361 karma · joined September 26, 2024
I've found it's usually a relation in sorts to the underdogs, in some way or another: a vengeance against the status quo, a sort of angsty reactance against it, or a desire to simply do the usual thing and signal yourself as "alternative". That's all the hipsterism is: a kind of counterculture. The author of this post is basically saying in the subtext "You're simply living off the scavenged technology of corporations and these computers aren't built for what you see in them. You are a stupid 20-something with false nostalgia," which I could argue is just a different sort of social signaling.
There is some truth in both sides of the Thinkpad culture argument. Thinkpads have excellent Linux support, ludicrously bad color gamut, questionable build quality generation-to-generation, but are always serviceable if not attractive. If the MacBook is the AR-15, the ThinkPad is the AK-47.
If you're hiring a consultancy or a pile of freelancers it's a bit different, but the question here would make me believe you don't trust their capability to start and I would be looking for teams that better align with what you expect as their outputs.
I have been thinking over the past week or so that we're likely to see consumer technology sitting well behind datacenter tech perpetually here, and this is not a transient shortage but an overall market adjustment to consumer and SMB being a few generations (or process nodes) behind the hyperscalers. Outside of gamers and enthusiasts, most people can be on anything from the last 7-8 years and be fine with it, and most of what they do is offloaded to the cloud anyway.
I'm also pessimistic enough to see a sort of long-term "compute control", where we see a few generations of technology leak to adversaries through individual channels, and then we start ensuring that _only_ controlled/regulated/registered companies can purchase the leading-edge. After all, nobody needs that much compute, it's dangerous! What if they put it on a drone?
This is ageist in the way I don't usually expect from the Valley. Plenty of entrepreneurs have built successful or innovative concepts in their 20s. It is OK to state that Wang is incompetent, but that has little to do with his age and more to do with his capability.
Can we prove that the location of this DC is attracting crime? It's not a vacant lot. This protest is because DTE is expected to raise electric rates for the state's residents, so you're costing the local economy in aggregate more than the jobs that the DC is even providing. It's not guaranteed, if almost likely not, to be a net positive on the whole versus the zero-case of a "vacant lot".
> the urban decay that's been destroying Michigan.
I'm asking this genuinely: have you been to Michigan? The entire state is certainly not some sort of industrial wasteland and a lot of people equate the state to the Urbex porn of the shell of Detroit. This is planned in the state capital's entertainment district, not some semi-abandoned factory area.
Most of the state I've seen has been mostly nature, some sand dunes, and woods.
I've been a large proponent of what LLMs and the transformative nature of them, but for a lot of people running these companies, it's clear that it isn't about the technology and instead about control. I've even lost some trust in my Apple products throughout this as it feels more like a matter of time that they bend to this more than they have, especially with the shakeup.
I think it's OK if people want to use these systems - but if they don't, we'll let the market speak for itself. For now, I'm out.
This style is basically a sort of nostalgiacore and that's exactly what it's trying to do. It's heavily influenced by Web 1.0 and the time-smear of 1990s-2000s early Web culture.
In 1996 JavaScript was extremely limited; even server side processing was often limited to CGI scripts. There was nothing like React that was in common use at the time. The Space Jam website was almost certainly not dynamically compiled as HTML - it existed and was served as a static set of files.
Even a decade later, React and the frontend-framework sort of thinking wasn't really a big thing. People had started to make lots of things with "DHTML" in the early 2000s where JavaScript was used to make things spicier (pretty animations, some server side loading with AJAX) and still often worked without JS enabled in a pattern called graceful degradation.
What you'd get from "View Source", or "Inspect Element", and what was literally saved on disk of spacejam.com, was almost certainly the same content.
It was already tough to run flagship-class local models and it's only getting worse with the demand for datacenter-scale compute from those specific big players. What happens when the model that works best needs 1TB of HBM and specialized TPUs?
AI computation looks a lot like early Bitcoin: first the CPU, then the GPUs, then the ASICs, then the ASICs mostly being made specifically by syndicates for syndicates. We are speedrunning the same centralization.
Do we want to accept that as a potential consequence, or have someone else choose for us what consequences we are allowed to accept?
You're making the subjective value judgement that a synthetic material is "junk", without qualifying it as such. A textile that is less expensive to manufacture, or is synthetic, does not automatically qualify as "junk". Look at technical fabrics such as GoreTex as a highly functional example, or any avant-garde techwear from brands like ACRONYM which usually last quite a long time and have some artistic merit within the fashion world.
It's OK to not like synthetic materials. It's also OK to not care about fashion-as-art, but fashion is oft ephemeral by nature and design.
The lack of oversight is a feature, not a bug, in this case.
This comment literally asks him to go check to see if his games work with Linux, and that he needs specific hardware for that compatibility to be meaningfully successful. The alternative is he just uses Windows and plays his games. It's exactly the type of "extra steps" that he wants to avoid.
I use Linux systems daily, and every now and then I'll go FOSS-zealot enough to go rip my Thinkpad back out of the closet and port everything over. Then, I'm no longer interoperable with any part of society that isn't involved in a fringe movement of the Linux laptop, and then go back, somewhat disappointingly, to my MacBook Pro.
After struggling with heat and power usage, I’ve resigned myself to macOS in the short term. I’d love to see real competition again.
Sam is an excellent hype-man and is going to play to the strengths of the team and their accomplishments; every new product release is going to be hailed as a breakthrough until people become skeptical if it really is. In the middle of the hype cycle you keep your foot on the gas, because you can make it through a potential AI winter and if not invest in more products.
"AGI" is a shaky definition with moving goalposts. What it means to me might not be what it means to you. How it manifests in product is unlikely to be the science-fiction "one model that does everything". It also doesn't mean that the path to AGI is the path to ASI, or the path to catastrophic risks.
I personally believe that if OpenAI has dismantled the safety org, it is not just because it is in their short-term best interest, but also because they have found that many of the initial concerns around "catastrophic risk" (in the MIRI-type doomer style) from current systems are likely to be unlikely or invalid. As for the smaller safety risks, I'm not sure business has really ever cared about those unless the costs realized outweigh the profit.