• 21 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • The Model X is notorious for this. I know a doctor who just had to fix his Model X’s suspension for “thousands” (his words). He also complained that you can never ever reach anyone at Tesla, that parts are impossible to get and that you have to expect repair appointments to be pushed back at least a few times, often mere days beforehand.

    At least the batteries seem to last forever, even on his very early Model S, even after hundreds of thousands of kilometers. There’s barely any degradation. Then again, this mirrors other EVs, even much cheaper ones without active cooling. EV battery packs usually outlast the cars they are in, which is why there’s a thriving market of second-hand batteries that are used for all sorts of applications, from converting normal cars into EVs to storing solar power at night.





  • That’s a very good answer.

    If I’m getting this right, this was a novel that you perhaps mentioned to your loved one, but a language barrier prevented them from reading it. They then suggested the use of an LLM to translate it, which you used as foundation to build upon. If I may ask, which story did you translate (it has to be good if you spent this much work on it) and which LLM did you use?

    I can’t see anything wrong with this. I’ve used this kind of approach using all sorts of machine translation tools going back over 20 years (not for entire books though). Let the computer do its thing, then fix mistakes - but this was always noncommercial, private use for myself, friends and relatives, as well as the occasional friendly online community. Although, I’ve also done entirely manual work, with no machine translation at all in situations when I wanted the best possible quality or where complexity and nuance made anything else impossible - like with a long list of “whisper jokes” from Nazi Germany, subversive jokes that people told each other under the punishment of death that require a ton of context no translation tool could possibly have.

    The point here is though that this is very different from a publisher doing this commercially - and you and I both know that these companies will not even allow for the bare minimum of time spent fixing mistakes made by the translation tools.




  • Technically it does, but not locally in the age of national governments. Before you’re saying it, the moment it stops being a local movement, it would work even less and lead to the organized repression I mentioned. To support my point, see how harsh government reaction has been to activists merely gluing themselves to the street (not to mention, how most people were happy about this crackdown).

    And no, I doubt “The Revolution” that magically solves all of our problems (unlike most revolutions) will be started by anti-AV riots.










  • Ready or Not is a thing and quite popular, although I haven’t tried it myself. As far as I know, it’s the closest to the old SWAT games and not exactly a low-budget Indie title. Similarly, covering the military side of things, there’s Six Days in Fallujah, which is considerably more aggressive and action-heavy than the titles of old, but similarly punishing.


  • There is one crucial difference between image editing software like Photshop and Gimp vs. 3D software suites like Maya and Blender: My hypothesis is (and feel free to pick this apart) that you can totally teach yourself to use the former rather competently without any outside help, not even documentation and tutorials, but I would argue that this is nearly impossible with the latter due to their far greater complexity. This in turn means that people will look up guides and tutorials and learn the idiosyncratic UI patterns that way, which is why Blender with its extremely nonstandard controls managed to gain a foothold far beyond the broke hobbyist sphere.

    Thanks for gently letting me down on RISC OS. I guessed that there wasn’t much going on with it, but I wanted to be sure.