Are you ok?

Kurzgesagt? I didn’t know this, how come?

These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

• Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
• Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
• A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
• The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

• The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
• Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
• The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
• The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.

I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.

A very minor one, but only in a roundablut way. Valve weren’t targeting a performance boost, but a battery increase. They went for a newer generation of their processor with roughly the same processing power and slightly more efficiency. The thing is, because of the added efficiency it can sustain high loads without throttling for longer. Between that and the minute differences in processing power, it happens to have a tiny bit of a performance boost, but it’s very very minor.

The paradox of tolerance. You’re quoting an racist remark - there’s no need to tolerate intolerance as the social contract is broken.

Why do you consider the UK’s ticketing system outdated? There’s oyster in/around London and QR codes everywhere else.

What are you missing, is location-based surveillance what would be needed to modernise it in your opinion?

What happened was, they realised that Arc was a niche product that had a fervient userbase but would never become a mainstream browser, so they announced its development was “complete” and they were moving on to Dia so that they could jump onto the AI bandwagon create the next generation of browser.

The best thing The Browser Company ever did was unintentionally making someone else decide to create Zen.

I’m very mildly pro-AI, in the sense that I remain optimistic there will be at least a few cool use cases and I’d love to find them.

So I tried Dia… And uninstalled it a few hours later. Why would I want to “chat with my tabs”? Even if I didn’t think this was a rubbish use case, every browser comes with a chatbot sidebar/extension/whatever, why would I want to change browsers just for that?

Heavy pass. Also, after how they abandoned Arc, I don’t think they can be trusted to develop a product and not pull the rug from under the users when it becomes mildly inconvenient to keep working on it.

This 100%

I don’t use Heroic that much so I might be misunderstanding things, but isn’t that exactly what the OP has said wants to avoid?

How are you launching the games, through Heroic? You could create multiple shortcuts to Heroic as non-steam games, one for each game you want; this is what I do for GeForce Now. Then use a decky plugin to change the cover / etc on the menu so that you have different icons for each game.

Also, if you look up the ID of a game on SteamDB, you can set the name of your “Non-Steam game” shortcut to that (e.g. 3792227499) and when you open it you’ll get access to all the custom gamepad layouts people have made for that game. They’ll stop showing up once you revert the name to something more readable, but this will give you temporary access to set one.

Sorry if this is not very clear, my brain is working at half power right now and I feel this message came out a right mess. I hope it’s a helpful mess though!

For the Sony? As an “enthusiast” the app is not the problem, the problem is more that the sensor has almost 50% surface area than what you find on a Xiaomi 13/14/15 Ultra, a Vivo X100 Pro / Ultra, Oppo Find X7/X8 Ultra, etc.

The app is a problem if you just want a “point and shoot”, and then you could install a GCam and deal with the hacky bits. However, if that’s what you’re after, you’re likely better off buying a Pixel / Samsung Galaxy anyway.

As someone who’s moved from Sony to Xiaomi, I think their flagships are great phones… Going through an identity crisis.

They are heavily marketed towards camera enthusiasts. So much so, that they’ve neglected the automatic camera modes, and the collective wisdom says that to make the most of them you should take photos in Pro Mode.

…which would be great, except for the fact that Sony put a 1" sensor in the Pro-I (well, they technically didn’t use the whole sensor, but still) and never attempted that again. Then you have Xiaomi, Vivo, etc, actually making phones for camera enthusiasts that can, in Pro mode, produce minimally processed images with better quality, as they are the ones using Sony’s best smartphone sensors.

Then you could say it’s marketed at people who want everything on a phone: SD, microphone… But then you have Sony’s recent shift back to 1080p screens. So if that’s what you’re after, 1400€ on a flagship with a 1080p is a tough sell.

If you consider it’s a “flagship for everyone” rather than fitting it into one of the niches above, then the lacking auto mode on cameras and the near-zero spend on marketing materials in Europe and the US makes zero sense.

So… Which one is it? They aren’t exactly cheap so I haven’t been able to buy another Xperia 1 without understanding this. The Xiaomi 14/15 Ultra has many caveats but it is unapologetic about being a smartphone for photography lovers, so I knew full well what I was getting into. As a product, the Xperia 1 VI was thoroughly conflicted.

They’re absolutely failing because the execs are hype-driven clowns who focus on the wrong metrics.

“Failing to drive rapid revenue growth”, WTF. Leaving aside whether GenAI is a useful technology or not, it’s never been a technology to “drive rapid revenue growth”, just like Microsoft Office, or calculators, or a million other technologies.

This is all just a pipe dream from a clueless exec class that prioritises short-term profits and hoped that implementing a glorified autocorrect would make people flock en masse to their random product. Why would you think an AI chatbot in your online clothes shop would make me like your ill-fitting jeans any better, you overpaid monkey?

Maybe you could have hoped for employees to achieve a “5% productivity increase” or something mildly realistic, but no, your brain-eating slugs told you to shoehorn AI into everything and 👏We 👏Don’t 👏Need👏AI👏Fucking👏Everywhere👏

I know I’m preaching to the choir but I needed the rant.

In the countries where healthcare has existed (and worked) for decades, there are additional taxes to alcohol, sugar, tobacco, petrol to cover for this.

And also yeah, and I have no problem whatsoever knowing that a small part of my salary goes towards saving the life of people who wouldn’t be able to afford private healthcare. That’s called empathy - and I wish that’d sink in as well.

Because he might not be “Middle Eastern” or “Dictator” but he behaves exactly like “some sort of Middle Eastern Dictator”.

Imagine what we could have achieved globally if we had spent all that money on a different cause.

We could have managed to establish a colony on Mars, or perhaps we could have even finished developing Star Citizen.

To be fair, if anyone is surprised after the two red flags that are “ByteDance” and “AI”, it’s on them.