Go figure. MacBook Neo Is the Most Repairable MacBook in 14 Years [0]
Much as a laptop would suit me, I opted for a mini and a large display.
Come keyboard time, I was ready to spend $$$$$ for an Apple keyboard, but the only backlit ones come on laptops. I'm using a Logitech now, with the option of charging it all the time, else the lights dim themselves to conserve battery.
Yes, I was 19 once. And three times after that. But there we go again, stuff designed for 19 year-olds.
This may be outside your plan, but I really could use a pdf editor that makes Internet Archive book scans more readable.
Apparently, the scanner(s) adopt some compromise setting that renders halftones OK, but gives all text a "dishwater gray" background.
If there are few pictures, I run the PDF through a quartz filter in Preview to threshold the text and later merge graphics pages with the "contact sheet" view from an un-threshold-ed image in Preview.app. This is slow and tedious.
Of course, computers are "smart," so they tell me, and should be able to recognize a picture from a block of text on the same page and render each one appropriately.
I used to do such editing of really important documents (like ads for pioneer computer products and gizmos like GENIAC and such)[0] pretty much by hand, splitting a PDF, if needed, into multiple images and hand/batch editing, then merging again.
I could use ImageMagick ... but it's not adaptive, as described above.
OTOH, some locations themselves are about as anonymous as Half Dome, so geolocation is obvious. "Only one place on earth looks like that".
I generally turn off location info on the phone and cameras, though the Nikon lenses include the lens serial number in the EXIF (but not the camera body's, go figure). I suppose that this is useful in case of theft or loss.
The "wisdom of crowds" used to work when the crowds were composed of people. Then came echo chambers. Then came bots, and then came easy to bias LLM's.
> Stop if you’ve heard this one before: an employee received a message from her boss and didn’t quite understand its meaning, suspecting it was written by AI. So, the employee asked an AI tool to interpret the message for her. The AI responded and then asked if she wanted a draft response back to her boss.
> But leaders are not actually equipping younger employees to navigate change, communicate effectively, and have good judgment, she said, which lowers their competitive advantage when human-centric skills are driving success in the AI era.
Great.
It looks like "leaders" are building a moat around their jobs, stifling the qualities that a company and employees need to create success and deliver value ( to real people) in an increasingly automated world.
I remember finding the unlikely sounding book "Corps Values" in which U.S. Marines were pushing leadership and decision-making down to the troops from higher levels.
> Only by incorporating such time-honored Marine qualities as pride, discipline, courage, and respect into our personal and professional lives can we meet the challenges that lie ahead.
I wonder what value these qualities have any more, especially when work teaches you to negotiate with a chatbot rather than real people.
We seem to be increasingly living in a Twilight Zone or Star Trek episode. Recall: [0]
> A Taste of Armageddon (episode). On a diplomatic mission, the crew visit a planet that is waging a destructive war fought solely by computer simulation, but the casualties, including the crew of the USS Enterprise, are supposed to be real.
> LLMs are innately “converging” — their underlying dynamics push them towards objective reality — citing the example of Elon Musk’s repeated comeuppances at the hands of fact-checks by his own AI chatbot, Grok.
Yes, but people have confirmation bias, and will ignore contradictions in a chatbot, and public figures, in favor of what confirms their biases.
For example: Who tweeted the following in 2019?
The United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East.
Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE..
A great many experts in the military, medicine, disaster relief, and cybersecurity { the list goes on } were fired.
It's almost as if the nation were being weakened on purpose.
Don't get mad, get Vlad. Or just prepare for the long-desired Rapture.[0] and which politicians seem to be working very hard to being about (the Apocalypse part, anyway)
"Competent" people are not valuable and over rated because they will flake out in such jobs when the group holds them responsible for all sorts of things they have no control over. They are the first people who recognize lumits. Their own, their teams and the systems. But people dont want to hear about Limits. They want saviors and messaihs. They want fantasy and magic. So the system runs not optimized for efficiency but illusion of control, for damping of anxieties and fears.
No, I’m convinced the one thing that Trump wants to do is to launch a nuke before he dies. That’s what he wants his legacy to be. and his name everywhere.
• They are already "trained" (in random violence against civilians. Checks one box)
• Bonespur "victims" have already been weeded out.
• They are already government employees and must go where assigned. (saves TONS of paperwork)
• They already have weapons, and unspent budget money.
• They already have swell masks to protect from radioactive dust that bombing reactors creates, and (this is big)
• Their kill to loss ratio is infinite.
Much as a laptop would suit me, I opted for a mini and a large display.
Come keyboard time, I was ready to spend $$$$$ for an Apple keyboard, but the only backlit ones come on laptops. I'm using a Logitech now, with the option of charging it all the time, else the lights dim themselves to conserve battery.
Yes, I was 19 once. And three times after that. But there we go again, stuff designed for 19 year-olds.
How about this? (image at imgbb.com)
https://i.ibb.co/66RZd3b/mbp16-m3-max-01.jpg (JK)
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