> In many ways it’s something that I have to tolerate to do many things that functioned fine before. I have to use an app to pay for parking. I need to create an online account to pay for a family swim at the local leisure centre. I have to submit an online form to book a slot at the local recycling centre. I need an app to check my bank and credit card balances.
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
> For US readers - in my country in Europe I'd say that 95% of people have only debit card, not credit card. it's very not common to have a credit card here.
In the countries I've been to in the EU (Belgium, France, Spain, Luxembourg), when they give you cards they give you typically both a debit and a credit card. It's extremely common to have both. I've got debit cards, a pre-paid debit card (which I top up when I plan to spend) and credit cards.
And getting up to 2% cashback in the EU (even if the fees vendors can add in the EU are maximum 0.3) is not that hard.
It's very common to pay for mostly everything with a debit card and then use a credit card to, say, book a plane or vacations or to open a tab when you check-in at some hotel.
Heck, I don't even know if you can book a plane with a debit card!? (and anyway then you probably don't get the cancellation insurance etc. that you typically automatically get with a credit card).
> quant HFT is pretty decent mental exercise and it has given them “deep” brain muscles. that’s my take.
It's quite crazy that it's Deepseek's background/original purpose. We already had very advanced stuff from the world of HFT, but now a frontier family of models from a private company that used to be (still is?) in HFT is plain bonkers.
According to an old interview, apparently they were always interested in AI. But finance is just where they had their first success.
> Many of High-Flyer's original team members worked on AI. Back then, we tried a lot of fields before getting our big break in finance, which is complex enough. AGI is probably one of the hardest things we can do next, so for us it was a question of how, not why.
Incidentally, Wenfeng is kind of reverse Hassabis. There were some rumours that:
> Hassabis quietly assembled a team of around 20 researchers to develop high-frequency trading algorithms, without Google's approval. When the parent company found out, the project was disbanded.
In this case the finance model was used to parse lengthy, verbose and inscrutable yet very impactful chinese government pr statements and do sentiment analysis.
> You'd have been lucky to be able to recover those in 2001.
2001 might be a stretch but indeed they do degrade badly. During Covid I was locked down, by a stroke of bad luck, alone, 2000 kilometers away from my wife and young daughter... In the house were I grew up. My old Commodore 128 was still in the attic and I dug it out, cleaned it, cleaned (and greased) the disk drive and tried to read my 5"1/4 floppy disks.
I'd say I got about 50% success: one disk out of two was already unreadable.
One could see it as "50% success rate after 35+ years is quite good" but I fear that if I were to try now, many more would fail.
I took the opportunity to make a copy of the game Commando (which has an incredible chiptune by Rob Hubbard) on two NOS (new old stock) 5"1/4 floppies. For thankfully I had a copy a Fast Hack'em that'd still boot.
Having real time capsule stuff, re-using data from old floppies that haven't been archived since decades, is becoming near impossible.
In my experience CDs and DVDs I burned myself have a lifespan even shorter than floppies. Most of the CDs I burned in the late 90s/early 2000s are already unreadable.
> In my experience CDs and DVDs I burned myself have a lifespan even shorter than floppies. Most of the CDs I burned in the late 90s/early 2000s are already unreadable.
Similar here: CDs and DVDs burned from 2000-2006 or so were, without exception, illegible by 2015. It's sickening.
> A lot of my friends have kept their old 486 computers, and everything is period-correct except for the hard drive and floppy drive which have been replaced with a CF-to-IDE for the HDD and Gotek running FlashFloppy firmware for the 3.5".
That's quite stretching the definition of "period correct". I mean: how could one have a 486 even less period correct than that? With adapters for more modern RAM and more modern CPUs and a 5090 somehow stuck in it?
> everything is period-correct EXCEPT for the hard drive and floppy drive
Hence why I couched my assertion with "except". IMHO its the best way to enjoy the original hardware experience without all the inevitable failures of using decades old magnetic storage media.
Side note, I had high hopes for industrial boards (Vortex86) as a means of letting more people experience the original hardware without having to lug around a boat anchor but when I tried one, the experience was fraught with all kinds of annoying issues (SVGA, etc)...
> I then realized that most people just stick with whatever default they're provided with, and it's a lot of them.
That's why Google already captured such a big part of the market with Gemini: they're now integrating it with just about everything. GMail? Gemini. Search? (asnwer by and "do you want to continue discussing this with") Gemini. Workspace? Gemini.
They may not have yet the same number of MAU as OpenAI but the Gemini experience is much more streamlined than ChatGPT: when people are presented with it, they just use it.
And to be fair Google's flash model are just amazing.
So in a bit more than a year, 10% of the planet has downloaded a NSFW classifier?
I mean: in the end there are only 8 billion people on earth, which projects do, all added up, need to download one NSFW classifier 600 million times a year?
Something something something makes me think there are inefficiencies at play here.
Depends, if every time a project redeploys it redownloads all external resources from their respective CDNs, do you consider that to be inefficient? What if it’s part of a service that runs on thousands of instances to keep up with the volume of user generate content?
> Well, as much as people lose all their muscle by been bed-ridden, he's lost all his brain by being AI Assisted™.
Wanna know the answer of those who lost all their brain cells to that?
"If there are bugs, it's only because the prompt was off. I'm a better prompt-engineer than your business partner, so this could never ever happen to me."
And off to the couch they go sit and shut their brains off.
My guy in fact started by blaming himself for prompting wrong, and yesterday he was "upset" that his friend Claudio missed some important documentation details (three API keys were needed and one I had no idea where to get, not mentioned once at all)
The really sad thing about those is that due to the phone being a mediocre, inferior, device the experience on that shitty tiny screen is pathetic compared to doing the same on a proper screen (say on a laptop or, as in my case, on an ultra-wide monitor).
Seriously: I do appreciate that I can use my bank's webapp to do wire transfers, check my balances, search for old payments I made, etc. compared to the old days where, if I was lucky, could do 1/10th of this by going to some terminal (that was only accessible 8/5) or, even before that, by going to the bank to ask a bank employee to do it for me.
But phone apps, on that dumb tiny screen and improper input methods? Just screw that.
> Can you imagine leaving the house without a phone?
It's still totally doable. Just as it's still possible to do a 1500 kilometers drive and getting without any trouble to your destination without needing an Internet-connected NAV system: a map + GPS-receive only works fine. I do it all the time.
I regularly leave the house without my house: it's okay, I know where my kid's school is. I know where the groceries store is.
Really the main reason I do take my phone is when I know I need to either give or receive an important phone call. A phone for phone calls: such a weird concept.
But I agree with the author that it's bad: when your local recycling center believes it's okay to make you install an app, you know things aren't headed a good direction.
I'll fight for as long as I can: I'll keep using "offline map + GPS receiver" for navigation while I can and I'll install as few apps as possible on my phones.
And most of all: I'll keep using my phone to give and receive phone calls.
P.S: there are still good stuff and communities on the Internet. I'll give just one example: the community sharing free 3D models that can then be 3D printed: I'm fixing and enhancing many things in the house with those.
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