My 2c: I meet people all the time using the same Macbooks for 5+ years. While I'm attracted to modularity, SoCs have undeniable advantages (I'm assuming other commenters will cover this). I bought the fanless MB Air because I imagine this thing could probably go for a decade without any repair, outside the battery. I'd say this longevity is worthy of praise.
For contrast, I used a Surface Book throughout college and within weeks of the warranty expiring I ran into serious issues with the battery, then the charging port, display backlight, fan. I loved it to death so I kept it on life support and changed my usage patterns until I gave up on it. And yes, my next device was a used Thinkpad, and I was able to fix most issues I ran into. But I'd
I am NOT a fan of the measures Apple takes to monopolize the maintenance and repair of their devices.
I’m still using my M1 MacBook from 6 years ago. My company keeps emailing me to upgrade to the newest one but everything works perfectly fine and the performance is more than adequate for dev work.
Compared to pre-Apple silicon I was getting company exemptions to upgrade before I was technically allowed.
Well, you could say that about computers in general. I'm assuming you're referring to temperature (or something similar) which can be set to always pick the most probable token. Floats aside, this should be deterministic. But practically I don't think that changes much since adjusting the input slightly can lead to very different output. Also back in the day the temperature helped it avoid cyclic loops
Yes but chaotic is very different than non deterministic, and not just in an academic way because e.g. I can write tests against chaotic outputs but not really against non deterministic outputs.
Scaling laws are irrefutable. There is no doubt that computers will be able to learn more than any humans, after all we're not outgrowing our skulls. The last mile is just tweaking how we define optimality and providing integration points. Everyone investing in this knows this at some level.
What's happening now is already pretty incredible given the understanding that we're basically still at the 'chat bot' stage for most people. The idea of agency is still very, very recent, but it's understandable that most people (particularly non SDs) are not impressed.
It's easy to look at the present and be cynical. If it is only able to solve your problem 95% of the time, you still can't trust it. I think the bets are really about how far we are from 99%, even for random stuff. The fact that a chatbot that was never explicitly trained to, just by predicting next probable tokens is wild. The pace of improvement in the past 5 years has been dizzying.
I'm not out here trying to put a dollar amount on it. But certainly, there is going to be a lot of money to be made. Of course it's a front for money and power. But like... isn't that the point of a corporation?
In my experience, AI summarization is a pretty lame application. I don’t really need a block of potentially wrong, rephrased text. I’ve got a feeling that the same applies to healthcare.
Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s all a large scale grift money incinerator where the only winner is Valve.
+ whatever pleasure you derive from it, ig. I can understand loot box addiction, but paying $20,000 for valve character dress up? Not even like a Peter Griffin player model or something, but a slightly different looking knife? Madness
