> too many SKUs and models - it takes a paragraph to figure out how 2 Dell laptops from the same release year differ.

And yet, I just watched a YouTube video where a "PC guy" was like, "adding the Neo just completely confuses the Apple product line. Are we heading towards having too many Apple options that confuse the buyer here?"

I get it, other than price, the Neo and Air are a bit confusing product wise. Have they looked at how Asus, Lenovo, and Dell are doing their products though? It's absolutely wild the disparity between PC and Apple for laptops.

I run both PC's and Mac devices in our house, we use what fills the job. Recommending PC laptops for family members feels like a total crapshoot though. Every time, I do all I can to find the right device for their needs and there are just so many trade-offs. Maybe I get all the right specs, ensure it doesn't thermal throttle, keyboard/trackpad are A-OK... but the webcam is trash. Ooof... now Mom is complaining about how no one can see her properly at bridge club call.

I brought up how the Neo might do to the PC industry what the Air did to Ultrabooks back in the day. The amount of hate I got on YouTube/Verge with copy-paste, "hahaha, wut, with 8 GB of RAM? lmao, lol, you Apple bot?!" was expected, but also disappointing. There is clearly a market segment happy to continue to put up with the mess that Dell/Lenovo are selling (anything but a Mac).

Wild how tribal we are to our corporate computer overlords.

The era where something like Framework with its fully customizable, repairable, modular laptops becomes the standard can't come soon enough.

For the time being, I'll let Apple/PC continue to duke it out. Hope some competition helps in the long run. :shrug:

Almost everything in tech has been subsidized in one way or another via tax avoidance schemes or outright lobbying and manipulation of the market.

Why would this be any different?

Yes, and this is the way it works JS currently.

The reason I'm commenting is because it appeared folks were advocating to stop doing this (despite the fact it seems to work just fine).

(I'm being facetious, if the hardware was open, someone would have already written a custom boot loader for this :P)

I was trying to keep an open mind, it's easy to be wrong with all that's going on in the industry right now.

Thanks for clarifying some of the details back to what I was originally thinking.

Makes a lot of sense, cool that the garbage collector can run independently of the call stack and function scheduler.

Also, I wasn't talking about building network layers, I was explicitly referring to things that use a network layer... That is, an application receiving streams of enumerable network data.

I also agree with what you're saying, we don't want UInt8, we want bits and bytes.

I'm really confused as to why the parent comment was edited so heavily. Oh well, that's social media for you.

Are there any concerns that the extra array overhead will make the application even more vulnerable to out of memory errors while it holds off on GC to process the big stream (or multiple streams)?

I am mostly curious, maybe this is not a problem for JS engines, but I have sometimes seen GC get paused on high throughput systems in GoLang, C#, and Java, which causes a lot of headaches.

I agree with this.

I have had to handle raw byte streams at lower levels for a lot of use-cases (usually optimization, or when developing libs for special purposes).

It is quite helpful to have the choice of how I handle the raw chunks of data that get queued up and out of the network layer to my application.

Maybe this is because I do everything from C++ to Javascript, but I feel like the abstractions of cleanly getting a stream of byte arrays is already so many steps away from actual network packet retrieval, serializing, and parsing that I am a bit baffled folks want to abstract this concern away even more than we already do.

I get it, we all have our focuses (and they're ever growing in Software these days), but maybe it's okay to still see some of the bits and bytes in our systems?

Link for those curious or confused as to what I'm talking about: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-rAW3vXOU

Forcing AI to fight in an arena for our entertainment, what could go wrong? (this was tongue in cheek, I am fully aware LLM's currently don't have conscious thoughts or emotions)

I am fairly sure that nVidia intentionally wants to keep addressable memory as a feature only for CUDA (among many other features).

Having CUDA be far superior to other shader code methods is good for vendor lock-in to their hardware, their software, their drivers, etc.

It is really sad seeing that the addressing is possible, but they won't open it up to everyone.

I've brought it up several times when talking with folks who work down in the chip level for optimizing these operations and all I can say is, there are a lot of unforeseen complications to what we're suggesting.

It's not that we can't have a GPU that does these things, it's apparently more of a combination of previous and current architectural decisions that don't want that. For instance, an nVidia GPU is focused on providing the hardware optimizations necessary to do either LLM compute or graphics acceleration, both essentially proprietary technologies.

The proprietariness isn't why it's obtuse though, you can make a chip go super-duper fast for specific tasks, or more general for all kinds of tasks. Somewhere, folks are making a tradeoff of backwards compatibility and supporting new hardware accelerated tasks.

Neither of these are "general purpose compute and data flow" focuses. As such, you get the GPU that only sorta is configurable for what you want to do. Which in my opinion explains your "GPU programming seems to be both super low level, but also high level" comment.

That's been my experience. I still think what you're suggesting is a great idea and would make GPU's a more open compute platform for a wider variety of tasks, while also simplifying things a lot.

This mindset is a healthy and good one. It is built on training yourself, learning, and practicing a discipline of problem solving without giving up.

Persistence is something we build, not something we have. It must be maintained. Persistence is how most good in the world has been created.

Genius is worthless without the will to see things through.

In my opinion, libertarianism in software is a hollow dream that leads people to make foolish decisions that can't be protected. This makes it easy for corporations to exploit and quash any barely audible opposition.

Almost as if by plan, the libertarian mindset has eroded and weakened open source protections, defanging and declawing it every step of the way.

Not trying to be glib here. This feels like the embrace, extend, extinguish pattern that we jokingly used to think was only Microsoft. It is now becoming more and more obviously the modus operandi of the entire enterprise software ecosystem.

I believe you are correct to be frustrated and ringing the alarm bell. This is a "death of the commons" moment for OSS.

Yeah, this has been my experience with low-overhead streams as well.

Interestingly, I see a ubiquity of this "open more streams to send more data" pattern all over the place for file transfer tooling.

Recent ones that come to mind have been BackBlaze's CLI (B2) and taking a peek at Amazon's SDK for S3 uploads with Wireshark. (What do they know that we don't seem to think we know?)

It seems like they're all doing this? Which is maybe odd, because when I analyse what Plex or Netflix is doing, it's not the same? They do what you're suggesting, tune the application + TCP/UDP stack. Though that could be due to their 1-to-1 streaming use case.

There is overhead somewhere and they're trying to get past it via semi-brute-force methods (in my opinion).

I wonder if there is a serialization or loss handling problem that we could be glossing over here?

"if I spent the time, risk, effort, and money to develop the pre-eminent protocol and hardware used by most TV's in the world... would I want to give that work away for free?"

I think the answer is probably no for most people.

Because most of us are not the IP holder, they think this technology should just be free (as you stated earlier).

This lack of empathy and care for others (even IP holders) is largely why these draconian IP rules and contracts exist. It's why there are whole crazy NDAs around the HDMI spec. It's because every time someone is given even a slight look under the covers, they try and steal it, because it's worth a lot of money.

This is a nuanced variant of "this is why we can't have nice things" all over again.

https://www.youtube.com/@AZisk

At this point, pretty much all he does is review workstations for running LLM's and other machine-learning adjacent tasks.

I'm not his target demographic, but because I'm a dev, his videos are constantly recommended to me on YouTube. He's a good presenter and his advice makes a lot of sense.

Now I have to start over again? Ugghhh…