I cannot find any mention of this on website of the "ToxFREE project" [0] or "ToxFree LIFE for All project" [1] (are these the same thing?). I want to see what headphones they tested and what the results from each one were, in addition to where the samples were taken from. Where's the data?
> It works because everyone in the game has something to gain from it
It's reminiscent of triangulation fraud in that regard. The incentive is for everyone involved to keep their mouths shut because you buy something for below-market prices on sites like eBay, the "seller" places orders using stolen credit and debit cards with legitimate retailers, and the product ships directly to you. Everyone wins...as long as the account holder doesn't pay attention to their statements.
A $500m TIF district for a city that takes in $10m annually and holds <$100m in assets? I've seen some really dumb uses for TIFs before but this might just take the cake.
After using this I'm even more confused. For what I spend in a month, there is zero upside to using it for rent: if this calculator is correct, every $100 of the first $800 I spend on rent reduces the net value by $10. I thought this was supposed to be suited towards paying rent, not towards not paying rent!
In fact, with the $495/year Palladium card, all you need to break even is $50/mo on travel. If this calculator is correct, I find it hard to believe that would pencil out for Column N.A. considering I'd be getting $600/year in annual credits. Assuming there's no monthly spend requirement past the initial $4k in 3 months and I can just get the rewards with one month of purchasing thereafter, all I need to do is buy 6 month-long transit passes and I'm already up $155 for the year (ignoring the $1400 welcome bonus since I'd need to spend $4k to get it).
It seems like a great deal (half a year of free transit passes every year) but surely there's a gotcha somewhere in the fine print.
A lot of the time the "solution" to problems on Windows is to reinstall/in-place upgrade because, as you said, Windows errors tend to be more generic so you can browse Google all you want but none of the instructions people provide will be of much help. So I'm not sure "widespread knowledge" is a point in favor of Windows when the errors frequently aren't specific enough to be reliably actionable.
> If it were satire, what do you think it would be satirizing?
Think of the most terminally online drama you've ever witnessed: the hysterics people work themselves into over what (to outside observers) seems utterly inane and forgettable, the multi-page Tumblr or 4chan posts that become the sacred texts of the "discourse", and the outsized importance people ascribe to it, as if some meme, album cover, or Qanon drop is the modern incantation of the shot heard around the world.
The people wrapped up in this stuff tend to self-select into their own communities because if you're not involved with or amenable to caring about it, why should they spend time talking to someone who will just nod, go "huh, that's wild", and proceed to steer the conversation elsewhere? In their eyes, you may even be a weirdo for not caring about this stuff.
So when I read:
> I’ve got a lot of interests and on any given day, I may be excited to discuss various topics, from kernels to music to cultures and religions. I know I can put together a prompt to give any of today’s leading models and am essentially guaranteed a fresh perspective on the topic of interest. But let me pose the same prompt to people and more often then not the reply will be a polite nod accompanied by clear signs of their thinking something else entirely, or maybe just a summary of the prompt itself, or vague general statements about how things should be. In fact, so rare it is to find someone who knows what I mean that it feels like a magic moment. With the proliferation of genuinely good models—well educated, as it were—finding a conversational partner with a good foundation of shared knowledge has become trivial with AI. This does not bode well for my interest in meeting new people.
I'm imagining the more academic equivalent of someone who got wrapped up in Tiktok drama or Q nuttery but couldn't find a community of kindred souls and, frustrated with the perceived intellectual mediocrity surrounding themself, has embraced LLMs for connection instead. And that's just hilarious. If Silicon Valley was still being produced, I'm sure this would have been made into an episode at some point.
The bits about not generalizing and engaging in fallacious reasoning are also quite amusing since, while yes, the average person likely would benefit from taking (and paying attention in) a couple introductory philosophy classes, expecting all humans to behave logically and introspectively is fantastical thinking.
> expecting all humans to behave logically and introspectively is fantastical thinking
Yes, that is exactly the point of OP's post, that humans are on average quite bad at behaving logically and introspectively and exhibit the very same behaviors that we righteously fault AI for doing. And then OP provides a list of faulty human behaviors that are the same faulty behaviors people give as demonstrating that AI lacks true intelligence.
Meanwhile, AI continues to improve and the human species does not.
And the conclusion is that the fact that the rise of AI has made human faulty behaviors more apparent may creepingly tear at the social fabric.
Read the first paragraph again. It sets the framing through which the rest of the post is understood (as first paragraphs tend to do).
I find this exchange to be a funny example of the truth of OP's list, where the part which sticks with you is some finer detail of one of the examples while the thesis statement itself, the very explanation of the overarching point of the post, seems to have fallen outside of the context window.
I can't say I'm surprised, but I am disappointed. The SATA SSD market has basically turned into a dumping ground for low quality flash and controllers, with the 870s being the only consistently good drives still in production after Crucial discontinued the MX500.
If you care even remotely about speed, you'll get an NVMe drive. If you're a data hoarder who wants to connect 50 drives, you'll go for spinning rust. Enterprise will go for U.3.
So what's left? An upgrade for grandma's 15-year-old desktop? A borderline-scammy pre-built machine where the listed spec is "1TB SSD" and they used the absolute cheapest drive they can find? Maybe a boot drive for some VM host?
Cheaper, sturdier, and more easily swappable than NVME while still being far faster than spinning discs.
I use them basically as independent cartridges, this one's work, that one's a couple TB of raw video files plus the associated editor project, that one has games and movies. I can confidently travel with 3-4 unprotected in my bag.
There's probably a similar cost usb-c solution these days, and I use a usb adapter if I'm not at my desktop, but in general I like the format.
Did that for a while until I invested in a NAS... at that point those early SSDs became drives for my RPi projects, which worked well enough until I gave all my RPi hardware away earlier this year... those 12+yo SSD drives still running without issue.
Where do you add more storage after you've used your 1-2 nvme slots and the m.2?
I would think an SSD is going to be better than a spinning disc even with the limits of sata if you want to archive things or work with larger data or whatever
4 M.2 NVMe drives is quite doable, and you can put 8TB drives in each. There are very few people who need more than 32TB of fast data access, who aren't going to invest in enterprise hardware instead.
Pre-hype, for bulk storage SSDs are around $70/TB, whereas spinning drives are around $17/TB. Are you really willing to pay that much more for slightly higher speeds on that once-per-month access to archived data?
In reality you're probably going to end up with a 4TB NVMe drive or two for working data, and a bunch of 20TB+ spinning drives for your data archive.
You can actually get a decent 4TB USB-C drive from Samsung. For most home users those are fast and big enough. If you get a mac, the SSD is soldered on the main board typically. And you can get up to 8TB now. That's a trend that some other laptop builders are probably following. There's no need for separate SATA drives anymore except for a shrinking group of enthusiast home builders.
I have a couple of 2TB USB-C SSDs. I haven't bought a separate SATA drive in well over a decade. My last home built PC broke around 2013.
Only SATA made it common for motherboards or adapters to support more than 2-4 hard drives. We're back to what we used to do before SATA: when you're out of space you replace the smallest drive with something larger.
Link? An adapter allowing a M.2 SATA SSD to be used in a 2.5" SATA enclosure is cheap and dead simple: just needs a 5V to 3.3V regulator. But that doesn't help. Connecting a M.2 NVMe SSD to a SATA host port would be much more exotic, and I don't recall ever hearing about someone producing the silicon necessary to make that work.
Actually that's a really common use - I've bought a half dozen or so Dell rack mount servers in the last 5 years or so, and work with folks who buy orders of magnitude more, and we all spec RAID0 SATA boot drives. If SATA goes away, I think you'll find low-capacity SAS drives filling that niche.
I highly doubt you'll find M.2 drives filling that niche, either. 2.5" drives can be replaced without opening the machine, too, which is a major win - every time you pull the machine out on its rails and pop the top is another opportunity for cables to come out or other things to go wrong.
M.2 boot drives for servers have been popular for years. There's a whole product segment of server boot drives that are relatively low capacity, sometimes even using the consumer form factor (80mm long instead of 110mm) but still including power loss protection. Marvell even made a hardware RAID0/1 controller for NVMe specifically to handle this use case. Nobody's adding a SAS HBA to a server that didn't already need one, and nobody's making any cheap low-port-count SAS HBAs.
Anything later than and including x4x has M.2 BOSS support and in 2026 you shouldn't buy anything lower than 14th gen. But yes, cheap SSDs serve well as the ESXi boot drives.
I bought 2 of the 870 QVOs a few years ago and put them in software RAID 0 for my steam library. They cost significantly less per TB than the M.2 drives at the time.
Only if the adapter is active; passive ones just tell the GPU to switch protocols to HDMI or whatever, so those are still kneecapped by driver limitations.
Edit: I just checked Amazon and active adapters are a lot cheaper (and less niche) than they used to be, though there are still some annoying results like a passive adapter which has an LED to indicate the connection is "active" being the first result for "DP to HDMI 2.1 active".
I suspect that this is due to the elimination of toll shopping/avoidance. Per [0] and [1], the only way to avoid a toll entirely is to drive from the West Side Highway or FDR Drive to the Brooklyn Bridge, but commercial vehicles are prohibited on FDR Drive and the Brooklyn Bridge has weight restrictions [2], so heavy trucks don't have a legal way to dodge the tolls anymore.
If you need to reach Long Island, the incentive to avoid the (tolled) Throgs Neck, Whitestone, Verrazzano, and RFK bridges are gone; now you're paying for the privilege of sitting in Manhattan traffic.
[0]: https://toxfreeproject.eu/results
[1]: https://tudatosvasarlo.hu/toxfree-life-for-all-english/
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