> Do we own the rights to our own likeness? And if we do, what about doppelgangers - people who look eerily similar to celebrities, or other "unknown" people?
Is this somehow a novel question? We've had the same issue since at least the invention of cameras.
No, but you can break up concentrated markets so that being refused by some payment processor is irrelevant because there are a thousand others willing to do it and they're all completely fungible.
What many have yet to notice is that Microsoft now makes more money from Cloud than they do from Windows, so the purpose of Windows is now as the funnel for Microsoft's cloud services. It's like using an operating system made by GoDaddy.
The $699 MacBook Air has 8GB of RAM. That's hardly enough now, much less if you plan to keep it for a few years. Which hardly matters when you can get 64GB of DDR5 to put in it for less than $100. Except that it isn't upgradable.
I've been using 8 GB of RAM MacBook since 2015, and by then this “8 GB isn't enough” chorus was strong. Nowadays I use a M1 Air, 8 GB of RAM, zero complains, really.
For most people that just browse the web, write some stuff and do their email, 8 GB is still enough.
many people in this thread are saying average users are just using their web browser, so they are “served fine with linux”. But apparently 8GB is unacceptable to run a web browser on mac os.
So which is it? lol.
And FYI 8GB is more than enough for a casual desktop/laptop user, at least on the M series macs. I used my wife’s M1 macbook air with 8GB of ram for a week while my new laptop was shipping in the mail. Even if I pushed it with 1 or 2 heavy apps, such as IntelliJ IDE (java development), it performs pretty well, albeit with some paging to disk on large projects. Barely noticeable and the system remained very responsive. For casual usage (zoom, google docs, gmail, instagram) it didn’t fill up the ram.
> many people in this thread are saying average users are just using their web browser, so they are “served fine with linux”. But apparently 8GB is unacceptable to run a web browser on mac os.
Are these things in contradiction? A web browser can very easily use more than 8GB of RAM by itself.
> Barely noticeable and the system remained very responsive.
"It's fine to run out of ram and start swapping because the SSD is fast."
Yeah, Apple's bottom barrel pricing isn't terrible, but as soon as you start upping specs the price goes out of control (disproportionally from the underlying costs.) Looking at pricing for the current Macbook Air, it's $400 to upgrade from 16GB to 32GB. A 16GB SODIMM costs ~$40 retail.
That $40 16GB SODIMM is significantly slower than the memory they use - even on the desktop side 16GB of comparable DDR costs twice as much, and that’s before you factor in the latency and bandwidth hit.
The problem is that there’s no alternative in the Mac world for people who don’t want the fastest option any more. Moving from the 16GB MacBook Air to the 32GB is a mandatory CPU/GPU upgrade and there’s no way to only buy one of the two if you don’t need the other.
> That $40 16GB SODIMM is significantly slower than the memory they use
No it isn't, Apple uses ordinary LPDDR5. The higher end models achieve higher bandwidth in the same way as HEDT PCs: By using more memory channels. The base M1 in that MacBook Air doesn't even do that, it has the same memory bandwidth as dual channel DDR5 PCs.
I've been using an M1 MBP with 8GB of RAM since 2020 for video editing, Blender, music production, and web development, and it's fine. It's not perfect, but it's totally serviceable and I rarely think about it, which tells me that 8GB is enough for the average computer user who's doing much less intense work.
If your SSD is near its max-capacity, then any extra wear has a bad affect on its longevity. But modern SSD’s handle excess writes very well if they are not near capacity.
A few extra GB written to disk daily is a drop in the bucket in an SSD’d TBW rating, no??
I’d say for a casual user with low storage needs, it’s perfectly fine. Otherwise it’s a bad idea imo.
What's telling for me is that SSDs have been a readily available consumer part for around 15 years now, a default option in PCs for quite a while now, and to my knowledge there hasn't been many tales of SSDs dying (specifically for write endurance or otherwise) beyond occasional bad models like the old OCZ vortex2s. Even early torture tests were finding that you'd need to push around 2PB of writes (on smaller drives than we have now) to get failures, and that was on a sample size of 1 for each model. I wouldn't expect a SSD to die more than any other electronics.
I've got a few dozen tales of SSDs dying in machines I've managed. Some dying slow deaths with lots of bad reads, some locking themselves in a read only mode, some just disappearing from the system.
Wear leveling spreads the wear out. If there is no free space, it can't do that, and you're completely screwed.
The problem with swapping is that SSDs are fast. If you have 8GB of RAM and manage to pick up any workload with a 10GB working set size, you're short 2GB, so the OS will have to put 2GB on the SSD. But your working set is 10GB and now only 8GB is in RAM, so it needs that 2GB back immediately. To do that it has to swap out some other 2GB, which it also needs to have back immediately. The result is that your SSD is the bottleneck and ends up maxed out doing writes.
NVMe SSDs will do something like 4GB/sec. Not a few GB a day, a few GB a second. A 256GB consumer SSD that can handle 100 full drive writes over its lifetime can thereby hit its lifetime wear rating in just two hours. Under ordinary storage use that doesn't happen because you're not maxing out the drive for hours on end -- after all, if you were storing ordinary data, writing at 4GB/s would cause the drive to be completely full after only 64 seconds.
But swap is deleting stuff and overwriting it and deleting it again. In a pathological case it could burn out a brand new drive in an afternoon and in more realistic cases could plausibly do it over a few months.
Neither of those assertions is correct. You personally may have a workload which requires more RAM, but there are many people – even developers – who have direct experience otherwise. macOS is notably more memory efficient than Windows and the M series hardware has efficient compression, and that configuration holds up fine for the usual browser+editor+Slack+normal app usage which a lot of developers have.
SSD wear is a concern, but they aren’t using low-end components so you’re looking at 5+ years of daily usage. I used an 8GB M1 for years and when I upgraded to an M3 there was no indication of SSD wear either in measured performance or the diagnostic counters.
> You personally may have a workload which requires more RAM, but there are many people – even developers – who have direct experience otherwise. macOS is notably more memory efficient than Windows and the M series hardware has efficient compression, and that configuration holds up fine for the usual browser+editor+Slack+normal app usage which a lot of developers have.
Sure, it's physically possible to use a machine with 8GB of RAM without running out. If all you do is open some terminals and a single-digit number of browser tabs to well-behaved websites, 8GB is an ocean.
But that use case is the exception, not the rule. Worse, ordinary people don't know what causes it. If you're a developer and your machine is sluggish, you know enough to realize it's because it's swapping, and in turn to know that it's swapping because you opened up some ultra-high-res NASA images in an image viewer and forgot to close them, or because you have the tab open for that awful news website that will suck up 20GB of RAM all by itself with its ridiculous JS, or simply because you have 10 different apps running.
For most people, all they know is that their computer is slow -- which it wouldn't be if it had an adequate amount of RAM.
Meanwhile, because they don't know what causes it, they don't know what to do about it, so they just suffer through it. Which has the machine continuously swapping, which is what wears out the SSD.
English yet had to be invented, and in term of life span for egemony over western intellectual linguistic expression, Latin probably is still on the top of the podium by a large margin.
And of course many proeminent figures in philosophy expressed their major works in Latin.
In case anyone is wondering why that is, it's because they put data centers in the places with the cheapest electricity. Which, in the US, is in places like Virginia and Ohio, where they burn fossil fuels.
If the people always talking about how cheap solar is want to fix this, find a way to make that cheapness actually make it into the customer's electric bill.
I've always wondered why data centers aren't taking off more in places like Iceland (cheap geothermal) or Quebec (cheap hydro). Both of these places are also pretty cold and one would think this benefits cooling.
There are periodically news articles and such about data centers in Iceland, of course, but I get the impression it's mostly a fad, and the real build-outs are still in Northern Virginia as they've always been.
The typical answer I've seen is that Internet access and low latency matter more than cooling and power, but LLMs seem like they wouldn't care about that. I mean, you're literally interacting with them over text, and there's already plenty of latency - a few extra ms shouldn't matter?
I'd assume construction costs and costs of shipping in equipment also play a role, but Iceland and Canada aren't that far away.
How much bandwidth is there in Iceland? I suspect not much because the population is only 400K. You will need to lay new undersea fiber. And how are you going to build them? The construction alone would take a massive amount of resources and manpower not feasibly available there. And what about the power supply? In data center heavy areas like Virginia, data center power consumption is already 25% of the entire state power consumption, and VA has 22x more people than Iceland. So if you build even 1/5th the number of data centers in just Virginia, that will consume the entire power grid of Iceland. Therefore, in addition to the data centers themselves, you are also going to have to build an entirely new grid and distribution system.
I did already mention both of those: re. bandwidth, I can't imagine LLMs use that much of it? It's just text - absolutely peanuts compared to something like Netflix. That said, of course, there are multimodal models. Construction difficulty is a factor, but at the same time, it's not like Iceland or Quebec/Canada are backwater regions, they're developed countries. Building a warehouse with some wires in it isn't the most complicated thing ever.
As for power, that's what I was referring to with geothermal and hydro - Iceland and Quebec both have famously cheap electricity. The former would need a large increase in capacity, for sure, but Quebec already pumps out a lot of power (and regularly sells it to the Northeastern US).
Not saying it wouldn't be difficult, by any means, but it does seem like all the right incentives are there.
> the clean energy could displace other dirty generation.
If you would have built 10GW of solar or nuclear to replace other generation and instead the data center operators provide funding to build 20GW so that 10GW can go to data centers, the alternative wasn't replacing any of the other dirty generation. And the economies of scale may give the non-carbon alternatives a better cost advantage so you can build even more.
Outright bans are a non-starter because it requires an infrastructure transition. You couldn't possibly replace every car with an electric one overnight, we can't make them that fast. But if you price carbon then it would cause every new car to be electric, or at least a plug-in hybrid that runs in electric mode 95% of the time. And the people who drive a lot of miles would switch to electric first, which would make a big difference right away.
Meanwhile the people with a 10 year old car they drive 5000 miles a year will keep it until it's a 20 year old car, at which point they'll buy another 10 year old car, but by then that one will run on electricity.
Then you could theoretically ban it, but by then do you even need to?
Nobody is talking about replacing all cars overnight.
You don't have to ban existing cars, they will phase themselves out. Give every X years and ban the sales of any non-hybrids for all but a few niche applications. Then in X+Y years ban all combustion engines other than niche applications.
But ultimately, we need to be serious about this, and half the population and the governments of most western countries are not serious. Many people still believe that climate change is a hoax, and ridiculous ideas like hydrogen cars and ammonia burning ships are still getting funding.
Consider that a bus has six to ten tires that each weigh around ten times more than a typical car tire. This is presented as the alternative to cars, is it even any different? Not implausible that it could actually be worse, especially if the bus isn't at full occupancy at all times.
Meanwhile the weight difference between EVs and petroleum cars is emphasized in the complaints, even though it isn't very large, while the much larger weight difference between any cars and buses is ignored. Because the point isn't to complain about tires, it's to complain about EVs.
And if the point actually was to complain about tires then you still wouldn't be talking about EVs, you would be talking about tires and how to make them shed less or construct them out of lower toxicity materials etc.
The city bus comparison is uneven, but if we consider peak travel times during the week, the density intuitively seems like it works out to less waste. City buses have their numbers and schedule dialed back when you're not in peak hours, and I suspect that it's peak hours where you see the bulk of waste from tires.
My city buses in peak travel hours have anywhere from 20 to 75 people on them. Even if we assume that every one of those folks would have carpooled (which rarely happens), we're looking at a lot of cars, and thus tires, on the road.
> The city bus comparison is uneven, but if we consider peak travel times during the week, the density intuitively seems like it works out to less waste. City buses have their numbers and schedule dialed back when you're not in peak hours, and I suspect that it's peak hours where you see the bulk of waste from tires.
This is really the problem with buses outside of extremely high density areas. (And extremely high density areas should have subways.)
You get off work at 5PM, you want to go to an entertainment venue and then go home at 10PM. You can find a full bus a 5:15PM that will take you there because it's rush hour, but then you can't get home on the bus because there is no bus service after 9PM. Which means you can't take the bus there during rush hour either, because you need your car to be there so you can get home.
Or, you can run mostly-empty buses in the darkness hours, but there goes your efficiency.
Last time I did the math, a Tesla Model Y only had 3x less tire emissions than a semi truck per distance traveled. City buses are on-par with a Tesla Model Y if you only care about mL/km tire wear.
The city bus uses tires with a harder rubber and dimensions such that the pressure at the road is less, plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.
To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity. Volume lost per mile driven is basic high-school arithmetic, and the only real questions are regarding data quality and whether the self-imposed constraints (e.g., examining real-world wear rather than wear given optimal driving or something) are reasonable.
> The city bus uses tires with a harder rubber and dimensions such that the pressure at the road is less
Harder rubber seems like it could make a difference, but then you could also put tires with harder rubber on a car.
You can get a heavier vehicle to have the same pressure at the road by using more and bigger tires, but then the problem is that the tires are bigger and there are more of them.
> plus its normal driving patterns have less wear than typical Tesla use.
Isn't a city bus constantly starting and stopping, both as a result of city traffic and picking up and dropping off passengers?
> To make those sorts of calculations easy, you can ignore all the pressure/usage/etc nonsense and just do basic math on tire dimensions (including min/max tread depth and width, not just radius, though I typically ignore siping and whatnot) and typical longevity.
I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.
And I expected the difference to be even more, but I guess that goes to show how much the weight argument is motivated reasoning if ~7x the weight is only ~3x the tire wear and then people are complaining about something which is only ~1.2x the weight.
>I tried plugging these in and it still comes out as a 6-wheel commercial bus has several times the tire wear as a 4-wheel light truck, rather than being the same.
Pardon me if I ask the obvious question, but did you divide your result by the average number of people moved? Because that's the actual utility of mass vs. individual transport. I would find it rather surprising if tire wear was the one measure were buses didn't win out.
A typical city bus has something like 2500 cubic inches of tread that it burns through, compared to 650 for a Model Y. Tires typically last 500k miles, vs 50k, generously, for a Model Y. I'd said "comparable," but that was just to avoid argument. From a tire wear perspective, you're better driving a bus even if you're the only person on it.
I saw this one and figured out where it came from. Google's AI thing says bus tires can last up to 500,000 miles. You follow the link and it says that buses can last up to 500,000 miles, with no implication that they do so on a single set of tires.
Ehh you can't really just put harder tires on a car and leave it at that. Harder tires means less grip, and that is a serious setback and much less safe in a car than the typical bus that runs city routes at lower speeds and less adverse road conditions.
Tire temperature also will play a big roll in tire wear, and I wouldn't expect bus tires to get very hot only rolling half the time and at a lower speed than the typical car.
And of course you also gotta factor in passenger count. Buses generally have more than just 1 or 2 people, while the vast majority of cars will have 1 or 2 people most of the time. And even if a bus tires were to wear out twice as fast as a car's tire, that is still less wear per person than a car.
That's true, but it is all relative. 70k+ mile tires for cars and suvs are fairly common. They sacrifice some ride quality and performance, but not so much as to be unsafe.
Batteries and EVs are the production side. Reducing demand is e.g. requiring you to drive fewer miles. You get a car that doesn't run on petroleum and CO2 goes down while vehicle miles can stay the same or go up.
Is this somehow a novel question? We've had the same issue since at least the invention of cameras.
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