bodge5000

I gave away my base spec (8gb ram, 256gb ssd) M1 air just a few months ago and it's still working fine, I just needed something higher than base spec for work but the new owner of the M1 loves it, for general purpose use it may as well be an M5.

I do wish they had removable storage though, I originally got that Macbook as it was the cheapest way I could try out MacOS and M1, once I decided I liked it, I was stuck with 256gb or spending all that money (and then some) again. This time, I went with 1tb.

From what I can tell, it's the thing they notice more than almost anything else. I was recently shopping for a new phone and my brother, who has no interest in tech, kept telling me I need to get the one with it (I forgot the exact term he used, it wasn't 120hz admittedly).

Off topic, but it's interesting how Recraft might've accidentally produced the closest thing to actual art from an AI model at least that I've ever seen. Is there any meaning to it at all? Is it taking "controversial take" as an unflattening image? Theres actually something to engage with it.

Unfortunately for the pro-ai-art people, even in this case it wouldn't make them the artist, as the "mind" of interest is the AI itself.

For some it certainly is, I remember it being very controversial (especially for Pebble) at release, but it's not something I'm particularly concerned about. Considering the current options out there, it's the best for privacy and thats more of a concern for me. If they stop producing them by the time mine dies, I've lived long enough without it, I'll be fine.

Can certainly see why others wouldn't be such a fan though

You might be interested in the Pebble Index 01, thats pretty much what that is, plus it's a smart ring so it's easy to keep on you, and can do local transcriptions. Downside is that it's disposable, it has roughly a years battery life and cannot be recharged

Maybe that's how it'll end up but it's important to understand that trillions haven't been invested in AI as just another skill, but as the "skill killer". If we do settle on it being just another skill, you shouldn't expect it'll be receiving nearly as much investment.

I'm somewhat of an AI skeptic so obviously I don't believe this, but even in the best case scenario that being skilled in AI lets you be skilled in any other field, thats still just an abstraction. If I'm hired as a programmer, I doubt my employer much cares if I can also do plumbing.

Perhaps your argument is "hire me and I can do your programming, accounting and analytics at the same time", but that somewhat dilutes the skill argument, since one human can only do so many things skillfully at once, and that'd just reveal yourself as really just a relatively unskilled middleman.

Even in this best case scenario though, I can't imagine an "AI practitioner" has an easy time getting hired. If I'm a Django expert, it'll be much easier for me to get hired by non-programmers as python programmers as I speak a language they don't, whereas AI uses natural language, so everyone already does speak your skills language. Even if it really does take skill, theres no denying it'll be harder to convince people that already speak the language of that.

I'm sorry to say but the business people don't want to talk to you, they want to replace you, that's what the LLM is for as far as they're concerned. Currently you're just filling the role of beta testing that replacement. The fact that you're so happy to throw away your fellow devs in the hopes of getting in bed with those people just makes this whole situation quite sad.

Maybe just get an MBA or something, I doubt its any safer from LLMs but thats clearly what you want to be doing

Funny that with Bun being acquired by Anthropic, if this big bet on AI doesn't work out we'll end up right back where we started; Node. Obviously Deno will still be OSS, Bun would likely end up that way too, but you get the idea

> It does so because, as Keurig notes, it’s collecting data about your household in order to let Keurig sell it to advertisers.

Off topic, but an odd and dubious upside to AI is that it provides an actually valid reason for this mass data collection. Before AI, as you note it was for advertisers, but what are they actually doing with it?

The promise was that with all this data, advertising would be perfected. I seem to remember fears back in the day that it could end up being a form of mind control, with this perfect understanding of you an advertiser could sell you anything, and you'd willingly consume adverts as entertainment they'd be so perfectly tailored to you. Not something any of us would want I'm sure, but that was the promise for advertisers. The opposite ended up happening. Nobody wants to use the internet without an ad-blocker, when you're forced to use Youtube or something without an ad-blocker you're counting down the seconds until you can skip it, and the rest of the time you don't even notice they're there, let alone any kind of mind control. Of course you do get thinly veiled advertisements as entertainment, but none of them use mass data collection, they're really not much different to how tv shows used to get made to sell toys in the 80s.

The reason I bring this up is for the question; what is this mass data collection for? We (really) don't want it, advertisers are either unwilling or unable to use it and it costs a tonne of money and effort. The obvious, and disappointing, reason is that we all need to pretend it works or the internet as we know it collapses, for better or worse. That plus AI being the new excuse I suppose.

Programming as an art form always reminds me of the Einstein quote; "Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas". Both are just art forms you cannot appreciate without some understanding of it. Arguably thats true of all art actually, its just that the more familiar forms, like painting or music, can be understood at a basic level without an understanding, whereas mathematics and programming are essentially alien to the casual observer.

That's pretty much all enterprise software though, it's pretty much how Microsoft stays in business, and even then if the question of switching is even humoured (the idea of a big company switching away from Office would be inconceivable to many), that'd imply its not sticky enough

To be fair they are correct, there's a "Download TTF" which seems to be at least partially broken (cmd-click works fine, but just clicking it takes you to an error page), but you are right, the files are there in the repo and download fine.

The readme isn't the first place I'd look for a download link either, but it is there

Ladybird have a "no politics" stance by the looks of things, what that really means is kind of up to you. Here's an article about it further, I'm biased against it and so is this article so take that as you will:

https://kvibber.com/reviews/software/ladybird-inclusivity/

Also I'm seeing comments suggesting that the lead behind it, Andreas Kling, is quite openly on the DHH side of things

Well you clearly do care about my judgement in this circumstance, perhaps that tells you something? Wanting to respect others and yet jumping to bad faith conclusions about people you know nothing about besides a line of text doesn't line up, and clearly you know that.

If everything you're saying is true, your moral compass is clearly not aligning with your actions here. That's fine, genuinely wanting to love and respect others and making a mistake in your actions on that moral compass is a one time mistake that can be easily remedied. The alternative is that you're actions align, the mistake was your conception of your moral compass, which would be a far bigger problem.

I don't think my friend is a sociopath. Perhaps 0 interest in justice is an exaggeration, or a matter of perspective, more like an average interest in it. At the end of the day, he took a career path for the same reason most people do. I can see why if you're deeply passionate about your field that can be annoying, but "sociopath" is really quite an extreme judgement

> People judge me for less all the time and I usually don't care.

Maybe its a case of "takes one to know one", but isn't this literally what a sociopath is? You act without caring what people think. I don't usually like to say that about a person I don't know but clearly you won't be affected by that.

I'll admit to having some bias against vibe coding, but trying to put that aside I think it depends on the purpose of the project. If it attempts to be an improvement over existing software then absolutely yes it would, things like speed, performance, security and reliability are not something I'd trust vibe coding for. If its for doing something novel where the previously mentioned is less of the focus, I can imagine myself looking past that, sure.

I can say with a great degree of certainty that I know him better than you would from half a paragraph. Would you like to think that someone would judge your character from so little?

is Work that much better than standard ChatGPT? I just tried standard for a relatively simple task; searching through the used market for a Macbook Pro and it alternated between ignoring my requirements (which was the whole reason I used it in the first place, as eBay does the same) and doing this weird thing where it'd suggest the "concept" of something (eg "X at Y price is a great choice" with no link to X at Y price).

So yeh, is Work much better for that kind of thing?

I wouldnt quite agree with that, gaming featured fairly prominently at least years WWDC, thats competing with a lot of other software and announcements for limited time. Pretending to care at an event where you can pretend to care about so many things is as close to caring as you get.

But I think it comes down to the wording a bit. At their core, the only single thing Apple cares about is making money. They only pretend to care about their computers, phones, everything they do is just an act, but we all know that so caring about something is relative, when we say they care about their computers its more that they put more resources into that than they do other things which we'd say they dont care about.

A friend of mine, really nice guy, is training as a lawyer at the moment. He has zero interest in law or justice, but heard that lawyers make a lot of money. Not too long about, programming went through a very similar phase. To be clear its not that I think programmers or lawyers shouldn't make good money, they absolutely should and it is deserved, its just it has the unfortunate side effect of attracting people who don't care about the field itself. For those people, they care as little as they can get away with and still be paid big money, and if LLM's allow them to do that at the cost of quality, they absolutely will.

I do think LLM's are making some genuine programmers less intelligent, but I think this type of person makes up a decent portion of its users too

I don't want to speak for them, but perhaps this is a very real consequence of the "use ai or get left behind" talking point. Maybe they were effectively scared into it, and now are too far gone. They seem like a very reasonable person if they're admitting to being over reliant on LLMs, so I don't mean this as an insult

As others have said there are other conclusions going both ways (though I do think most settle on as you said), though one very fair conclusion I came across is that it's not allowed because the whole issue of copyright is still somewhat unresolved, and though its fine right now, that could (probably wont, but could) massively backfire later.

Ahh of course, yeh that makes sense

I havent used Windows in years so maybe somethings changed, and far be it from me to get in the way of someone taking them down a peg, but this bit confused me:

> The vendors do not remove the Windows license, and you must pay the entire price, even if you do not want to use this system.

Surely if you don't want Windows you just boot from a usb drive and install another OS without having to pay them anything. Its not like Windows can stop you from installing another OS, right?

Great to see Island of Dr Moreau mentioned, people often forget about that but its one of my favourite books

Classic sci-fi was far from universally optimistic, it had more optimistic pieces than we do today but I'd still say on the whole it was more dystopia than utopia. Even for its own time, the original Star Trek was considered uniquely optimistic, though a large part of that is that its just much easier to write a good story where the setting itself provides the necessary challenges for a story to work, rather than an optimistic setting which rules out a lot of the usual challenges. Even Star Trek struggled, a good chunk of its stories are about encountering a race or civilisation without that utopia, turns out telling a good story without any conflict is pretty tough, especially a long running one.

But it does more generally reflect how society views technology as a whole too. People are generally a lot more pessimistic about new tech now, myself included, we've seen time and time again how its used to control or squeeze us. There actually was a Star Trek episode, "The Game" (season 5, episode 6) about an addicting device you could compare to smartphones (though the device in Star Trek doesn't spy on you to sell your every move to advertisers, missed a trick there), and that certainly wasn't supposed to be an optimistic look at technology, so you can see why things have gone the way they have.

From what I've seen they do care quite a bit about gaming, but not to the point where they're willing to actually do much about it, so I wouldn't expect a proton style compatibility layer anytime soon unfortunately

Absolutely not, sci-fi is just often a good vehicle for these kind of ideas (plus it gives me an excuse to talk about warhammer), but your right, theres plenty of real world examples to look at too.

Others have listed some great examples, but to be honest I was actually thinking of something somewhat more contemporary, specifically the eldar (or dark eldar perhaps) in Warhammer 40,000.

The long story short is that the Eldar once had paradise, and spent their time seeking greater and greater excess and pleasure, which eventually gave birth to an immensely powerful demon of excess. For the current-setting followers of this demon, their lives are spent in a desperate hunger for excess that can never be satiated, every greater excess they experience quickly becoming too dull to bare. As for the Eldar, their paradise is gone and their race is doomed, all they can do now is fight off the inevitable.

Obviously I don't think the rich have much to fear in terms of giving birth to a demon, but you get the point

There's been plenty of good sci-fi written about this, but surely they know that any any display of power is meaningless without someone to have power over? The wedding in Venice only means anything because people live in Venice and you're still able to "take over". Any "paradise" built like this will never be paradise, it'll be just chasing the next extreme until there's nowhere left to go