Apple's execution on AI is the worst of anything I can think of they have worked on in the past 20 years. It's embarrassing they announced this with a vague "coming this fall" when they basically have completely lost credibility in their ability to ship AI features considering it was initially announced YEARS ago.
I think a lot of it is the old "perfect is the enemy of good" with Apple trying multiple times now to announce this big basket of all these AI features supposedly coming all at once instead of just regularly shipping new useful AI integrations every month. There was so much easy useful shit that was immediately apparent as soon at OpenAI dropped that first big voice mode years ago coupled with basic app integrations. Particularly in the context of the AI labs that are operating in that lane almost too much where it seems a new model or mode comes out every two weeks.
I just checked amazon and I paid $350 in Nov 24' for 96GB (2x48GB) 6800MT DDR5 which at the time felt quite expensive and a bit of a splurge but I figured I had my DDR4 kit for almost a decade so probably similar lifespan for DDR5. That same listing is currently $1300!!!
When RAM prices are increasing like a crypto currency we have a real societal problem.
The difference is those have largely all been steadily increasing every year for decades. Tech and entertainment (streamers etc) have been one of the few bright spots you could point to as something that would usually improve yearly.
At this point there is hardly anything left and I think it leads to some pretty dark scenarios when we have a society where we have somehow decided: fuck it, almost everything gets worse for almost all of you every single year.
I have it more for the fast nas access and being able to treat nas disks as more or less the same performance as if they were directly sata in my machine. Significantly less so about the external network aspect.
If you want to buy the cheaper old ones and are concerned about heat just add a usb fan. I have the same mikrotik switch in the post and 2 sfp to rj45 + this fan https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00G059G86?th=1 sitting on top and it makes a dramatic difference in temp.
It's comically (and extremely variably) priced. A trip from DC to NYC and back would be ~$25 in electric costs with a typical electric car versus Amtrak could easily be $300+ though possibly as cheap as $50 if you are flexible to awful hours like depart at 4:30am or something.
Yeah Youtube search is mediocre, though I feel like search has broadly declined across the entire web on all sorts of apps and services I use. Not to mention all the actual "search engines" feeling less and less powerful every year. I don't get it.
What the hell is going on. Why does it seem like largely out of nowhere there is suddenly such a dramatic push on age verification and internet censorship popping up literally all over the world at the same time.
Where do you live? I'm in a HCOL area and just checked that same combo for a Friday night premiere and it's more like ~$70.
The markup on concessions has always been a thing but it really is just insane to think the unit economics on 2 sodas and a popcorn must be like 50 cents and selling it from $26 (in my area). Clearly they must make the most money this way but it is just crazy that anyone outside of significant disposable income even considers buying concessions. It's priced in such a way where anyone outside of the top 5% income brackets should just laugh at the price and view it as an extreme luxury good and not ever even consider buying anything.
This is a comically short lifespan. Didn't they launch less than like 6 months ago? To just torch it and shut it down is wild and right from the jump referencing downsizing the team... I got the impression this was a fairly small team from the beginning. Not to mention it was backed by stupendously wealthy cofounders making fortunes off the web 2.0 run of original digg and reddit, yet can't seem to stomach a bumpy 2 quarter initial launch?
There was a lot in the new digg that I was concerned or at least not optimistic about but come on - are we even going to try anymore?
One thing I haven't seen mentioned in this thread is M5 Pro now supporting 64GB ram . I believe prior gens you had to go Max to get 64. m5 Pro 64GB is $3000 meanwhile to upgrade ram on the max you need the 40 gpu core variant with 64GB is $4300. $1300 dollar mark up for twice the gpu compute and 50% higher mem bandwidth isn't great value imo.
I've been thinking recently about the scale at which it seems the vast vast majority of people participate in close to zero public discussion online and what a bummer it is.
Basically all discussion platforms are broken for any sort of long term meaningful discussion which I think is at least part of the problem. Even this thread and this comment just the fact that the thread is now 4 hours old the amount of views and chance of getting many responses drops precipitously. On most platforms unless you are someone with a large following you basically have to think like a marketer and post often and early on posts to stand a chance of getting a discussion going. It's always so ephemeral too. Even though posts on a platform like HN on reddit still exist and you can comment on old threads probably 99% of the activity happens in the first 6 or so hours and then it largely ends.
It makes me miss forums where at least you had long lived threads with simple time based post order and a good chance of replies. This doesn't seem to exist on only platforms now and forums have largely faded away.
The fragmentation of discussion has also messed things up. For example yesterday I was listening to a HardFork podcast episode which is a fairly popular pod, topping the charts in at least the tech category, and after listening I wanted to check for discussion around the episode and probably leave a comment or two. I assume this episode had to have gotten at least in the low tens of thousands of plays though perhaps that is way off. I went searching for discussion and basically found a largely dead subreddit for the podcast with no threads being regularly created for the episode and an empty comment section on nytimes which any site comment section is a useless place for discussion anyways. The pod is also posted on youtube which the youtube comment section had the most activity of anything I found but the youtube comment section and the way it is structured/operates is perhaps the most useless of all the platforms for trying to have any discussion. I just don't understand how if at least say ten thousand people listened to the episode surely at least 1% would be interested in discussing it and 100+ people going back and forth would be a large, active, healthy discussion somewhere.
Even threads that seem "active" on sites like HN or Reddit in the context of the actual audience sizes are shockingly small and confuse me. For example The Pitt season 2 just premiered and posted 5.4 million viewers, the subreddit post ep discussion currently has 5.3k comments which is quite high for a show. That is a joke of a percentage though, 0.1%! and even worse in the context of people that are posting probably post more than once in the thread. I understand many and even most people not wanting to post to discuss a show they just watched but how the hell is less than 1 in a thousand!
This post got long which also damages the chance of any engagement due to TLDR culture.
I like using various browser profiles to group projects or related kinds of browsing. I built a small extension called TabsIO that makes it easy to export/import tabs between different profiles or browsers and I also added statistics tracking on open windows/tabs count so you can see if you are making progress over time to cut down on open items.
Just writing off AI upscaling completely is bs. It's not some magic bullet to use on every video and there is a learning curve on how to apply but there are absolutely scenarios where you can get shockingly good results. I think a lot of people make judgements on it based on super small sample sizes.
On a separate note also not mentioned llm's are really good at generating ffmpeg commands. Just discuss with chatGPT your source file and goals for a video and you can typically oneshot a targeted command even if you aren't familiar with ffmpeg cli.
I don't understand why it feels like out of the blue there is suddenly a rampant and somehow worldwide effort left and right to increase censorship, age verification, etc on the internet. Also I don't get why it seems like so few people care in comparison to years ago during the whole SOPA/PIPA thing where there seemed to be widespread and significant vocal opposition.
On the age verification thing the only reasonable proposition i've heard would be a feature that allows parents to set some setting that gives a device users age or age range for mobiles and tablets. I think this covers a reasonable percentage of use cases if your goal is actually protecting kids and not just using that as deceptive cover to sneak in widespread surveillance laws. A simple setting that says for example this ipad user is 10-13yrs is privacy preserving enough and would not negatively impact adults and because it would be coming from the device itself would actually be harder to get around vs VPN's or spoofing IDs, etc.
The idea of trying to address all devices in all scenarios is absolutely preposterous in my opinion.
The trick here is buying used. Especially for something like the m1 series there is tremendous value to be had on high memory models where the memory hasn't changed significantly over generations compared the cpus and even m1's are quite competent for many workloads. Got a m1 max 64gb ram recently for I think $1400.
It certainly feels like this should fall somewhere along a spectrum of antitrust behavior. It's astounding the degree to which they are able to operate as if money isn't real. Strange circular deals and infinite VC money really fuck with markets and these past few years we've been venturing down a particularly concerning branch of capitalism.
I think a lot of it is the old "perfect is the enemy of good" with Apple trying multiple times now to announce this big basket of all these AI features supposedly coming all at once instead of just regularly shipping new useful AI integrations every month. There was so much easy useful shit that was immediately apparent as soon at OpenAI dropped that first big voice mode years ago coupled with basic app integrations. Particularly in the context of the AI labs that are operating in that lane almost too much where it seems a new model or mode comes out every two weeks.