I wonder, did they pay for the artists whose art they took without paying or asking to train that LLM model they are promoting? I guess we know the answer :)
Article mixes "elites" and real elites. The mere usage of the term employment is a dead giveaway, among other issues. Real elites are not employed by someone as a general rule, with some exceptions of course. Article would be more aptly named "Overproduction of qualified or overqualified workers".
It's been awhile since I've read Turchin but I'm pretty sure in his own examples elites are indeed employed in prestigious positions. Which is really his whole point, there are only so many prestigious positions. His example using musical chairs has always stuck with me.
Memory compression is a feature on Windows PCs for years (decades maybe?), it somehow doesn't prevent people from raising valid complaints about swapping with 8Gb or RAM.
I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners to admit that 8Gb is not enough. Like, I'm using PCs for years and I will be the first in line to point their deficiencies and throw a deserved stone at MS, they never cease to provide reasons. Why is it so different at the Apple?
Because 8GB is literally enough? There are multiple 8GB Macs in this house and they are fine. I wouldn't use them for development work but they're completely competent at the basics.
What's basics? Of course one can always overbuy hardware compared to the tasks but we are discussing some usage more fitting to the laptop form factor. I would argue that for a laptop a basics is at least some kind of office white collar work or similar. And so it is most likely that at least 2-3 of the Electron monstrosities would be used, an office package or something along the lines, multiple loaded tabs in a browser a few of which will be memory leaking enterprise crap, a few communication apps etc. Nothing really outlandish, only handful of apps, but because they are all fat, they will eat the 3Gb margin super fast and start caching.
The storage is fast enough to not be too much of an issue, and the basics would be mostly a web browser, a lot of things can be done with only it, and if you need to do more than web browser, text editors, you probably should want more than the Neo in the first place
Tons of 8GB users out there who are happy. I'm on 16GB and its definitely enough for a power user - and running multiple coding environments, Docker, IDE's. MacOS is really good with caching.
> I wonder, why is it physically painful for some Apple owners
This wasn't necessary. I was just pointing out that 8GB hardware is not the full story. It's also true with windows, as you correctly point out. If you're coming from a slow SSD, or even Linux (it's a relatively new feature to have on by default) you might be pleasantly surprised.
Also, I'm an Apple owner and I have no problem saying it's not enough for anyone on this website. I tried it for a few years as my "second screen" computer, and would bump against it all the time, with glorious screeching as the audio skipped. But, I'm also a developer/power user.
The majority of people aren't power users.and that's the target audience for this. Clearly.
8GB has been completely fine for every non power user I know. Again, the majority of people do everything within a browser, maybe play some music/video at the same time, maybe open an office type app. It's completely acceptable for that, and that should not surprise you, as someone who has an understanding of memory usage and paging, and high bandwidth SSDs, in the slightest.
Perhaps because it's enough for a lot of things. I only came up against the 8GB limit when I ran a LLM locally using Ollama. It worked but wasn't workable.
8GB isn't ideal though and 16GB would've expanded its capacity to do more things. But soon as I want to do more things I shuffle over to my PC with it's dedicated GPU and 32GB o ram
I'm guessing Apple cuts capability to the lower end so as not to hurt sales of the higher end. Usage profile is often dependent on context. There are enough non-power users (when mobile) like me that 8GB isn't ideal but it's enough. And if it wasn't enough we could've paid more for the 16GB, but I personally decided it wasn't worth the ridiculous Apple ram price premium.
So these are my reasons for saying 8GB is enough. I'm also using an M1 MacBook Air, so the puniest of the lineup. Next laptop I'm considering is possibly a think pad with linux so I'm no macOS fanboi.
Reputation system and elected or at least transparent moderation is what's needed to curb any bad actors. In fact, identity verification would make it easier for spammers, just buy stolen identities in bulk in darknet for a few dollars and fire away. Facebook supposedly leans very hard into real identities and the end result is a dead wasteland of bots talking to bots. And on the other hand, there are plenty of regular forums with not a sign of bad actors, because they were collectively exterminated and the newcomers are vetted.
Is anyone else bothered that "social media" for the last few years is equated only to the micro-post platforms like xitter, bluesky, mastodon etc.? Are there any "normal" new social networks with no arbitrary character limits, tree comment structure, usable categories or subforums and sane UI, not singularly focused on a tiny screens?
I can understand this issue with low margin private businesses. But the LLM bots are now everywhere.
I call my bank and I must tell a dumb robot a description of my problem, which it then claims to not understand and fucking hangs up on me. Now I need to repeat like a parrot "operator, operator, operator" until that clanker resigns and connects me to an operator. And the issue is managing a specific account, so nothing in the FAQs was relevant. Bank has more than enough margins for human support.
Or another case - our government went all digital lately and we have main point of access to many stuff via an app/webportal. That service only has a very dumb and limited bot as a support, while service governs a lot of important functions. So instead I have to write comments under their Facebook marketing posts, then if I'm lucky some human spots them and then a real support writes me in a Facebook messenger. This is beyond infuriating. Government also has more than enough money to spend.
Same with other businesses with proper margins, like telco, automotive etc.
There is no significance to the number 12 on the analog clock outside it being painted on top of the clock face. And even that is completely absent in the digital clock, where hour 11:00 is the same as 12:00 or 13:00 in significance.
So there is zero astronomic reason to fixate noon to a particular number if doesn't suit us, humans.
I'm just saying that astronomic argument is kinda meaningless for the DST discussion, the only thing that matters is manual allocation of light time for the most people as possible, so that a majority of population would receive highly beneficial natural light as much as possible. When the solar high point would happen in that scheme should be entirely irrelevant.
We have an ongoing effort in parsing logs for our autotests to speed up debug. It is vary hard to do, mainly because there is a metric ton of false positives or plain old noise even in the info logs. Tracing the culprit can be also tricky, since an error in container A can be caused by the actual failure in the container B which may in turn depend on something entirely else, including hardware problems.
Basically a surefire way to train LLM to parse logs and detect real issues almost entirely depends on the readability and precision of logging. And if logging is good enough then humans can do debug faster and more reliable too :) . Unfortunately people reading logs and people coding them are almost not intersecting in practice and so the issue remains.
I think there’s too many expectations around what logging is for and getting everyone on the same page is difficult.
Meanwhile stats have fewer expectations, and moving signal out of the logs into stats is a much much smaller battle to win. It can’t tell you everything, but what it can tell you is easier to make unambiguous.
Over time I got people to stop pulling up Splunk as an automatic reflex and start pulling up Grafana instead for triage.
Yeah it sounds very familiar with what we went through while building this agent.
We're focused on CI logs for now because we wanted something that works really well for things like flaky tests, but planning to expand the context to infrastructure logs very soon.
Nvidia will get all that money back via GPU purchases, Amazon via cloud rental and SoftBank is being typical SoftBank - a rich but not particularly bright kid in a class :) .
"I give you $30 billion if you use it to buy $30 billion of stuff from me" doesn't sound like a very good investment. Is Nvidia expecting more back than it puts in? Enough more to make the deal profitable?
"I give you 30B$ worth of hardware that costs me <10B$ to make in exchange for 30B$ worth of shares in your company" would be a more accurate description.
Well, I won't pretend I know the answer :) . But I assume that a) they are partially betting on making a normal return on investment (i.e. OAI not crashing), b) they profit from running a huge expense/revenue cycle (a company making say a million of profit and having a billion revenue is favored better than the same but with only ten million revenue), and c) even if all goes wrong, it is still better to get back most of the investment even if not everything and zero profit, compared to a possibility of just losing it all like SoftBank or other investors.
In the end it's exchanging GPUs for OpenAI shares. It's not a non-trade, and in the current market Nvidia could really sell the stuff for cash. The marginal cost is very much sharply positive.
Exactly which values they are "going to burn at a stake for"? Making as many people homeless as they can in the shortest possible time? Befuddling governments and VCs into creating an insane industry-wide debt which would either lead to a "success" in replacing jobs or an industry-wide crisis? Or maybe a value of stealing intellectual property of every human on the planet under the guise of "fair use" and then deliberately selling the derivative product? Or the value of voluntarily working with "national security customers" when it suits them financially and crying foul when leopards bite their faces? Or the value of ironically calling a human replacement machine "anthropic" as in "for humanity"?
Yeah, I totally see Anthropic execs defending them to their last dollar in the wallet. Par for the course for megacorps. It's just I personally don't value those values at all.
reply