I see they’re promoting something called the Helium network. What’s the relationship between that and Meshtastic? Are they completely different things?

Bill Gates walked into the meeting “riding high” because he acquired patents for malaria treatments. Reality beats satire every time.

Bill Gates will never be a good guy.

I’d use a Kill-a-Watt or similar to check how much power it uses, before deciding whether it’s worth installing anything on it. Also check how much noise it makes, unless you have a separate room for servers. Enterprise servers aren’t always a good fit for home use.

Binary on fingers really comes into its own when you need to order 1023 beers over heavy background noise. Except when there’s a mix-up and you end up with -1 beer.

That’s my thinking but I suspect it probably does this anyway.

I suspect “yes” comes with strings attached, which is why I’m sticking to the other option. But it’s likely I already agreed to the strings when I agreed to my company’s demand that we use Teams.

Also I don’t want to give some manager at Microsoft the satisfaction of adding my click on “Yes” to their stats.

Every single time I open Teams it pops up a dialogue asking if I want to try Copilot. There’s no “No” option, just “Yes” and “Maybe later”. If you click “Maybe later”, it asks again the next day. One day they’ll just assume “Yes” and not ask.

And this is at work for a company that has demanded we jam needless AI into all our applications.

The best bit is that if you lose patience and cancel, the “Cancelling…” takes even longer than finishing the job would have done. I really have no idea what’s going on. Journalling file systems in Linux don’t have to do this.

I copied 400GB of assorted files in an RDP session today and Windows had to think for a minute or two, then copy them ever so slowly, then stop at 99% done, then crash Explorer and disable the start menu and taskbar and CTRL-ALT-DEL and all ways of getting to the Task Manager, and then freeze the whole machine so that I had to travel to the physical machine and hold down the power button, since when it has been unusably slow because Windows now wants to rebuild the RAID array, which takes days. This was a pretty average Windows session.

Not 99%. Windows has many usability issues. I’d vote for “dont steal focus and stick windows in front of where I’m typing” and “don’t move things just as I go to click on them” for a start, and also “don’t somehow take an hour to delete 50 files.”

For people to test, you need management that is willing to invest in QA. But that incentive disappears for a corporation when there’s no free market of competitors who can poach your customers by making a better quality product or service.

Windows should just tell you “The file is in use by <actual information here>” by default.

Didn’t Microsoft fire their dedicated human testing team in about 2014?

LILO

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

The public, aka Microsoft QA Team, found the bug. It’s a QA success!

Are we doing product placement like reddit now? Lemmy has grown up!

Yeah, the places to use it are (1) boilerplate code that is so predictable a machine can do it, and (2) with a big pinch of salt for advice when a web search didn’t give you what you need. In the second case, expect at best a half-right answer that’s enough to get you thinking. You can’t use it for anything sophisticated or critical. But you now have a bit more time to think that stuff through because the LLM cranked out some of the more tedious code.

Innovation! Tech that’s the same but a different shape!

This article really tells you nothing. It just repeats the marketing material, almost as if it’s an ad dressed up as an article.

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Yes, I think that’s reasonable. The midrange CPU in the Beelink you linked is already significantly more capable than the Intel N150 etc., though it has a TDP of 15W compared to the N150’s 6W. I haven’t dug into which specialized features they support (hardware codec support etc.) but for a general-purpose computer I’d definitely prefer the one you linked to those N100/N150 minis, even if it uses a little more power. Others might have a different opinion but that would be my choice.