• 2 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: April 27th, 2024

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  • Actually, I agree. And so far, small local models are really solid, and can punch above its weight even when compared to frontier models.

    I believe what I meant when I said I doubted it was since these AI corpos seemingly give no indication that local is an option, so most people would think they can only access an LLM through the web. This would bolster the SaaS ecosystem dominating over local AI, although local will keep increasingly growing as a more favourable option.

    Although I do agree that the industry will shift from being server based to PC based inference as well, I don’t see that shift being large enough to make these companies change their training paradigms to include telemetry from local AI, but I’m sure some will.



  • I doubt it, but honesty, many systems can do inference pretty well, like how I ran the MLX version of Qwen 3 4b with a DuckDuckGo search RAG, and used it to ask quick questions and verify some simple things, running on a MacBook Air m2 16gb, and barely made a dent in the RAM utilisation or SoC, and this also goes for my much less powerful machines, like even a galaxy a20, with 3gb of memory and a low spec octacore exynos, can run small models really well, although the quantisation needs to be a bit strict.






  • When I was in public high school last year, the boys toilets were horrid, someone spilled baby oil all over the place for some reason, people would rip off doors, smash the toilets, make wall smear murals, leave their CO2 canisters everywhere (which was what they’d get high off of, odd choice but an interesting one I suppose), and of course, piss literally anywhere. I mean, hey, at least the massive mirror was completely intact somehow…




  • They could have easily made the RAM and Storage user serviceable/upgradeable

    Nope, they couldn’t have, since the A18 pro chipset doesn’t support modular memory at all, of expanding it past 8gb. It’s a phone chip after all. There’s also the fact that Apple has equipped all their devices with unified memory, which, if they even managed to make it upgradable, all chips would need to support massive memory bus widths to have the same or similar bandwidth (requiring more modules), would need proprietary modules or at least rare modules like SOCAMM, and would reduce the space inside the chassis for anything else, like battery, modular ports, etc.

    Sure, I hate Apple’s antics in terms of lack of right to repair, but frankly they produce arm based computers, where have you ever seen an arm based laptop or mini pc with modular RAM? I’m sure some exist but they’re likely too obscure for me to have heard of (although I have heard of System76’s Thelio Astra, although again they are a bit obscure outside Linux circles.)

    Edit: forgot to add, but yeah soldered storage is really inexcusable.


  • First of all, I couldn’t find where you specified “outside work”, so maybe you imagined it and accidentally believed you did.

    Second of all, phones can be efficient at some tasks, but PCs can be for others. Phones aren’t always the most efficient thing ever at every task. Programming for example is much more streamlined on desktop, since you can simply install an IDE, program what you need and test it pretty easily unless you’re really shit at coding. On mobile, it’s different, on iOS you’d be hard pressed to find an IDE at all that isn’t some completely unheard of one with at most 3 stars if people actually used it, or 5 stars from the creator of it. On android it’s a little better, although I genuinely haven’t heard of official or even recommended options for IDEs either.

    Thirdly, people aren’t downvoting out of elitism, it’s out of logic, PCs are amazing at most things, maybe apart from endless short form video scrolling. Phones are just portable PCs built to be more energy efficient, do mostly the same tasks, but also lack most of the input methods apart from a digitiser, and a miniaturised display. None are bad, and frankly I’m typing this on an iPad right now, but that’s because I’m away from my desk and just wanna do some simple browsing. On my laptops I can genuinely do what I’d like that isn’t just browsing, I can have a game open that’s not compatible with iPadOS or android, and even within browsing, I can have 30 or more YouTube or other tabs open without the browser grinding to a halt, which I can’t say the same for safari on the iPad or chromium on my android phones.

    People aren’t “just old and set in their ways” because they like the tactility, openness and forms of ease of use PCs bring. Sure, your workflow may have never touched PCs at all currently, but other people have different workflows. Other people aren’t stupid for not being you.






  • you’re right, and I’d personally pick from a one, but realisticaly, if someone only just needs a laptop and doesn’t really know what to get, where to get it, why to get that specific one, etc, then I don’t think they’d even know second hand sellers can be reputable in the first place.

    My mother for instance, she bought an Acer Aspire Go for around $550 AUD from one of our large consumer electronics stores (not sure but I think it was Officeworks),so she can do all her important stuff on, think appointments, setting up debit cards, tracking orders, etc. She didn’t want anything used or refurbished, since her view of such is that, if she bought one used or refurbished, it’ll be barely held together, half broken, probably someone bit part of the corner off, and so on.

    if I were her, I would’ve just gotten a cheap refurb Thinkpad, but seeming that its at least somewhat common for non-tech literate people to think it’s scary to get into the second hand market, most would simply rather choose large consumer electronics store chains. Maybe this issue is just because of the tangibility, where you can walk into a store and physically hold the laptops and assess them, rather than the online only nature of the second hand market, unless there is a rare physical store for refurb and used tech.