With your theory, you could run a DirectX to Vulkan translation layer on Windows and also get increased performance. Which may be true, but once again points the finger at bad drivers.

Yes, from what I’ve been told that actually does improve performance in many games.

The compatibility layer is overhead, but the key difference for many games is that DXVK swaps directX for Vulkan, and Vulkan often gets better performance.

The performance gains of using steamOS are twofold, there’s less OS load (this is particularly noticeable in low performance games, windows will consume much more battery on a game like Dead Cells than SteamOS will), and there’s also a vulkan performance increase for some games. My understanding is if you see a big performance increase in a demanding game, that’s usually thanks to vulkan.

You have to be careful about that too, the code isn’t written to be easily understood by casual reading.

For example, the code will describe your hot, neutral, and ground wires as “ungrounded, grounded, and grounding” wires. Applying rules meant for a “grounding” wire to a “grounded” wire can have serious issues.

The whole code is written like that, where it’s really easy to get confused if you don’t understand the exact terminology it uses.

As an electrician, it’s difficult to give good electrical advice over the internet.

First of all, you don’t know how capable someone actually is at doing work. There’s both a knowledge and a technique requirement for quality work. Bad electrical work can easily cause house fires and death, if I tell someone online how to fix an issue, and they electrocute themselves or burn down their house, I’m partially responsible for that.

Second, it’s hard to give good advice on how something should be done without seeing it in person. Small details that are hard to get from a description or image can change how stuff is required to be done, and the code is complicated and has lots of exceptions and different requirements. Also different areas have different code requirements, and different AHJ requirements, so fully accurate advice has to come from an electrician in your actual area.

Final thing I’ll mention is that getting qualified as an electrician is hard. Getting a full electrical license where I live requires 8 years of experience (4 years being directly supervised, then 4 years of light supervision). You also have to pass a pretty difficult exam, electricians usually spend 6+ months studying hard and taking training classes for the exam, and then it still has an abysmal first attempt pass rate and normally takes many attempts to eventually pass. Ultimately after all of that (8 years, months of focused study and classes, multiple test attempts), 25-30% of people are never able to pass and get their full license.

With all that considered, I’m happy to give advice to other electricians online. If they’re already certified I can have some confidence that they have the knowledge and skills to do a good job with any advice given. However trying to give actually good, responsible advice to someone who is uncertified and a complete unknown on terms of skill/knowledge/location with only a partial knowledge of their problems and setup, it’s hard. It’s much easier to recommend they just get a licensed electrician from their area to take a look at it.

Thanks for sharing this, I find the Amish practices and work arounds for technology really fascinating for some reason. I’d love to tour some of the more technology permissive Amish communities and learn about their rules and restrictions on its use, but unfortunately there’s not any living in my area (not to mention needing to get approval to be shown around).

There are different Amish groups with different tolerances for technology. Some Amish are allowed to use electricity/etc as long as they generate it themselves instead of buying it from a power company for example. They have amish-specific low function computers they use for spreadsheets and the like.

Direct internet access is normally not allowed now, but I could imagine that’s not universal or may not have been banned in the early days. Many modern Amish are allowed to use various work arounds for internet access, like fax services that they can fax a search to, and it will fax back screenshots of web results and websites.

Generally the same culture, but skewed towards more tech savvy types and online-centric culture groups. It’s a lot smaller than reddit, which helps a lot with the quality of interactions, but I think if it grew enough it would end up very close to reddit culture.

Ars Technica is generally excellent in my experience, one of the better tech news websites.

Google maps auto suggests that restaurant name if you start searching for it, but then fails to actually pull up the location. Checking the actual maps location shows nothing there.

Most models now are .safetensor files which are supposed to be safe, but I know in the past there were issues where other model filetypes actually could have attack payloads in them.

Apparently the video was presented after the verdict was already issued. This video had no impact on the actual outcome of the trial, and was more of just a closing statement.

So the judge didn’t approve this a testimony, but just found it emotionally touching.

Japan in general has weird copyright/patent laws. For example the whole palworld patent lawsuits.

Good news is it probably won’t affect people outside of Japan, except that it will stunt games/etc made in Japan.

Probably comparing her acting in the new Snow White movie to Tommy’s acting.

Or new incognito window.

I feel like this won’t stop anyone who was already refusing to use a Microsoft account for windows. Anyone who was already bypassing the account requirement will still do so, it just will be more difficult. They’ve accomplished nothing except further pissing off some of their most competent user base.

They’re worried about advertising growth, not user growth. If anything this will make them more likely to ban users as they try to make the site more acceptable to advertisers.

Definitely agree. Most printers are sold at a loss with the plan to milk the buyer long term through ink and other services. EcoTank printers are more expensive, but Epson makes their money at the time of purchase. The ink is extremely cheap, and there’s no way for them to tell if you use 3rd party ink at all. We’ve been printing out textbooks with ours, which would be financially disastrous with a traditional inkjet printer.

Overall I’ve bought two, one for home and one for the office at work. The cheaper ink has paid for the printers several times over now.

Linux too, at least in most applications I’ve tried. Some will ask you when you ctrl+shift+v if you want to paste formatted or unformatted text.

You won’t see much about protests until we’re closer to the next election.

I wasn’t sure from the title if it was “Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the US adults] are.” or “Nearly half of U.S. adults believe LLMs are smarter than [the LLMs actually] are.” It’s the former, although you could probably argue the latter is true too.

Either way, I’m not surprised that people rate LLMs intelligence highly. They obviously have limited scope in what they can do, and hallucinating false info is a serious issue, but you can ask them a lot of questions that your typical person couldn’t answer and get a decent answer. I feel like they’re generally good at meeting what people’s expectations are of a “smart person”, even if they have major shortcomings in other areas.