The human form factor - torso up anyway - is probably easier to bootstrap on a general basis; keyed off of human data. But I don't like the failure modes of bipedal robots - imagine a robot flailing around trying to regain balance, in any setting with humans around.

I'm no expert of course, just pontificating.

I don't think it's intrinsically wrong, we are in a late stage of a transformation. Software is eating the world and AI is (so far) most profitably an automation of software.

There is plenty of money to be made along the way. I don't really buy the article's seeming confusion about where the money is going to come from. Anthropic is making billions and signing up prodigious amounts of recurring revenue every month.

The argument to always go for the biggest return works OK for the first few years of high growth (though the timeline is probably greatly compressed the more you use AI), but it turns into a kind of quicksand later.

Xaml and styling and all sorts to try and compete.

Trouble is, it made desktop development harder, and it didn't win against the web. It left the simple and safe formula of standard and common controls for a designer's playground, but the designers preferred the web. And if you make something for the web, you can package it in Electron and get cross platform cheaply.

(Actually 15 years is mentioned in the article now that I scanned it)

What is an adult? Like most words, "adult" encodes a cluster of related behaviors and it's a probabilistic judgment as to whether any individual counts. And it's also shaped by the circumstances of the day. The roles and responsibilities of adulthood change over time, with different social expectations, and those roles may become achievable or less expected to be achievable, depending.

It's unsurprising that the article doesn't really come to any conclusion. The question doesn't admit a hard answer. A better question might be, what is the good life of today, and what transitions and when might make sense in our time.

Our lives are less structured by tradition than times past. But some biological truths can't be denied. A good life, today, might require one to be countercultural, if our ad-ridden culture over-venerates individualism and youth.

I suspect most people only realize these things in retrospect. You don't really know what doors have closed until you find yourself ignored, knocking outside.

And then, if your laptop is busy, your machine is occupied - I hate that feeling. I never run heavy software on my laptop. My machine is in the cellar, I connect over ssh. My desktop and my laptop are different machines. I don't want to have to keep my laptop open and running. And I don't want to drag an expensive piece of hardware everywhere.

And then you need to use macOS. I'm not a macOS person.

I'm also into motorcycles. Before I owned a house with a garage, I had to continuously pack my tools up and unpack them the next day. A bigger project meant schlepping parts in and out of the house. I had to keep track of the weather to work on my bikes.

Then, when I got a house, I made sure to get one with a garage and power. It transformed my experience. I was able to leave projects in situ until I had time. I had a place to put all my tools.

The workstation is a lot like that. The alternative would be renting. But then I'd spend a lot of my time schlepping data back and forth, investing in setting things up and tearing them down.

YMMV. I wouldn't dream of trying to universalize my experience.

It's not so easy to get nice second-hand hardware here in Switzerland, and my HEDT is nice and quiet, doesn't need to be rack-mounted, plugs straight into the wall. I keep it in the basement next to the internet router anyway.

The "sensible" choice is to rent. It's the same with cars; most people these days lease (about 50% of new cars in CH, which will be a majority if you compare it with auto loan and cash purchase).

It wasn't my primary motivator but it hasn't made me regret my decision.

I hummed and hawed on it for a good few months myself.

The RAM choice was because I have never regretted buying more RAM - it's practically always a better trade than a slightly faster CPU - and 96GB DIMMs were at a sweet spot compared to 128GB DIMMs.

That, and the ability to have big LLMs in memory, for some local inference, even if it's slow mixed CPU/GPU inference, or paged on demand. And if not for big LLMs, then to keep models cached for quick swapping.

However, I do believe that we're at an inflection point where DC hardware is diverging rapidly from consumer compute.

Most consumers are using laptops and laptops are not keeping pace with where the frontier is in a singular compute node. Laptops are increasingly just clients for someone else's compute that you rent, or buy a time slice with your eyeballs, much like smartphones pretty much always have been.

I personally dropped $20k on a high end desktop - 768G of RAM, 96 cores, 96 GB Blackwell GPU - last October, before RAM prices spiked, based on the logic that hardware had moved on but local compute was basically stagnant, and if I wanted to own my computing hardware, I'd better buy something now that will last a while.

This way, my laptop is just a disposable client for my real workstation, a Tailscale connection away, and I'm free to do whatever I like with it.

I could sell the RAM alone now for the price I paid for it.