately frustrating to me.

• podcasts : this is one of the few ways my ADHD brain truly focuses. Listening to a podcast while walking, biking, running, driving, doing dishes, cleaning a room, mowing the lawn, etc. is almost foolproof in getting me to pay attention to the content. I have to be in the right mood to read, and videos are background noise to me after having the Discovery Channel or Scifi Channel on 24/7 in my apartment in college. Before smartphones I had a trusty RCA Lyra that went everywhere with me; and while the form factor and experience were fantastic, I now have a backlog of over 800 podcast episodes that would not fit on that device’s 512MB internal storage. (Also, I just got a pair of noise canceling earbuds, and I have to admit I really like them)

• camera : I’ve chosen my last four smartphones based on the camera quality. I’ve got kids, and being able to take adorable pictures of them at the drop of a hat is very useful to me. I don’t need all the computational nonsense, but I do need it to be good enough and ever-present. Before smartphones, I would occasionally bring a digital camera around with me, but I can’t afford one that would give me the quality I want, and it wouldn’t fit in my pocket anyway.

Messaging, fitness tracking, and work stuff is also easier, though not in a way that I don’t think I could backfill with other things if needed.

Nostalgia aside, the experience of these big three use cases is indisputably better with a smartphone than it was in 2005. Could I live without them? Yes! Absolutely. But I’d prefer not to, and since I shook my social media addiction I don’t really feel the need to.

The weird thing is that Windows 10 broke that model. It always used to be that the even-numbered Windows versions were worse (after, let’s say, Windows 2000): ME (#4)? Bad. XP (#5)? Good! Vista (#6)? Bad. 7? Good! 8? Bad. 8.1 (#9)? Good! But then Windows 10 came out and threw the whole rhythm off.

You could pretty reasonably argue that 8.1 wasn’t a true version, and thus Windows 10 was the 9th version of Windows, but that just means that 8 was the combo breaker by becoming good eventually. In either case, Windows 11 being bad restores the bad version/good version rhythm.

They want us to upgrade to 11 so they can do that when they release Windows 12.

Great point. Their strategy at this point is holding a gun up to your hard drive and saying “upgrade now or your data gets it.”

You just described most of my post history.

Get yourself a tally counter (click counter, hand counter, whatever). As an added bonus, it’s also a great fidget toy!

✅ Colorado

✅ Connedicut

✅ Delaware

❌ District of Columbia (on a technicality)

✅ Florida

But not

❌ I’aho

❌ Iniana

❌ Marylan

❌ Nevaa

❌ North Akota

❌ Rhoe Islan

❌ South Akota

I would assume it uses a different random seed for every query. Probably fixed sometimes, not fixed other times.

Oh, this is great news. I have Nova tweaked to work almost exactly like this. Excellent, thank you.

The laws of physics aren’t on your side there. The truck isn’t trying to slow down on the incline and speed up on the decline; it literally can’t not. At least not without causing serious wear on the brakes, which drivers try to avoid if it won’t cause a crash.

Yeah, I bet someone would do it for Youtube views, but you’re right, that’s too much.

I get it. In my opinion being made of plastic isn’t as bad as feeling plastic-y, but I realize that’s a personal thing

My experience with Framework is exactly one unit, but I would disagree with this. The Thinkpads I’ve used all felt more plastic-y and less sturdy than my Framework. The keyboard did feel cheaper until I wore the powdery texture off of the keycaps (took about a week), at which point it felt amazing.

They’ve had AMD for a few years now. No Intel one, but they do sell empty GPU module shells, so maybe someone could cut down a desktop Intel card to fit in one?

No, it would certainly be ironic (and raise lots of questions), but I don’t think I’d call it “silly.”

1. Something cannot be silly if it is deadly.

2. Not every conversation has to go back to Trump. I know he’s on our minds a lot, and what he’s doing is awful, but being able to retreat into spaces where he doesn’t dominate the conversation is important for mental health, and also for our ability to recognize that he’s not a god-king. He wants to dominate your every waking thought. Don’t let him.

Who said anything about foresight? This is entirely historical. Thanks for actually reading anything I’ve said.

I’m saying they can only do it because the big innovation was “throw more money at it.” Yes, given a functionally infinite amount of hardware, electricity, legal free reign, and publicity, I could invent a machine that does at least one (1) impressive thing, too.

Remember, these models weren’t created to identify cancer in patients better than humans. They were created to do everything better than humans. And the fact that they are mediocre at everything except identifying cancer in patients (and a handful of other things) means that they’re failing at 99.997% of their goal.

That doesn’t mean that it’s innovative, or a breakthrough technology that deserves time to mature. It just means that you get more swings at the law of averages if you have a lot of money.

First of all, because it doesn’t matter whether it’s actually real or not, investment doesn’t actually follow innovation. The actual value of a company or idea has almost nothing to do with its valuation.

But more importantly, why do you think that’s the important part of this conversation? I’m not talking about its long term viability. Neither were you. You were just saying that it was a new innovation and still had to mature. I was saying that it was actually a much older technology that already matured, and which is being given an artificial new round of funding because of good marketing.

Are you trying to claim that the fact that there’s lots of money flowing to these AI companies is proof that AI isn’t just a bubble caused by money flowing to these AI companies?