I feel 1200 is not that bad for what it offers. Also if we're talking Fenix 8: there's a cheaper version that has the same software and features but is like 900 or something (simpler design and hardware). The 1200 USD is the most expensive OLED + Titanium with Sapphire glass edition AFAIK.
It beats having to buy a running watch AND a scuba diving computer AND an oxygen saturation sensor AND some kind of sleep monitor. And it's nice for surfing and sleeping better and jetlag recovery tips and heat aclimation and checking the pressure sensor to see when airplane cabin pressure starts dropping and tons more. After a while I noticed tons of other random interesting things too: when HRV goes down for a few days, I'll know I'll be sick 1 to 2 weeks later, when resting heart rate is like 55 or higher (high for me) I probably did exercise too close to bed time or am having sleeping probems, etc.
IMO super cool that it does all of those and more very well.
They've ratcheted the price up each release to change your threshold of what a fitness watch should cost. Same with phones and cars.
A $300 Forerunner 235 did all those things except the scuba stuff, which only a small number of people need (and most of those people really want an actual dive computer when their life is on the line deep underwater).
But the Current Forerunner 165 is $250 and still does most of those things (everything the 235 did), while having upgraded sensors and GPS from the 235. Garmin still makes excellent entry level fitness watches for most people and when I look around my run club, that is what most people buy.
Got recommendations? Here in Europe the formulations seem to be almost all the same (which I'm assuming means that they're all very bad for you).
Very hard to find any mineral sunscreens here. Decathlon has one in the most terrible packaging: a roller which means it's close to impossible to get the stuff out.
Seconded. Been using Altruist for a few years now. Hybrid mineral (TiO2)/chemical. Unscented, light fluid, slight white cast once dry (Caucasian/north European skin type).
Also I don't get eye irritation as with many other types after an hour or two. Available easily online if you can't find it locally.
There's no reason to avoid chemical sunscreens unless you have an individual allergy to some of the components. The concerns about them being "carcinogenic" or "disrupting hormones" or "killing the environment" is fearmongering and marketing bullshit pushed by "clean beauty" companies.
Endocrine disruption: Oxybenzone (BP-3) and related benzophenone-type UV filters have demonstrated endocrine-disrupting properties in vitro and in animal studies, with some human data suggesting possible hormonal alterations and increased risk of uterine fibroids and endometriosis.[6-7] However, most human plasma concentrations are much lower than those producing effects in bioassays, and current evidence suggests low intrinsic biological activity and risk of toxicity for most organic UV filters except oxybenzone.[8-9]
Contamination: Benzene, toluene, and styrene have been found in a large proportion of sunscreen products, likely due to manufacturing processes rather than the UV filters themselves. Benzene contamination is a particular concern due to its established carcinogenicity.[1]
The FDA listed 12 typical sunscreen ingredients, such as avobenzone, octinoxate, and oxybenzone, as not currently having sufficient data to be recognized as safe and effective. They're absorbed into the bloodstream and studies have found them to persist for weeks
Based on current data, the FDA categorized only two sunscreen ingredients as safe and effective, the mineral-based ones: zinc oxide and titanium dioxide, which don't permeate the skin much.
That's about oral ingestion as a food additive. I would also not recommend eating chemical-based sunscreen lotions...
From your link: "There are currently no indications that the use of titanium dioxide in cosmetic products is harmful to the health of consumers if the legal requirements are complied with. Titanium dioxide is not absorbed dermally, i.e. through the skin, and consequently not by application of skin care products containing titanium dioxide. In several opinions on titanium dioxide nanoparticles in sunscreens the Scientific Committee on Consumer Safety (SCCS) has considered absorption via the skin of no concern according to the current state of knowledge when applied to both intact and sunburn-damaged skin."
We have millions and millions of people using these substances on their skin for dozens of years. If they were remotely harmful, it would be pretty obvious.
There are a plethora of hormonal problems being observed with no clear answers what's causing them or why. We have generational testosterone decline and sperm counts falling. Puberty age has been dropping consistently. Could be a mix of the following: microplastics, pesticides, sunscreen chemicals, tap water pollutants, endocrine disrupting chemicals on receipts and cans, etc.
Many times in history things weren't obvious until years of damage had passed. You could also say, if they were remotely safe, it would be pretty obvious, but the FDA hasn't been able to determine that. Right now the evidence is unknown, proceed at your own risk. And you have an alternative with minimum blood absorption right next to it in the aisle.
I find this whole anti-LLM stance so weird. It kind of feels like trying to build robot distractions into websites to distract search engine indexers in the 2000's or something.
Like why? Don't you want people to read your content? Does it really matter that meat bags find out about your message to the world through your own website or through an LLM?
Meanwhile, the rest of the world is trying to figure out how to deliberately get their stuff INTO as many LLMs as fast as possible.
> Does it really matter that meat bags find out about your message to the world through your own website or through an LLM?
Yes, it matters a lot.
You know of authors by name because you read their works under their name. This has allowed them to profit (not necessarily in direct monetary value) and publish more works. Chucking everything into a LLM takes the profit from individual authors and puts them into pockets of gigacorporations.
Not to mention the facts the current generation of LLMs will straight up hallucinate things, sometimes turning the message you're trying to send on its head.
Then there's the question of copyright. I can't pirate a movie, but Facebook can pirate whole libraries, create a LLM and sell it and it's OK? I'd have a lot less of an issue if this was done ethically.
Because it’s not a very serious comment, and yes, of course it makes future problems less severe. That’s such a weird and impossible-to-defend take?
“Well we’ve had this exact problem for decades but now the same problem is instead coming from elsewhere so this is now completely different” makes zero sense.
As an aside, a wink should send a pretty obvious message. I think you’re taking this generic internet conversation too personally.
Yes, my point all along is that it’s not different at all, so it’s a weird complaint to hear so often when it was relatively few complaining about the cards.
I think at least partially, it's not an anti-LLM stance, it's an anti-"kill my website" stance. Many LLM crawlers behave very poorly, hurting websites in the process. One result of that is that website owners are forced to use things like Anubis, which has the side-effect of hurting everybody else, too.
I prefer this approach because it specifically targets problematic behavior without impacting clients who don't engage in it.
In simpler terms, it comes down to the « you made this ?, I made this » meme.
Now if your ‘content’ is garbage that takes longer to publish than to write, I can get your point of view.
But for the authors who write articles that people actually want to read, because it’s interesting and well written, it’s like robbery.
Unlike humans, you can’t say that LLM create new things from what they read. LLM just sum up and repeat, evaluating with algorithms what word should be next.
Meanwhile humans… Oscar Wilde — 'I have spent most of the day putting in a comma and the rest of the day taking it out.'
LLM can create new things, since their whole purpose is to interpolate concepts in a latent space. Unfortunately they are mostly used to regurgitate verbatim what they learned, see the whole AI Ghibli craze. Blame people and their narrow imagination.
People, yes. Well-behaved crawlers that follow established methods to prevent overload and obey established restrictions like robots.txt, yes. Bots that ignore all that and hammer my site dozens of times a second, no.
I don't see the odds of someone finding my site through an LLM being high enough to put up with all the bad behavior. In my own use of LLMs, they only occasionally include links, and even more rarely do I click on one. The chance that an LLM is going to use my content and include a link to it, and that the answer will leave something out so the person needs to click the link for more, seems very remote.
I can think of several anti-LLM sentiments right now:
- developers upset with the threat of losing their jobs or making their jobs more dreadful
- craftspeople upset with the rise in slop
- teachers upset with the consequences of students using LLMs irresponsibly
- and most recently, webmasters upset that LLM services are crawling their servers irresponsibly
Maybe the LLMs don't seem so hostile if you don't fall into those categories? I understand some pro-LLM sentiments, like content creators trying to gain visibility, or developers finding productivity gains. But I think that for many people here, the cons outweigh the pros, and little acts of resistance like this "poisoning well" resonate with them. https://chronicles.mad-scientist.club/cgi-bin/guestbook.pl is another example.
You forgot the big one, every head of the major AI companies had dinner with a fascist the other day, and we already know they have their thumbs on the scale of weighting responses. It's more reasonable to say that the well is already poisoned.
"content" suggests "I wrote this to have something on my webpage", as opposed to "writing", which suggests "I made a webpage to have somewhere to share this"
I don't want having to pay extra money for vibe-coded LLMs companies bots to scrape my website constantly, ignoring cache headers and the likes.
Every single person who has wrote a book is happy if others read their book. They might be less enthusiastic about printing million copies and shipping them to random people with their own money.
The LLM can just write the Prolog and solve the sudoku that way. I don't get your point. LLMs like Grok 4 can probably one-shot this today with the current state of art. You can likely just ask it to solve any sudoku and it will do it (by writing code in the background and running it and returning the result). And this is still very early stage compared to what will be out a year from now.
Why does it matter how it does it or whether this is strictly LLM or LLM with tools for any practical purpose?
I feel like you're kinda proving too much. By the same reasoning, humans/programmers aren't generally intelligent either, because we can only mentally simulate relatively small state spaces of programs, and when my boss tells me to go build a tool, I'm not exactly writing raw x86 assembly. I didn't _build_ the tool, I just wrote text that instructed a compiler how to build the tool. Like the whole reason we invented SAT solvers is because we're not smart in that way. But I feel like you're trying to argue that LLMs at any scale gonna be less capable than an average person?
I think you messed up something with your time-travelling setup. We're in the timeline where GPT5 did not become the all powerful sentient AI that Ai boosters promised us. Which timeline are you from?
Because arguing with people who are wrong on the internet. It's no fun doing the same with an LLM because you're either actually wrong or it will assume you're right without putting up a fight
I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.
Grok has to be more than n-times (2x?) as good as anything else on the market to attain any sort of lead. Falling short of that, people will simply choose alternatives out of brand preference.
This might be the first case of a company having difficulty selling its product, even if it's a superior product, due to its leader being disliked. I'm not aware of any other instances of this.
Maybe if Musk switches to selling B2B and to the US government...
If you piss off half of your possible user base, adoption becomes incredibly difficult. This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.
> I'm predicting that Grok fails simply due to half (?) the software engineering populating not wanting to use anything Musk has developed.
I think that's a wildly optimistic figure on your part.
Lets assume that developers are split almost 50/50 on politics.
Of that 50% that follows the politics you approve off, lets err on the side of your argument and assume that 50% of those actually care enough to change their purchases because of it.
Of the 25% we have left, lets once again err on the side of your argument and assume 50% care enough about the politics to disregard any technology superiority in favour of sticking to their political leanings.
Of the 12.5% left, how many do you think are going to say "well, let me get beaten by my competitors because I am taking a stand!", especially when the "beaten" means a comparative drop in income?
After all, after nazi-salute, mecha-hitler, etc blew up, by just how much did the demand for Teslas fall?
The fraction of the population that cares enough about these (on both sides) things are, thankfully, single-digit percentages. Maybe even less.
>>After all, after nazi-salute, mecha-hitler, etc blew up, by just how much did the demand for Teslas fall?
I had been saving up for a Tesla but now I am looking elsewhere. I think a lot of people are doing the same here in Canada. You can grok the actual numbers if you want.
Yeah, a simple example is to just look at how many companies/universities have ChatGPT vs Grok subscriptions internally. I can imagine that many people would have a problem with subscribing to Grok, even if its performance is comparable.
> This is why tech and business leaders should stay out of politics.
Yeah but they don't stay out of politics, do they? Gemini painting black Nazis was a deliberate choice to troll the vast majority of the population who isn't woke extremists.
My family subscribes to Grok and it's because of politics, not in spite of it. The answer gap isn't large today but I support Musk's goal of building a truth seeking AI, and he is right about a lot of things in politics too. Grok might well fail financially, the current AI market is too competitive and the world probably doesn't need so many LLM companies. But it's good someone wants AI to say what's true and not merely what's popular in its training set.
I think their point was that becoming very involved in politics in a way that alienates half of the population has tarnished Musk’s brand (although, I’d personally adjust that down to more like 1/3). If the point of your whataboutism is that previously it alienated the other 1/3… that doesn’t seem to improve their odds, right?
If anything they’ve now pissed off 2/3 of the population at some point or another.
Literally not. Elon Musk even published the infamous algorithm which he had claimed silenced and censored right wing voices. The only thing the algorithm did that was odd was that it had a special case written into it to boost Elon Musk. You can go look it up.
Mechahitler, the South African genocide debacle, explicitly checking Elons Twitter feed, “You get your news from infowars” system prompts, etc have basically made Grok not a real option for me. I do not want to use a product that is specifically being engineered to be a right wing disinformation machine.
And no, generic brand safety mishaps are not the same; everyone is not doing this.
I'm trying to build an automatic form filler (not just web-forms, any form) and I believe the secret lies in just chaining a whole bunch of LLM, OCR, form understanding and other API's together to get there.
Just 1 LLM or agent is not going to cut it at the current state of art. Just looking at the DOM/clientside source doesn't work, because you're basically asking the LLM to act like a browser and redo the website rendering that the browser already does better (good luck with newer forms written in Angular bypassing the DOM). IMO the way to go is have the toolchain look at the forms/websites in the same way humans do (purely visually AFTER the rendering was done) and take it from there.
Source: I tried to feed web source into LLMs and ask them to fill out forms (firefox addon), but webdevs are just too creative in the millions of ways they can ask for a simple freaking address (for example).
Super tricky anyway, but there's no more annoying API than manually filling out forms, so worth the effort hopefully.
I'm in EU and maybe my opinion is controversial, but I think there's something very positive for EU citizens about Trump using tarrifs to pressure the EU politically.
Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
I feel the US/Trump is our only hope of slowing this down as a guarantee of (future) true democracy at the EU level essentially doesn't exist for us any other way. The EU sees China as an example to follow and I feel Trump/US is the only thing trying to stop EU leadership of going there.
First, there are no EU citizens. Only citizens of countries that are EU members.
Second, no EU-wide regulation can come into being without support from Council, and Council is formed by member countries.
As always, people are complaining EU this, EU that, when EU in reality is their own country, among others. It will be your country that will do the censorship etc. If your country is small and weak it has low impact on the international state of affairs, regardless of its membership in the EU. Macron or Merz have much more to say than von der Leyen.
> Why? Because it's basically our only hope of slowing down the evolution towards a centralized totalitarian EU government. It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
The countries already want to it themselves. See the UK for an example.
This is not a controversial take. If people can see what their future holds by seeing examples, they can take action regardless of their role in society.
Currently we're seeing a global version of a SaaS rugpull, and this should wake people up, if they're not awaken already.
You're right, I read their comment wrong. My mistake. But, from the eastern border of the EU, US looks way more authoritarian than EU at this point in time.
>It's pretty obvious that the EU wants to ban free speech (online) ASAP and fully control the public political narrative ASAP.
What specific actions has the EU done to ban free speech and control the political narrative?
I see the US deporting legal permanent residents when they peacefully protest against US policy[1]. and I see the US searching social media accounts and forbidding private accounts[2] for visa applicants. Both of those seem like Trump is attempting to control political speech more than anything the EU has done.
As Portuguese living in Germany for a few decades, I feel that first we need to sort out the local mess, otherwise the central EU is already lost anyway.
Both are true IMHO. EU has structural domestic problems it keeps ignoring for too long and now it also has external new ones on top: Russia, Trump, etc. Both need fixing.
The thing is, EU politicians have been more than asleep at the wheel for over 2 decades now coasting along, and it shows in the mess we are in today: energy polices, tech development, economic growth, unsustainable welfare state, lack of strong defense, etc.
All they do is flashy speeches and virtue signaling on the international stage while not actually fixing any problems, just cashing in their paycheques till they can reitre on their generous pensions and leve the mess for the next ones to fix or just keep kicking the can down the road.
Current elites are discredited, as is (neo)liberalism, but I don't think we will have any significant shift until a really serious crisis, because overall public still cannot face new reality, and politics is downstream of culture. So it will get worse until it can get better.
Sure, the issue is that whenever Europe "got worse" in a serious crisis, it never ended well. Usually millions died, and it was only better after that for a little while. So what do we do?
How exactly is the US/Trump preventing the progress of this wave of authoritarianism? They're part of it, dummy. Using all their influence and power to prop up far right parties accross the continent, normalizing insane ideas about population control and ending democracy. There's no getting out of this without a genuine regain of interest in actual liberal values (not speaking of american democrats here), and Trump embodies their exact opposite.
The capitol storming and freeing all that participated. Having major cities being taken over by the army. Stifling free press. You know all that good old dictatorship playbook stuff.
> The capitol storming and freeing all that participated.
I don't have an opinion on that. It is the president's prerogative to pardon whoever he wants, no justification necessary.
> Having major cities being taken over by the army.
That is the National Guard. Not the same thing as the Army. The Army would be a very bad option should that happen. The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
> The cities are not taken over. The mayor/police chief of those cities have no desire to reign in crime, the federal government has to step in. Depending on your political views, this is a good thing or a bad thing. Bottom line is that people much more safer now in DC than they were 2-3 weeks ago.
I find that the people who make statements like this don't actually live in cities. Its like you got your talking points from Stephen Miller.
Trump and free speech in one sentence?!
Did you see what they did against protestoors in university campuses or how many people they arrested or deported for just saying their opinion?
I'd rather go to the China model of authoritarianism with working infrastructure (trains, what have you) and a belief in science than to the US model of anti-science regressive authoritarianism where the one percent are the new feudal lords...
The big assumption here is that authoritarianism in Europe would get you better infrastructure.
My personal belief is that for good infrastructure you want capable local industry (to build it) AND a population that is not too wealthy (because this gives additional infrastructure more relative value, keeps the workforce for building it more affordable and thus citizens less likely to oppose the whole thing).
I don't think that having european dictators would really help either of those points, so my infrastructure expectations from neofascism are quite low.
The Koch brothers and there anti climate science propaganda network immediately come to mind, as does the Mercer family and their sponsoring of Breitbart.
If I had said "you can't even find 2 extreme outliers among the 3 million 1%ers in the US that are opposed to one particular type of science because of their financial interests" then this would be a reasonable argument. But I didn't say that. And even then, Koch industries is a terrible example. They employ thousands of scientists and engineers.
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