Apple's execution on AI is the worst of anything I can think of they have worked on in the past 20 years. It's embarrassing they announced this with a vague "coming this fall" when they basically have completely lost credibility in their ability to ship AI features considering it was initially announced YEARS ago.
I think a lot of it is the old "perfect is the enemy of good" with Apple trying multiple times now to announce this big basket of all these AI features supposedly coming all at once instead of just regularly shipping new useful AI integrations every month. There was so much easy useful shit that was immediately apparent as soon at OpenAI dropped that first big voice mode years ago coupled with basic app integrations. Particularly in the context of the AI labs that are operating in that lane almost too much where it seems a new model or mode comes out every two weeks.
I just checked amazon and I paid $350 in Nov 24' for 96GB (2x48GB) 6800MT DDR5 which at the time felt quite expensive and a bit of a splurge but I figured I had my DDR4 kit for almost a decade so probably similar lifespan for DDR5. That same listing is currently $1300!!!
When RAM prices are increasing like a crypto currency we have a real societal problem.
I don't want to live in a society where RAM inflation is higher and food inflation. Future generations will ask me where were you when Computer prices were rising, internet bandwidth was rationed and people had to wait overnight to continue vibe coding because vendors blocked further API calls for many hours at a time.
> people had to wait overnight to continue vibe coding because vendors blocked further API calls for many hours at a time
Tangential but this is funny. Back in the early 90s, I did a lot of BASIC programming in the family computer, this was before we had Internet. I could spend hours.and hours in front of the computer doing stuff.
Fast forward to around 2010 I remember a distinct feeling one time the internet went off at home. Sitting in front of the computer and feeling that it was "useless" because it wasn't connected to the net.
We are getting to that point in coding apparently: 5-10 years ago, everyone programmed just by typing commands, looking at S.O. and thinking. Now, if we open our "IDE" and it doesn't have access to The Brain, we are left just standing there looking in awe at the machine.
dunno, I have electricity problems (especially on winters when Russia strikes the hardest on infra) but I usually have this time as a downtime for lightweight C coding in Termux and retro gaming, all on Galaxy Note 8 (Android 9!!) + power bank.
I guess it feels less like a problem when you have that problem regularly and are forced to adapt. and I guess I'll just HAVE to switch to Pixel 10 when Pixel 11 comes out - the integrated Linux terminal right there is awesome. or maybe just get a MacBook like most around me did
I keep going back to Sublime Text when everything in VS Code becomes too much. Last time I looked at Sublime, I was like “Damn, the last update was from 2024? Must be dead.” Until I realized the lack of updates was because it was fully functional for what they wanted as is without connecting to the internet at all.
It isn't just a psychological feeling though. We've (unnecessarily) offloaded everything to the net, so there's a very real element of uselessness that kicks in when there's no connection.
E.g. back when you were coding BASIC, you probably had magazines and either ended up copying a lot of code by hand, or if you were lucky the mag came with a floppy disk. Now no such magazines exist. Manpages were all local, now it's readthedocs online. Fat local-friendly standard libraries in almost all languages have been modularised and package managers for the most part expect to install stuff by fetching it from the net.
So unless you have heavily prepared for the cyberapocalypse or sth, there really is not much you can do on your machine when the internet goes down.
On the other hand, however, when you can prepare in advance, it's great to shut off the net for a while. I do my most productive coding during flights, for example.
Yeah, I also feel that this negative aspect of "AI" adoption is not much discussed overall - massive centralization and dependency on a remote service woth something as important as computer programming.
From the point of view of AI companies, the benefit of very high hardware prices is that there will no competition from local models any time soon.
There might be an overdue era of computing where being a little mindful of resource consumption might go a long way, now that Moore's law has been killed by economics, but I wonder how that'll play out with vibe coding that vomits out thousands of lines of inefficient code.
I honestly wouldn't mind living in a society where growth and excess is no longer viable.
They were a fairly common occurrence in the late 90s. I worked at an OEM at the time and we would stockpile it during gluts for that reason, then make a killing ~6-9 months later.
don't think it's a societal problem; it's just a direct result of capitalism. and while capitalism causes all sorts of huge problems, it might also be the best of the options we've got
Recently I had the realization that a lot of people see economy as something completely decoupled from society. Capitalism is both completely unrelated with people and the result of people's innate desires. The UBS discussions are a funny one for me. Capitalism is supposedly the best way to manage limited resources, but we would still need it in a supposed utopia where recourses are in abundance. I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.
> I confess that I don't have the knowledge to understand the reasons for that.
You want the technical, mathematical, reason for that? The short version is that for society as a whole, prices are information. How many fields should be filled with grain plants? How many with flowers? How many factories should make cars? Phones? Tv furniture? How much fuel goes to heating? How much to transporting old people to the hospital and back?
I hope that can explain, if "society" gets that information more than a tiny bit wrong ... very bad things will happen. VERY bad things. People will die, lots of them, and quickly, if you get it wrong.
I hope it also makes it clear that for society as a whole, money isn't a "real" limit. Rather it's a tool that makes the actual limits clear. If we make 50% more bread, how do we make that not affect how many heart surgeries can be done?
Capitalism has many advantages, the strongest of which, in my opinion, is that it simply imposes a cost on lying. You can lie about production, about prices, but it'll cost you. It is resilient against the bane of so many other systems: it is extremely resilient against people trying to sabotage it, because everyone has an incentive to undo or bypass sabotage. In other systems like communism or slavery the people doing work have an extreme incentive to lie, and the only break on that is violence against workers. But the state fundamentally has no idea if you're lying or not, so that violence will be mostly random. It can't be directed against the people actually causing problems in society.
Thanks for taking the time to answer, I really appreciate that. About the pricing, isn't that the same as managing scarce resources? In a supposed AGI utopia, why would society still need it? To be clear, I get your point. I'm not against capitalism, I just don't get why it would be needed when resources are unconstrained
The difference is those have largely all been steadily increasing every year for decades. Tech and entertainment (streamers etc) have been one of the few bright spots you could point to as something that would usually improve yearly.
At this point there is hardly anything left and I think it leads to some pretty dark scenarios when we have a society where we have somehow decided: fuck it, almost everything gets worse for almost all of you every single year.
I have it more for the fast nas access and being able to treat nas disks as more or less the same performance as if they were directly sata in my machine. Significantly less so about the external network aspect.
If you want to buy the cheaper old ones and are concerned about heat just add a usb fan. I have the same mikrotik switch in the post and 2 sfp to rj45 + this fan https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G059G86?th=1 sitting on top and it makes a dramatic difference in temp.
I appreciate the craftiness of this but with the years I stopped being a fan of Frankenstein setups. The vendor should be honest; if the piece of tech is expected to heat up, just add a fan to it and manual toggle and a knob to control it or have it work auto.
It's comically (and extremely variably) priced. A trip from DC to NYC and back would be ~$25 in electric costs with a typical electric car versus Amtrak could easily be $300+ though possibly as cheap as $50 if you are flexible to awful hours like depart at 4:30am or something.
the actual cost of a trip between times square and the national mall is about $200 all things considered based on the ~0.80 federal mileage reimbursement rate for 250 miles. that train corridor is overwhelmingly successful as well so the idea that amtrak isn't a good deal is at odds with reality.
That's assuming you don't already have a time-depreciating asset in your possession. Per mile cost is about halved if you drive significantly more than average.
Yeah Youtube search is mediocre, though I feel like search has broadly declined across the entire web on all sorts of apps and services I use. Not to mention all the actual "search engines" feeling less and less powerful every year. I don't get it.
What the hell is going on. Why does it seem like largely out of nowhere there is suddenly such a dramatic push on age verification and internet censorship popping up literally all over the world at the same time.
Where do you live? I'm in a HCOL area and just checked that same combo for a Friday night premiere and it's more like ~$70.
The markup on concessions has always been a thing but it really is just insane to think the unit economics on 2 sodas and a popcorn must be like 50 cents and selling it from $26 (in my area). Clearly they must make the most money this way but it is just crazy that anyone outside of significant disposable income even considers buying concessions. It's priced in such a way where anyone outside of the top 5% income brackets should just laugh at the price and view it as an extreme luxury good and not ever even consider buying anything.
This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?
There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
They were pretty clear about it - they screwed up by underestimating the scale of the problems. It's better to admit your mistake quickly and try to fix things.
I think a lot of it is the old "perfect is the enemy of good" with Apple trying multiple times now to announce this big basket of all these AI features supposedly coming all at once instead of just regularly shipping new useful AI integrations every month. There was so much easy useful shit that was immediately apparent as soon at OpenAI dropped that first big voice mode years ago coupled with basic app integrations. Particularly in the context of the AI labs that are operating in that lane almost too much where it seems a new model or mode comes out every two weeks.
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