realitista

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in 5.25-inch floppy disks expected to help run San Francisco trains until 2030

Not to mention you had to type the whole freaking program in line by line from a book where the program was written out over 10 pages, then wait 2 hours for it to load from tape and if you made a single mistake you had to type the whole damn thing in again.

At least we have some proper old man stories we have to tell our kids about how hard we had it.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in Cory Doctorow: What Kind of Bubble is AI?

It's really hard to know how this will play out. The models only have to improve a bit at this point to be reliably better than humans, as which time it probably makes sense to replace humans. It seems they will probably still hallucinate but do it little enough that it's still a net gain to use them. Compute power needed to run them will surely come down.

I'm as skeptical as the next guy, but I do think they will have uses, especially in examples like radiology which he he uses as a negative case. However I'm pretty sure it will eventually be able to do the initial screening to find the 95% of cases with nothing at a rate similar to existing medical diagnostic testing and then return the other 5% back to a human to review and decide further treatment. Based on my experience with speech language models, I'm pretty sure you'd be able to tweak the models to produce mostly false positives rather than false negatives and then run it through further layers of review afterwards.

realitista , 3 months ago (edited 3 months ago) to Technology in 5.25-inch floppy disks expected to help run San Francisco trains until 2030

Close. First tape experience was a TRS-80. Later moved on to DATs on various Unix boxes, AIX, Solaris, Linux. I did own an Amiga but it had a 3.5" disk and even a 20mb hdd! During the c64 era I was on Apple II, also floppies.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in 5.25-inch floppy disks expected to help run San Francisco trains until 2030

Yes though the failure rate of actually trying to read it later when you need it is quite high in my experience.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in 5.25-inch floppy disks expected to help run San Francisco trains until 2030

Strangely my hard disk is only 3.5" though.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in 5.25-inch floppy disks expected to help run San Francisco trains until 2030

Could be worse, could be 8".

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

Well it's still a lot more expensive than the $5-$10 I pay on an ad hoc basis for an eSIM when I need one every few months, even if I was traveling almost exclusively 100% in countries where I needed non eu data packages it probably wouldn't pay off, but it's good to know it's out there. I guess if I was in that situation it would probably be worth it just not to think about it (at least the Google price would be).

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

Airalo

realitista , 3 months ago to homeassistant in Show us your dashboards

Mine's here, a few things have been modernized since I last updated but general functionality is about the same.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in Beeper is now available, no waitlist!

Add iMessage and Viber and I'm in.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

Not sure how this is different. I don't really find out which carrier I'm using in each country, I use an app which lists all the countries and the offers available. I choose one and install it on my phone. Usually it's a limited time eSIM just for the duration of my trip.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

I've never noticed that they disconnected if I had them enabled. But I've never had more than a couple active at a time.

realitista , 3 months ago to Mildly Infuriating in Why do we have to do the health insurance company's job for them?

Living in Europe with single payer health care, this sounds crazy. I just go to the doctor, leave, pick up my drugs, etc. It's all handled by the insurance except maybe a few bucks on some drugs. Worst case I have to show my insurance card but that rarely even happens.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

I'm betting that doesn't work for every country in the world with unlimited data. If it did, I'd like to hear the carrier that pulled this off and the price of the service.

realitista , 3 months ago to Technology in More and more people are ditching carrier roaming in favor of travel eSIMs

You can have as many esims as you want too, so you can have 10 numbers or data packages if you want. Just open the app, buy one, install it and it's ready to go, no need to deal with phone companies.