This is one of the main reasons that Amazon is my default online merchant, despite all of my reservations with them: a purchase won't increase the amount of marketing email I receive. I don't know how much spam they send to new accounts, but I must have my preferences tweaked to eliminate most of it. Contrast that to every merchant that thinks that since I bought a product from them once, they should spam me multiple times per week, oftentimes even when I've unchecked the "receive marketing emails" box.
My Framework Desktop with 128GB was about half that. I did luck out by buying before RAM prices went crazy, though.
I'm looking forward to the fallout when the data center bubble bursts. There's a good possibility we'll see a glut of hardware, either on the used market or from manufacturers that no longer have massive orders from OpenAI and the like.
It's not just giving a shit: it's also the capacity to act on giving a shit. I'm exhausted at the end of the day after getting the kids to bed, and I'm fortunate to be in a stable marriage, live in a large home that my wife and I own, and work a well-paying WFH job. I can only imagine how tiring it must be to not have those advantages.
There are the parents doing heroics that I can hardly imagine, and they should be celebrated. But we need to design a system that provides a sufficient level of support for those families that only have an average level of capacity.
That's actually a very logical stance: China is much less interested in what you're doing as an individual citizen—and much less able to act on what they know—than the United States is. For the same reason, Chinese citizens should trust the United States with their data more than China.
It is possible to get real work done with LLMs. There are plenty of ethical concerns, and they're definitely over-hyped, but they are exceptionally useful tools when used well.
I'm guessing it would be tough to make the numbers work demolishing a 4-story building and building one that's only 2-2.5x the square footage, especially with today's interest rates.
I'd assume they have a botnet to parallelize it. Though depending on where you live (not that they'd be using their own machines) fast pipes are fairly common—I have a 5gbps symmetrical fiber connection to my home in Michigan.
One of my vehicles is a 2009 Civic. It continues to amaze me that with minimal maintenance, that 17-year-old vehicle will fire right up with the turn of a key, with hundreds (thousands?) of parts moving in a specific way, many of them with tolerances in tiny fractions of an inch.
The battery in my PHEV (Chrysler Pacifica) showed no appreciable degradation in eight years (and >100k miles) before being replaced under recall for a manufacturing fault last year.
Agreed. I have a work MBP 14" and a Framework 13, and I didn't realize until just now that they weren't the same screen size. The Framework 13 is very comfortable to use.
Windows 95 was still based on DOS, and didn't offer a lot in the way of isolation or other security features. Win98 and ME were similar. It wasn't until all Windows versions used the NT kernel (XP being the first consumer-focused release) that this changed.
The Framework Desktop has a Ryzen 395 chip that is able to allocate memory to either the CPU or GPU. I've been able to allocate 100+gb to the GPU, so even big models can run there.
Most recently I used it to develop a script to help me manage email. The implementation included interacting with my provider over JMAP, taking various actions, and implementing an automated unsubscribe flow. It was greenfield, and quite trivial compared to the codebases I normally interact with, but it was definitely useful.
I've found qwen3 to be very usable on my local machine (a Framework Desktop with 128gb RAM). I doubt it could handle the complex tasks I throw at Claude Opus at work, but it's more than capable of doing a surprising number of tasks, with good performance.
Mainly all the tasks that I otherwise feel I have to track myself. I've found that my head feeling clearer is an indication that I trust a tool to not lose context.
I have a series of skills and scripts that I manually invoke using Pi. It checks my calendar, Slack, email, etc. and keeps pretty good track of my day, to the point that I trust it enough to get a lot of noise out of my head.
It's especially gratifying (in my experience) to sing in a choir. I've been in the same chamber vocal group[1] for almost 20 years, and it has enriched my life in so many ways. I count the other members of the group as some of my closest friends.
Many areas have ensembles with a range of experience levels and commitment requirements. Now is a great time to look up local ensembles and see when they hold auditions (most of them are probably within the next few months).