I assume the comment I am responding to was made in sarcasm, so I'm basing my response on that register, so apologies in advance if I have got this wrong.
I don't understand what is dystopian about this: With the exception of mildly elevated resource consumption to achieve the end goal (a nicer photo), is this not the sort of things that humans have been wanting and doing for as long as photographs have been a thing?
It was previously mostly unachievable for regular people to have their snapshots processed in such a way, but it feels like it's just making what used to be special mildly trivial. Anyone who has had their wedding photographed for the past 20 years has had the photos touched up on the way through. Any school portrait for just as long.
100 years ago people would dodge and burn photographic prints to improve them as much as the technology allowed. This is just the forward evolution of that old tale.
Maybe slightly odd is how anyone could possibly think I was being sarcastic. :)
I'm not attacking you here or anything :)
I'm just a bit shocked at how cynical people can be. The thought would not cross my mind ... and I'm a skeptic of many things!
There's a video somewhere of some people in Wyoming, riding horses.
All of the comments are young people shock of these 'boomers' committing 'animal abuse'.
I mean ... just ranchers riding horses.
People think that 'Ward Cleaver' form 'Leave It To Beaver' is some 'creepy twilight zone figure' ... when he's just literally a nice guy. Or rather the character is.
We're getting way to jaded!
So - I really mean it: AI is going to be mostly very pedantic stuff.
I witnessed the birth of computers and the internet - and while AI is definitely a big deal ... I think it's just going to feel like 'more computing stuff' in the end.
Computers started out for Science - then it became about video games, socialization, design, commerce, and of course 'gambling and porn' and all the 'same vices'.
Every step of the way there were people thinking it was being 'debauched' etc..
AI is going to be about the most mundane things, just as most technology is today.
It will be boring and in the background, and probably weird like a poorly designed, slow web-page full of cruft, but it will 'do the thing'.
The Arch wiki explicitly links to the AUR for lots of things, but the prime example is probably the NVIDIA page - https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA - this page is going to be massively viewed, and if you have Pascal or older architecture the suggested driver is from, you guessed it, the AUR.
Nowhere on this page does it suggest that the AUR is at all untrustworthy.
The frame is a compositional aid, and it does have quite a strict relation to what the camera is capturing.
The best version of your complaint is that the viewfinder does not have accurate frame lines that account for parallax at various distances, which is true, but there are still ways of using the viewfinder to assist in composition.
If you take two or three shots at two meters, and look at what the camera captured versus where your composition was in the frame, you can immediately intuit a baseline for where the frame lines 'should be' on the viewfinder at two meters. "Occupies the bottom right two thirds of the viewfinder" for example.
Without a reference frame, these intuitions (and your aiming of the camera!) are going to be far less accurate.
It's totally incorrect to state that the area served by either Sydney or Melbourne airport has less economic activity than the area served by "any airport in the US", or even the vast majority of US airports, so whatever laptops-at-airport (and I suppose airpods-in-ears) is a proxy for it sure isn't economic activity.
This is the primary reason the Minibook X won out in my searches: It's the only small device that has a keyboard layout that puts all of the keys in the right spots.
They're sometimes an odd size, but when I hit the wrong key due to a sizing constraint, I don't even have to think: Backspace, hit the right key with mildly adjusted positioning.
I've tried a few machines with different layouts, and that's never the case - and having to stop and look at the keyboard to find a key interrupts flow in the worst kind of way.
I have this laptop, and it is amongst the best laptops I have ever owned, despite being awful in many ways. It has almost completely replaced my use of my M4 Macbook Pro, simply because I always have it with me. That, and it can run Linux.
I don't share the complaints of the OP about the keyboard or the screen, though. The keyboard is fine, I can hit about 110WPM on it, slower than my regular pace, but enough that there's no dramas. The layout is great: Occasionally there's keys that are too small (looking at you, apostrophe) but everything is at least in the right spot, which is way more important.
The 2K display at 10" is high enough DPI that everything is totally crisp, and you can unlock ~95Hz (bad for video, good for everything else) with a bit of a tweak. You can also smash a byte into the EC at the correct offset and access the full unrestricted BIOS -- mostly to crank the RAM up to 4800MT/s.
I'm running vanilla Arch with Niri and Noctalia, and it's a dream. It's my primary dev machine, used in combination with a remote server with a tonne more grunt. If it broke tomorrow, I'd buy another - and I wouldn't do that with my macbook.
I agree. The keyboard is fantastic, it is the best smallest keyboard I've ever used. Debian 13 works out of the box and there are no screen rotation issues.
The cause is just that the panel is mounted rotated on the device. It's supposed to be used in a tablet where the top is the short end and the side is the long end, opposite to a laptop.
> Yes, but no room is made for people who see no use for it. There is a forced-consensus that this technology is useful, which I have to combat against at work.
This is the crux of the issue -- The technology is useful. Using it appropriately is probably the thing that people are ignoring, but you're conflating one and the other in your comment.
It is not useful to you in this case, and complain that it is an overall detriment in your industry. Those are fine and reasonable statements and conditions, and I see no reason to disagree with them... But your first statement, people who see no use for it? That is, to me, as off-putting an opinion as the consequence-unaware hypebeasts who are running OpenClaw with access to their trading accounts and can't see why others aren't.
I sympathise with the idea that everyone wants to use the new hammer and so is treating every problem like a nail, but hammers are still pretty good tools. (And you can ignore the ex-NFT-fans hammering on their dicks in the corner.)
I mean only that I see no use for it myself, in my own work. I'm sure there are people working in roles around me who believe they get some use out of AI doing their work for them, and they will have to answer to auditors when they find problems with their work, or when someone is killed.
To me, as a non-techie person, it feels as if people who work in software believe that because their work can be done by AI, everyone else's can, too. Or that this would be better, simply because it proposes a technological solution to human work — it is taken as read that a solution which uses cool sounding computers and data farms is better than one done by humans with a pen and a pad and life experience. They don't have to justify this belief, because the money is on their side.
I don't mean to tar you with a too-wide brush, and I feel like you have a good handle on your personal acceptance for LLM assistance. No complaint there.
I do think, maybe alternative to your view, that LLMs can provide useful feedback to graduate-level employees in most fields.
It is not that the work can be done by LLMs -- we're not there, yet, in software or otherwise -- but that LLMs as useful tutors specifically in regard to denouncing known bad ideas is largely applicable all over.
What I mean by the above is that I have yet to find a truly interesting idea spun from whole cloth by an LLM. They're mediocre at it. They're trained from the aggregate thoughts of those in every industry, and you and I both know that the aggregate of the industry is, generally, mediocre.
Conversely, though, is the hit: They won't be worse than mediocre. An indefatigable tutor who gives no great advice but will counsel you against blowing yourself up (or cutting a limb off with a rope, or falling overboard) is, to me, worth an amount.
The failure modes will get better, the advice will get better. Are we there, now? Unsure. You can tell us all better.
What does that really mean though — ten more years of data centers exploiting local communities for their resources will mean that a computer might be able to teach people to tie knots, and reliably check their work... No government would allow that to certify someone, and no company would risk the lawsuit when someone dies doing what the AI tells them, so it's a non-starter. Even if it were possible, and governments got on board with certifying training like that, would anyone think this was better than what we have now?
What are the likely use cases in my industry then? That AI is used to bodge the important paperwork that protects lives; is used to draft legislation; is used by both employees and management to do things like personal development reports.
Is anyone meant to be impressed? Is this worth communities having their water stolen from them?
I appreciate I am skeptical, but it is hard not to be when the world spends all day telling you a piece of technology is going to fundamentally change the world, and in real life you only see people use it to blag CVs, personal reports, and lesson planning.
> "What does that really mean though — ten more years of data centers exploiting local communities for their resources"
That is purest hyperbole. Data centers use a lot of electricity, but they are hardly looting local communities. The water issue is wildly exaggerated, unless a data center is located in a desert, because most water is recirculated.
And why do you think no one will allow an AI to certify someone on certain topics. Their knowledge at the moment is roughly the average of people in the field. Is an average person in your field not able to certify others? In any case, AIs are improving very rapidly, so what is not possible today will be possible tomorrow.
As an example, let me point out the Tesla FSD. On a per-mile basis, self-driving Teslas have a massively lower accident rate (less than 20%) than human-driven vehicles. That is a very physical activity being handled by an AI.
I don't understand what is dystopian about this: With the exception of mildly elevated resource consumption to achieve the end goal (a nicer photo), is this not the sort of things that humans have been wanting and doing for as long as photographs have been a thing?
It was previously mostly unachievable for regular people to have their snapshots processed in such a way, but it feels like it's just making what used to be special mildly trivial. Anyone who has had their wedding photographed for the past 20 years has had the photos touched up on the way through. Any school portrait for just as long.
100 years ago people would dodge and burn photographic prints to improve them as much as the technology allowed. This is just the forward evolution of that old tale.
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