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I dunno, I brought a pi 500+ with an SSD, 16GB RAM, little screen, PSU, mouse and cables. It was around £300.

It's not super powerful but my young kids use it to surf the net, play Minecraft, do art projects, etc. (we are yet to play with the gpio).

I don't get on with the keyboard but otherwise would make a decent development machine for me, considering my development starts with me ssh'ing into some remote VM and running vim.

The whole lot is tiny and extremely portable, we pack it away in a draw when not in use.

All in it felt like good value for money for something that took about 3 minutes to get up and running.


You can get much more powerful PCs for much less, e.g.:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0CFPRDQY8/


That's actually about the same price as the pi 500+ without the screen. Except that one has 500gb Vs 256gb SSD, but doesn't have the snazzy led keyboard.

Processor comparison too

https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-raspberry_pi_5_b_b...


Is it that unimaginable things might have changed in the almost two decades since you left?

Yes, it is unimaginable that the UK has replaced most of their automated car washes with immigrants washing cars manually. I've been back there and I've still family there, it's not that different "on the ground" as it were, despite the big political changes.

It did not, all the automatic washes are there.

I can see the reason why people see it this way though. For £20, you can have 4-5 people getting your car into the best state it can be in under 20 minutes. I would even say it is a joy to watch them work so efficiently.

Most people prefer that over automatic car washes, so after some point, while the automatic washes are there, you become blind to them.


Bear in mind that it's much, much harder to launder money through an automated car wash.

I live in the UK now, have done for 40+ years and there are (still) automated car washes everywhere.

Conversely, I've no idea where you or the parent has the idea that the UK is full of automated car washes and the OP is talking bullshit. I live in London and can think of a only a handful of the old fashioned automatic car washes.

Whereas I can get a hand carwash at pretty much any supermarket car park I land on. From a guy with a bucket and trolley to a full team of four going at it with a power wash. Tesco, Sainsbury's, wherever.

The Albanian angle feels loaded, but it's true that many of the employees do seem to be recent immigrants.

I don't see much point denying this reality, it feels a bit like trying to argue there's always been high streets full of betting shops, charity shops, vape stores and American candy shops.


London is an odd one as space is limited and the hand wash places can pop up anywhere quite easily. If I look at the more suburban place I'm from most petrol stations still have the automated ones (contactless payment now instead of the tokens). And most of the larger supermarkets there that have petrol stations still have the automated car washes too.

I know exactly what they're talking about and I lived in another city in the UK (not close to London). It's a thing.

London is a small part of the U.K. with a below average number of cars. It’s an anomaly compared to the 85% of the U.K. which is normal.

I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.


> I often try running ideas past chat gpt. It's futile, almost everything is a great idea and possible. I'd love it to tell me I'm a moron from time to time.

Here's how to make it do that. Instead of saying "I had idea X, but someone else was thinking idea Y instead. what do you think" tell it "One of my people had idea X, and another had idea Y. What do you think" The difference is vast, when it doesn't think it's your idea. Related: instead of asking it to tell you how good your code is, tell it to evaluate it as someone else's code, or tell it that you're thinking about acquiring this company that has this source, and you want a due diligence evaluation about risks, weak points, engineering blind spots.


Maybe I'm still doing some heavy priming by using multiple prompts, but similarly you can follow-up any speculative prompt with a "now flip the framing to x" query to ensure you are seeing the strong cases from various perspectives. You must be honest with yourself in evaluating the meaningful substance between the two, but I've found there often is something to parse. And the priming I suggested is easily auditable anyhow: just reverse the prompt order and now you have even more (often junk) to parse!


I've gotten pretty good results from saying it's someone else's idea and that I'm skeptical. e.g. "A coworker wrote this code, can you evaluate it?"


Where possible I like to ask it to evaluate a few options. Which is better, x or y, and why?. I don't hint which idea I prefer.


For ideas that are already well established, you can ask it to evaluate an idea against generally accepted best practices. I don't have a background in game design and I'm more of a hobby developer so I used to do this when I was building retro game clones.


I suppose the only use case would be someone so unconfident in themselves they would do nothing at all, but not sure it’s healthy for that either…


"be uncompromisingly critical"


I've found this memory across chats quite useful on a practical level too, but it also has added to the feeling of developing an ongoing personal relationship with the LLM.

Not only does the model (chat gpt) know about my job, tech interests etc and tie chats together using that info.

But also I have noticed the "tone" of the conversation seems to mimick my own style some what - in a slightly OTT way. For example Chat GPT wil now often call me "mate" or reply often with terms like "Yes mate!".

This is not far off how my own close friends might talk to me, it definitely feels like it's adapted to my own conversational style.


This one seems relatively cheap and ships from Germany

https://www.bosgamepc.com/products/bosgame-m5-ai-mini-deskto...


Don't know if birds count, but the egret population has exploded in the UK in the last 10 years.

There's zoos here that have them in their exotic bird sections. Always makes me smile as they are often visible even in London parks and rivers.


I used it everyday for the first 5 years of my career, got my first big job off the back of a shorter graduate job that exposed me to it.

It will always have a special heart too.

However, in the way it was used in my roles at least - I found it enforced far too rigid a separation between the data and the presentation.

There were multiple times a backend could not perform some function or transformation of the data, for various and always non technical reasons.

That left it to the xslt developers to figure out a solution, and sometimes due to the limits of the language that involved writing a custom java function / xslt plugin.

Things that were incredibly simple when some sort of scripting language is available in your frontend web app could be incredibly convoluted when all you had was an xslt processor.


It's also very simple and free of ads or any other extraneous clutter, a bit like hacker news, which is also fast.

There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.


No, if anything I was disappointed to read within 20% was correct! (I played it before reading your post!)


Initially the win criteria was within ±10% of the correct answer, but 15 minutes ago I changed it to ±20%. My rationale here is that the goal of the game is to get within the ballpark of the correct answer. And a guess of 80 billion when the correct answer is 100 billion seems quite good and indeed should probably win the game.


Thank you for making this.

I have an idea for a gameplay that I think I would enjoy more:

  - If the first guess is within a factor of sqrt(10), then you win.
  - If not, you are given two choices for the second guess: Up or down.
  - Up and down are 10x higher and lower guesses (making them adjacent ranges to the first guess).
  - If the second guess is wrong, you lose. No more guesses.
The point is that the second guess makes you rethink the original question once more, to figure out what it was that you missed. Which is more fun that doing bisection.

I wrote 10x and sqrt(10) to make a game literally about orders of magnitude, but you could of course you smaller numbers, like 4x and sqrt(4), to make it harder.


I greatly appreciate your suggestions, munch. I really like it, but I worry that the game loses some of its mainstream appeal through that. I don't know, I have to look into this in more detail.

However, I did find a solution to bring the focus a bit away from the binary search/bisection.

Namely, the game now shows a hint after the second incorrect guess. For example the hint "The US covers 1.87% of the Earth's surface." is displayed for the question about what percentage of the Earth's surface is land.

This of course lets you, just as you wanted, rethink the original question once more now in light of new information.

text: I think I found a solution to bring the focus a bit away from the binary search and would greatly appreciate feedback from you.

The game now shows a hint after the second incorrect guess. For example the hint "The US covers 1.87% of the Earth's surface." is displayed for the question about what percentage of the Earth's surface is land.

How does the new information received through the hint impact your guess and assumptions? help


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