I really liked that dude that at the start of his presentation introduced a little dude he had drawn on paper, gave it a name and did a skit with it. He then beheaded the little dude and proceeded to proclaim he was dead. The audience did a D: and were shocked and appalled. He then proceeded to explain that’s exactly what humans always do and how we treat AI. Our brains automatically anthropomorphise anything and everything. We assign properties based on feelings and not what it really is. The audience got it right away, really convincing demo. I don’t remember who it was, but it was so good to watch it happen with the audience there.

One of the big issues with Picard is that the original script was with the android being the main character and Picard not even be part of it. Then the studio wanted a big name attached to it, because they didn’t believe it would do well to revive the Star Trek franchise on its own. So they got Patrick Stewart involved, made Picard the main character and basically mangled the show. I think Stewart also wanted a lot of changes to the show and the studio involvement was huge as well. This made the end result pretty terrible tbh.

Out of curiosity, what sort of reasons do people have to switch out their SIM? I haven’t done that in a long time myself, but I might not be the typical user.

I remember I had a Voodoo card at the time of GTA2. Playing the Glide version of that game (if you could get it working) was like being transported into the future. The resolution was higher, the framerate was higher and more smooth, the lighting effects were insane. Especially on a large CRT with vibrant colors that game looked absolutely amazing.

I really like Volt and everything they do in multiple countries. They look at problems and think of solutions. Many political parties have an underlying philosophy or religion and every stance they take is based on that. This often leads to parties that I sometimes align with on certain issues, to have a totally different opinion on other issues that I absolutely do not align with. Volt’s philosophy seems to be: Do whatever actually works and improves the situation. I find myself hardly ever disagreeing with them and if I do it’s more in the details than the general direction. They are also not afraid to stand behind stuff that’s really necessary and hurts in the short term, but in the end actually solves the problem.

They don’t get a lot of votes so far as they are pretty new and people are slow to switch. But I hope they get big in the future as they truly are in my opinion what we need to move forward.

Most AI content is posted by actual humans, so identifying the user as human seems kinda pointless? What matters is if the content itself was AI generated.

MongoDB is normally not public facing right?

He also points out that there are many ISBNs that are “wrong”, but are actually correct in the real world. This is because publishers don’t always understand about the checksum and just increment the ISBN when publishing a new book. In many library systems there is this checkbox next to the ISBN entry field where you can say something like “I understand this ISBN is wrong, but it is correct in the real world”.

So just flagging wrong ISBNs would lead to a lot of false positives and would need specific structures to deal with that.

Alright, I’ve got nothing for you then.

I didn’t think the thing would be good. When he got it in, we spent a day running benchmarks and fooling around with it. We compared it to his old workstation and my desktop system. It wasn’t a very controlled environment, we were just having fun and putting the thing through it’s paces.

I asked my friend yesterday how he liked the machine having worked with it for some time now and he’s really happy with it. It is across the board faster than his old machine and is wonderful to work with. He can setup complex simulations and take it with him to the office. This was always a bit of a pain point in the past, where he would run the simulations at home on his workstation, but then could only share the results. Sometimes they would rent server time to run the simulation on a cloud system, but that was a bit of a hassle and had costs. Now he just uplugs his notebook, puts it in the bag and off he goes. He also now doesn’t have 2 systems from work he needs to regularly log into and keep up to date. Sometimes he had a couple of months where he didn’t need the laptop and it would get fussy over missing updates etc. So for him at least it’s a big win and to me shows you can run some pretty heavy stuff on those machines.

Are there faster machines out there? Absolutely. Are there even better notebooks out there? For sure, Apple M3 is faster and M4 is even faster still. And with Apple the performance per watt is better as well. But running Windows on those is (for now at least) not something that’s suitable for work. The security department would certainly not approve of a highly modified version of Windows.

The whole point of this post was Arm chips might be huge in the future and I have to agree. These current gen Arm CPUs are impressive and the next gen will be even more so.

You also seem to indicate running benchmarks and running applications is somehow not the same thing? Sure not all benchmarks are realistic, but are more of an indication and relative performance thing, as to easily compare different systems. And not all applications stress the system the same way. But every benchmark I’ve seen says that notebook is on par and exceeds the performance of my 5950X desktop and to me that’s impressive. In the real world if we are using simple office applications or websites/web-apps, I doubt we would notice the difference in performance, both are equally fast and perhaps the latency of the internet connection is a bigger factor there. But something like Speedometer shows the real world browser performance of the laptop is better than on my desktop.

Did the engineers at Qualcomm spend a couple of weeks with a small team to optimise a custom Linux environment for Geekbench and put a boatload of cooling on the chip? Sure, I believe that. They want to show the CPU in the best possible conditions. Is the real world performance still very good? Yes, it is. And there are so many notebook reviews that back this up.

Are there also terrible notebooks with a CPU throttled all the way down and lacking enough cooling? Also yes. But the same can be said for x86 notebooks. Especially Intel notebooks of 12th and 13th gen, those ran hot and slow all the time.

If you are convinced all Arm notebooks suck, I’m not here to change your mind, I’m not here to provide any kind of proof. All I can tell you is I know of one real life case where I saw with my own eyes the thing was pretty damned good. If you don’t believe me, that’s just fine. It’s just a discussion on the internet, don’t take it too seriously.

It’s not like anyone can afford a new laptop in 2026, with the RAM prices being what they are. So it probably won’t be the year of the Arm CPU, no matter how good those chips actually are.

It’s a work machine, he uses it for work. He runs a custom simulation package from work, I can’t name the app without doxxing my friend. It scales well with CPU and memory and uses an optimal number of threads for the amount of cores (and even works well with stuff like multiple CPUs or different cores having access to different cache). For running most stuff at least 32GB of memory is required and for the stuff he does 64GB of memory is an absolute must. Simulations take between 20 mins and 8 hours depending on what he wants from it. The simulation tool does not use the GPU at all, so that’s a non-factor. The tool is x86 based, with an Arm version coming soon™, so there might even be performance improvements in the future. The simulations run faster in all scenarios as compared to his old workstation, even the long ones. Cooling is not an issue on this particular machine and due to the many core load boosting isn’t done anyways.

We ran Speedometer because many laptop reviews include that one and it’s very quick and easy to run. Specifically the 3.0 version because we had a source open with Apple M benchmarks that included that one. The result was somewhere around Apple M2, maybe a bit faster than an M2 but def slower than an M3.

You can try it yourself and read about it here: https://browserbench.org/Speedometer3.0/ It benchmarks regular use in web-apps, as a lot of apps these days are web-apps. So it gives an impression of every-day tasks in websites and web-apps.

I think the results you mention back up what I said? It regularly outperformed my 5950X desktop machine in benchmarks or was at least on par in other cases. My desktop is a big case with water-cooling and when benching the fans do make a bit of noise. That little notebook outperformed it and the fan was barely noticeable.

Like I said, I was sceptical, but that thing impressed me a lot. You can draw your own conclusions, that doesn’t really matter to me. If you think Arm laptops suck by definition, that’s fine, you do you. But don’t say you can’t use it for heavy applications, because at least for some cases that’s just not true. I think the GPU (especially the driver) is a weak point for these system, so anything that leans on them probably should use a systems with a separate GPU and not the builtin one. But this is also true for Intel and AMD, so not really any difference there.

We have tried a whole bunch of benchmarks and the laptop was on par or faster than the older Threadripper workstation and my 5950X desktop. Most benchmarks were multithreaded, but there was some singlethreaded stuff as well. He uses the system to run simulations for work and that software also runs faster than the old workstation. I can’t run that on my system, so I wouldn’t know how it compares.

I don’t have the exact bench results as we didn’t write them all down, just ran and compared. But I do have a result screenshotted of 27.9 in Speedometer 3.0, which is pretty good I think.

As it’s the laptop from work he runs Windows on it, the new Windows Arm version which wasn’t even fully released at the time he got it. That version seems to be a big step up from the old Arm Windows which was used for budget Bing books. His model is the most high end one, 15" with 64GB of memory and 1TB SSD with a Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100 cpu. That one has some pretty good cooling inside.

I was sceptical at first as well, as I would have thought the performance wouldn’t be great and there would be compatibility issues. But he’s been using it for a while now and says everything works just fine. Replacing a big box workstation with a thin and light notebook and have it perform better is pretty wild. There would absolutely be faster systems available, for example a 9950X system or latest gen Threadripper workstation would be faster. But that would have been more expensive because those systems are more expensive to start with and he would then need a separate laptop as well. Having something in a thin laptop form factor and it be an upgrade in performance is pretty mind blowing.

I’m assuming that’s like pure alcohol (as alcohol related stats usually are to negate the difference in drinks), so if he only drank beer of around 5% he would have drank 8700 beers. Say he started drinking alcohol at the age of 16 that averages out to somewhere between 7 and 8 beers a week (or the wine/booze equivalent). While not exactly alcoholic levels, this is above average (depending on where he lived) and an unhealthy amount.

I got one of these a while ago for €75 delivered from China to mess with, way before all the YouTubers got hold of them. Seemed like a fun little unique board to mess around with and they were dumped because they weren’t suitable for mining anymore. I modified the hardware quite a bit, changing up the cooling, connecting a small PSU etc. I wanted to put it into an enclosure but never did. The reason was after I modified the hardware and was happy with that, modified the firmware and was happy with that, I focused on the software. The software is a nightmare, I intended to run Linux so Windows not working was a complete non-issue for me. However even under Linux it’s a pain in the butt to get it working and even then it’s very weird. Some things will run just fine, be stable with excellent performance. Other stuff just straight up won’t run with super weird errors I couldn’t figure out, or it runs but the performance it terrible. I have seen a lot of people posting hacks and fixes and some people trying to collect all of those in some centralised locations, which is really cool and helps a lot. It also seemed fussy about the PSU, where a high power large standard PSU would work fine with the old paperclip trick, getting other PSUs to run was more difficult. I tried 3 different smaller PSUs before ending up on something that it would boot on each and every time. With the others it would just hang on a black screen instead of booting, although it did sometimes work when trying multiple times in a row. I also severely underestimated the amount of cooling required, the heatsink it comes with is terrible and only works with extremely high and laminar airflow, with intake in the front and exhaust in the back. This was probably fine for running in a mining location where they have large aircons going and super loud fans that put out a lot of airflow. But I wanted a little case I could put on a desk. At first I thought I could use 2 40mm fans to blow the air just like the original design, but that turned out to need so much RPM it got loud even with quiet fans. So I started with modifying the heatsink so the top is open, it’s all folded close so with a little 3D printed tool it’s pretty easy to get it folded back open. Doesn’t look pretty and takes a few hours to do, but improves it a lot. Then I 3D printed some brackets and attached 2 120mm fans to that, attaching the brackets on the side with some tape to make it fit snugly on the heatsink. This works well, temperatures are good, but still isn’t super quiet and requires a bit of airflow. This means designing an enclosure is a lot harder, as it would need rather a lot of intake and exhausts to not suffocate the fans.

In the end I gave up. I had a really cool concept in mind and had a lot of fun tinkering with it. But with all the software issues and having a hard time cooling the thing, it just wasn’t worth going forward with it. I might revisit it sometime, when more fixes are posted, so it actually works. And maybe design and build some custom water cooling for it, so it can be cooled more easily.

Heavy duty desktop applications are excellent on Arm. I know someone who has one of those new Microsoft Surface laptops with an Arm chip and that thing is impressive. It outperforms my Ryzen 5950X desktop in many cases and does it all without breaking a sweat. I had my doubts before if it would work, especially since a lot of x86 stuff goes through an emulation layer. But even in x86 benchmarks that thing is super fast. And with 64GB of memory you can run some really heavy duty stuff. He uses it as a workstation for work and it outperforms the big box he had before, can take it anywhere and was cheaper than the original workstation as well. And with an USB-C hub he can connect his multiple monitors and keyboard, so the setup really hasn’t changed much from before. Only downside is Windows sucks ass and messes up the monitor config when the thing gets disconnected, but he wrote a script to fix it, so not the biggest of deals.

Plants actually use O2 themselves a lot of the time, so we would still need to truck in a whole bunch of that stuff in. Also the amount of plants needed for just a single human is huge. Most plants are rather bad at producing O2. Most of it actually comes from algae living in water, not potted plants. The YouTube channel Joel Creates did an experiment with how much algae you would actually need to breathe. It’s like a lot, a lot a lot really. Building some place on Mars or even in orbit that such a large amount of algae could happily live is pretty hard. Hell it’s pretty hard on Earth, where you don’t need to worry about temperature and pressure going out of spec or stuff like radiation. These days we do have pretty effective LED grow lights that prevent the whole thing from becoming too hot. From movies people think space is cold, but getting rid of heat is a big problem. With that much light blasting into the water, the temperature rises and the algae will die from that at some point. So radiating away all that heat is a must. On Mars or the Moon this is easier as the surrounding rocks could be used as a heat sink. The actual real hard part is not just building this, but building it in a way that can support human life for a long time. Systems such as these are chaotic in nature and often suffer from cascade failure modes. If a little thing goes wrong and some of the algae dies, it often cascades into a full failure where all of it dies off. So there would need to be many smaller systems, isolated as much as possible to prevent cascading failures. The system would also need to be modular enough so it would be easy to disconnect a module, completely clean and sterilize it and put it back into use. With staggered phases applied as to not have large swings in output. As these systems would be rather large in scale and have many different complex parts, a high level of automation is required. And we haven’t even touched on getting all of this constructed somewhere and have it bootstrapped with enough water, with the right stuff in it and none of the wrong stuff. Enough reliable energy and nutrients to feed it all and transport living algae there to kick it all off. As far as I know nobody has ever gotten close to anything like this on Earth, let alone in space or on a place like the Moon or Mars. It would be a project that rivals the original Moon landings.

It might sound like a simple enough concept and it is how we are currently living on this planet, so it should be possible. However keep in mind our planet has had huge swings in temperatures and atmospheric composition. There were many many times in Earth’s past where humans could not survive the conditions and we evolved here.

Same, but I ensure it’s fully dry before putting it in the hamper. So usually a couple of hours later, or just before I next need a towel I replace it.

Lmao and I can tell you who gets to support that weird hacked together kinda janky piece of infrastructure!

The more you wiggle, the bigger it gets. Not like on Mac where the max size is capped. The cursor might be capped on KDE, but it freaking huge at that point

Asking for a friend: A high score is good right?

We’ve had one family yes, but what about second family?