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Better to Skip a Year for Hardware Upgrades?

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Re: Better to Skip a Year for Hardware Upgrades?

#21

Post by 0_____0 »

mjorgers wrote: post #17

Am I the only one who hasn’t felt the need to upgrade in _way_ more than just one year? I still have an old XPS 15 9560 (pushing 10 years!!!) running Ubuntu which is perfectly usable. I upgraded the ram (32Gb) and the battery, and I still consider it to be totally usable for most day to day tasks. Development, docker containers, browsing the web with an unhealthy number of tabs open. What more do I need?

Same. My daily driver is a high spec Dell laptop from 2018. I do CAD work on it and it's approximately fine. I upgraded the memory last year and I've had to repaste the heatsink and replace the battery, but I still can't justify getting a new machine given that it does everything I actually need flawlessly.

Re: Better to Skip a Year for Hardware Upgrades?

#22

Post by AnimalMuppet »

exmadscientist wrote: post #7
eschatology wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These ai authorship accusations are now everywhere and it's getting really annoying. It just distracts the discussion away and adds nothing.

I disagree. Articles written by AI are inherently less trustworthy (they're notorious for fabrications and hallucinations) and often have a very low content density. "Write me a 10 paragraph article about high hardware prices for my blog" is the sort of thing that expands to a lot of fluff with not a lot of content. I don't really want to read that article. Even if AI might (might) be justifiable as an editor, it's s…

I agree that AI-written text often has a low content density. I wonder if it's a matter of information theory.

Information theory defines the information of a symbol as being related to how often it occurs and how often it is expected to occur. Something that isn't expected carries more information. (Usually "symbol" is defined as one character or byte, but it could be a word or word part.)

Well, if you think about LLMs that way, they give you the most-probable next word (or word part). That means that they give you less information than normal writing. I suspect that's why it reads as bland, low-content - because it really is low content, in the information theory sense.

Now, it doesn't always give you the most probable next symbol. There is some randomness. And you can increase the randomness by turning up the temperature. But if you do, then I suspect it becomes incoherent more quickly. (Random gibberish may have high information from an information theory standpoint, but humans don't want to read that either.)

Re: Better to Skip a Year for Hardware Upgrades?

#24

Post by bryanlarsen »

83 wrote: post #18
bryanlarsen wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This case is interesting, because it seems obvious that the AI accusation is just plain wrong. The article is riddled with the kind of grammatical and spelling mistakes that humans regularly make but that a modern AI would never make.

That could easily be part of their prompt. I just did a quick test telling Copilot to "add a few spelling and grammar mistakes to look like a human wrote it" and it does a reasonably convincing job.

The errors are more than superficial; few authors would be willing to have AI screw up their work enough to invert the meaning of some of their sentences. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47169256

Re: Better to Skip a Year for Hardware Upgrades?

#25

Post by dpc_01234 »

eschatology wrote: post #3
hackeman300 wrote: post #2

>These aren’t the actions of early adopters—they’re the moves of a community that’s decided it’s not worth it at the moment. These aren't the words of a human – they're the words of an LLM

These ai authorship accusations are now everywhere and it's getting really annoying. It just distracts the discussion away and adds nothing.

It's slop derangement syndrome. Agreed.
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