That makes it one of the cheaper options in this category.

The GMKtec EVO-X2 is $3500, so a bit cheaper when you factor in storage. I don't think you can find any 128GB Ryzen 395 systems for cheaper than that. HP's costs $4700. Beelink's is $4400.

And then there are similar non-Ryzen systems, like the Nvidia Spark at $4600 or the MacBook Pro is $7k.

I don't see a price there, so I'm not sure how "overpriced" it is. But it's a class of product that is expensive across the board, compared to a typical desktop workstation or gaming PC.

The use cases are mostly local AI. That's very demanding and requires compromises one way or another. You want high memory capacity and high memory bandwidth most of all. You can't get both without paying out the nose, so you need to find the sweet spot for your specific use cases.

Discrete GPUs give you high bandwidth, but low capacity.

Standard desktop memory gives you high capacity, but low bandwidth (and also low compute speed since CPUs are no good for the workloads).

This type of product is a middle ground. Integrated memory gives you better bandwidth than DDR5, but not as good as a discrete GPU. Integrated GPU/NPU gives you much better performance than a desktop CPU, and can access the full integrated memory directly. Upgradeable memory is not really possible for this class of product.

The real competition for this is a tricked-out MacBook Pro. Those are faster, but they ain't cheap, and I don't think Apple even sells any 192GB Macs anymore, and when they did it was close to $10k.

A lot of the time, a new language is created to make one particularly difficult thing easy.

For Go, that one thing was concurrency. You CAN do concurrency in C or Python or whatever, but it's not really built into the language. It's hard to do right and easy to do dangerously wrong.

For Rust, that one thing was memory safety. C leaves it all up to you, so it's very easy to make mistakes that lead to memory leaks, crashes, or security vulnerabilities.

If you program in any language for a significant amount of time, you're bound to find a few things that you do a million times that you wish were easier to do right and harder to do wrong. Some people see those problems and say "I can make something better".

93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution

This isn't what I'd call "reliable".

I'm also not impressed with their methodology, which is heavily based on Gemini.

To generate mirrored AI stories, we reverse-engineer writing prompts from each human story by prompting Gemini 2.5 Flash (Gemini Team, 2025a) to infer the underlying premise

That's too many steps removed from anything you'd encounter in the wild. They're not even testing against human-prompted output.

And then they use Gemini again to analyze all the stories. Relying on proprietary cloud models for the core of your analysis is like building on sand.

MediaTek Helio G81 SoC, with 4GB/64GB

Uhhh. For $500? Sorry, no.

Sometimes I have to wonder, what's it going to take to make people leave X?

I mean, it was a shithole even before Musk bought it, 4 years ago, and it's gotten predictably and steadily worse ever since.

Gemini might be good at something, but I'll never know because it is bad at all the things I have ever used the assistant for. If it's good at anything at all, it's something I don't need or want.

Looking forward to 2027 when Google Gemini is replaced by Google Assistant (not to be confused with today's Google Assistant, totally different product).

Disgusting and unsurprising.

Most web admins do not care. I've lost count of how many sites make me jump through CAPTCHAS or outright block me in private browsing or on VPN. Most of these sites have no sensitive information, or already know exactly who I am because I am already authenticating with my username and password. It's not something the actual site admins even think about. They click the button, say "it works on my machine!" and will happily blame any user whose client is not dead-center average.

Enter username, but first pass this CAPTCHA.

Enter password, but first pass this second CAPTCHA.

Here's another CAPTCHA because lol why not?

Some sites even have their RSS feed behind Cloudflare. And guess what that means? It means you can't fucking load it in a typical RSS reader. Good job!

The web is broken. JavaScript was a mistake. Return to ~~monke~~ gopher.

Fuck Cloudflare.

Almost certainly, yes.

People on Mastodon are not happy about those statements, and called Proton out on it relentlessly with every post Proton made. This is Proton running away with their tail between their legs, back to platforms where they have more control and/or are already full of right-wing nutjobs.

If anyone's looking for secure email, look at tuta.com instead. The email service is very similar in terms of UX and offers better encryption. They don't offer the rest of Proton's suite, but...maybe that's a good thing? I mean, do you want to get locked into an ecosystem?

Ridiculous.

He specifically started talking about American party politics, unprompted, making sweeping statements about both Democrats and Republicans. NOW he wants to blame us for...being concerned with his views on American party politics? Dude. Get real.

Saying stupid shit now and then is forgivable, but not if you take it in as the new nucleus of your public image. Why do so many public figures have this compulsion to double down combatively?

Link to Mastodon thread: https://mastodon.social/@protonprivacy/113833073219145503

I feel bad for this kid. That really is a bad warning dialog. Nowhere does it say it's going to delete files. Anyone who thinks that's good design needs a break.

Half the replies are basically "This should be obvious if your past five years of life experience is similar to mine, and if it isn't then get fucked." Just adding insult to injury.