And do it with enough solder on the iron to get good thermal transfer. "Enough" really isn't a lot but it's also not a tip that's been wiped entirely dry. How you hold the tip relative to the via/component lead matters (because you want the liquid solder to help with the thermal transfer).
It’s very difficult for anyone person to say because we all see our slice.
If you got an education in an area that’s in demand and you are a good communicator, made sensible choices and were lucky to not have any major misfortune hit you directly then more than likely you have a pretty nice life that has been getting better and unaffected but the political circus.
If you were unlucky with your starting point in life, didn’t get an education in an in demand area, or did but really struggle to communicate, or got hit by some bad luck then life could feel very stalled at the moment and frustrating.
There’s a lot of negative news around the UK at the moment and I think a lot of it is taking real aspects of life here and massively blowing it up or extrapolating across the whole country. I suspect by a certain political party funding negative news on a mass scale.
Crime is up in some places, but still generally not very high. Pot holes are up in many areas, but roads are still good in the main. Some industries are declining but even within things like manufacturing there is a lot of growth and jobs.
It’s the fifth largest economy in the world and most things works pretty well. So swings and roundabouts.
> If you were unlucky with your starting point in life, didn’t get an education in an in demand area, or did but really struggle to communicate, or got hit by some bad luck then life could feel very stalled at the moment and frustrating.
Which was always the case, but now you can find someone online with an agenda to manipulate you. Or, in reality, the algorithm pairs you.
Never thought I’d see my home town being discussed here. I no longer live there but regularly go back.
It’s not a great town but it’s also not truly awful. It’s a reasonably deprived town that harks back to its former grand past with an older demographic constantly topped up by people retiring there from east London.
There’s a lot of very nice people who are mortified that Farage is the MP and that the town has become a political joke. I struggle to see how people can vote for Farage but if you walk around the town center (which is perfectly safe like all of the UK is regardless of what social media and US news outlets say) you can understand why people want some change.
In reality there’s no well paid jobs and, with the aging demographic and no reason for anything to be based there, no reason for there to ever be any sadly.
Also Farage is in the district a lot more than the media makes out, I hear enough second and third hand sightings of him that he must be there more than once a month.
They are rationalisations: 'whatever makes a change to my situation' is a ticket that appeals to a lot of the poorer people, and it of course won't be the Tories or Labour, or their stand-ins in other countries. A huge amount of people alternate between the extremes of the spectrum.
Painting all far-right voters as evil is wrong and unproductive. Saying this as a far-left voter.
Of all the airports to do it at in the UK this is probably the one that doesn’t need it. Parking at Gatwick is a breeze, lots of options close and far from the airport and quite reasonably priced. Now Luton, that’s another story.
It’s not human surpassing intelligence though in my opinion. If we had the same constraints on that task then we would also come up with the idea of creating our own viewer and if, like the LLM, the knowledge to do so was embedded in our brain we would do it, it would just take longer because we can’t type as fast. So instead we would buy or compile a viewer since the problem is already solved.
IDK the models definitely do write qualitatively better prose (and better code) than the majority of people. If your definition of "human intelligence" is baseline performance of 0.2% of humanity it's certainly something else.
Better code and better prose are not great indicators of intelligence. Can it help you survive in the middle of the jungle? Can it grow rice? Can it give you first aid? Intelligence is the ability to learn skills and adapt them to the situation. The importance of skills is contextual. Better prose and code is just education, not intelligence.
Imagine it's 2006, there's no LLM in sight and you're arguing on an Internet forum that growing rice is a better highlight of intelligence than computer programming or writing.
Also it absolutely is not education, as repeated failure to educate programmers without aptitude or drill essay-writing into general population has shown.
Then you'll also says that a printer is more intelligent than most of humanity because it can replicate a drawing better than any painter. Or that the ipod is a better musician, etc,...
I can't be amazed at tools. I only applaud the minds that create them. Someone that find a way to grow rice where everyone thought was impossible is way more worthy than whatever opus produced. Just like someone winning the Tour de France is more remarkable than the latest AI benchmark or whatever.
There's likely about a billion cyclists and most of them stand no chance at winning Tour de France ever in their life. And it's funny how we moved from growing rice towards inventing the agriculture.
And look I don't know how to grow rice but I grew other staple foods before. I also wrote substantial texts and programmed computers for decades. Saying that farming is more intellectually challenging than writing or programming is plain ridiculous and counterproductive to whatever argument you were trying to make.
> Saying that farming is more intellectually challenging than writing or programming is plain ridiculous and counterproductive to whatever argument you were trying to make.
I’m not saying that. You invented it on your own.
What I’ve been saying is that writing and programming are not the sole indicators of intelligence. There are plenty of other skills that highlight the intelligence of people.
I don’t say that my compiler is intelligent because it can take my C89 code and optimize it to run on the latest architecture. I also don’t know the latest optimizations techniques. But I would credit the people that are working on GCC and the fact that they know more than me on the subject.
Saying that LLM are better than most humans at programming is like saying that calculators are better at math than most humans, or that a car is faster than humans. It’s a tool, and tools are created. The ones that are creating it are the ones deserving the praise, not the tool.
Speaking of inventing stuff, I'm not sure where you find me praising anything. It was statement of the fact, exactly as "a car is faster than a human".
they don't, cite one example of well written LLM prose? they can definitely infer a lot more slop than people have patience to, and anyone writing or reading slop prose has realised this and replaced sitting around writing and reading slop wiith llm's writing and reading slop and then grug-brains paste 10k words of slop say "grok, pls summarize, no mistakes" and grok tells them "What a brilliantly written article! ... "
Have you ever received an email from trades folk, in the days before LLMs? I'm not saying it's a better writer than Hemingway but very likely better than most your classmates.
Looks like that’s one factor. A number of brands I expected to be marked as Avoid based on who owns them were indeed marked as such. Pleased to see a few of my chosen brands were marked as good. Shame that basically no sun glasses company is good.
But animals and humans are different. Humans are an animal but to suggest a lion, dog, fish etc operate in the same manner seems a little odd to me.
My dog was perfectly happy to snooze most of the day, play with toys occasionally, go for walks and try to hunt rodents. I on the other hand would be incredibly bored with that.
From memory when I ran a production line with soldering stations ventilation is equally (and possibly more) important for lead free solder.
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