In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).

Were you pronouncing it b-anal?

That middle paragraph is very misleading. It’s Generative AI as a service that is actively harmful to the environment. Having a 15 W chip to do tasks like erasing objects from a photo is not any more harmful to the environment than a GPU that uses 15W. In fact, NPUs can be more efficient at some tasks than GPUs.

The problem is opening your phone/browser, and being able to call on demand GPT-4 to wake up a cluster of 128 Nvidia A100s operating at around 300-400W each. That’s 51.2 kW.

Now you can draw some positives and negatives from that figure, such as

• Given that an iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 has a thermal design power of 8 W, GPT-4 on the server is about 6400 more energy intensive than anything you can do on an iPhone. 10 seconds of GPT need a similar amount of energy to an iPhone 15 Pro operating flat out at maximum power for 18 hours. Now in those 10 seconds, OpenAI says they “handle multiple user queries simultaneously”, but still - we’re feeding the machine.
• 51.2 kW is also roughly how much power a large SUV needs to roll at constant speed on a motorway. Each of those large clusters uses a similar amount of energy to a single 7-seater SUV, but serving many users at the same time. Plus unlike cars, a large portion of their energy usage comes from renewables. So yes, I agree that it’s a significant impact but largely overrepresented and we have bigger fish to fry; personal transport is a way bigger issue.

Which country?

Yup. Loads of them! https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hallucinations+llm&btnG=

Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what’s happening.

I agree with the philosophy, but not with the approach.

If you own/make the OS, and you know that the registry can get orphan entries which slow down the system, don’t wait for the user to open an “optimisation app” to clean that up. Just make sure the registry is cleaned transparently and in the background.

This seems to me like a tactic to get less tech-savvy people to accidentally set Edge as their browser and ensure their Ads and Microsoft’s tracking is working as the mothership mandates. Worst part is we have evidence to think I’m not being the slightest bit cynical here…

I’m talking about TV ads, magazine covers. General models (not the super-skinny runway models which don’t necessarily follow typical beauty standards) or porn (which follows its own set of trends I’d say, like over exaggerated bodies, breast implants…).

I don’t know if it’s the best difference but I’m talking generally about the difference between people like Jennifer Aniston in 1997 vs Scarlett Johansson in 2020, for example.

You don’t have to go that far - if you look at 90’s female models, or actresses that were considered “hot” at the time, they had a significantly different body type from today. They were a lot skinnier, there was more diet and less gym involved in the female bodies of the 90s and early 2000s.

And because of the logarithmic nature of decibels, 6 dB louder approximately means twice as loud. So these claimants are saying the airpods reached about 700 times higher volume than they can.

I worked for Airbus for 3-4 years. I wasn’t wildly happy with how many things are done, but when I read news about Boeing I routinely think “woah, that’s wild”.

I only get on a Boeing plane if there is no other option. It’s not a case of voting with your wallet in an “I won’t buy a phone without a headphone jack” situation, but a serious safety matter. Many of their decisions (particularly the MCAS / MAX8 fiasco) are absolutely insane. They might rectify whatever they want, but as semi-informed passengers I don’t see how we can trust that the current board is prioritising safety over shareholders…

God this is equally terrible and hilarious 😂

For example, The Associated Press reported that an official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan moms. It claimed it too had a child in school in New York City, but when confronted by the group members, it later apologized before its comments disappeared, according to screenshots shown to The Associated Press.

Thanks GPT, very useful

And so is straight male-focused porn. We men seemingly are not attractive, other than for perfume ads. It’s unbelievable gender roles are still so strongly coded in 20204. Women must be pretty, men must buy products where women look pretty in ads. Men don’t look pretty and women don’t buy products - they clean the house and care for the kids.

I’m aware of how much I’m extrapolating, but a lot of this is the subtext under “they’ll make porn of your sisters and daughters” but leaving out of the thought train your good looking brother/son, when that’d be just as hurtful for them and yourself.

An interesting perspective that I heard once is that it was the Fax Machine that killed the Concorde. Before faxes, people (businesses) had to physically transport documents, which meant that for large financial companies in Wall St and the London City the Concorde was a great business tool and worth the expense. When the documents you’re carrying enable signing a multi-million business deal in the same day, a £6000 ticket is a completely reasonable business expense.

The fax machine rendered that business need obsolete, and leisure travellers can deal with an extra few hours to cross the Atlantic.

No no, pride is not about being “special”. Nobody is special. It’s about people embracing who they are, despite having a tougher going than others.

It’s about not staying in the closet in a country with bigots. It’s about being a woman in a working culture that favours men. It’s about going to university in a country that favours manual labour. It’s about being trans… and daring to say out loud “this is not my gender”.

Being a white, straight, cis man is not very difficult. Being a non-white, straight, cis woman is statistically more common, but harder. Normally, “statistical anomalies” have a harder going, but this is definitely not about being special. It’s about being whoever you are, despite the adversity.

Also, to clarify - I haven’t mentioned anything about not being straight. My sexual orientation has nothing to do with my response.

Yeah, that is the whole point. The whole point is not “I am proud of who I am attracted to”, the point is “I am proud of being open about who I am attracted to despite the bigots and social challenges”.

Which is why there is no “straight pride”, “blond pride”, or “high school student pride”. There is no glory in doing something that is statistically speaking, completely devoid of interest…

I can’t read “My mate Paul” and not hear it in Philomena Cunk’s / Diane Morgan’s voice. Well played sir!

I have a surface pro x. I can’t install Google drive on windows. I can’t install Linux. Affinity apps don’t get graphics acceleration because of some missing directX support. Neither does Blender, or Fusion360. Darktable and Rawtherapee only work under emulation. How is this a $1000+ laptop? All those things work flawlessly on an underspecced base MacBook air with 8GB of RAM (up until you need to use all the ram to keep five chrome tabs open anyway).

I know there’s some hyperbole here, but my point still stands: the author is right when they said that Microsoft hasn’t given up… Because it feels they’re not even trying. Apple said EVERYBODY MAKE ARM APPS NOW, and compatibility problems lasted a year. Not ten years.

Ah, it was just because of the “ban cars” comment with no more context around it. I’m happy with reducing cars, not with expecting cars to get banned altogether or to cease to exist magically.