In a car with ABS, two sets of tyres with different grip will have a different point at which tyres lock up, with grippier tires locking up later and ABS letting the brakes bite harder before acting.

Now a harder question is whether a tyre with less rolling resistance will be less grippy. All things equal, yes, it will. Tyres grip by deforming and creating friction in the contact patch, and the point of these tyres is to reduce friction.

To make up for this, manufacturers use clever designs (e.g. where tyres can deform more under certain conditions) so that they can retain characteristics similar to tyres with more rolling resistance. Of course, everything in engineering is a compromise, which means that A) these tyres are more expensive because of the additional complexity and B) the design and materials science can only go so far and they have indeed slightly less grip; otherwise all the tyres would be like this.

As an anecdote, Toyota sold the GR86 with Michelin Energy Saver tyres fitted as standard (in Europe at least) for “grip” reasons: they allowed the car to drift at really low speeds (some car journalists commented that it was remarkably easy to take roundabouts sideways at legal speeds).

Were you pronouncing it b-anal?

Well, they’ve already lost £200M on Suicide Squad alone, so here’s to hoping they can continue losing money thanks to their greed.

Oh boy. £120 to just unlock the base characters or “dozens and dozens” of hours of grind for each of them.

We’ll see how this goes, but I see this going the way of Suicide Squad. I wonder when, if ever, Warner Bros. Is going to learn that players are actively pushing back against corporate greed and live service games are already way past the limit of microtransactions that players deem acceptable.

I’ve found the article here, gone in, and immediately forgot that it wasn’t the onion as it didn’t sound like something remotely true. Then I was immediately confused about how they’d made the satire look so real, with even fake-pipe photos. That’s been a confusing 5 minutes…

Bandwidth or “headspace” are my favourites, the second one being almost exactly equivalent to “I can’t be bothered to think about that”.

That middle paragraph is very misleading. It’s Generative AI as a service that is actively harmful to the environment. Having a 15 W chip to do tasks like erasing objects from a photo is not any more harmful to the environment than a GPU that uses 15W. In fact, NPUs can be more efficient at some tasks than GPUs.

The problem is opening your phone/browser, and being able to call on demand GPT-4 to wake up a cluster of 128 Nvidia A100s operating at around 300-400W each. That’s 51.2 kW.

Now you can draw some positives and negatives from that figure, such as

• Given that an iPhone 15 Pro’s A17 has a thermal design power of 8 W, GPT-4 on the server is about 6400 more energy intensive than anything you can do on an iPhone. 10 seconds of GPT need a similar amount of energy to an iPhone 15 Pro operating flat out at maximum power for 18 hours. Now in those 10 seconds, OpenAI says they “handle multiple user queries simultaneously”, but still - we’re feeding the machine.
• 51.2 kW is also roughly how much power a large SUV needs to roll at constant speed on a motorway. Each of those large clusters uses a similar amount of energy to a single 7-seater SUV, but serving many users at the same time. Plus unlike cars, a large portion of their energy usage comes from renewables. So yes, I agree that it’s a significant impact but largely overrepresented and we have bigger fish to fry; personal transport is a way bigger issue.

Which country?

Yup. Loads of them! https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=hallucinations+llm&btnG=

Hallucination is a technical term. Nothing to do with thinking. The scientific community could have chosen another term to describe the issue but hallucination explains really well what’s happening.

I agree with the philosophy, but not with the approach.

If you own/make the OS, and you know that the registry can get orphan entries which slow down the system, don’t wait for the user to open an “optimisation app” to clean that up. Just make sure the registry is cleaned transparently and in the background.

This seems to me like a tactic to get less tech-savvy people to accidentally set Edge as their browser and ensure their Ads and Microsoft’s tracking is working as the mothership mandates. Worst part is we have evidence to think I’m not being the slightest bit cynical here…

I’m talking about TV ads, magazine covers. General models (not the super-skinny runway models which don’t necessarily follow typical beauty standards) or porn (which follows its own set of trends I’d say, like over exaggerated bodies, breast implants…).

I don’t know if it’s the best example but I’m talking generally about the difference between people like Jennifer Aniston in 1997 vs Scarlett Johansson in 2020, for example.

You don’t have to go that far - if you look at 90’s female models, or actresses that were considered “hot” at the time, they had a significantly different body type from today. They were a lot skinnier, there was more diet and less gym involved in the female bodies of the 90s and early 2000s.

I’m hopeful. I want to believe what happened to Suicide Squad is an indication that consumers/gamers are less willing to put up with this shit than a few (a couple?) years ago.

I worked for Airbus for 3-4 years. I wasn’t wildly happy with how many things are done, but when I read news about Boeing I routinely think “woah, that’s wild”.

I only get on a Boeing plane if there is no other option. It’s not a case of voting with your wallet in an “I won’t buy a phone without a headphone jack” situation, but a serious safety matter. Many of their decisions (particularly the MCAS / MAX8 fiasco) are absolutely insane. They might rectify whatever they want, but as semi-informed passengers I don’t see how we can trust that the current board is prioritising safety over shareholders…

God this is equally terrible and hilarious 😂

For example, The Associated Press reported that an official Meta AI chatbot inserted itself into a conversation in a private Facebook group for Manhattan moms. It claimed it too had a child in school in New York City, but when confronted by the group members, it later apologized before its comments disappeared, according to screenshots shown to The Associated Press.

The guy with the phone looks like he’s saying “Yeah, eclipse bitch!!”

Thanks GPT, very useful

No no no WB, you wanted to make it live service, now you deal with it keep adding content for the next 5 years.

Obviously very far from reality, but I wish live service games were required to have a clear, binding plan for how long they’re going to be supported and what’s the exit plan. If they’re a service, they should have an enforceable contract.

That would help buyers not buy a game that is going to be sunset in a year, and/or prevent publishers from releasing cash-grabbing garbage with no evident business plan or idea on why players are going to find the game worthy of giving them money for years.

I believe so. I have some roles in my team I’m hiring for, that have reading code and fixing small bugs as one of the requirements, but not developing code from scratch. (It’s a sort-of field engineering role).

We do test for both things (treating the “developing code from scratch” as bonus points rather than a strict pass/fail) and some people can find and fix bugs in a couple minutes, but are incapable of writing some basic python to iterate through prime numbers and store them in an array.