Selfish of him to keep all those nutrients locked up in his flesh prison when there's a climate-induced global food shortage coming. He feeds but one now, he could feed dozens - perhaps thousands, if rendered into fertilizer.
I don't get it. It keeps moving and I can't navigate around (WASD, arrows, anything). Why isn't the central monument spire thing the well-known ur-article (Philosophy). What is the information architecture?
I'm generally with you on it, they're sort of fatiguing in a depressing way.
But try the new James Bond game. Linear shooter, but a great story and fantastic cast on top of super fun mechanics. By the Hitman studio with a lot of their core ideas Bondified to favor action over stealth. It hasn't irritated me in the way almost any other game manages to.
Andor really was an outlier, wasn't it? It's up there with the Sopranos and the Wire as one of the best TV shows in my lifetime, and everything else they make is lukewarm garbage soup.
I haven't seen it yet. Serious question - Does it have any Jedis or Siths? (If there are no Jedis / Siths, it isn't "Star Wars" for me and I will not watch it).
Andor does not prominently feature any Jedi, Sith, or other Force-users as main characters. The show does feature at least one unambiguous use of on-screen Force powers, but it's not the focus.
The setting of the show is influenced by their actions, but during the time period the show is set, the two most visibly active Sith - Palpatine and Vader - are high-ranking members of the government, and are entirely off-screen, and all Jedi are assumed dead or in hiding. The main character considers The Force to be superstition.
For my own taste, at least, I thought the show was very good, and it felt more "Star Wars" to me than most of the other spinoffs, sequels, prequels, and extended universe of the past decades. It really nails an overall sense of "how the universe works", in the setting. The aesthetics, the capabilities and limitations of technology, the social organization, and the sense of a wide and exotic universe, all match what seems "Star Wars" to me.
The whole thing is buggered. My latest, in car, on 26.6.2 with phone connected via bluetooth. I hold the voice button on my steering wheel down to activate Siri:
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"You'll need to unlock your phone for that."
"Call Fred."
"OK, calling Fred."
Phone is locked in my pocket the entire time. Like, make your damn mind up. Every time I try to call from the car now I have to ask it at least twice, usually three times.
And a completely baffling one recently, not even anonymizing names, also in car:
"Call George."
"OK adding L.S.D. by Hallucinogen to your Liked Songs playlist."
I've switched to Home Assistant and the same devices on the same network work instantly, as they should.
Apple is so terrible at this. They have nobody to blame: it's their system, their protocol (I have pre-Matter devices), their home hub, their certified devices.
Home Assistant with a pile of community-maintained python hacks runs circles around Apple.
> For reference, it used to turn off the lights as I complete my sentence and put my wrist down.
What probably happened is that it used to be one of the preset instructions it pattern-matched your request to, but now they inserted an LLM in between all of that, so you have to wait for it to return some tokens and then eventually call the internal method for triggering the scene.
I mean, they moved it from a deterministic set of actions to an AI-pilled LLM nightmare with probably a paucity of all test cases covered given the near-infinite permutations and actions available.
A smarter release would have been extremely limited in scope, heavily tested, and aimed simply for feature parity. Or even scoping it to just one section, like editing/adding/updating calendar events and all associated functionality. Or even exploring routing to much-less hallucinatory, more performant models like CNN for certain tasks instead of just throwing everything at probabilistic model and hoping for the best.
But that's not the way of AI-pilled middle manager thinking now.
That's also what drives me absolutely insane - I want a guide from Apple that gives me a regular syntax I can use to get predictable results with Siri. The fuzzy, natural language stuff in Siri is so bad that it's completely unpredictable what will work.
Super frustrating. It's the best thing about LLMs, that you can be so imprecise and human with your discussion, with context maintained from input to input. Siri doesn't have the predictability of an old-school fixed syntax voice agent (like Wildfire from the '90s - remember that? It worked!) and doesn't have the flexibility of a proper natural language interaction with an LLM. It lacks any sort of working memory - "Create an appointment on Tuesday at 3pm." "OK." "Name it 'Mechanic visit'" "Now playing songs by Mike and the Mechanics."
Yeah, the lack of memory is a huge problem - makes it impossible to conversationally correct a mistake. Instead, you have to start the interaction from the top and hope that this time it works out.
Huh interesting idea and quite easy to test by putting the phone in a blanket in the trunk. It's definitely using the car speakers, and when I do eventually get a call through I am heard clearly, but perhaps that initial interaction is using the phone mic.
If it’s misunderstanding the command and thinking it needs an unlock twice, but then finally gets it correctly and does it without an unlock.. that actually could be explained by the microphone
> I'm really not sure the "legion of servants" of Victorian-era elites were the people experiencing the worst living conditions on earth.
Indeed not. Being in service provided one of the most desirable careers you could hope for as a working class Victorian. When your options look like pit, mill, or factory, cleaning floors in a nice warm house is a good alternative. And that was just the foot in the door: there was progression available. Those jobs were hard to get, prestigious, came with their own status hierarchy, and could keep you set for life.
I did not know that. But almost everybody in the working classes suffered from awful work-related health problems in Victorian Britain. Some vitamin D deficiency for a scullery maid compares to a miner's black lung or that ghastly phossy jaw that afflicted match girls.
I think the best form of this work was probably to be staff on an absentee landlord's estate. While the master or mistress was away, you would have little work to do except cleaning or maintenance, and probably could get away with having a life of leiaure.
None of that should be affected when the switch is flipped, that's the bit I'm struggling with. Sure, connecting a wire somewhere could act as an antenna but attaching a switch to the unconnected end of the antenna can't do anything. It's very weird.
> The switch could be connecting ground trace to the casing
This seems most likely - that there's actually a conductive path on one side of the switch from the switch body to the metal frame it's bolted to, so flipping it does take the frame in and out of circuit (doing something like changing capacitance or introducing RF noise on the ground plane which something in the PDP is sensitive to.)
Yes it's quite bad what that muppet is up to but it's not Stalin level yet.
Decades ago I wrote a paper, lost to time now, on the effect of his military purges on the fighting effectiveness of the Red Army during the back half of WW2. He purged not just senior commanders but mid ranks and up, think like down as far as their equivalent of majors. A vast amount of battle-relevant experience was swept away, much more damaging in the day-to-day grind than simply disappearing a few field marshals.
My point is, hope is not lost for the US military. Yes lots of irreplaceable senior experience is being tossed aside for unforgivably stupid and pointless reasons, but there's a lot of recent, hard-won, actual shooting war experience in the officer corps which, if they don't all bugger off in disgust, will serve us well in future. Today's captains and majors are well aware of how drones in Ukraine have changed battle[1], to give one example, and the career-minded among them will be in doctrine-influencing and development positions before too long.
I'm aware this is to some degree wishful thinking.
[1]I chose this example because it's going to be one of that drunken fool's more consequential errors: re-tasking the Army unit charged with developing drone capabilities for the US.
Russia won not because of tactical brilliance, but because they simply threw biomass at the problem.
Just throw enough barely armored tanks and bodies at the problem, and the germans eventually run out of resources. It only took about 9M soldiers. Glorious sacrifices for the benefit of Stalin.
Consider how many lives would have been saved with a shred of tactical brilliance.
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