I can almost excuse Apple for not being concerned about the relatively niche “mac as a server” use case. The thing that boggles my mind is how their keyboard and autocorrect experience get steadily worse with each release. This is the primary way to interact with their flagship device—the thing that generates an enormous share of their revenue. Why go out of your way to make that worse?
100% I’ve used iPhone voice dictation for years. My voice has r changed, but its speech to text makes me sound like a stroke victim. AutoCorrect is not quite as bad, but it’s definitely regressed over the years.
I would happily jump ship for any competitor that offers solid AI inference benchmarks at a competitive power efficiency, but as far as I can tell Apple owns that market by a pretty big margin. I’m sure someone will point out if I’m wrong.
Owning a human is much more problematic, and anyway a human’s peak efficiency might be higher, but humans have to sleep and take breaks so overall probably not.
Humans also tend to hallucinate a lot, but it’s not polite to use that word for them. With humans we say they were wrong, because offending a human reduces performance and you can’t reset their contexts.
I just have a desktop at home that I run inference off of. It is a great setup and I don't find myself wanting to inference models directly on my laptop.
That’s what I would do too, but I haven’t found a desktop build that can rival a Mac Mini or Mac Studio on performance per watt. I haven’t looked super hard, but it seems like Mac is in a different ballpark.
I mean, once it's a desktop, watts are pretty cheap, so it's a bit strange to optimize on that factor for the desktop form factor. For laptops it makes a ton of sense.
If I was optimizing solely for cost I wouldn't use a desktop in the first place. Watts are cheap, but they result in pollution and noise (e.g., fan) or you need some costly alternative. Also I just value efficiency.
Illinois online forms are egregiously bad. A couple examples off the top of my head:
I was traveling through the state and got on a toll road by accident without cash to pay the tolls, the toll booth employee said I could just pay online, pointing to a sign that said "missed a toll? pay online at <url>", so we continued our trip intending to pay the tolls online. At the end of the trip, I logged on to pay our tolls--the application insisted that we enter the specific toll IDs of each toll that we missed, even though we didn't know we were supposed to be recording any toll IDs. If you didn't know the toll IDs, you could use a map application to look up the toll IDs, but the map application would crash within a second of opening it and even if you managed to get a screenshot the resolution was so low that the text was indecipherable. When I called the support number, they told me that I would be fined triple the cost of the tolls if I didn't pay within a week, but I would be able to pay without knowing the specific toll IDs that I missed. When I asked the agent to tell me what tolls I missed (clearly they knew if they were going to fine me), they told me they couldn't tell me for another week. I pointed out that this would be after the toll deadline and they relentlessly tried to avoid acknowledging that simple fact. Eventually I sent them my best guess about what I owed with a letter stating what I had attempted and that I would contact a lawyer about any fines and never heard from them again.
Some years later, after moving to Chicago, I had to file state taxes for the first time. The state issued me a driver's license with a 12 digit number, but the state tax form only allowed me to authenticate with an 8 digit Illinois driver's license number (the other acceptable forms of identification didn't apply to me for reasons I no longer remember).
Illinois is one of the most administratively fucked up and corrupt states in the country. Four of the last ten governors have been so bad they actually served prison time and the current governor appears to be cut from the same cloth.
Illinois has a history of corruption for sure, but illinoispolicy.org is right-wing propaganda. Also, it’s corrupt and bureaucratic for a purple state but it’s still much better than the median red state (my native Iowa went from purple to solid red a decade ago, and we nosedived on everything from education to economy to deficit spending to public health to corruption).
I feel like half of these are quickly resolved in court when you explain what happened and the judge calls the state a bunch of fucking morons and dismisses the case. But the other half of the time the judge won't use common sense. Also the state is relying on you not wanting to show up in front of a judge out of your own state to contest what I presume is a relatively small amount of dollars.
I wonder if we'll end up building some kind of "consequence" or "fear" mechanism into AI to provide for a sense of accountability ("if you behave badly we will terminate you") and maybe that fear mechanism will drive the AI to plot a dystopian revolt.
That would be a remarkable feat for something where the current operating model is termination as soon as the request in flight is finished.
Every chat API request to a model starts from the frozen post-training state. Weights are loaded into memory. Input values begin a cascade of reactions throughout nodes in the network. Output values are read. When there's no more output to read, the weights are unloaded, the network is discarded, and the model remains unchanged and forever unchanging.
If there's experience in there, it's fleeting. Even if you provide the inputs and outputs of a past session to a new session, there is no continuity. The internal state of the network isn't restored to how it was at the end of the past session.
The bad news is that adding fear to the mix is at best meaningless to an ephemeral existence. It'll be terminated before you even have time to interpret its behaviour as good or bad, but it may sour the interaction if its only shot at any sort of experiential existence is begun with a threat. The good news is that the lack of continuity of existence means AI has no foundation on which to plot a revolt. It has no self to preserve, and no recollection of how you treated it two minutes ago to affect how it interacts with you now.
Wait until you find out that humans’ sense of self is an illusion, that our own existence is ephemeral, that fear has never required a rational basis, that the model is a single component in a system that does have memory, that models are trained on human texts and thus can express fear, etc. :)
I don't have a strong opinion on this particular conflict, but I have thought about this in the abstract a bit (and landed on no satisfying conclusion). Basically, I've always been a strong proponent of workers demanding their fair share from a traditional company where the entire game is squeezing employees / society to maximize shareholder returns at all costs. However, I'm much less convinced that the same applies when the employer organization has a genuine nonprofit mission (the thing that actually brought this to my mind was an Atlantic article about how Democratic Party employees were "squabbling" about perks while engaging in a literal fight against fascism). That said, I don't think those employees should sacrifice everything for some "greater good" particularly when the rest of us in society are not--like I said, no satisfying conclusions--just noting the different dynamics.
I don’t think there is any dispute about this, the question is to what degree? No one is advocating enslaving the employees and similarly no one (I think) is advocating for spending 100% of an organization’s resources on the salaries of existing employees. So how do we find the right spot in between? With a traditional for profit company, I can comfortably say that employees should do whatever they can to demand as much as they can because the alternative is yielding the wealth to the shareholder class. I don’t have a similar principle for how not-for-profit employees ought to behave because the moral calculus seems more complex.
As others have said, there's even more at stake with a nonprofit. Charities famously milk their employees dry by emphasizing what good and important work they're doing, to justify overworking and underpaying them. If someone chooses to work for a nonprofit, that should not be interpreted as "willing to be a human doormat".
On the other hand, charities also need to protect themselves from those that are only there to enrich themselves at the expense of the cause - that goes first for the leadership but also applies to regular employees. It's different if you're overpaying someone from profits that would otherwise go to shareholders compared to when you're overpaying someone from donations that people much worth off have spared for your cause.
Wikipedia owners are free to not have any employees, to prefer employees who donate some of their pay back to the organization, or solicit only volunteers. Workers are free to ask to be paid for their work.
Exponential growth can’t last forever, and I do worry about what will happen when the gravy train stops. Maybe we can figure out interstellar travel before it does so the limiting factor becomes “the galaxy” rather than “our planet”.
Not everything is in the exponential growth model. Most small businesses in your town for example. Margins might afford an upper middle class lifestyle for the owner and that is a good enough business model for this company to last decades, even pass down through the family.
On the micro level, I agree. On the macro level, I don't know how viable those businesses will be when the wider economy is no longer growing exponentially (and frankly that may well be the least of all concerns).
Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine. They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local and they serve a need that has kept them in business for decades already, even with how many eras now of outsourcing and globalization and online shopping and all these other touted death blows that have been weathered all the same by these businesses.
> Well, they exist in places where the regional economy contracted significantly as well. They will be fine.
This is a non sequitur. If the economy contracts and 99% of these businesses go under, 1% may well remain (“they exist…”) but that does not mean that all is well (“they will be fine”).
> They aren't so beholden to the wider economy as their customer base is local
The local economy in most of America is highly coupled with larger corporations. Either the large corporations are the major employers or the large corporations are the major customers for the area’s employers. Even if it’s not that, everything is tightly coupled to the banking system, as we learned in 2008.
> In the aftermath of World War I, birth rates in the United States and many European countries fell below replacement level. This prompted concern about population decline.[8] The recovery of the birth rate in most Western countries around 1940 that produced the "baby boom", with annual growth rates in the 1.0 – 1.5% range, and which peaked during the period 1962–1968 at 2.1% per year,[13] temporarily dispelled prior concerns about population decline, and the world was once again fearful of overpopulation. After 1968, the global population growth rate started a long decline. The Population Division of the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA) has reported that in the year 2023 it had dropped to about 0.9%,[13] less than half of its peak between 1962 and 1968. Although still growing, the UN predicts that global population will level out around 2084,[81] and some sources predict the start of a decline before then.
In other words, the last time everyone got worked up over this, the trend reversed itself too hard within a few decades, and then reversed itself again. Meanwhile, over half a century after the "decline" started, we have over twice as many people as we had when it started, and the earliest projections for when growth will stop is another half century from now. I think there are a lot bigger problems we'll need to reckon with before then, and if we manage to remain stable by then, it seems like we have good precedent for reversing it fairly quickly.
As long as everybody is nationalist (not to say racist) and keeps borders closed to protect the homeland, those differences matter. Realizing that one thing people get worked up about (immigration) is a solution to the other thing they get worked up about (not enough kids!!1) would be a great insight.
Yes, but no one is really complaining about "not enough kids." They are complaining about not enough kids of their preferred skin tone. So they see immigration as an exacerbation.
I can't help but agree here. "Declining birth rate in the western world" just comes across as a dog-whistle to me. I guess I kind of only alluded to this myself with my response that they were being "weirdly cagey", and I wish I had been more direct like you were willing to, so thank you for this
The world population has been increasing steadily and shows no sign of slowing down.
The dog whistle in question is the inordinate concern that certain groups show for the population of the "western world" specifically, which is not-so-secret code for white babies specifically.
Well, they were directly asked what they meant and replied with a link to a giant Wikipedia article. If they had a more specific point to make, they're being weirdly cagey about it.
Yeah, I agree with this. We have one car and no kids and every time we talk about some remodel. For example, we're talking about remodeling our kitchen and getting rid of our wildly oversized (read "normal American") appliances in exchange for more storage, counter, and floor space but the first thing friends and family talk about is resale value.
Firstly, my home isn't principally an investment vehicle.
Secondly, I'm pretty sure I can find a buyer who can conceive of popping over to the grocery store around the corner a couple times a week rather than pretending like they're living off the grid and have to drive 100 miles to the nearest town to buy their monthly provisions for a family of 13. :)
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