swiftcoder

> It is not exactly an investment

At $30,000 it's sure an expensive hobby. You could get into Caterham racing for that...

Interesting that the open weights models don't have enough safeguards for this to trip GLM 5.3. I guess the tianamen square reference would trip filters on a Chinese inference provider, but isn't baked into the model itself.

> And you think 1 is better.

I think the Apple experience was better when they focused on delivering a single SKU of each product line, yes. Less decisions as to what to buy, greater focus on making that one SKU stand out.

At least the N, Ns naming scheme referred to straight-forward (albeit minor) upgrades, and were released a year apart...

Love these little dives into history!

It's unrelated to the physical connection, but the drive encryption used on the built-in drive keeps its keys in the CPU's secure enclave, so dead CPU == data lost, regardless of whether the ssd itself is damaged.

Obviously if you used the same encryption scheme on a removable drive you'd hit the same issue - but most people don't do that, because storing the encryption keys in the Secure Enclave makes your drive effectively no longer removable.

> The touchpad reduces the travel of the hand but not the time to aim.

This is likely true for casual users, but for veterans this is a skill issue. My touchpad accuracy/speed more than matches most folks touchscreen accuracy/speed.

The removable storage will presumably not be encrypted the way the soldered storage is

Yeah, but traditionally Apple doesn't pull that weird naming shit. Although I guess the mobile naming scheme has been headed there for a while.

> Is this an odd rollout for their actual high end MacBook Pros

It's the same rollout they've used for a couple of generations now. First the base model chips in fall, then the pro/max versions in spring

I have to say, I really dislike the thing where the base M(n+1) is always in the market alongside M(n) Pro/Max. I appreciate the underlying chips are probably quite distinct, but from a naming standpoint its confusing as hell.

I submit that most people haven't been able to do that for some time now. Advertising wouldn't be such big business if it didn't work on a macro scale.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that the nadir of software is somewhere in the late 2000s. I'm going to pick 2009.

Snow Leopard on the macOS side of things, Windows 7 on the other, both offering marked improvements in stability and sandboxing over their predecessors. Shareware is booming, the first App Stores have only just launched, Facebook is still that place you share exam notes with your college classmates.

They are, but in practice you have a fairly small group of low-level rendering specialists who bounce around the major studios and game engine vendors

Console mindshare is not the same as a broad body of engineers being familiar with the graphics API thereon

If I move my cursor slowly I can see the difference, I guess? But I don't habitually do that - I run with mouse/trackpad dialled to maximum acceleration, even at 120Hz there's a skip when you flick the cursor halfway across the screen. And I'm rarely scrolling a line at a time, I'm going page at a time.

I don't really get the obsession with smooth movement for desktop use (as opposed to gaming). Possibly this is a generational thing? Why is anyone intentionally using a computer primarily via slow analogue inputs?

I find that watching something like a fast-pan in 24fps footage on a modern LCD is horrific. CRTs used to inherently smooth this sort of thing out, but now we get these harsh frame transitions. As much as the soap-opera-effect is maligned, a high refresh rate LCD needs some form of motion prediction for low frame rate content.

Right, but we're mostly all watching 24 fps movies on LCDs. I don't have a cinema projector in my living room.

I was being entirely serious. Even at $400 of tokens it would probably still be worth it to take a functioning prototype into the discussion. At $4 it is a steal

> This is like saying I wonder when YouTube is going to turn into Pornhub

To a certain extent, it already has. YouTube for Kids and regular YouTube are worlds apart.

I wonder at what point the Roblox kids all reach 18 years old, and Roblox can pivot them all to a separate adult version thereof...

Plus we all grew up reading the 24fps text scroll in the Star Wars intro just fine. Until we convince a new generation of cinematographers to shoot in 120fps, it all seems a bit moot - even most digitally-authored content doesn't exceed 60fps (and tech people are the first to complain about things like the soap opera effect...)

> 2. A one-shotted POC in the span of an hour with $4 of tokens that is clearly wrong in 20 different ways?

A meeting between all the stakeholders to agree on requirements easily runs $1,000/hour. Taking your $4 functional PoC into that meeting is going to save so much time...

I do kind of love the aggressive UI theme

> carry on to Vulkan/WGPU with background story that there is also DX12 and Metal that follow similar principles

Except that's a minefield all of its own. DirectX 12 is its own special beast that is unlike the others. Vulkan is already mired in 3 revisions of architecture changes. WGPU is based on the (outdated) first cut of Vulkan, not the current model. Of all of these, only Metal has a reasonable on-ramp for newcomers to 3D graphics.

> I’ve also seen people argue that we should learn to not see vocabulary gender as gender at all, just start associating some words as “la” and some as “el” with no boy/girl idea behind it.

If you look up the list of exceptions to the whole "-a = feminine, -o = masculine" in Spanish, it's incredibly long (and covers many of the most common words). Similarly there are a whole bunch where the gender is correct, but the article is swapped because it sounds better. The gender of specific words is also arbitrary, and doesn't agree between the various Romance languages.

This whole thing is just the leftover pieces of Latin's 3x linguistic genders hanging around in our languages, and ceased to be related to actual gender centuries ago.

I think this varies a lot from person to person. I find the effect to be incredibly subtle - one of my monitors reset it self to 60hz a while back, and I didn't catch the problem for days.

> If you stick to a job at an employer that does this kind of crap then indirectly you are an enabler, even if you protest. Meta would replace them but that's on Meta, not on those that walked out

So walking away would allow the former-employees to have a clear conscience, in full knowledge that the evil will continue exactly the same without them?

This is a somewhat exotic philosophical position you are staking out here

> If you truly despise their actions, start leaking documents to the press

I don't think meta has had an all hands meeting that wasn't live-tweeted by journalists since... 2019? The leaks are pretty ubiquitous, but notably not from high-ups or the folks with access to a lot of the public policy stuff.

Turns out when your main recruitment strategy is dangling multiple-6-figures in front of debt-laden college graduates (during an employment slowdown), there's always going to be another person willing to take the place of whoever leaves, and the work still gets done

A lot of folks left over Cambridge Analytica, another bunch left over Myanmar, more left over Trump, and yet the hits keep on coming...