I thought this as well and bought my wife the 8GB model, thinking it would be enough for her casual use. With nothing open but Chrome or Safari (dozens of tabs, sure) it will lock up and sometimes even hard restart. 8GB is just not enough for anyone anymore.
Either there’s something much bigger running or the hardware is defective. I used an 8GB M1 with VSC, Podman, Slack, etc. for a few years during the pandemic and it was fine. Chrome is a notorious memory hog but even then it was okay so I’d review the installed extensions if it’s that high.
I'd strongly consider returning the machine. This is very far from my normal experience with an 8GB M1 over several years (as a developer as well as a casual user).
The extinction doesn't seem to have happened 50k years ago in North America. That seems to have been made up by whoever wrote the headline. The date of 50k years ago does not seem to appear anywhere in the linked academic paper, does not correspond to climate change at the start of the current interglacial, and does not correspond to evidence of the arrival of humans in North America. Even the body of the phys.org article doesn't say the extinction happened then.
There were wooly mammoths alive in 2000 BC, 600 years after the Great Pyramid was built. There is evidence of humans and mammoths being in north America together.
In my view, we need legislation to step in and enforce some level of algorithmic tuning. Modern algorithms drive engagement at all costs, regardless if it's healthy for the individual. I want to be able to tune the algorithm to potentially use a timeline feed instead, or limit content to only come from topics I subscribe to, etc. We probably need parental controls that allow parents to enforce algorithm tuning as well.
A recent example of an algorithm going wrong is Reddit. Home used to show you strictly a feed of reddits you subscribed to, and it was shown as a timeline. The most recent changes not only removed the timeline approach to the feed, it's now injecting subreddits you don't subscribe to and asks if you're interested in them.
I find it completely unsurprising. Many animal species construct shelters/nests using available materials such as sticks, leaves, mud, etc. Humans are smart, so they do it more creatively, but no doubt our less-intelligent ancestors constructed shelters of some sort.
> Considering beavers make wooden structures for their own benefit and survival
It's more like they have a compulsion to stack wood where they hear running water. The implication here is intention and a cognizance of purpose, which is not unheard of in the animal kingdom but is fairly rare.
We don’t know that it’s purely compulsion, do we? Perhaps they know that still pools of water are best for survival so they’re motivated to prevent water from running away. The level of compulsion could be more sophisticated than we imagine. This seems to be true with many mammals. Not long ago in North America, it wasn’t uncommon to think of dogs as meat-headed automatons. Today it’s common to recognize that they have emotions and personalities much like we do, and there’s little evidence to suggest otherwise. I’m not convinced beavers are like giant fruit flies trying to plug holes.
We have similar compulsions too. Humans have an instinct to seek shelter, for example. You might say "well thats because we are taught this etc etc" but at the same time, all great apes shelter, our hominid ancestors sheltered, we shelter today, there is clearly an instinct to shelter even if we have these conscious thoughts around it. I bet if you had a perfectly feral human and had them in a clearing in a rain storm, they would try and find some shelter from it in the forest without being taught any wilderness survival basics.
This is the reasoning model for modern empiricists:
1. Make a baseless a-priori claim that mistakes what we have evidence of to be the bounded set of what is:
'We have not discovered any social mechanisms in beavers to transmit knowledge across time and space' is transfigurated into 'No social mechanisms exist in beavers to transmit knowledge'
Similarly, having not yet discovered a single reason for my wife to be upset with me, I must recognize that she doesn't have any.
2. Invent a false dichotomy, with one option being totally absurd, the other being your pet theory.
3. Settle on your preconceived notion.
Is it ever possible to transmit knowledge, or anything for that matter not across time and space?
I think a great use case for this technology could be to preserve dying languages. I'm sure a lot of work has already gone into preserving the written form of these languages, but training models on data sets of native speakers could be a way to preserve pronunciation.
I've been hesitant to buy one just because it seems like the screen is subpar. The OLED Switch screen is beautiful, and I'd really like to see something like that in the Steam Deck before purchasing it.
The screen is "good enough" IMO. I definitely like the OLED screen better, but everything behind the screen is well worth it. This has to be my favorite tech gadget of the past several years.
They really thought through things in terms of usability. If you really want to use it as a Linux machine to do certain things, it's there for you. If you're buying it for a kid to play PC games on, it's just as suitable.
Its a meh ips but fortunately u can use a plugin to increase the saturation to make it look better and closer to the bright colors of the OLED. Power of the Linux huh
I'm optimistic that the Deck will just have more "mod parts" later on, maybe including a better screen. It's so repair-friendly you can buy hall effect joysticks made for the Deck and switch them out.
With the abundance of repurposed displays by Waveshare and co., maybe someone will some day come up with a better display module?
