erm 80% of the new apple silicon isn’t in laptops but go ahead, engineering genius. your approach to tech is very boomer-pilled.
i'm still not sure why an engineer can't engineer themselves a cat-free space so their work stuff remains unbothered, unpushed, and unbitten. it's usually not even that hard to close off a room to cat access or even train them off of counter and desk surfaces. if the cats are bored, engineer a catio like a thoughtful suburbanite.
you can plug monitors into macbooks, no? keyboard/mouse? put the laptop on a non-skid mat and safely out of the way of the usual feline foot traffic? if the criteria is nothing should fit into a cat's mouth, that rules out a lot of things. like power cables.
it's weird hearing a self-reporting cat lover bemoan that their cats want to spend time with them. i guess everyone has their limits.
you can plug monitors into macbooks, no? keyboard/mouse? put the laptop on a non-skid mat and safely out of the way of the usual feline foot traffic? if the criteria is nothing should fit into a cat's mouth, that rules out a lot of things. like power cables.
it's weird hearing a self-reporting cat lover bemoan that their cats want to spend time with them. i guess everyone has their limits.
guys, i hate to inform you for the third time but laptops comprise about 25% of apple’s product range. i promise you that a lot of cat owners manage just fine with imacs or mac minis (or a dog, because let’s face it cats are gay). you don’t need to start thinking about external monitors for a laptop. just get an imac. i promise u they work just as well for the same tasks.
Last edited by uziq (2025-02-01 23:54:45)
I would have to install windows to run most of the applications I use, this doesn't seem like a great step forward.
Fuck Israel
- SuperJail Warden
- Gone Forever
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I plan to build a home AI machine once Deep Seek is easily portable to home server type situations.
How cool would that be? Back in the day nerds dreamed of home servers. Now anyone can have a home AI system on their table. You don't need to upgrade it often. Frankly most people won't ever need anything beyond the original ChatGPT model. When was the last time anyone needed an updated version Of MSWord?
How cool would that be? Back in the day nerds dreamed of home servers. Now anyone can have a home AI system on their table. You don't need to upgrade it often. Frankly most people won't ever need anything beyond the original ChatGPT model. When was the last time anyone needed an updated version Of MSWord?
it has always been possible to have a home server, just not particularly beneficial? there's already a whole bunch of products that cater to home media centre-type use-cases, for pooling together the household music, movies, photos, backups, etc. and of course consumer-level NASs have always been a thing, with more or less affordable options for RAID backups and network access.
running a fully local 'lite' AI model on a raspberry-pi type device would change the economics of the entire industry. deepseek is the first time i'm thinking about mass layoffs being a near future eventuality as opposed to a 'one day' thing. the US companies trying to build moats were pricing their models way above the reach of most small business use-cases. deepseek makes daily use of AI for trivial tasks affordable.
running a fully local 'lite' AI model on a raspberry-pi type device would change the economics of the entire industry. deepseek is the first time i'm thinking about mass layoffs being a near future eventuality as opposed to a 'one day' thing. the US companies trying to build moats were pricing their models way above the reach of most small business use-cases. deepseek makes daily use of AI for trivial tasks affordable.
Last edited by uziq (2025-02-02 02:02:30)
- SuperJail Warden
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It is sort of like Android challenging Apple in the early Smartphone wars.
I am actually pretty skeptical about the mass layoffs thing. This stuff is great for increased office productivity. We are far away from it being able to staff a soap factory.
I am actually pretty skeptical about the mass layoffs thing. This stuff is great for increased office productivity. We are far away from it being able to staff a soap factory.
automation in robotics is coming along at a very high pace as well, which makes your soap factory comment strange.
have you seen what the chinese version of boston dynamics can do? there are so many manual jobs in factories ripe for automation.
layoffs will ironically come in the tech companies first and foremost. a lot of coding labour is being saved by LLMs operating as a sort of autocomplete on steroids. some of the ones tailored specifically with large technical data sets, e.g. claude, are basically doing pro-level coding with very simple prompting. and a range of other AI LLMs can now cover PhD-level math and science. the nerds are doing to their jobs what they first did to chess with supercomputers in the 1990s.
have you seen what the chinese version of boston dynamics can do? there are so many manual jobs in factories ripe for automation.
layoffs will ironically come in the tech companies first and foremost. a lot of coding labour is being saved by LLMs operating as a sort of autocomplete on steroids. some of the ones tailored specifically with large technical data sets, e.g. claude, are basically doing pro-level coding with very simple prompting. and a range of other AI LLMs can now cover PhD-level math and science. the nerds are doing to their jobs what they first did to chess with supercomputers in the 1990s.
with regards to automating factory stuff, it wouldn't surprise me if the chinese are actually feathering the brakes a bit with how far they could implement that stuff (note that in the last few years they've allowed housing prices to fall by 7%, spooking investors but throwing a political bone to a lot of young chinese).
at present the manufacturing sector there has the american economy/worker by the balls, anyway. there's not much incentive to invent technology that will make chinese workers permanently unemployed. the politics of these new technologies always pose interesting questions. releasing deepseek as open-source a week after trump announced some manhattan project-scale funding arrangement for openAI is a hilarious move in terms of geopolitics.
at present the manufacturing sector there has the american economy/worker by the balls, anyway. there's not much incentive to invent technology that will make chinese workers permanently unemployed. the politics of these new technologies always pose interesting questions. releasing deepseek as open-source a week after trump announced some manhattan project-scale funding arrangement for openAI is a hilarious move in terms of geopolitics.
- SuperJail Warden
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The Chinese real estate market is as real as the numbers on Wall Street.
It is pretty clear that Chinese and soon Indian tech companies are going to be strong competitors. Both countries have invested in producing STEM students by a large amounts. Sure they have engineers driving taxis in India but the size of the population and careful government investment is eye watering. American tech workers are looking around and realizing that their companies are increasingly being staffed by Indians. Even if all of the Indians disappeared in Silicon Valley we can't replace them with as qualified Americans.
Meanwhile the U.S. government is committing to a purge and looting. Think of how nuts that is to be doing at this time.
It is pretty clear that Chinese and soon Indian tech companies are going to be strong competitors. Both countries have invested in producing STEM students by a large amounts. Sure they have engineers driving taxis in India but the size of the population and careful government investment is eye watering. American tech workers are looking around and realizing that their companies are increasingly being staffed by Indians. Even if all of the Indians disappeared in Silicon Valley we can't replace them with as qualified Americans.
Meanwhile the U.S. government is committing to a purge and looting. Think of how nuts that is to be doing at this time.
it may be fake numbers but the point is that they're inducing a ~7% fall in prices as opposed to letting the speculators and investors feast. they're acting in the interests perhaps not of the people per se but at least of avoiding political strife. i could imagine them applying the same reasoning to technologies that would thrust their vast urban working class into unemployment. they've only just all moved from the country to the city in the last 2-3 generations. i doubt they're in a hurry to create another vast upheaval – even if the robotics and automation are within arm's reach (ahem).SuperJail Warden wrote:
The Chinese real estate market is as real as the numbers on Wall Street.
It is pretty clear that Chinese and soon Indian tech companies are going to be strong competitors. Both countries have invested in producing STEM students by a large amounts. Sure they have engineers driving taxis in India but the size of the population and careful government investment is eye watering. American tech workers are looking around and realizing that their companies are increasingly being staffed by Indians. Even if all of the Indians disappeared in Silicon Valley we can't replace them with as qualified Americans.
Meanwhile the U.S. government is committing to a purge and looting. Think of how nuts that is to be doing at this time.
at the moment the majority of the chinese population are actually pretty well-positioned in the global system. since deng's reforms and visions of a vast urbanised proletariat making cheap goods has come to fruition, china is basically having a 1950s american-style boom with a newly minted bourgeoisie. they are way better off than their american equivalents. it gives them more freedom and leeway with the new technology, for and against. in contrast, the american mass seem to be totally at the whims and mercies of their tech overlords. (it helps that the chinese government has repeatedly brought their burgeoning tech billionaire class to heel, in often extreme and humiliating ways, effectively banishing them to the gulag from time to time.)
europe has the worst of both worlds. our technology companies suck and our governments are trying to implement a highly regulated, 'AI for the benefit of all' program which amounts in total to very little. standard political boilerplate speeches and pablum.
Last edited by uziq (2025-02-02 04:09:58)
i think you're misreading the changing sociology of these professions in the last 1.5 generations.SuperJail Warden wrote:
It is pretty clear that Chinese and soon Indian tech companies are going to be strong competitors. Both countries have invested in producing STEM students by a large amounts. Sure they have engineers driving taxis in India but the size of the population and careful government investment is eye watering. American tech workers are looking around and realizing that their companies are increasingly being staffed by Indians. Even if all of the Indians disappeared in Silicon Valley we can't replace them with as qualified Americans.
in the last two decades all of the prestige has begun to drain away from STEM careers. actual PhDs and research jobs in the sciences are not desirable at all for upper-middle class americans now. the university career ladder is an over-managerialised, demoralising grind. what you now have, instead, is effectively a class of chinese and indian 'coolies' who are doing all the drudgery and labwork. PhDs and STEM publications still confer enormous prestige in those communities in a way that they don't for the children of the american 'professional-managerial class' (PMC). the roles actually involving STEM education and expertise are now literally H1B visa jobs.
what the privileged children of the elite want is jobs in the menlo park side of silicon valley, the 'sand hill road' type of careers. they're either focused on being in 'founder mode' or aiming for jobs in private equity or venture capital. in other words, the new elite formation is in around harnessing and directing chinese and indian STEM grads.
salaries in STEM have not kept pace in the last generation or so. neither have meaningful job opportunities: even before the H1B bonanza, the whole stereotype of 'liberal arts degree? would you like fries with that?', quipped by grinning biologists or chemists, was becoming badly out of sync with reality (jobs for many pure science disciplines are just as scarce as humanities-type roles). funding has been systematically cut (against which, see the giant funding push in china at the same time, which is now the world's biggest funder of scientific research). the result is that careers in the sciences are simply not as prestigious as they were in the hey-day of 'get a job at RAND Corp or Bell Labs or Lockheed Martin'.
china is the country now carrying the torch for prestige STEM roles. all their best institutions genuinely are technical or engineering institutions. the most prestige is conferred on graduates of their physics or electrical engineering or civil engineering programs, etc. in the USA, the elite crop aren't doing engineering degrees. that's for aspirants from the lower-middle class who are urged by their risk-avoidant elders to 'do something practical with a job at the end of it'. they don't want to write code. the idea that the current elite are doing compsci is about as aged as bezos' graduating class at princeton or gates' cohort at harvard. they want to be venture capitalists or in the c-suite of a new AI startup. even the big quant roles on wall st are going to émigré russians or chinese who are stronger at the first principles stuff.
Last edited by uziq (2025-02-02 16:50:13)
i mean, his argument was about laptops being pushed off desks though? there's ways around that, or keeping your cat from sitting on your laptop's keyboard. plenty of cat owners get on with laptops without issue.uziq wrote:
guys, i hate to inform you for the third time but laptops comprise about 25% of apple’s product range. i promise you that a lot of cat owners manage just fine with imacs or mac minis (or a dog, because let’s face it cats are gay). you don’t need to start thinking about external monitors for a laptop. just get an imac. i promise u they work just as well for the same tasks.
my desktop pc has like a dozen tempting wires sticking out of it, but since cats aren't allowed in the home office, it's not an issue. on the rare occasion one sneaks in, it's too astonished at its own success to do much more than lay on the rug triumphantly.
being restricted in the technology you can buy because of a creature is fucking retarded. keep the animals out of the home office? i mean, what are we doing here. engineering genius seems stumped for solutions.
the truth is that a lot of cat owners live for accumulating memes and anecdotes like that. if dilbert cat-proofed the most important parts of his shared abode, he wouldn't be able to share stories about the cats pushing him around. the "asshole cat" thing is rather anthropomorphic, and the stereotype isn't really that close to the truth anyway.
the idea of a cat roosting right in front of your screen and humming like an idiot is cute, but i'd still pick them up and put them somewhere else. also, lots of dog goofballery to be had if you have one of those.
the idea of a cat roosting right in front of your screen and humming like an idiot is cute, but i'd still pick them up and put them somewhere else. also, lots of dog goofballery to be had if you have one of those.