My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.
I was hoping to see a mention of Odex 1 by Odetics. I was working in a printed circuit board factory at the time (1983), and we got to build boards for it. Later on, there was a demo where it lifted one end of a small pickup truck off the ground.
I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.
My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.
There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.
Who knew that giving power to unpaid volunteers who don‘t necessarily have the users or the companies‘ best interest in mind might turn out to be a bad business practice.
I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.
But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.
I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.
I switched my default search engine in my browser to perplexity.ai a few months ago and am super happy with it. The only time I use Google anymore is to specifically visit www.google.com and put site:example.com in the search field, when I know the results I am looking for are only found within that site. I've only had to do that five or six times in the last few months.
And yes, just plain old Google search is completely lackluster in comparison to the perplexity.ai search I get to do today.
Perplexity is nice indeed. I actually pointed my parents at this over the summer. They are Dutch and not really fluent in English. But you can talk to it in Dutch and it's really good. To my surprise, especially my father really seems to like it. He had a stroke a few years ago and he was never that tech savvy. But this works really well for him.
Google is trying to be too clever and failing at that at the same time. I use it for some searches when I roughly know what I'm looking at. The longer the query the more likely it is I'll be using perplexity.
Same. I find perplexity to be much better for researching technical topics than Google or other classical search engines. I have only had occasional accuracy issues (like it suggesting something from a feature request that hasn’t been implemented rather than official documentation), but the reference links makes it easy to verify.
