I did read the article. It mentions HIV/AIDS. The comment I replied to said only HIV, and as they noted, HIV alone doesn’t necessarily imply any ill health effects at all. However some people with HIV who then develop AIDS may in fact be terminally ill.
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
Up until ~2015 one of the world's most deployed browser engines was Sciter. A work of _one_ person. A fast embedded browser engine, a binary about 4Mb in size.
It was used to render the UI in apps like our favorite McAfee antivirus.
This niche is still wide open. Electron apps are just terrible, and a focused fast embeddable browser engine would be very welcome.
He's been mostly wrong about the potential for AI, but mostly right about the financials. Don't listen to him for opinions, but don't discount his factual reporting because his opinions are off.
Not to turn this into a Web fight or anything, but come on... Even my t420S from 2011 could be upgraded with ssd and more ram and is still used :). My daily driver is t480, 8 years old, my wive's x1 carbon 7 years old, with no intention of retiring either anytime soon.
The notion of Apple, of all companies, "setting standard for long span devices", is laughable to me as I look at my ipads no longer running old software I paid for and getting slower with every forced update.
Apple makes sexy devices that match many people's requirements. Good on them! But this continued notion they invented everything is grating.
Multilevel capability based secure Operating Systems are due for a resurgence thanks to the LLMs that make it obvious that ambient authority based systems aren't suitable for the modern world, what with persistent internet and mobile code. Genode is supposed to be coming out with a prototype of a capabilities based gui (or at least some sketch of it) at the end of August this year.
It's important to understand what a data diode is, and how to properly use them, along with air-gapped networks. You can have computer security enforced by the laws of physics, if everything is done right.
There are many important advances to be made in the field of high throughput processing. We've relied on CUDA for far too long, things like TinyGrad offer a hint of what's possible. There are also FPGA and similar architectures that can do pipelined processing far outside what's possible in a Von Neumann architecture.
If my harness wrote the code, I have it write the commit. I will hand author something at a higher level that expresses my intent for how I promoted the harness.
This all has the -aire of theatre. OH NOES THE POWERFUL AI GOT OUT
Then everyone coming out with humbled determination about working together to responsibly use and contain this powerful technology for the greater good (and profit margin).
I will not believe marketing gimmickry is not a large part of what's going on with every one of these "incidents".
There are three companies I am confident will survive an AI bubble popping: Google, Microsoft and Apple.
A lot has been made of Google's recent earnings being cash flow negative (I think for the first time ever?). Building data centers is something Google is very good at. They've also partially or wholly insulated themselves from a collpase by using Special Purpose Vehicles ("SPVs") where the collateral for loans is simply the GPUs. Even the physical building and the land its own is leased from another subsidiary. Google is still a cash cow. I also think they may break the NVidia mohnopoly with their own TPU hardware given enough time.
Microsoft too is a cash cow and seemingly hasn't bet the farm on Copilot.
And Apple is a real dark horse here. They, like Microsoft, don't seem to have bet the farm on AI but also, they're in a unique position to drive a move to local LLMs with their own silicon. Their ARM CPUs use a shared memory architecture. Nvidia strictly segments the market by limitng VRAM on consumer GPUs. Apple can get around that. They just don't have the raw FLOPS to compete yet. There have been rumors they're targeting the M7 series in 2028 for a big jump in AI performance.
This market is going to boil down to performance-per-Watt (IMHO) and that's going to be interesting to watch as NVidia moves up to an annual product cycle. what will the new generation do to existing deployements when hardware 1-3 years is at a severe PPW disadvantage? we'll see.
Personally I just want to be able to buy 64GB of RAM for $200 and an SSD for under $100 again. You know, like 2025.
It is my opinion that a large chunk of the legwork in anti-cheating is solved by protecting your game with adequate server-side checks and heuristics/data. Valve does a pretty poor job of this but there are plenty of games with a thriving competitive environment that does not require the use of kernel anti-cheat.
My default assumption (with no knowledge about this particular case) is that all gear in YouTube videos is sponsored. Too easy to get jealous of all the fancy setups. But I don't want to become a YouTuber so that settles that.
The losses are being spread equitably to anyone who has wanted to buy computing equipment over the last few years. Similarly anyone who wants to buy electricity in a region impacted by data center build outs.
If you're wondering why these "churls" are increasingly popular, it's the reality that far from being mobbed by skeptics, the entire market economy is being taken for a ride in the name of AI. It's very much like the febrile environment that developed about Crytpo, in which anyone who expressed concern that maybe this tech wasn't going to revolutionize money, programming, and society itself was a "churlish skeptic".
I certainly wouldn't credit Ed Zitron with timing his predictions very well, but that doesn't make them wrong, and it certainly doesn't support the AI maximalism we're all forced to endure.
I'm not sure what sanctions you are thinking about but generally if you want to be beyond the legal reach of a nation state or group of nation states, you just set up a server in a different nation state that doesn't enforce the laws you want to avoid.
In September they're bringing the latest major iOS version to the iPhone 11 which released 7 years ago. And from what I've seen on the iPhone 11 subreddit, it improves performance.
What other device manufacturer does that? The Google Pixel 4 released the same year dropped major OS updates after 3 years. Same for the Galaxy S10.
