I think that providing modern monitors that make sense is probably the easiest way to please employees. No matter how excellent the salary is, if they are stuck working on old, small, blurry, faded screens, they'll be unhappy. It also gives a bad impression of the company as a whole. I did L1 tech support a long time ago, and people were overwhelmingly happy to see me coming to replace their old CRTs with LCDs.
I'm thinking super long context length or something to that effect.
I can imagine schemes for instance where context is compressed into chunks and then chunks that are ranked highly relevant for the token are decompressed. Which would sort of be between a long context and a memory retrieval scheme...
Maybe they are doing it on purpose to demonstrate what it looks like when untrustworthy parties have access to frontier llm and that its development should be regulated to protect all of us. /tinfoil
It ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers.
I think IBM will lose many customers.
It ought to be extremely easy now to use LLMs to transpile cobol and do the necessary reverse engineering to migrate off mainframes and aix servers. I think IBM will lose many customers.
The problem is that those COBOL systems have to be absolutely provably correct, for both financial and regulatory reasons. LLMs can't do that. They're designed to be variable.
You can't vibe code a bank transaction system. "Close enough" isn't good enough in some fields. A minor glitch in a video game may result in screen artifacts. A minor glitch in a banking system can crash the economy.
Interesting. I will try some of of those instructions but I don't mind much about the tics.
My actual complaint: end-of-turn summaries that are undecipherable unless you watched the session closely.
Both Opus and Fable regularly ends hours of work with status updates phrased in crystal clear terms like:
"**V2** debug-helper gate (R4d) | Medium-risk | Gate on `?debug=1` URL param at 3 fixture sites — **not** a localStorage flag (`browser_page` clears it every test). 284 debug-API calls ride the fixture, so R4d goes last+alone"
I think it is because the plans are crazy expensive. when you pay 200-300$/month for an online subscription, its normal to want to extract as much value as possible.
This project is impressive but I wonder if those efforts would not have been better spent on an open platform that actually respects its users and that is less likely to kill the whole project on a whim. It seems like building a house on someone's else property.
I use MacBook anyway, this project brings open platform to my MacBook, I'm happy with that. I guess many people have the same situation like me. I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
>I don't use other laptop because their hardwares aren't comparable to MacBook.
Yes, because being non repairable, being non upgradable, having early thermal throttling due to subar cooling, and having a mediocre keyboard is SO much better than anything else that is out there.
I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts. Whats next, you are going to tell me that your Macbook is great for local LLM usage because 10 tok/sec while your laptop gets too hot to use on your lap and makes your fingers hot is all that anyone needs?
Sure, but I eat all these downsides and more, just for the battery life.
I was a (mostly) happy Asahi Fedora user for a while, but eventually went back to macos (for the battery life). I'm not sure how much better it is, but I actually trust that it will sleep and wake properly when I use its lid.
The prices and ram have been fucked though, long before the latest ram crisis. I have a macbook m1 air, which I bought second hand. I'm looking at maybe upgrading to a second hand m3 or m4 air (with more ram), but honestly the prices are just wrong. Whatever I buy will be too expensive and unable to run decent llm models.
In the very extreme case of not having access to charging for extended periods, I would understand the battery life argument, even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm that basically means your cpu sits fully idle when not in use (unlike Macs which constantly phone home to Apple)
But with fast charging and basically an outlet most everywhere you would actually use your laptop, that ship has sailed.
> even though there are laptops you can buy with comparable battery life than are non mac, especially if you run a lightweight linux distro with i3wm
I am totally a Linux person, but I have to say: I run Alpine with Sway, and my battery life is nothing compared to a Macbook. It's just another world, it doesn't remotely compare.
I am very much a Linux person, I have been running Linux on my personal computers (and mostly on my work machine) for 20 years. But in the last few years I changed company and had to work on an M-series Macbook, and the battery life is absolutely amazing.
For people who mostly use their browser and a few programs, I understand why they would want to use a Macbook. I mean, I can go for a full weekend without charging it, and I do programming stuff where I compile regularly.
Late intel macs are in fact crimes against thermal design, but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones (except the 14-inch M4 max, that one does throttle.). The keyboard is also no longer e-waste tier. The rest is true, but you may wish to update your talking points.
The Macs all throttle with heavy workload that raises the temps no matter what you do. The efficiency (and battery life) comes from the hardware being configured to do certain things very efficiently, like video decoding.
Compute is compute, Apple didn't circumvent physics. It just managed to take chunks of that compute that represents the most average use case, and make it more efficient, in the same way that ASIC mine bitcoins more efficiently than GPUS
As for keyboard, it still sucks. Impossible to clean without taking the thing apart, so if you get any dirt under the keys, its gonna be there for quite some time.
> but this is no longer a problem on most M-based ones
It definitely is. Apple's mistake with the Intel Macs was refusing to throttle the chips before they hit their T junction temp (~95c). This is why a lot of Wintel machines will max out around 70-80c in sustained load while Macs will fly past those temps.
The same behavior is present in both Intel Macs and Apple Silicon chips - you can very nearly boil water on your Macbook if you push the GPU with sustained load like LLM prefill.
I don't get why you're so against Macs. I would invite you to show me a comparable laptop like a Macbook pro, with similar battery life, similar build quality, similar usability and functionality where you don't have to be a sysadmin every 2 days because [insert Linux driver] isn't compatible with [insert hardware].
Like honestly look into it and compare 1 to 1. Your talking points are outdated.
> I swear, the blatant lies that come out of supposed Mac fans on HN is almost like Apple is astroturfing this forum with shill accounts.
How ironic. There is no “blatant lie” in “their hardwares aren’t comparable to MacBook” if you don’t know what aspects they are comparing, but there are in your comment.
I will clarify, at the same price, the MacBook is good at: display, instant performance and battery life, trackpad, webcam, sound and microphones, build quality.
My workload: web development, video call, running VM.
I basically could not find any laptop comaprable in those aspect AT THE SAME PRICE.
Are you aware that “it’s not comparable to” / “it doesn’t compare to” doesn’t literally mean that it’s strictly impossible to attempt a comparison? It means that the comparison is not favourable.
When i tried to upgrade from 5x to 20x a few months ago, they froze my account until i sent them a full 3d scan of my face and a photo of my id. The only way i could deny was to cancel my account. So this is nothing new for them.
