alright_scowl

> fsociety remarked (quite correctly) that there are a large number of people who constantly feel the need to denigrate Macs

And in response I remarked (very accurately) that there's an even larger number of people who constantly feel the need to always gush over anything Mac. This very thread is full of such examples.

> "That's not true. I have a Mac, and I don't like it very much."

Misrepresenting much? I said it's an okay laptop. Gets the job done.

> You said they were ridiculously overpriced, which implies that no reasonable person could look at one and think it was worth buying.

That's true. I can get other okay laptops for perhaps half the price. But they won't be as sexy as Apples. They certainly don't have fanboys taking offense at someone saying they are just okay.

> You came into a subthread

I was the one that started the subthread, by daring to say that the M1 I use has a speaker as bad as any other laptop I used. Oh the horror.

Except, you're proving mine.

In a thread full of people gushing on Mac speakers, me saying it's an okay but overpriced machine is considered "hating for the sake of hating"

I wouldn't describe the speakers on the M1 I use as amazing. It's more or less as bad as the speakers of previous laptops I used.

I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.

Except they don't? I hate the speaker sound on the Mac I use for work.

Unless "so good" in the title means "not as awful as other shitty laptop speakers", but even that is a poor statement, when the text in the link makes only mentions some vaguely interesting technical musings, without comparing it to anything else.

The way the title is written makes it sound just like any other inane data point of people gushing over Macs.

Made me spit my coffee.

Have my upvote, you glorious bastard.

Agreed. And I say that when my role is "building software systems"

People with different roles in an organization will have different perspectives and goals. Ultimately the software system being built will have to be a compromise of those perspectives and goals.

Everyone has "skin in the game" to a degree, even if they don't "carry a pager".

> People are so skeptic and negative about humans nowadays.

Any positivity I might sometimes happen to feel about humanity quickly proves to be misguided as soon I read what other humans have to say on the internet.

Just go to Twitter, Reddit, or some comments section on YouTube, and you'll quickly come out hating the species too.

> Europe has nothing.

The company that develops Stable Diffusion is German.

I find it as impressive as ChatGPT.

> when the companies funding the research and launching the products realize that the tools are an existential threat to their profits.

Ahh, like Kodak when they were the first to create digital cameras, a good 10 years ahead of the competition, and decided to shelf it because it would eat the nice profits of their film business?

This strategy always works wonders :)

I would actually like if the big tech companies didn't invest in AI to keep their profits. They would eventually be swallowed by other companies that didn't.

> We survived nukes because they were heavily controlled and their spread contained

Much to the opposite. We survived nukes because many countries have them.

If only one country had them, I presume it would be a lot more trigger happy, knowing its opponents wouldn't retaliate.

That's exactly how I've been using it. Absolutely amazing stuff. Saves me hours of combing stuff through the internet while coding, so I can focus in the actual problems I need to work on.

> But in some cases there just might me a connection between concepts we haven't seen before that have merit to generate a truly new idea.

But it's important to notice that a language model cannot reason to synthesize new information by making this connection. It can only connect two ideas if those ideas were already connected in the training data. To put in another way - ChatGPT is a new powerful way to organize existing information.

And that's not to be dismissive. Natural Language Processing is a hard problem, and ChatGPT gracefully parses through and generates natural language, giving out mostly correct answers at the same time. But the quality of information it gives improves with my skill to ask it good questions. Not different from a internet search engine that gives you better answers if you now how to make better search queries.

> If you do the math that doesn't always work out.

I disagree. But it depends on how less the remote companies pay. Are we talking about 80% of the salary of a RTO company? 60%? 30%?

The close it gets, the better the math works out for remote companies. Moving away from metropolitan areas incurs in a huge decrease of expenses, and a huge increase in quality of life. But of course, it depends on the salary you'd make working remote.