According to that site you can downgrade the firmware (some people really disliked the various UI changes and the firmware is getting quite prescriptive)

You can also run your own homebrew apps so I found someone who installed KOReader which they claim is better experience than default reader especially for pdfs and also link better to personal cloud storage.

There’s also ability to use locally stored Web Application Frameworks but I’m not 100% sure what the use case would be.

Four years is not very long in a climate poised to undergo a phase transition unless we are able to reverse course very sharply. The IPCC is clear on this.

There’s some compelling evidence it’s also incompatible with economic growth despite this being the stated goal.

Yes. Of course wider changes like WFH and pandemic have affected things but specific policy choices have led to those trends being supported and reinforced in order to produce better air quality outcomes. Both those trends are present in lots of cities without this drastic impact.

If he retains an ownership stake doesn’t that mean he still takes home the profit of Brewdog so boycotting would still be effective/desirable?

It is probably good that OS community are exploring this however I’m not sure the technology is ready (or will ever be maybe) and it potentially undermines the labour intensive activity of producing high quality subtitling for accessibility.

I use them quite a lot and I’ve noticed they really struggle on key things like regional/national dialects, subject specific words and situations where context would allow improvement (e.g. a word invented solely in the universe of the media). So it’s probably managing 95% accuracy which is that danger zone where its good enough that no one checks it but bad enough that it can be really confusing if you are reliant on then. If we care about accessibility we need to care about it being high quality.

Yes fair points. I assumed it was a balance between aerodynamics and crumple zones/legal requirements which is why they don’t all look like the aptera (or Schlörwagens).

I’m quite sure the system isn’t optimising for what we want/need out of vehicles though and we could almost certainly do better.

They are similar as far as I understand because they all want the same outcomes of the design : better aerodynamics and effective crumple zones to faculiate higher survival of the occupants in a crash (some vehicles additionally try to limit injuries with pedestrians too but less so in US vehicles).

I do agree that we have lost some of the majesty of older variations of designs but largely I think it’d convergent evolution. To leave that behind you’d want to have a really good reason which I don’t think the cyber truck really has. Different for the sake of being different rather than innovative.

What I find frustrating about the current wave of “AI” is how much it obfuscates any meaningful discussion about the utility of different methods and approaches.

Does Machine Learning or Machine Vision have a role in decarbonisation? Probably yes but it will require thought (and carbon accounting to make sure savings large enough!).

Do LLMs or other GenAI techniques designed to pump out rehashes of existing images or text at tremendous energy cost? No.

Are either of them “Artificial Intelligence” or are either of them likely to become “Artificial Intelligence”? No.

I read something about how the best outputs are done using a blend of make-up/models with CGI adding the layer of realism on top so pure CGI is worse but film studies pursue that because its cheaper and outsourcable compared with a heavy unionised make-up/prop workers.

Don’t leave us hanging - what was the one book that was so bad?

Not sure how serious this comment is but these are anomalies against expected behaviour from models. These models include historical data with the addition of how we expect the changes we are making to impact it with the best knowledge we have of how the systems work.

So its not saying its surprising that Australia is hot this time of year it’s saying it markedly hotter than we expect or can explain using everything we understand about the climate.

Love this!

“Enjoys” is not how I would describe it.

I’m pretty sure it’s real. I met someone once who worked in materials research for food and they said that modelling was big there because the scope for experimentation is more limited. In materials for construction where they wanted to change a property they could play around with adding new additives and seeing what happens. For food though you can’t add anything beyond a limited set of chemicals that already have approval from the various agencies* and therefore they look at trying to fine tune in other ways.

So for chocolate, for example, they control lots of material properties by very careful control of temperature and pressure as it solidifies. This is why if chocolate melts and resolidifies you see the white bits of milk that don’t remain within the materia.

*Okay you can add a new chemical but that means a time frame of over a decade to then get approval. I think the number of chemicals that’s happened to is very very small and that’s partly because the innovation framework of capitalism is very short term.

Yes I agree that the headline and article is silly to reference memes and undermines the study as a whole which seems more sound.

I know loads of people of take hundred of photos a day and then pay a cloud hoster (or use a “free” service) to store it indefinitely and never look back at it again.

Cloud storage isn’t straight forwardly just hard storage because its kept in data centers such that it can be downloaded at any point.

Cloud storage is replacing any sense of needing a digital archivist processes for people and businesses because it much cheaper and easier to store it just in case the data is needed again rather than actually strategetically thinking about what data is important to keep and what isn’t.

Though worth saying that the link suggests the computing was used for aerodynamics for ensuring production wouldn’t destroy them not. For the shape as such. I’ve also seem it said that the can is part of that too.

It is quite hard to track down but here’s it being reported by the head of modelling at P&G in 2006

https://www.hpcwire.com/2006/05/05/high_performance_potato_chips/

Very much so. We aren’t winning until the taps are turned off

I’m sure its small - “AI” is an unnecessary waste of resources when we can ill afford it. That said we have actual quantifiable targets (that are so tough because we’ve left it so late) for energy and emissions so it might still be the case that this also needs to change.

Sadly, ine of the things I hear quite a lot from people is the assumption that digital means it has no impact at all and they act accordingly to that assumption but when you add it up it is having a sizeable impact.