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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Laptop and Chromebook are two very different things. A laptop is sufficient for any use case that doesn’t demand GPU power, but if you’re ever considering buying a “gaming” laptop, don’t. You can get a cheap laptop and a decent gaming desktop for the same price and they’ll last you longer and run better.

    A Chromebook is just walled garden bullshit.









  • I tend to binge through books. I just finished Andy Weir’s Artemis and Project Hail Mary in about one night each.

    Which means the things I’m in the middle of tend to be web serials since I can’t just rush through. I’ve got dozens of tabs of royalroad open in my phone’s browser. Everything by Ravensdagger is good, and I’ve been enjoying Return of the Runebound Professor and Let’s Not Obliterate, and awaiting the scheduled return from hiatus of Ends of Magic on Monday.










  • From the 1998 paper titled “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine” by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page:

    Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is “The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention”, a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98]. It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.