My dreams are in colour as well, and they're usually like a parody of real life. I can usually tell they're dreams while I'm dreaming because the dream world is "incomplete" in a way. Like only the parts that affect me or that I can somehow perceive are there.

It's developed from experience with the Shanghai Maglev, which uses technology from Siemens. It isn't really "stolen" in any sense, and the basic underlying technology is decades old and well-understood. The challenge has been scaling it up for systems beyond a single short route.

The export NES (unlike the Famicom) didn't have sound connections brought out to the cartridge, so it couldn't have sound chips in the cartridges.

It didn't avoid shovelware - think about all the horrible LJN crap with the "Nintendo seal" on the box.

That one upset me and made me nervous.

A huge issue with the DragonAge game was that they spent a massive amount of development time trying to turn it into a 'live service' game, then pivoted to a classical single-player experience. Putting the sociopolitical messaging aside (and whether it was 'real' or 'perceived'), a development cycle that completely pivots that sort of underlying, fundamental paradigm shift is going to undo a massive amount of development work...and EA still found it necessary to have the devs do a bunch of last minute 'crunch' and 'ship now patch later'...which meant that the early reviews reflected some of the rough edges, and then the sociopolitical messaging accusations at the height of "anti-woke" sentiment was just the icing on the cake...and thus, the flop.

So, my concern was - and still is - that the suits at EA are going to grab their Excel spreadsheets and see that FIFA still makes a mint, while single player games don't...and ignore everything else and blame DragonAge's bad numbers on the absence of microtransations and lootboxes and season passes.

They've been real quiet this year on the Mass Effect front; I'm nervous that they're pivoting again because of the DragonAge failure, rather than looking at Elden Ring or Baulder's Gate or Cyberpunk 2077 as evidence that single player games can, in fact, still make money.

I did, at least to ChatGPT. I summarized here; I'll give you the transcript if you like.

Because that's what Microsoft is pitching. I gave ChatGPT a hell of a lot more specific information regarding equipment, already-attempted procedures, and intended outcomes, than about 90% of the people at work who call me for support provide...and it STILL waited until after I bought what it said to buy, to tell me it was the wrong controller. It could have said, "this is one possibility, this is another, depending on the exact specific LED strand you're working with; I can't conclusively determine that based on what you've provided..."

It's what the general populous is going to demand in exchange for their keyboards and mice. If the goal is for the computer to understand what the user wants, even when the user is being vague, then there's no way that Microsoft is going to get there in five years or less.

I don't care that ChatGPT was wrong in this particular instance; it's a learning experience for a hobby. No problem. I *do* care that Microsoft thinks that it will take a very short amount of time to get from that state to Jarvis, or the computer in Star Trek, in about as much time as it takes to graduate high school.

I asked ChatGPT to help me get a string of LED lights to work. I spent half an hour following the instructions; I tried the Tuya app and the first party app, made a dummy account, tried the AP-mode instead of the BT-LE mode...never, ever got them to connect properly. I gave it the exact model number on the back of the unit, I gave it links to the exact product, I told it the quantity and color of wires in the lead, and I was still on the version 4 model. It helpfully recommended the QuinLED Dig Quad board, a super cool ESP32-based controller to replace the craptastic Tuya garbage that came with it.

I waited a week for the board to arrive, and I connected it all up...spent an hour of faffing around with no ability to control color or brightness...only to find out that after ALL of that, the Dig Quad was the wrong board because these were analog LEDs rather than digital ones.

...So now, Microsoft wants to tell me that they're going to totally overhaul Windows to use *so much AI*, that it will basically be able to read my mind and do what I want it to do by me giving it vague parameters, and then being accurate? They're pitching Jarvis as something they'll have working properly in four years, to the point will actively want to be talking to their computer (along with everyone else in their adjacent cubicles), and it'll be desirable...but today, the models can't accurately assess which LED controller to recommend when given EVERY piece of information that an informed CSR would provide?

...Given that very few people use Copilot by choice, and given that previous attempts to overhaul Windows have been niche at best (almost 15 years into touch-based computing and *how many* Windows users leverage a touch screen even 20% of the time?), and given that existing models are useful but far from indispensable, and being that there is already a growing resentment from the sheer volume of "AI Slop" that's making the internet even less desirable to use for many.

...Occam's razor is telling me that this is just Nadella trying to avoid the stock price from cratering by give some sort of assurance to shareholders that the bazillion dollars they've spent on GPUs weren't wasted.

Why do you post half your rant with your username attached and the other half anonymously? You do this regularly, and it's always obvious when you do it. Why don't you just post the whole thing at once, or post it all with your username attached? Are you trying to expose half the rant to people who have you marked as a "foe" to hide your comments and the other half to people who hide anonymous comments?

Why do you put quotes around "rich Western countries" in that context?

I used quotation marks because it's a verbatim quote from your comment.

Unlimited growth in unsustainable.

Yes, this should be obvious. Yet capitalism in its current form is predicated on perpetual growth. This leads to the awkward realisation that capitalism as we know it is unsustainable.

Consumption and disposal are sustainable. The question is at what point does consumption and disposal become unsustainable or too harmful to warrant it.

There are a lot of signs that we're on the wrong side of the threshold already.

Your implied argument is fallacious: there's no reason e-waste must necessarily be thrown into a heap and burned and the runoff leached into the water table

If you factored in the cost of dealing with e-waste responsibly, things would become a lot more expensive. But people will ignore externalities until they have a gun pointed at their head.

You're being disingenuous. What you're referring to as "rich Western countries" outsource manufacturing to places like China, and deal with masses of waste by dumping it wherever they can get away with it. Then you want to blame the countries manufacturing the goods for the emissions/waste from manufacturing (rather than the actual users of the goods), and blame the countries where the waste is dumped (rather than the source of the waste). If you cut the consumption, you'd no longer have the waste.

The problem is excess consumption. People in the third world don't consume anywhere near as much, and hence have less impact overall than a far smaller number of people in rich countries. Removing every Indian wouldn't solve the problem, because they aren't the ones creating the waste.

I know that Slashdot's unofficial tag line is "tomorrow's news next week"...but as a Nothing Phone 2 owner, the NP3's floundering is completely unsurprising.

They hyped up the reveal, as they tend to do, and when release day finally came...the entire comment section was like, "wait, wut?"

I don't *necessarily* think the $800 price point is the dealbreaker, at least in a direct sense. The bigger issue is that the NP3 shifted from the Glyphs - a unique function that all of their other phones have - and moved to the 'Glyph Matrix'. This wasn't a completely bad thing, but they took away the regular glyphs to do it. Now, I understand that the Glyphs come across as gimmicky for most, but it's a very visibly distinct element of their phones, so messing with it was a gamble...and it seems that Carl Pei is learning that a niche vendor needs far fewer people disliking their product for a company to have a 'New Coke' moment.

To continue, the press releases and announcements leading up to the NP3's release seemed to focus on their AI functions. I'm not convinced that was wise, because I think it's much more difficult to compete in that space. For the folks who *want* AI in their phone, a Pixel 9 costs the same as an NP3; I don't think Nothing is going to favorably compete with Google on those merits. Similarly, the 3(a) and 3(a) Pro releases spent so much time focusing on how amazing the camera was...it almost seemed like they were selling a camera that incidentally had a phone bolted onto it. This is a selling point for many, granted, but Samsung and Google and Apple all have fantastic cameras on their phones. Again, these devices seemed to compete in the most crowded of spaces.

Meanwhile, the areas Nothing *could* be competing in, they aren't. Batteries aren't removable. Headphone jacks aren't present. MicroSD slots are unavailable. Bootloaders are still unlockable (for now), but LineageOS only *just* got official support on the NP2, two years after its release. They don't offer any first-party alternatives to the Google services; no custom e-mail addresses or a variant of F-Droid for their custom apps and Glyph-enabled ringtones.

I can appreciate the desire to scale to the point where they compete competitively with Apple and Samsung, but pissing off the base isn't a worthwhile way to do it...and I think enough people are voting with their wallet that Carl is getting the message. My guess is that they'll try marketing it a bit more for the next month or two, and if they don't sell, they'll bring the price down to $599 to clear out inventory and fast track the NP4...which will probably have an $899 price point, but at least this time the people in the focus groups who say "don't do that" will probably be given a bit more credence, so the phone might actually be desirable.

I doubt reducing competition will benefit consumers.

Those mountains of e-waste are coming from the "rich Western countries". Consumer culture is unsustainable.

...instead of having enthusiasts work on their hobby if it matters to them, Drew proposes that libraries - notorious for funding constraints and limited staffing - offer those same self-hosted services? ...And, I assume library staff is going to provide tech support for this, right? And he wants backups, right? And 100GB/patron means that it'd take less than 10% of patrons to exhaust the amount of storage most libraries would budget for...AND, are libraries supposed to keep data if users move out of the district? Also, my last discussion with my library's IT folks indicated that they got rid of their local servers and it's all on AWS and/or M365 now anyway...

And let's even assume ALL OF THAT was solved...he didn't like the function set...what's the library going to offer that will solve that problem? If it's software who's functionality he didn't like, that has nothing to do with self-hosting. If the library software solves the problem...what would be the problem self-hosting it since he's got the gear anyway?

Ultimately, it's super unclear what the point is here...except that, apparently, he wants to externalize hosting onto taxpayers instead of having to make the purchases. To his point, self-hosting is a hobby, and it's not for everyone...but it's super unclear how he's suggesting "a future we should be fighting for". People that don't care about privacy or transient availability of data are served by Google and Microsoft and Amazon. The people that *do* care about those things aren't going to trust their local libraries much more than they'll trust the big tech. So...why is this a better future? It's still trusting one's own data to someone else's computer...

Sadly it's heading in the opposite direction. The EU has banned credit card surcharges. Australia currently permits credit card surcharges, but they're moving to banning them and instead lowering the cap on what the credit card issuers can charge. I still think allowing the merchant to pass on the cost to the customer is fairer.