I remember testing a protocol called DDE back in the Windows 3.1 days, and we couldn't figure out what Excel behaved so much faster than Lotus 123. Then we dug into the code and found that Windows 3.1 would free up all available memory as it launched Excel. A sneaky trick which I guess meant that users would find Excel much more responsive that 123 and ultimately help Microsoft get Office domination that it has today.
Someone else in this thread who worked on Wine said there was no evidence for such a thing since the faster launch times also occurred in Wine. What forensics did you use to determine this?
I don't believe the context of the Wine related comment was Win 3.1. OpenOffice wasn't around to compare launch times. Internet Explorer was around, a bit, but was competing with Netscape, not Mozilla.
I honestly don't know why Apple can't do their own ChatGPT. They have the money / resources to then implement something like the ChatGPT 'plugin' architecture so if someone wants to turn on their lights or get specific 'private' information that apple cannot give as 'training' data. i.e. callout to 'private' API's if appropriate to a sensible LLM generated response
I'm expecting that they will - and considering the raw power of their local hardware, I think they have the best shot of anyone at cornering the AI assistant market.
- private, on-device language model execution (see llama.cpp for feasibility)
- a single, consistent AI available with you wherever you go
- total access to your personal information / documents (knows your birthday, can see your meeting notes)
Because they have the hardware to run it locally, they have three very hard-to-beat advantages:
1) privacy, because the LMs can see all your stuff but none of it goes back to apple. Microsoft can't do this; they get flak every time they try and phone home with telemetry, and they don't control their platform enough to run a massive LM in the background.
2) omnipresence: if you're in the apple ecosystem, you'll always have your iphone with you. That means the LM will have access to location data, maps, chat - everything. And since it never leaves the phone, privacy-oriented people may be ok with it. And that means the LM can be exponentially more useful than just summarizing documents.
3) evaluation costs - they are the only competitor who will not have to pay for a massive datacenter, which means that the LMs can be as powerful as the M2+ hardware they sell. Everyone else will have no alternative to running the LMs on their centralized, expensive hardware.
I just load my audiobooks collection onto nextcloud and when I want to listen to an audiobook I share the file with PocketCasts which has full m4b support with chapters and covers and has excellent audio support to speed up the playback and skip silence (can get through a 8 hour audiobook in about 5-6 hours
The electricity isn't just paying for the one transaction it's paying to secure all historical transactions and all current balances.
When counting how expensive a visa transaction is, you don't also consider the price of all the bank vaults in the world and the staff protecting those vaults, because protecting existing ownership is orthogonal to enabling new transactions.
There is a point to be made, but you've made it all wrong.
You could argue that the $2000 transaction is actually validating all previous transactions... which sure. I will grant you that.
But by that reasoning, you need to amortize all future purchases as paying for part of the Game of Life transaction! If you do that then the cost of the transaction approaches INFINITY DOLLARS as time goes to infinity!
Obviously, this way of looking at the cost of the transaction is useless to the point of being meaningless. So let's stick with $2000, which has a clear meaning in reality.
The security isn't there to protect historic transactions, it's there to protect the holdings of current holders. If I had a bitcoin at one point and no longer have that bitcoin, I'm completely indifferent about the security of the transactions involving that bitcoin because it no longer impacts me.
Also, the cost per transaction - even if viewed through that lens - does not approach infinity as time goes to infinity because there would be an infinite number of transactions as well.
Yes you can. If the token price falls substantially and the fee pressure disappears you can continue transacting without adding work to secure the blockchain.
This is actually one of the largest open problems for Bitcoin. In a few years, the inflation will drop below a point where it is enough to secure the blockchain, meaning the security of Bitcoin is entirely dependent on revenue from transaction fees, which only exist if there are more transactions trying to get into blocks than there is block space to hold the transactions.
If Bitcoin doesn't have enough transaction demand, you will be able to transact on bitcoin for nearly free without contributing to the security at all, which is a very bad thing for Bitcoin as a whole.
The proof-of-work mechanism for blockchains is broken into two elements. There's the inflation element, which is a reward for miners that is independent of transaction volume, and then there's the transaction fee element.
The inflation element exists to secure the blockchain, and is proportional to the total amount of value being held on the blockchain. As the coin price goes up (independent of any transaction activity), the amount of reward for PoW mining also goes up. It doesn't make sense to count this part of the PoW reward a cost of transacting because the purpose is unrelated to transacting and also if transacting completely halts the expense does not go away.
Well one problem I ran into was because of the changes to iTunes audiobooks are now stored in the Books app but the Books app doesn't support external drives for media so the Catalina update includes hours of copying files from my external HDD to my primary Macintosh HD - filling it up almost entirely (I have/had about 300GB of audiobooks) - this was bad enough (as their was no UI telling me it was doing this) but then Time Machine kicked in trying to back up these files (I had excluded the external drive but obviously not the primary partition) but because I ran out of space during the initial Catalina upgrade run, their were lots of artifacts which also got added to Time Machine. Time machine itself started trashing for hours.
I lost probably a day (to a day and a half tidying things up and cleaning up stuff that was not my fault) and of course I have no decent way of managing audiobooks now.
Well I use the Sleep tracking feature which I find very interesting (though probably slightly inaccurate).
I find that the only time I don't wear my Pebble Time is when I am having a shower and in those 10-15 minutes I can fully top up the charge on the PT, which I find is a killer feature. Basically, its more/less constantly charged, I wish other Watches (Android, Apple) would implement 'fast charging' to replicate this feature, as I hate having to think about charging any device.
