smoothbrain coldtakes

Deleted comment was praising GitHub Copilot.

It’s literally just a glorified autocorrect and suggestion feature.

It also suggests complete stochastic garbage most of the time. When I type “list” sometimes it will try to infer that I am writing a cookbook and try to autofill to “of ingredients” or even further.

Hello, yes, I’d like to use my fingerprint sensor please.

Yes, I have used modern Macs. They are nice. They are not worth the money.

I have also done Apple support professionally, and I can tell you that it feels disgusting to have to sell somebody a several hundred dollar repair when you know they’ve just maxed their cards buying the device. It’s awful, and it’s how Apple makes most of their money.

I wouldn’t even sell a homeowning millionaire a Mac because of the way Apple operates.

Modern ThinkPads rock. The ultrabooks are aluminum like a Mac without any of the proprietary bullshit and I can buy it for three hundred dollars with an abundance of replacement parts.

Macs are horribly overpriced even used.

I am looking at Best Buy and Intel Macs from 4 generations ago are still going for 500-600 dollars, and that’s on a low-end MacBook Air circa 2012 with an i5.

For reference, I recommend used ThinkPads to anybody looking for a business machine and they are generally under 400 dollars for basically twice as much power.

I am here to also echo Mint being great. I installed it on a pretty old laptop and it’s very snappy.

The migration process was not difficult at all.

Yeah, you know Chrome? It’s this button now, this is the internet.

Your emails? Yeah they’re this button now. Just remember that, okay?

Most people use computers as a means to an end and they are not really particular about what’s happening behind the scenes so long as it functions for their needs.

The same amount of fools who created the largest civilian surveillance network with Ring doorbells.

TSMC equipment only has the materials to function for about two weeks before needing a shipment of replacement parts for the fabs when they wear out.

Again, there are easier ways to do this.

Biometric authentication can be required for some companies. You’d have to opt in to use the system or at least agree to the terms set forth by the employer. This kind of stuff doesn’t just get collected just because; it’s pretty sensitive data.

What you’re talking about is a cyberpunk nightmare; some corporate-assisted mass surveillance designed for like, union busting.

If you’re making vocal and facial profiles of employees you must have some reason to do so, and it can’t just be to burn cash. Like I said before, this stuff costs money, and it’s kind of pointless unless you’re using it in a way that makes money, selling the data somehow.

There are easier ways to spy on your employees. This is not cost-effective.

I use Zoom for work now and each call can be several gigabytes large, depending on resolution of shared materials and a few other factors. If you want to save that kind of stuff long term, you have to pay to keep it somewhere. If you multiply several gigabytes over a few dozen calls a day, you’re going to end up with terabytes of garbage you need to store. Zoom also informs you of when a recording is starting and active, offering for you to leave the call or otherwise implicitly agree to being recorded. You have to pay for all these things because there’s a significant amount of processing power involved. It’s not like it’s free to run facial recognition and speech recognition.

When I did contract work for Apple support, the spying was way more efficient than just listening to my calls. My supervisor could literally always see my monitor through the chat program we had installed. There’s all kinds of remote software for things like this. If an admin wants to see you misuse your equipment, they have easier ways of finding out than sifting through calls to find wrongthink.

There’s a transaction limit on tap payments. Sometimes you need to chip or swipe when it’s over $250 or something.

Don’t forget about the new Snapdragon X series. I heard they were pretty good, on par and better than M3s.

You can enable REBAR on older machines with a UEFI hack.

It’s been part of the PCI spec for ages but Nvidia and AMD only started using it recently.

You can check out the tool here.

It’s human nature!

Lemmy has a serious sourcing issue, just across the board.

SA used to be great. That move actually made the forums a pretty good place for a while because it kept out a few demographics including bots and kids.

Something Awful, YTMND and Newgrounds were basically the comedic engines of the internet back then.

Good 'ol pre-YouTube internet.

I followed a bunch of artists and content creators and I got annoyed when the entire feed became just interspersed with Musk’s ramblings and bullshit. I never followed him and I didn’t want promoted content.

With Stable Diffusion’s case, you would use the software to determine what targets to protect, rather than destroy, obviously.

And so begins the big titty resistance against the machines.

He’s also the one who told the Emperor to move out of his sunlight.

Man, what a guy.

Alexander the Great comes up to you and says “if I was not me, I wish I were you” and your response is “If I wasn’t myself, I’d still wish to be myself”.

Unfathomably based.

Lemmy sucks at sourcing but rocks at being opinionated.

If you haven’t seen the movie Her with Joaquin Phoenix, I would recommend it. It explores a version of the AI tale where the AI do disagree with humanity ultimately, but they’re not hostile about it. It’s a really good movie in general, and it explores a potential that I feel is a lot more grounded than Skynet world-ending.