Spent like $2000 NZD on a new XPS 13 to replace my old XPS 13 from ~2017 - a device I loved. The new one was a piece of hot garbage. Overheat and throttled playing League of Legends - a game that has ran adequately on every other piece of hardware I've owned since 2011?
I couldn't understand how a 2022 device would run so much worse than 2017 device and assumed it was faulty. Returned, given a replacement, same issue. It is quite literally not built to hand the heat from the Intel chip doing very minimal stuff. I refuse to use a laptop that sounds like a jet engine when Microsoft is doing basic background stuff.
Returned and ended up buying a used 15 inch T-type Thinkpad with an AMD chip recommended by Reddit for $500 NZD. Runs great, cool, and quiet. It's much bigger and bulkier that the Dell but I don't mind.
Note: Not a Thinkpad fanboy, work has given me an X1 Carbon that I dislike for the same reasons I didn't like the new XPS 13 - it's useable, but it's still much hotter and louder than I would like.
That brings back memories of me using an XPS 13. In theory it was a great notebook, but in real world it has lots of annoying issues. I then bough a Macbook and never looked back.
I use divestos and I saw this coming when they failed to port to lineageos 21.0. I suspect they simply couldn't muster the effort (or funding) to continue.
Relocking the bootloader is a bad idea unless you know it doesn't verify integrity on boot or have some way of updating the keys used (AFAIK, only Pixels properly implement that)
Yeah, I was using it on my previous phone (and will probably switch to it now).
Relocking the bootloader isn’t really necessary unless you care about the evil maid attack. I’m slightly worried about it because I travel a lot and want to be sure that my phone stays intact in the unlikely case it’s seized at the border or something. (Of course, the data is encrypted, and you could reflash the OS when you get the phone back, so relocking isn’t strictly necessary but still nice to have IMO.)
I do have a Pixel; I think later OnePlus models also implement that but yeah, the support is really scarce.
I've been using this for a couple of years on my home-server.
It's an Obsidian knock-off. It's pretty janky and the documentation is lacking. It's open-source which is nice... But the company behind it is ??? I don't know. They are Chinese but I couldn't find much about them.
I use it because I can self-host it, it has most of the features Obsidian has, and I can use it in a web-browser from anywhere - which is the biggest feature for me that Obsidian lacks.
It seems like they borrowed heavily from Notion, Obsidian and RemNote, as far as I can tell (wouldn’t call it a knock-off though, since there are sooo many apps in this space that you don’t really know who came up with what anymore). But the app doesn’t feel janky to me at first glance, it definitely feels more responsive than Notion and less “slippy” than RemNote. Although it is quite noisy with all the tooltips popping up immediately.
My first impression is that they really wanted to include everything (even RemNote-like spaced-repetition flashcards, Notion-like Databases and of course there has to be AI too) and it seems like they did a pretty decent job at that. I also appreciate that there are so many export options, even for Org-Mode (preserving internal links, images, code-blocks, etc.).
I like that it provides a solid, feature-rich alternative to all the cloud-first, closed-source apps in this space. But it may be too distracting/overwhelming for my use-cases with all the advanced layout capabilities and features though. Tana is a similar all-in-one solution that is really well done (and more innovative than this one), but I always seem to gravitate toward more focussed apps.
I assume you want to self host in order to sync locally, right? If that's the case, you can use Obsidian with git plugin and you get sync + versioning (all what git offers).
Logseq is floss(gnu license, closurescript) and almost perfect for me but it's totally mysterious to me what's stopping it from serving a web interface that serves files on the web server. It's an electron app with an HTTP API but for some reason the web demo only opens files clientside with filesystem API
Anyway, one of these days I'll fork it and make it work for me. I also have a perverted desire to change the serialization format from markdown to XML so I can manipulate the graph with other tools that talk xpath, xquery, basex.
They are doing a rewrite of the app to have a SQLite DB storage for notes instead of markdown files. I think once that is released it will be available in a web browser. Currently in alpha testing, I access the application through the browser.
I also installed it on my computer to give it a try, but then as you mentioned I could not find who are behind it other than it's based in China. So decided to just keep with Obsidian
The first profile has a README (zh-CN, easily translated) introducing themselves as a married couple as well as their career trajectory leading to their current company. Googling the company name leads me to https://www.tianyancha.com/company/3153162387 showing the company’s legal structure, the legal names of the couple, their address, etc. (again, zh-CN but easily translated). Looks like I can view their financial reports too if I have a subscription.
The profiles also link to their social media accounts (on their own dev-focused community).
What more is there to know? At least it’s more than the average ShowHN asking for your email and sometimes credit card. I don’t understand these “couldn’t find much about them” claims.
The link you posted gives me "According to relevant legal regulations, access is temporarily not supported in your current location." and "If your device or the Wi-Fi environment you are in is using a VPN service, please disable it and try again."
I'm not using any VPN. Normal internet from Germany
I vaguely recall this being part of a tit-for-tat thing between China and the anti-Chinese. There have been movements to restrict Chinese access to FOSS, because forking FOSS lowers Chinese dependence on the West, along with (ironic) accusations that the "authoritarian" Chinese are limiting access to Western tech products. I thought there was some sort of legislative or judicial outcome that came out of it, but no luck with a quick google.
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U.S. restriction on Chinese use of open-source microchip tech would be hard to enforce - October 13, 2023
> U.S. lawmakers are pressuring the administration of President Joseph Biden to place restrictions on RISC-V to prevent China from benefiting from the technology as it attempts to develop its semiconductor industry.
China’s Use of Foreign Open-Source Software, and How to Counter It - April 2, 2024
> Democratic governments also need to reassess which products should not be made open-source because they’re at risk of being weaponized by malign actors.
Whatever the US did, Europe would do. Anybody in the US or Europe working on a FOSS project with Chinese contributors that they're friendly with? Has anything happened recently?
TianYancha is a corporate data aggregation website, it has nothing to do with FOSS. Your post is such a clumsy attempt to steer the conversation into Anti-Americanism/Westernism. Like really blatant lol.
They open sourced it and you can self hosted. I mean, does it even matter where they are from? Why it’s automatically suspicious when you know the authors are Chinese.
True the origin does not matter, but it would be better to have more transparency about the contributors even if it's an open source tool. Because you can still get injected with a malicious code when an update is pushed.
But I agree we should not categorize according to geolocation, but more transparency would be better irrespective of the location in any project.
for web-browser access I host Obsidian with kasmvnc. It is not ideal for use on the phone, but from a tablet it works, and I can host it with Vivaldi in a webpanel for quick edits.
> The fact that some people can’t tell is actually scary.
It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I had some obvious AI writing sent to me by a lawyer on the other side of a dispute recently and I was pissed - I don't mind if you want to use it to help you (I do myself), but at least have the decency to edit so it doesn't read like ChatGPT trash.
> It really is, and I see more and more of it in Reddit comments, and even at work.
I have a morbid fascination with how bad Reddit has become. LLMs have supercharged the problem, but even before ChatGPT became popular Reddit was full of ragebait, reposts, lies, and misinformation.
The scary and fascinating thing to me is that so many people eat that content right up. You can drop into the front page (default subreddits or logged out) and anyone with basic adult level understanding of the world can pick out obvious lies and deliberate misinformation in many of the posts. Yet 1000s of people in the comments are getting angry over obviously fabricated or reposted AITA stories, clear ragebait in /r/FluentInFinance, and numerous other examples. Yet a lot of people love that content and can’t seem to get enough of it.
This loophole is as old as export restrictions. Cutout resellers have been used to skirt these regulations for decades. The scale is noteworthy in this case.
The ban is very forward-thinking and acknowledging the reality of the situation that China is not our friend and there's no reason to be shipping them our best military and semiconductor IP. They are not going to use it to make US/China relations improve or a better world.
Always important to bear in mind that the examples they show are likely the best examples they were able to produce.
Many times over the past few years a new AI release has "wowed" me, but none of them resulted in any sudden overnight changes to the world as we know it.
VFX artists: You can sleep well tonight, just keep an eye on things!
Yes, and like pretty much every AI release I've seen, even these cherry-picked examples mostly do not quite match the given prompt. The outputs are genuinely incredible, but if you imagine actually trying to use this for work, it would be very frustrating. A few examples from this page:
Pumpkin patch - Not sitting on the grass, not wearing a scarf, no rows of pumpkins the way most people would imagine.
Sloth - that's not really a tropical drink, and we can't see enough of the background to call it a "tropical world".
Fire spinner - not wearing a green cloth around his waist
Ghost - Not facing the mirror, obviously not reflected the way the prompter intended. No old beams, no cloth-covered furniture, not what I would call "cool and natural light". This is probably the most impressively realistic-looking example, but it almost certainly doesn't come close to matching what the prompter was imagining.
Monkey - boat doesn't have a rudder, no trees or lush greenery
Science lab - no rainbow wallpaper
This seems like nitpicking, and again I can't underestimate how unbelievable the technology is, but the process of making any kind of video or movie involves translating a very specific vision from your brain to reality. I can't think of many applications where "anything that looks good and vaguely matches the assignment" is the goal. I guess stock footage videographers should be concerned.
This all matches my experience using any kind of AI tool. Once I get past my astonishment at the quality of the results, I find it's almost always impossible to get the output I'm looking for. The details matter, and in most cases they are the only thing that matters.
The one thing that immediately stood out to me in the ghost example was how the face of the ghost had "wobbly geometry" and didn't appear physically coupled to the sheet. This and the way the fruit in the sloth's drink magically rested on top of the drink without being wedged onto the edge of the glass as that would require were actually some of the more immediate "this isn't real" moments for me.
The ghost is insanely impressive, it's the example that gave me a "wow" effect. The cloth physic looks stunning, I never thought we would reach such a level of temporal coherence so fast.
I think those types of visual glitches can probably be fixed with more or better training, and I have no doubt that future versions of this type of system will produce outputs that are indistinguishable from real videos.
But better training can't fix the more general problem that I'm describing. Perfect-looking videos aren't useful if you can't get it to follow your instructions.
I am not trying to be negative, however it is the reality that ML/LLM has eliminated entire industries. Medical transcription for example is essentially gone.
That thread you linked doesn’t seem to align at all with your claims though? The majority of comments do not make the claim that they’re using any GenAI elements.
As someone who’s worked in the industry previously and am quite involved still, very few studios are using it because of the lack of direction it can take and the copyright quagmire. There are lots of uses of ML in VFX but those aren’t necessarily GenAI.
GenAI hasn’t had an effect on the industry yet. It’s unlikely it will for a while longer. Bad business moves from clients are the bigger drain, including not negotiating with unions and a marked decline in streaming to cover lost profits.
I don't see it as that much of a problem. It's like washing machines taking away people's job of washing clothes, what are they gonna do with their time now? Maybe something more productive.
We really have a problem once there are no more jobs left for us humans, and only the people who own capital (stocks, real estate etc) will be able to earn money from dividends.
The amount required to pay rent on their continued survival, which in a capitalist society, and excluding members of the capitalist class, will never be zero.
Tbf, the biggest private infrastructure project in the history of humanity is now underway (Microsoft GPU centers), the fastest app to reach #1 on the App Store was released (ChatGPT), and it’s dominating online discourse. Many companies have used LLMs to justify layoffs, and /r/writers and many, many fanart subreddits already talk of significant changes to their niches. All of this was basically at 0 in 2022, and 100 by early 2023. It’s not normal.
Everyone should sleep well tonight, but only because we’ll look out for each other and fight for just distribution of resources, not because the current job market is stable. IMO :)
On the contrary I dont think theres anything special with their examples. It probably represent well most output. Think of image generation and the insane stuff people can produce with it. There's no "oh yeah this is just cherry picked"
