The $100k fee is such a bad idea. I would be fine for there being a minimum salary to get rid of the undercutting of available American labor. But there are certain niche jobs that there just isn't any local talent for that will just result in contracting with them overseas which is a lose-lose.
I think you could argue that this is following the same trend as forums (and usenet before that). You get a consolidation of where people go to read up on things that interest them.
Look at Slashdot for example, it was once so popular that any site it linked to could be "slashdotted" from all the traffic. Now people go elsewhere. YouTube, TikTok, Reddit.
What happened to Slashdot wasn't a "consolidation", though, it was a suicide. I was a heavy reader of the site up until they had an infamous redesign that made the site literally unusable for me, so I left.
That's very different from the scenario discussed in the article.
I don't think that was it. Slashdot would only run stories from their 'content partners' like ZDNet and the Register, so they were always 2 days behind Reddit/HN/Twitter/etc.
(When RMS was 'cancelled', that would have been a huge deal there in the old days, they had one post days later.)
Also Digg wasn't just a graphical redesign, they changed how the site worked. I don't think Slashdot ever did that.
RMS wasn't "cancelled" (a reminder that "canceling" and "canceled" is a snarl word.)
His decades of incredibly shitty behavior came to be more public knowledge as both men and women in CS realized the behavior they'd witnessed wasn't some outlier once a few women who were well-known came forward and disclosed his behavior.
What brought it all to bear was him repeatedly, on a technical mailing lists, defending sex with underage girls, which in turn led people to actually go looking through material on his own site where he pontificated that sex with anyone over 14 should be legal, or even younger. These are his exact own words:
"I think that everyone age 14 or above ought to take part in sex, though not indiscriminately. (Some people are ready earlier.)"
"I am skeptical of the claim that voluntarily [sic] pedophilia harms children. The arguments that it causes harm seem to be based on cases which aren't voluntary, which are then stretched by parents who are horrified by the idea that their little baby is maturing."
Add onto that decades of stories of creepy, manipulating, harassing behavior toward girls/women as well as incredibly sexist comments about women's technical abilities...among a lot of other really anti-social behavior, like an apparent refusal to bathe...while expecting anyone who hosts him to read a 40 page long missive about exactly how treat him.
One of the smartest things reddit ever did was ensure old.reddit.com remains fully functional. I imagine one day they'll EOL it, and when they do I'll no longer be a reddit user (probably not really a bad thing).
Even if Old Reddit still exists, the vast majority of users are on New Reddit or the app on their phones. Those are designed to keep people endlessly scrolling, not sticking around in any one place and building community. Also, the phone as default device has reduced comments to 140-character quips, and one looks like a real weirdo now if one writes a solid paragraph or two like in the old days.
Well, it's kinda surprising that Digg actually followed the Slashdot playbook (Slashdot fucked up first) - Digg should have at least learned something from Slashdot's mistake.
Both stories are pretty fascinating examples of how corporate dynamics can ruin a product. In Slashdot's case it was a clear example of "well, we hired a bunch of designers, so obviously we need to do a UI redesign!", but the designers had no idea how users actually used the site. They added a ton of whitespace and IIRC collapsible content to make the site more "modern", but in doing so it made it impossible to quickly scan the comments for high value/insightful responses. In Digg's case it had all the hallmarks of VC meddling ("we've got to monetize!") While people often comment about how buggy Digg V4 was when it released, the bigger issue was the content was just laughably bad - it was changed to like page after page of the dumbest corporate spam. Anyone using the site for 5 minutes would have known it was fucked, so I'm guessing there was just so much internal pressure to "get shit out the door" that they just wanted to release something rather than admit what they built was a turd.
I had the same blog post get on HN and on Slashdot. HN link didn't get to the front page, got about 25 human visits. The link on Slashdot got the blog post 2500 visits, plus the Slashdot IP addresses visited tons of other posts and content on my web site. Maybe places don't get "slashdotted" any more, but a link on Slashdot seemingly gets you a ton more visits than a link on HN.
Also, Slashdot visitors use more MacOS and Linux than Windows. The reverse is true of the small number of HN visitors.
OpenAI and Anthropic valuations are based on the premise that they may develop AGI in the near future. How do you value a company based on that premise? Throwing regulations into the mix doesn't make the problem much harder than it already is.
So this is probably not good news for the MacBook Ultra with 512GB of RAM rumors being..affordable.
What's worse is that this is probably going to get worse. My angel investment group is getting inundated with pitches that amount to building an RX-6000 with 96GB of RAM and installing a local model to do "thing X".
So even if the OpenAI's of the world stop trying to use up all the RAM, you're going to have thousands of start-ups pushing local models.
Makes me really wonder about that new Surface Ultra pricing with the nvidia chip in it.
If Apple can't pull it off with their supply chain weight they can throw around, what is that thing going to be priced at? Microsoft/Nvidia are either going to be subsidizing it or it's gotta be close to $8,000+ at launch.
Compute? Inference doesn't only need memory bandwidth. You need to actually do work with the memory you're loading which needs compute power. Which needs more electricity, which needs more cooling, which isn't practical for something as thin as a MBP.
MacBook Pro has plenty of compute for local LLMs to be usable. I'm getting up to ~150 tokens/s with Deepseek-v4-Flash on a MacBook M5 Max. It's quite capable for coding assistant usage.
In general LLMs are bottlenecked by memory bandwidth rather than raw compute power.
Yes, it's quantized (4 bit). Sure, it's... not quite as good as what's on offer via API. And sure, "up to" does a lot of work (I don't have an average/median for you but it feels fast to me).
But it's usable, fully local, fully private, and has no subscriptions and no operating costs other than electricity.
I mean it’d take minutes of research to realize people are successfully and efficiently running 4-bit quantized GLM 5.2 on MacStudio 512GB M3 Ultras at over 60 tok/s. K2 2.7 is quite literally designed for 4 bit quantization and runs even better.
The integrated GPU. Not enough compute onboard to handle prefill for 100gb+ models, and the decode is constrained by memory bandwidth that's lower than most dGPUs that price.
Apple would be in a much stronger spot right now if they didn't pretend like eGPUs were inconceivable black magic that Macs are incompatible with.
I'm not sure I follow - 614 GB/sec is pretty squarely in dGPU territory (~5070 level). External GPUs can definitely exceed that on the very high end, but it seems pretty competitive, no?
Competitive for 16-24GB dGPUs, but for 100gb+ inference workloads it's going to be a decode bottleneck. For smaller models it'd be fine, but the same goes for the smaller GPUs.
In particular though, the fatal bottleneck is the weakness of the iGPU. Filling a KV cache on a 100gb+ model could take a few minutes, or even hours if you're trying to restore a 256k-to-1m token session.
No officially-released version of DOS contains generic CD-ROM drivers; the last few DOSes (MS-DOS 6.x, DR-DOS 6/7) contain the redirector (`MSCDEX.EXE` or equivalent) but not the device driver.
From 1992, Windows 3.1 rapidly took over.
The first mass-market CD-ROM drives were the mid-1990s, and ATAPI CDs that could attach to an EIDE interface only became common in the latter half of the 1990s, when Windows 95 was the default PC OS.
Microsoft never shipped any version of Windows 3.x on CD; I used to have a Gateway 2000 WfWg3.11 CD in my travelling toolkit, just in case. Windows 95 originally shipped on 13 1.4MB floppies.
Eh. I don't think "developers broke it". The 8086 gave us something like a flat 20-bit address space and then encoded it as a segment. Once that exists, normalizing far pointers is inevitable.
Not to do a "The Amiga was ahead of its time" thing but as a reminder, 68000 has a flat 24-bit address.
I mean, anyone here could have a decision maker just return a random number. Fast and easy.
The question really is how GOOD is it?