I know Perplexity isn't often talked about anymore but their design of every sentence needing to be able to be referenced back to an actual source (like an academic peer reviewed paper) seems like a super power for trust.
Yeah, until you follow the link only to find out that the link does not say what Perplexity told you it does. This happened to me a frightful number of times.
My initial experience with Perplexity was it citing AI blog spam as a primary source so consistently I immediately dropped my subscription. (this was over a year ago, I haven't re-evaluated them since)
I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.
Of course for anything of consequence I’d go and actually read the sources (but for plenty of every day stuff it’s fine). On the free plan btw
> I’ve added to my system prompt in perplexity “ignore unreliable sources” and “make sure claims are supported by multiple sources” and that seems to help.
LLMs are really weird sometimes. I had some issues using a coding harness where the agent was failing to use the correct tool call syntax (I was using some rando free model on OpenRouter). I sent a message “look closelier at the tool call format” then all the tool calls for the rest of the session succeeded.
Whether Perplexity is useful to someone, and how useful, will depend on how effective it is in giving answers that are (1) correct as often as possible and (2) checkable if they're sometimes wrong.
If Perplexity's answers often treat AI-generated blogspam as reliable then that will probably make them less often correct (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they generate to be consistently correct) and harder to check (because people generating AI blogspam generally don't need what they have to be clearly sourced, and because even if they did it's an extra step of link-following).
So if Perplexity turns up a lot of AI-generated blogspam, that probably makes it less useful. Is it "up to Perplexity"? Again, I don't know what that means, but I don't see that it matters. What matters is how much value it provides, at what cost in time and money and effort and attention. If its output is mostly repeating claims from AI-generated blogspam and that makes the answer "not much, and at too much", then so much the worse for Perplexity even if there's some sense in which it's under no obligation to do better. If its output is reliable and checkable, then so much the better for Perplexity even if some of its deficiencies are in some sense moral failures.
Coming from the company that simultaneously offered six(!) different models of iPad at once, this is not unsurprising at all. From 2022 to 2024, Apple offered: Two models of iPad, an iPad mini, an iPad Air, and two models of iPad Pro (11 and 13 inch).
For Apple, product & hardware come first, marketing and positioning is secondary.
Macbook Pros have had at least two segments in them for a very long time: the base level smallest pro and the 'real' MBP.
The base level has fewer ports / less beefy cpu / less features; right now the 14" M6, but previously dual core, two thunderbolt 13" intel MBPs without touchbar. These are popular with corporate fleets.
The 'real' MBPs have all the ports / beefy cpu / best features / optional bigger screens.
Apple likes its market segmentation but it's not precious about it in the face of big technology shifts. If there's hardware they love and want, they'll try to ship it and sort out the segmentation after.
It seems to me like a transition year. Apple occasionally has these where the lineup doesn't make sense until they phase out the old and bring in the new. iPads in 2016, iMacs in 2021, iPads in 2022, Macbooks in 2011, etc.
It's really hard to maintain a perfectly positioned product lineup while managing underlying shifts in technologies. It's usually the availability and price of new components that cause this, along with needing to iron out issues before bringing a technology fully mainstream. Here the touchscreen is new, the hinge is new, and the screen tech is new to the platform. You can't always just drop something that on the mass market.
But those quadrants still had options for upgrades. I think people vastly misunderstand that chart. It was about reducing product lines down because the Apple of the 90s had too many models that all varied very subtly.
Or are you forgetting that you could choose display types on the old PowerBooks and MacBooks , or choose drive options for a premium etc?
There’s nobody confusing the Pro for the Air or the Neo.
Nobody is confusing the iPad base, air and pro. They’re all strongly segmented.
Yeah quadrants are just a first level sorting mechanism to get people in the door and focused on something. The real genius of Apple's segmentation is that there's always a next step up just $100-300 away. So you might start in the consumer side, but then walk your way up to pro because your consumer laptop is now optioned out enough to be within spitting distance, so may as well make the jump.
It also thermally throttled like hell, was much thinner, and had much reduced IO. What's impressive is keeping the same form factor and IO selection, and still getting that weight reduction.
Assuming you are talking about the 4-port version of the 2019 Intel Pro model, the 2019 had more I/O than the next gen 14-inch, specifically because the 4th port on the 14-inch got turned into a dumb HDMI port that can only do HDMI out, not HDMI/DP/USB/Thunderbolt like an actual Thunderbolt port can. It is absolutely a reduction in total I/O capabilities, changes in abilities from Thunderbolt 3 to 4 notwithstanding.
I would rather have 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports than 3 Thunderbolt 4 ports, an SD card slot I won't use, and 1 HDMI port that can only be used for HDMI instead of whatever the hell I need it to be another Thunderbolt port can be.
I would rather have a Framework 13 Pro where I could choose 4 ports of my choosing and swap them out at will. (That’s my current machine, sold my M2 MacBook Pro for it).
I would rather have a ThinkPad X9 15p Aura Edition, which has 3x thunderbolt, SD Card, HDMI, and USB-A, all at the same time with no dongle.
I love the Framework laptops in every other respect, but I just don't get the "swappable port" concept. Those are still dongles; they're just special dongles that can only be used on one brand of machine and which require allocating internal space away from battery, on a machine whose power-hungry OSes can't spare a single watt-hour.
I don't know what's so hard to understand about it. They're dongles that don't stick out when you use them. That eliminates a lot of the annoyance with dongles.
They also let you customize what ports you want in your laptop. You don't have to customize them. You don't have to pull them out. It's still an advantage.
You can also replace your ports easily if they get physical damage.
They can also be used on any brand of machine or even a smartphone. They're just Thunderbolt/USB-C.
They don't take space away from the battery, the battery on the Framework 13 Pro is almost the exact same size as the one in the MacBook Pro 14, and as of the M5 model the Framework 13 Pro gets better battery life than that Mac.
Perhaps but I never once used all four thunderbolt ports at once on that gen of macbook.
I hazard a guess most users are the same and would prefer having a HDMI / SD card for those moments where you just forgot a dongle while travelling (or, as always happens to me - dongle breaking at the worst moment) and I think the modern MacBook IO is significantly better for it
Exactly. I'm not happy about being in Dongleville. It sucks shit here. I have boxes of dongles. They get tangled on my desk with is stupid messy with dongles. Stupid things. But I am here. And everyone else seems really happy about Dongleville and I can't change the fact that I need dongles, so we might as well just embrace it.
Because the Dongle-heads do have one thing right, one port that can be turned into lots of other kinds of ports with a dongle is more versatile than a port that can only be a video out, especially when the device doesn't have a ton of room for lots of ports.
How is an HDMI port more practical than a port that can be an HDMI port or a DisplayPort or a USB port or an SD card reader or an SDExpress reader or a dock or a port expander or whatever else?
Except you probably have dongles in your bag anyways. USB-C breakouts. C to A adapters. I am already in Dongleville. A slight repreive in the rare case I need an SD card is a glass of water in hell, plus, I already have multiple USB-C to SD card readers anyways.
Fujitsu U939 13" is lighter than 1kg, has a charger port, 2 USB-C, 2 USB-3, RJ45 (folded), HDMI, Smartcart, SD card, SIM Card, Pen, Mouspad with real buttons, keyboard with normal cursor buttons and separate PgUp and PgDown buttons.
My t480s is also very light as is the framework 13. I was actually surprised how heavy the m1 pro was when i got it, much heavier than the intel 13 before it, but more like the macbook from 2012.
Unrelated, but does anyone else find the adjacent (4b) definition of 'synthetic' to be unusually unusual, in a way few definitions in a dictionary are?
Without anything redacted, definition 4b is "devised, arranged, or fabricated for special situations to imitate or replace usual realities"?
If I was selling dollars for 50c and Nvidia, alphabet and Amazon giving me dollars for a piece of my company, my revenue growth would be the same. That’s what Anthropic is doing.
lol yeah if you completely discount the actual amount they paid for that compute which is hidden in the 70Bn of debt which is waved away as a non operating loss, sure.
Hackernews commenters generally dont care about the Anthropic's financials because they have unassailable grievances.
At $2T Anthropic would need to look roughly like Alphabet today by 2030 for investors to earn a normal market return (20-25X earnings). That or similar baselines should be the basis of discussion, not if AI is overhyped, if it will grow faster than Amazon did, oligarchy(?), etc.
YouTube did ~$60B in revenue last year.
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