This seems like the kind of things you can do before you get kids and have real responsibilities. Then you need to get back to reality. Sounds fun though and I would have liked to experience it.
It seems to me that it's based more on the use cases than the speed of improvements to the technology itself.
There were times when a CPU four times as fast changed what I could do with a PC. For a long time, with Moore's Law in full swing, we reliably got that sort of improvement every three years, and PCs older than that were widely seen as obsolete. Today that would only speed up batch jobs for me and have no impact on any of my workflows.
Some sort of on-device AI thing is probably the next threshold for PCs. I don't think there's anything production-ready and compelling right now, but I can imagine useful automation features when it gets good enough.
It's also that software back in the day was much more fine-tuned to use the very limited resources as well as possible, so getting a better CPU would visibly speed up things.
Somewhere in the late 2000s, the CPUs got powerful and cheap enough (in the sense of "cents per MHz") that it shifted from having to be creative to get your programs to perform at acceptable speed, to not having to and instead focusing on delivering marketable software faster.
The only thing nowadays I can imagine requiring a substantial amount of raw processing power would be on-device AI processing, but that doesn't seem to be the case here, as large parts of the processing is still done in the cloud.
Editing high-resolution video comes to mind as an example of something that will still stress most PCs. Being able to scrub through footage and preview the effect of edits in real time without using low-res proxy files demands a lot of performance. I think higher-spec modern PCs are there for 4K, but I'm not sure about higher.
Great read, although a shame that it didn't go any further than adding the write cache SSD solution, which must have been many years ago. I was hoping for a little more recent info on the EBS architecture.
Did Douglas Adams travel in time.... this is scarily accurate!!! My BMW keeps turning off the volume if I wave at anything in the direction of the touchscreen. There is a little infrared camera near the roof that can sense hand-gestures and turn volume up or down ... and lots of other things.
You did buy a car without a dipstick, what do you expect? BMWs are fun to drive and are horrible too maintain. I remember helping someone because the radiator melted a reservoir tank, such a terrible design I never looked at another one!!
They should need forced to make dipsticks but the EU doesn't care when it's a European company. The EU is more anti American companies than actually caring.
It's inevitable. We are in a normalization phase right now. Soon, kids will just shrug at stuff like that, because they will all know it's likely fake and therefore not care much about it.
However, I feel really bad for those who has to be the ones to go through the pain of this phase though.
Sure, it's fake, it's really nothing more than an automated artistic impression. It could always have been done by a human artist, but most people wouldn't have the skills. It's not much different to using an image editor to stick a person's head onto somebody else's body, which is so old that it's "normalized" and no longer of much interest.
We're probably, what, a year or two away from oversaturation and normalization?
It kinda seems like we're just hurtling towards a banal dystopia, where everything is hyper-real and everyone is just desensitized anyway. People on the subway just sit there, wearing their AR goggles and undressing everyone else, with their apps' horniness sliders turned up to max and porn sounds leaking out of shitty headphones. That guy across from you is whacking off again, just like last week, and you just groan, walk to the next train, and catch up on that show.
Your kid is called into the principal's office again. The bully posted nudes, so your kid posted even more nudes, with the bully and the principal doing things that someone with your lower-body flexibility never thought possible. You didn't even know that was a fetish. But ugh, not this talk again. Between the faux outrage and the condescending morality talk, they've heard it all a thousand times. It's not like the adults can do anything about it anyway. Can we go home now? This is more embarrassing than the pictures themselves.
I hope, at the end of all that, people start to consider what really matters. Which has only ever been 'local' - being right with oneself, and trying to do right with one's lived, 3d reality. Seeing technology as a tool to help, not as means of controlling others through endless distracting.
Ie, it is for the individual to reject that which is incoherent with the reality that they themselves are. One doesn't have to watch porn, one doesn't have to immerse oneself in the nonsense. Each of us has free will - one doesn't need to choose immoral nonsense, regardless of what the screens say.
Same. I even got my mom an electric bicycle as a present, just to lower the entry to physical exercise, but it just collected dust in the corner, despite endless promises to start using it. She passed away suddenly 3 years ago. I'm sure her heart just gave up. Still can't really take it in.
If the joy of your bad habits outweigh whatever other sources of joy you have in your daily life, then it's hard to motivate someone to stop. In their mind, they are making the conclusion that they'd rather die with some joy from the bad habit than die entirely unhappy - which kind of makes sense.
>If the joy of your bad habits outweigh whatever other sources of joy you have in your daily life, then it's hard to motivate someone to stop. In their mind, they are making the conclusion that they'd rather die with some joy from the bad habit than die entirely unhappy
Yeah, I'm pretty sure this is the kicker for my mom. We were driving back from an errand and she said she wanted to stop for a [marketing name of 1000 cal coffee-slushie]. I gently but firmly reminded her that wasn't going to help her goals and she launched into a small tantrum that included 'It's the only joy I get'.
I love her so much and I'm terrified of her suddenly being gone, or worse, declining into early alzheimers/dementia like her dad did.
She is receptive to discussing changing her habits in general, but if I get specific and try to help her start any sort of plan to give them up or minimize them, she responds as if I am attacking her. I don't know what to do.
I've never struggled with my weight, but I once noticed I was getting heavier than I liked and I successfully lost about 30lb in 4-5 months. It doesn't have to be that intense for her, but I know what works. I just can't get her to commit to any variation of a serious approach.
It's particularly funny because their example docs for .NET outputs "B4aajs", which to any Swedish l33t speaking individual, would read "Bajs", which means "shit"
There's been some success in creating translation layers that can convert between different LLM embeddings, and even between LLM and an image generation model.
