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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • Except many many experts have said this is not why it happens. It cannot count letters in the incoming words. It doesn’t even know what “words” are. It has abstracted tokens by the time it’s being run through the model.

    It’s more like you don’t know the word strawberry, and instead you see: How many 'r’s in 🍓?

    And you respond with nonsense, because the relation between ‘r’ and 🍓 is nonsensical.




  • Totally on board.

    Physical media meant straightforward ownership. I have it and I will have it. The distributor I bought from went out of business? I don’t notice, my copy still works. My distributor turns out not to have had the rights to sell it to me? Well that’s bad but it’s done and I have my copy. I start a series and I know I can finish it before the rights move to some other distributor.

    Netflix early streaming days were magic. One service had rights to pretty much everything and was relatively affordable. Now each service has a tiny fraction of old Netflix and each one costs more than twice what Netflix streaming did. Frankly paying 3x the netflix price would have been fine if the trend continued except for pricing, but alas, here we are. Also, there’s no amount of money to pay to some of these services to make them shut up with ads, even with ‘ad-free’ offerings/plans.



  • The apps may have been a bit anemic, but it was early enough that all the app stores were not great. They were certainly hurt by their initial “JavaScript only” stance.

    Really painful was that they had exclusivity with Sprint of all carriers. That was a really limiting decision.

    I think ultimately the singularly fatal issue was the HP debacle. The initial circumstances of the acquisition might have been ok for the platform. Thanks to some leaked material HP under Hurd actually seemed to have some vision for reinvigorating their consumer brand including an emphasis on former palm products. But Hurd was ousted and that whole initiative was canned and the new leadership killed the product line that they had just bought. Which was the most baffling call, they didn’t make room for some other smartphone or tablet platform, they just shrugged and killed off a product that was their only shot at relevance for a clearly exploding new consumer market.



  • That was one thing that was wild about the Palm WebOS devices. It was just plain old linux. Games? They were just Linux games using SDL. Porting WebOS applications to desktop linux would have been nearly trivial. It would have just been amazing if Palm had pulled it off (alas, they chased a single design, Blackberry-style with small form factor, which missed just so much of the market). The users were utterly oblivious to all this (which is good) and it was just the best combination of capable of great things easily with a power user and able to run whatever the casual user would have needed.

    It was still before Android was pretty much a sealed deal in the market (2009 Android was still horribly rough) so it had a shot, but Palm just couldn’t pull it off.