Yes absolutely. My local Best Buy is a depressing hollow shell. The drone section is vacant, the PC part area is now vacant (no GPUs, no RAM, no SSDs). I have visited glorious Microcenter in Dallas, which is a long way from here, and a magnitude different (better) experience.

> his contributions included investigating why generative AI systems suck up to users

Why does it take research to figure this out? Possibly the greatest unspoken problem with big-coporate-AI is that we can't run prompts without the input already pre-poisoned by the house-prompt.

We can't lead the LLM into emergent territory when the chatbot is pre-engineered to be the human equivalent of a McDonalds order menu.

I find your belief that what is needed for emergence is better prompting … amusing.

The ai would still be sycophantic even without the pre-prompt. It’s been reinforced to do so, it’s baked in the weights.

"No taxation without representation" is a perfectly reasonable stance.

Questionably useful at the cost of personal computer components doubling. Unquestionably shafting the personal computer market.

Dude it would be so great to have a little device and you text it SMS messages as prompts. Then it just sits there and thinks away probably getting really hot lol.

It's unfortunate that there is huge interest in prolonging lithium battery life because it's an indication of products with hard-to-replace batteries.

protected lithium cells are fairly save and easy to replace into devices designed for them. Lifepo4 cells similarly.

We need more product engineers out there fighting the good fight.

I was ready to install Linux. I installed a new 1TB ssd in my laptop. I shrunk the windows volume using Windows' Disk Management.

Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recreating a new one.

This seems like a horribly complex task and I can envision about a million unwritten things that can go wrong that the answer would be "well duh, that's obvious if you had any experience with linux disk partitioning. I myself bricked a dozen PCs."

Deleting the EFI partition, if it goes wrong, by definition my system would be bricked until I could figure things out.

Also, everything must be typed into terminal exactly with no error and one chance. (If the typo causes the command to error, phew. if the typo causes something else to happen, beware)

So yes, I have a lack of taste.

Downloads distro famous for its manual install process, complains about how manual the install process is…

How does someone browse this forum and get to the point of installing Arch without intimately understanding that Arch is infamously, abnormally difficult to install? Proving GPs point perhaps

If you had tried Ubuntu, KDE Neon, CachyOS, ElementsryOS, or really any other distro, this would not have been your experience.

Arch is a Manual experience designed for power users. It is not a good choice for even your average Linux user, let alone a first time Windows convert dipping their toes.

This is the issue though, Windows obscures the natural complexity of many things and picks defaults that serve to lock you into the ecosystem. You have expectations about how easy certain things should be that you are unwilling to let go of, and you dismiss the things that other systems make easy as irrelevant.

If Windows had never hidden the natural complexity of EFI, or chosen sane defaults, your experience would be better. It is absolutely insane to blame that on Arch.

After leaving that comment I had a moment of doubt that maybe I had gone too far, but no, you've reassured me. The windows user wants to stink up a power user distro to make it a fisher-price toy. Disgusting.

You are right. I went with ultramarine linux and am perfectly satisfied.

I can't help but think that in 1910, both the concept of "fear of rejection" and "high standards" would have made no sense to people at the time. Yet I would agree that they are valid concepts today. We have to explore why these two concepts exist and why they did not exist in 1910. It seems valid to call them side effects of something bigger, what the bigger is I don't know. I don't see how society can address these two issues without addressing the other issues that lead to the existence of these.

I'm not sure why you believe that "high standards" and "fear of rejection" didn't exist a hundred years ago. Think Gatsby, from the Great Gatsby (published 1925): dude longed for human connection (hence throwing massive parties), but was terrified of being outed as not belonging to the social strata he found himself in. That's fear of rejection. People being to good for others is basis of the class system, and that predates written history.

After seeing your renders on github, a question I always have is why voxels are stereotypically 1m square... wouldn't the ideal voxel engine immediately set the scale to something more high-res? I'm just drooling at the thought of a voxel engine where a block size is equivalent to the size of a physical pixel.