I have never seen “immense” spelled that way!

That’s a big difference but not all. The sub-$1000 ultrabook sector has SO MUCH garbage, like Intel Celerons that stutter when you scroll down a web page designed in 2022+. Manufacturers are happy because they can sell rubbish and uncle John with no idea about computers will say “I want a laptop with 1 TB so it’s faster, and it must have free office 365 and an antivirus”…

So when someone puts a phone processor in a laptop and builds a chassis that isn’t a $5 extruded plastic shell, they panic because it still manages to be better in both benchmarks and real world use despite the paltry amount of RAM.

Performance wise it’s an interesting one. I think from a price and energy standpoint it sits squarely against windows ultrabooks with a Snapdragon X, for example, a Galaxy Book 4 Edge.

Based purely on benchmarks, the A18 Pro is weaker than that, plus you have only 8GB of RAM.

However - I have a Surface Pro X with the original SQ1, with roughly 40% of the performance of these… And even at that level, the problem is Windows on ARM, not the performance. It only lets you down for things it’s clearly not meant to do, like video editing.

Another alternative I see for that price is a windows laptop with an i5-1334U, which theoretically gives you a raw performance within 2% of the A18 Pro.

Given that at this price Linux compatibility is an absolute lottery, would I sacrifice half the RAM for having an OS that isn’t Windows? Yeah there’s not much to think. W11 will probably eat half the RAM on telemetry alone, and Apple’s BS is easier to put up with than MicroSlop’s…

The LLM is whatever you want it to be. Self hosted or from any provider with a compatible endpoint. It’s likely a proprietary one… Because the cost of training LLMs means most are proprietary ones.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with running Openclaw. What is way too brave for my taste is giving it access to accounts with your personal data, or the filesystem in your computer. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.

I run it in an isolated server, and it doesn’t have access to my data - if it goes tits up, it deletes unimportant stuff only. If anyone gets access to the credentials in it, it’s a bunch of budget limited API keys, so they can spend all of $4 on openrouter. Maybe the riskiest bit is its Google account. I went with the approach of giving it its own Google account, so that it can create docs and calendar events and then add me, rather than getting access to my Google account. But then again… That account has no payment info, nothing that I would be mega worried if it got leaked…

Sure, it might limit the usefulness a bit, but I think installing something like this is only acceptable if you sandbox it and don’t let it access valuable information. Going full mad scientist on something as “alpha” as this, letting it run wild with your info is nuts.

Some really good advice that someone gave me once is that the internet doesn’t exist.

Sure, it obviously does exist, but this was about communication style. When you send an email, you change codes and don’t write in the same way as a WhatsApp - you can expand your points more… But you should never forget you’re talking to a person - just because it’s internet, you shouldn’t talk any different to them.

You shouldn’t assume that the message is anonymous just because it’s internet. You shouldn’t assume certain things are okay “just because it’s internet”.

I don’t think they were 100% right because they were disregarding that code changing between different mediums and audiences is normal (you don’t talk the same way to your boss and your partner, or in written form vs spoken), but I do stand by the point that you shouldn’t change code or make assumptions just because “internet”.

This is true but at the current computer prices, nowhere near as bad as it sounds. I spend £100/year or thereabouts for GeForce Now, and

• there’s no way I could play games on a £500 laptop that I renew every 5 years,
• no way that a £1000 laptop could get me to play AAA games for more than 1-2 years
• and sure, I could play games on a £2000 laptop, but no way that will last me 20 years.

If you have a life and can’t play any more than 25 hours a week, the value proposition right now is great - there’s no viable alternative that allows you to keep playing AAA games for the equivalent of £100/year.

It was created as a bit of an art experiment. What happens when AI agents take prompts for another AI agents. What do they “discuss”, do they give each other tips and advice, how much weird shit do they do…

From that point of view, it’s been rather interesting.

At this point, and given the current state of Proton (👍) and the current state of Windows (👎), the question should be, “Does the new version of Wine run Windows apps better than Windows?”

It might not be sexy, but I’d argue it doesn’t need AI to be.

Take the SMEG ones as an example - they’re not my cup of tea, but the amount of people who are willing to pay a premium for a fridge that doesn’t do anything special other than looking nice shows clearly that.

I think it’s ok, the comment literally says “according to Lisuan”. Which I see as factually correct - that’s the marketing claim, or the performance according to them, just like Teslas have been self-driving according to Tesla since 2012.

You’re making it sound like it’s choosing to misgender her, it’s not. It’s not fucked up because it’s a text extruder making a mistake, there’s no good or bad intention here. It’s shitty because the current state of glorified hallucinating autocorrects is shitty, but not because evil Grok is choosing to do anything.

Yeah, I’m not going to defend training AI with copyrighted works… But I’m not going to waste energy siding with anyone who was okay with X. If you stayed in X, you’vr made your own bed. Now don’t cry because the owner is an AI-pandering nazi, we all knew that already.

Still debatable, the weights are the code. That’s a bit like saying “X software is not open source because it has equations but it doesn’t include the proofs that they’re derived from”.

In 2025? Is that even a thing?

Source? I’d expect a more realistic claim is running a microwave for 30 seconds to a minute.

I don’t think generating a sora video can definitely take 2-4 hours of GPU time as your claim suggests.

Are you ok?

Kurzgesagt? I didn’t know this, how come?

These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

• Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
• Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
• A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
• The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

• The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
• Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
• The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
• The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.

I would recommend people buy their books off ZLibrary instead, where they come with no DRM.