> Say a business could make 8% margin by cutting corners and applying only short term thinking, but the same business could make 6% by not doing these things.
Sure there is, market forces quickly push the person making 6% out of business, because the one making 8% can lower their prices, or use that extra capital to buy up more resources.
Why spend excess to train when you can do it somewhere else for a lot cheaper? Cheap energy subsidized often by taxpayers is the real issue, and instead of those subsidies helping those paying for it, it's just moved capital upwards.
That's not how the market actually works. One company could lower prices. Or they could keep their prices high to condition their customers to higher prices, and maintain the higher margins.
Indeed, the last decade of business has been all about businesses preferring higher margins over more efficient markets.
At home this is super easy, use one of the multiple TTS models out there and provide a clean clip of Morgan Freeman's voice. Typically around 10 seconds will do. I just run a python script to daily scan my FreshRSS sources, compile my news and generate a 'podcast' that's about 10 minutes for a morning listen. Currently using F5-TTS, but there are lot's of other models out there as well.
I think under Lemonade you can do that, especially with AMD systems, using the models that allow for hybrid operation. Prefill happens on the NPU and token generation happens on the GPU. Not sure if this is faster or better than just doing it all on the GPU side.
It's slower but more power efficient. I think only some form of onyx models are available and I couldnt get anything to run on the first gen NPU's in the 7940HS cpu.
I think that's the 'push/pull' problem though. Information dense UI that takes months or years to learn, or something that may be less information dense, but a monkey can learn it in minutes.
For me, it's typically a balance between speed and efficency of data to help you make decisions quickly, but should be able to be used by anyone with technical experience.
So less of both. Less 'pretty UI' and less "omfg here is every piece of information shoved together and you need to be a wizard to understand it"
It's like doing the calculations yourself (with whatever tools you want) and knowing what you're doing, steering the process yourself, rather than begging someone to give you the result so you can then show it off like you did the work. I can understand and explain what my calculator is doing and I'm not offloading decisions to it. Using a language model to shit out projects that you can't fully understand the structure of yourself is insane. Ceding control of any design decisions to a language model is insane. They're fine as second-order autocomplete and semantic search engines. Humans should be handling design and implementation entirely, making things for other humans. An LLM running in a loop can't build humane systems.
> Humans should be handling design and implementation entirely, making things for other humans. An LLM running in a loop can't build humane systems.
I tell the LLM what to do in its loop. It builds it. I tweak it until it is perfect. I care a lot about UI.
I'm mostly building my own UIs lately, but I find no problem with the development loop. I'm building much better UIs, because it's way easier to test things, and scrap things that I thought would work, but don't. It all happens in a matter of minutes.
I think even with family and friends that live far away, screens are often an excuse as well. Well sorry we aren't going to be able to visit gas is just too much, we can FaceTime instead! And I think it's ignoring the bigger problem, is perhaps you talk to your family members once a week, but do you have your community around you that you talk and do things with 'off screen'? Its easy on the internet to say you do, but the reality is most people would rather doomscroll than be bothered with trying to know their neighbor.
Before screens you visited even less. Well if you compare the 1960s to today - but the 1960s had the phone as well. Compare 1700 to today and you realize quickly that "visiting your sister who married just one village over is a big deal and it couldn't happen often".
I am not sure that's 100% the case. Sure as children and even through college it's easy to make friends, but as we get older, we certainly are exposed to more people and more opportunities if we choose so.
I think the major problem though is due to the way the world is rapidly shifting, and people's utter mental exhaustion, it's easier to sit and do nothing and become a mindless drone to 'the boob tube' or rather your phone than it is to be with your community.
This isn't something new, it's just becoming more evident, especially as there are less and less communities.
Just think about it, you likely live in some sort of apartment, town house, or suburban area, and how well do you know your neighbors? One apartment/house over, two, three? Or maybe just a friendly nod when you pass, but nothing more.
> Oh you watched this show with the iconic soundtrack? Too bad it's only available on the VHS release from 1995, they couldn't get the rights anymore so here is the same show but worse with different music
Even slightly more modern shows I think have had that happen as well. The Drew Carry show would have been a great example.
Yup. Daria is one of the most tragic ones, given how it was an MTV show and thus featured music iconic to the era and familiar to the audience. Replaced with muzak in the DVD releases, and a bunch of pirates have cobbled together best-effort mash-ups based on audio from TV rips, which sometimes were of very low quality, but for some episodes, all that had survived in the piracy scene was like, a RealVideo file with a 64kbps audio stream.
I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.
When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.
I also really enjoyed this show and rewatched it a few years ago on DVD. But I certainly noticed the main title music was different. I don't recall noticing in-episode music though, and wouldn't have remembered it from the show.
I went looking for the PAL DVDs after seeing your comment, and found one season but not a full set. After looking a little online it seems like the PAL release might have been cropped down a bit from the NTSC release? If that's the case it seems pretty disappointing.
Scrubs was another one with pretty obvious music changes, because some were part of the dialogue or a joke that just doesn't make sense after the change.
Daria is another example - being on MTV they used a lot of popular music from the time which clearly did not cost them much extra at the time of TV broadcast but was replaced with generic music for the DVD release.
Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.
Interview With the Vampire theatrically ends with the rolling stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” playing over the final scene and end credits. When the movie was on Netflix, that was cut from the soundtrack and replaced with an acoustic cover of the song.
I don't understand this. Back in the early days of the internet, you absolutely couldn't learn 'how to do it' without finding obscure books or knowing someone. Now though? You can learn all of it, and find the resources almost instantly. Want to build a computer, self host, program, you have millions of resources at your hand.
There were a lot of books written back then on programming. My local book shops had a section dedicated to computer programming - including all the popular programming languages of the day like C, C++, Basic (and eventually Visual Basic), Java and so on. The books were technical and specific, but they were incredibly easy to find. And back in those days book shops were everywhere.
I learned C, Java, JavaScript and Obj-C from books over the years. Those books were honestly much better resources for a beginner programmer than most online resources are today.
Things that are easy to do don't necessarily mean that's the right way to do it. Grueling work sometimes helped you learn far more than just getting the answer to something easy.
Back in the early days of the internet, there were FAQs written about everything. You could talk to people who actually knew what they were doing, as opposed to today.
Agreed! What’s this weird `SCREEN` command? Punch F1 and you get a complete breakdown of all the screen modes, color palettes, and their resolutions.
As I mentioned in another comment, I think if you didn’t grow up with it, you just underestimate how amazing QBASIC was as an IDE, a programming language, and perhaps most importantly as an educational tool. I mean, it even came with actual BASIC programs (GORILLA, NIBBLES, etc) right there that you could use to explore and tweak the values as you learned.
There’s no better way to learn how something works than to physically play with the actual values, change constants, change variables, and observe how that affects the behavior of the game.
Me too! Though I never learned how to use functions (subroutines) until I picked up C from a book later on. I still have dozens of programs I wrote back in the day in qbasic, largely based off the examples in the help system.
If you define a millennial as someone born from 1982-1996, the majority of those kids by the time the had a computer lab (say by the time they were in middle school) would have been too old for BASIC. You are talking 92-06, Windows 95 took over the majority market share by the end of '96, and you are forgetting a whole lot of schools had Apples being pumped in, so a lot less access to BASIC. Unless you were in a programming adjacent class, the majority of millennials weren't learning basic. Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.
> Ask your non tech millenials how much BASIC they learned and they would look at you like you grew an extra arm.
Yes, but they would say the same about any other programming language too.
BASIC was common on the Apple ][ series, and in the Win95 era QBasic was popular.
It was not impossible to have access to computers in the educational environment (either in class or as an extracurricular) before middle school, either.
Sure there is, market forces quickly push the person making 6% out of business, because the one making 8% can lower their prices, or use that extra capital to buy up more resources.
Why spend excess to train when you can do it somewhere else for a lot cheaper? Cheap energy subsidized often by taxpayers is the real issue, and instead of those subsidies helping those paying for it, it's just moved capital upwards.
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