i would have guessed it was more of a statue of liberty problem, where the copper corrodes in contact with open air. but apparently the contacts are supposed to be gold-plated, so that surely wouldn't be the case.

My phone didn't detect the SIM card through multiple reboots (not the restart option itself but full power off and power on), and no matter which slot I used (the phone is a dual SIM)... Managed to avoid disaster somehow by putting rubbing alcohol on the SIM's contacts though. But I did notice that the electrical contacts look duller than usual

how do you figure it was almost fried? did it yell at you?

Yayyyy

Kobo users continue to win

sure but that's not new information. the net effect of being able to discern if text is AI generated or not is a positive one so i don't see the point in getting mad

did they mention the ao3 thing?

Yayy it worked! And it wasn't even premium so idk where I read that

Thank you I will check this out 🙏

i've had no problems using instapaper with my kobo clara :/ have you tried using the bookmarklet? https://www.instapaper.com/docs/save/browser

I'm having a ball on this bitch

I've been thinking about this since you replied, trying to sort my thoughts. I think the thing that gets me the most incensed isn't the disproportionate news coverage dedicated to the evil vortex holding a sports championship. I think it's the reporting "People are delighted at the wholesome wealthy tourists experiencing other cultures for the first time!"

It can't be so important that I need to hear more than once that a British guy enjoyed a Massachusetts delicacy or that the same guy enjoyed a real Mexican Taco. Wealthy tourists are barely even people

i'm also not thrilled being reminded that the world cup exists

I'm inserting typos into jbo application and messages on purpoise so that people don'ty thin lI'm a Robot so maybe I AM goiung to SLUCK dowwn those slamai sluts

Well if I sucked down salami salts suicide-style I'd never post again, except for funny 9/11 drafts scheduled on Tumblr for the next 200 years

Yeah.

I do think there is a moral quality to the individual use. I don't think it bears repeating all the Reasons LLMs Are Bad. But on top of that, Elon Musk's Grok is being used to kill school children, generate child porn, and push Hitler-praising propaganda to the nazis on X. I think we can talk about the evils which come of an individual using Grok, compared to those of an individual using Claude, compared to those of someone abstaining.

On that topic, I think the way we measure these things is out of wack. Just in terms of technologies people use, young queers in the US practically mandate the use of Meta to be included in their social circles. That's bonkers evil genocide-blind Hitler Youth shit with harms a thousand times more than someone having a blast chatting it up with an LLM. Maybe there's something to be said about resisting a new bad technology intruding into our lives.

And I think we've seen pretty conclusively that purity cultures are wholly counterproductive to anything good, and it just makes for a chilling effect that prevents potential good-actors from doing anything useful, turning them into fertile doormats for everyone else. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised that we're still doing purity culture stuff but man.

This is all a bunch of words from me to say that I completely agree. The proportionate attention we assign to these things is all out of wack.

It makes me crazy because there are lots of really scary significant issues, present and likely future, with AI, and those get barely any airtime from the average anti-AI type that I see around. Just wasting so much energy on misinformation and weird fucking purity tests that cannot possibly matter. Mass surveillance and weapons! The stuff that needs that kind of focus is the huge horrible advances that have come and are still coming to mass surveillance and weapons!!!! I want to scream and tear my hair out every single day

"If I sucked down salami salts suicide-style and saw that Pearly Gates Saint..." Beautiful. Please never stop posting

this is true of every scene. there's a lot of the online scene who are actually good offline

I like the local anti-AI scene because everyone in the real world seems more normal and calm about everything

i might need to touch grass. but i just touched grass. it's not doing any good

The other day I had to borrow my mom's brand new laptop that she used like five times in the last year since she got it?? Ofc it's full of factory bloatware and slow as shit. Such is life nowadays

https://www.apple.com/accessibility/features/ One other site that shows off Apple's A11Y features

I guess it also bears going over all the nice-to-haves you get from a Neo vs an Air vs a Pro. They're all really things that you don't need. Plus you can get what is IMO the nicest perk (the fingerprint scanner) on a Neo too

Apple has a helpful comparison site but Apple does the Starbucks thing of making up a whole vocabulary of new names for things, like "TouchID" instead of their fingerprint scanner, or "Liquid Retina XDR" instead of "high resolution HDR display". It's really confusing

Anyways, going from the Neo to the Air, you get

• Fingerprint scanner on all models
• A faster computer
• A slightly better display (p3 instead of sRGB; this probably means nothing; also slightly bigger)
• Slightly better speakers and headphone jack
• Trackpad is pressure sensitive (although this does nothing in practice)
• Faster USB C ports (Thunderbolt instead of USB 3 and USB 2)
• More battery

From the Air to the Pro, you get

• Even faster computer
• Much better display, with backlit zones (good for movies and some games), brighter display (good for working outside), and 120hz display
• Much better speakers
• Another USB port, and an HDMI port and an SD card slot
• 16GB minimum RAM (although Airs since the M4 also have 16GB minimum RAM)

These are all just Nice Things To Have tohugh

Going from a base Neo to a base Air does go from $600 to $1100 (albeit you get more with your cash for that) but when you compare to the used/refurb market it's not as large a gap. (At least until used/refurbed Neos hit the market).

I also think you'd get more problems with low RAM when you also have a 256GB SSD (unless it's overprovisioned to account for that). I have ~40GiB of mysterious system data I can't clean off my Mac, and it's a problem all the time for me at 512GB, I'd love that 40GiB back. You can pay $100 more to go from 256 to 512GB on the Neo (and you get the fingerprint scanner) at least.

I also have a lot less faith in Apple after all the Liquid Glass stuff, it really raises the ceiling with how much an update can compromise even the most basic parts of using the computer. Apple could unilaterally say "macOS 27.4 fixes a zero-click RCE that makes your battery explode into a fireball, also it bundles 30GB of the latest Apple Intelligence models. Get fucked."

And at least for me, every time I take a look at the RAM on my Macbook Pro I'm using almost all of my 16GiB, with high memory pressure, even though I usually only have a browser and text editor open.

That said, "8gb won't be enough" makes the assumption that (1) apple hasn't found a way to solve disk thrashing, but they might have and (2) RAM usage won't constrict in this Leslie's Law (opposite of Moore's Law, i am very funny) environment.

Both assumptions could be wrong! Maybe Apple has crazy good wear-leveling algorithms on overprovisioned chips with some kind of heuristic magic putting the least important pages on the weakest blocks, and maybe devs start being more respectful of RAM given the existence of the Neo and the RAM shortage.

(there's also the third assumption of "you might want to use this laptop for 10 years", i bet it would work just fine for five years)

Right now getting 16gb macbook basically doubles the price, so I'm not gonna recommend it to someone for light use. You definitely get into swap mode with 8gb way easier, but I'm not sure if every user is going to stay there most of the time.