"I'm not political" or "don't make it political" type posts on Musk-related topics are often signs that somebody agrees with the worldview that Musk espouses.
I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.
Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
> The main issue with ibuprofen is that it can have fairly annoying (but non-life-threatening) side effects like stomach upset and GI bleeds even with normal dosing.
Those side effects are more problematic when used chronically. This is when acetaminophen shines, because it has virtually no side effects at all when used as directed.
> You can say it's inconvenient but it's hard to argue they're being greedy when they do these things to merely lose a little bit less money on every subscription they sell.
TFA is probably overly inflammatory but it's worth pointing out how this loss leader cycle works.
These companies are not your friends, they're burning VC money to subsidize services before the eventual rug pull, enshittification is coming.
> 2 months ago management was showing us scoreboards, praising leaders who used most tokens. Last few weeks, we're getting weekly emails, telling us that whenever we can - we should use cheaper models, and that we should watch the page which shows our tokens usage.
GPT 5.5's double token cost was the threshold for me. These things are getting expensive quickly - the subsidized pricing can't go on forever.
We're moving to a world where it makes sense to have one cheap locked down phone with the society mandated garbage apps on it, and another device that you use for real computing.
We aren't given the choice, in many cases. For example I remember a poster here who was forced to have an Android or Apple phone because his kids' school required an app to pick up the kids after school. So his options were to get a big tech phone, or get in trouble for not picking up his kids. "Get the school to come to their senses" was, unfortunately, not an option available to him.
I've been using several GNU/Linux smartphones as my only phones for the past 18 years (with a short exception around 10 years ago when I carried an Android phone too as there was a gap on the market) so I can say from first-hand experience that it's really not such a big deal as everyone keeps painting it. For these kinds of odd needs where you have no hope to fight back you just launch Waydroid, use the app and stop the container afterwards. However, when you do fight back it often turns out that this "mandatory app" isn't actually so mandatory and in turn you contribute to making the world around you a bit better.
The question is should the sane minority jump from the roof in one of the allowed ways - headfirst or assfirst - only because the majority decided (or was duped into believing) it was convenient to do so, or better not partake in madness?
Android is going to bifurcate between "phones that run proprietary apps from the play store" and "phones that run software from anywhere else." And while maybe you can get by without banking apps, your life is going to get increasingly harder when you want to do many other things.
Ride hail app? Transit fare app? Government ID app? Airline app? Maybe you don't need them yet, but the best way to model this future is to consider what you'd do if you didn't have a phone at all, and the amount of friction this will generate as the expectations are only entrenched and expanded.
I'm glad people are saying no. It's good to do it as long as we can. But the final outcome seems inevitable now and to me it feels very close.
I actually agree that the "two-phone future" makes sense, but I still wouldn't bet on it actually taking off on a large scale, because 95% (maybe even 99%) of people won't carry a second device just to preserve a freedom they don't really feel they're losing in their daily lives. Large corporations are able to make such radical decisions with ease precisely because of this inertia of the masses.
Fortunately Google thought about this, so government ID and banking apps usually check that they are running on a sufficiently locked down and officially blessed phone through the Play Integrity API.
> I think the zeitgeist today is different. Because Trump has dialed the crazy up to eleven in his second term and a lot of Dems are now pissed. That’s why democratic socialism/leftism is having a resurgence. And, based on what I’m seeing on the ground, there’s now a strong appetite for justice and retribution.
Does it really matter how much the minority party is pissed though? The American public knew how corrupt this guy was, shrugged, and voted him back into office.
If Democrats do win back the house and senate it will only be by the thinnest of margins. There seems to be little appetite to fix any of these structural problems outside of the "Democratic base."
> They can't pick and choose "oh no they are in jurisdiction of law A but not in law B". Jurisdiction is a fundamental concept, there's no middle ground.
I mean, they shouldn't do this but clearly they can rule however they want with any pretext they want, because they answer to nobody but themselves. Who's going to tell them they can't do something? Who is left to appeal to?
It's a deeply corrupt and undemocratic institution, with virtually unchecked power to rewrite legislation and even the Constitution at a whim.
I also don't understand why people in this price bracket are buying Mac laptops instead of desktop computers with GPUs? Just to flex that it's portable?
(I'm not one of the people you're speaking of with a 128gb M5 but) if you want to run one of the medium-sized open-weights models (Qwen 27b, 35b, Gemma 4 26b, 31b) or larger, you get into an interesting optimisation space.
* yes, you can run it on an older/smaller GPU plus system RAM but performance will suffer
* if you want optimal GPU performance you need the model in VRAM plus context, so 24GB (3090, 4090) or 32GB (5090) cards, plus a system that's reasonable powerful to plug them in to. Ideally you'd have a multiple cards working together but for optimal performance this means either 2x 3090 or nvidia's workstation cards.
* you can go for a 128gb Strix Halo system, but the memory bandwidth isn't great and they're becoming increasingly more expensive (5.5k EUR for HP laptop, 3.9k EUR for GMKtec EVO-X2 mini PC)
* you can go for a 128gb DGX Spark (5k EUR+) which also has unspectacular memory bandwidth or RTX Spark (price unclear but probably not cheaper)
* or go for a Mac with a decent CPU and a good amount of RAM (bandwidth varies by model, but typically a bit better than Strix Halo/DGX Spark and worse than bespoke GPUs.
As usual with such questions, there are of course cheaper paths (if you want to accept the tradeoffs) but Macs are reasonable vs. competition for these workloads.
I just recently got into experimenting with local LLMs when I had anyway (for non-LLM reasons) built myself a new desktop system with Intel Ultra 270K-Plus and RTX 5080. With 64GB system RAM and 16GB VRAM. Relatively speaking a high-performing and low-to-moderate cost system.
I wasn't really expecting much from these local open weight models neither when it comes to speed or "intelligence", but my preconceptions were quickly put ashame when I got ollama up and running and pulled my first model. I get a consistent 117-128 t/s with Gemma4:26b-a4b without any tuning (just the default settings), which was much faster than I had expected. Can't wait to dive deeper into this, especially with Qwen3.6 models.
Does anyone's have experience adding a 2nd Nvidia GPU of the same generation but different (slower) model in the same system? Will it give a major boost with larger models, or will the slower card just be a bottleneck? I have an unused RTX 5060 Ti 16GB that I'm considering to install alongside the RTX 5080, but it would necessitate removing some other hardware, so I haven't bothered yet.
I'd say adding another 16Gb gpu would be worth it - you'd be able to run larger model/larger context all within gpu's. It would give you more options of what you can run fast. Your current model probably doesn't run completely from GPU (depending on quants I don't think you can squeeze Gemma4:26b into 16Gb vram), so you already have some layers running on gpu and some on cpu. If you add another gpu you might be able to move all layers to vram which should speed up things for you. The layers calculations happen on whatever gpu's it sits, so the layers that are already on your rtx5080 would compute same, but the layers that currently your cpu handles will be computed with faster vram/compute of rtx5060.
Thanks! I'm seeing a 10/90 split between CPU/GPU with gemma4:26b, so I guess there's at least something to win there by adding the other GPU. And perhaps something to win by connecting the monitor to the iGPU instead to free up VRAM, from what I gather.
Just in case someone should be interested in how a consumer PC setup like this performs, still using only 1x RTX 5080 + 64GB system RAM and Intel Ultra 270K-Plus; I tested Qwen3.6:35b-a3b now (using ollama and default settings) and I'm getting around ~86 t/s. The lowest I've seen so far is 70 t/s. The CPU/GPU split with 35b is 39/61% (with 4K 165 fps monitor connected to 5080, so there's probably some room for optimization here by moving it to the iGPU).
Best thing is that this setup is basically dead silent (it could, hypothetically speaking, be running in my bedroom just fine, and I'm a light sleeper).
A mac with a boatload of RAM can run models that will exceed the limits of any GPU not worth at least twice the Apple hardware itself.
You get fewer tokens per second, but at some point the balance between quality and quantity makes the large model size worth the spend.
When you're spending this kind of money, you may as well treat yourself to a pretty screen and some decent speakers. Nothing the competition doesn't offer these days, but you get them for free with the car-priced RAM upgrade so why go for less.
I don't even travel a ton but portability is huge. It's not a flex, it's a functional thing that lets me move around within my house or work while I'm at my parents or traveling or anywhere else. Other than my media collection that lives on my home server, I want most of my files to come with me on my laptop.
I think it is because desktop computers with GPUs with enough VRAM to run interesting models are insanely expensive, hard to source and consume a lot of electricity and dissipate a lot of heat.
Yes, it's better on the Spark but the M5 is a lot closer than before with neural accelrators. After prompt processing, token generation speed on the M5 Max is 2.3x faster.
No Apple markup but you get the Nvidia market up instead. Prior to the recent Apple price increase due to RAM shortage, an M5 Max 128GB was a bargain if you want to run local LLMs.
The fact that I can take it with me? That I don’t need internet to still have access to deepseek? The fact that electricity is expensive and an mbp uses ~10% of the power that an equivalent vram set up would using gpu’s. Also, in order to get the same vram I would need to spend a similar amount, but wouldn’t also have a machine that was useful for other workloads that need a huge amount of ram.
You need an expensive motherboard, cooling, PSU(s) to use multiple high end GPUs together. Then there is the noise and the fact that you can't bring it on an airplane.
> Maybe I'm not paying close enough attention (probably) - but I feel that China is providing a glimmer of hope that this (only the uber elite can get good AI assistance) isn't true, and we're maybe at a weird inflection point of sorts wrt the leverage that tech can now provide.
I think it's easy for China to be more open right now (and Western governments to essentially not worry about it yet) because they're playing catchup.
If we reach some endpoint where American models stop improving for the general public and only party apparatchiks and sycophantic oligarchs can access them, the situation is different. Chinese models could exceed the publicly available SOTA, and surely they would close off their own models in the same way.
I used to think the HN policy of "do not discuss politics unless it intersects with tech or is novel" was useful, but lately I feel this perspective is part of how we got here, with a white supremacist controlling more wealth than any other human and exerting political influence in heretofore unseen ways. We've decided it's OK to simply look the other way if there's some shiny bauble, and we've missed the forest through the trees.
Musk doesn't do anything that is not politics. This must be called out more, not less, and we need to bring shame back for supporting such an agenda.
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