Yes, the cutting edge is very nice, but any laptop past 2016 is useable for the average person. Even gpu inference on older process nodes is perfectly doable. The HPC space absolutely prefers newer chips but hasn't ripped out their 2018 chips in their clusters because they still deliver value.

And sure, the latest best things sells for higher margins for now, but with the way consumer prices are going, people may start choosing older still perfectly capable models that cost less.

The greater danger to a working economy is not absence of the absolute must cutting edge chips but lack of independence which this initiative seems to seek to curtail. Good for Germany.

Why not both? Why not both technological progress hand in hand with progress in human rights?

They tell us that any slowdown to progress is evil, that they are justified in their crimes because in "the future" all will be fine and dandy.

And what a beautiful future they are bringing us, with the destruction of post WW2 prosperity, increasing wealth inequality, etc etc.

You can install nonprivileged google stuff on the main account.

Alternatively you can setup a private space (accessible to the main user but mostly separate from the main system) with a few clicks in the settings.

If you prefer more friction / isolation you can setup a separate user where you can install the google stuff.

You can scroll through r/localllama and find tons of people getting useable speeds out of Qwen 35B.

24 tok / second on an ancient 1080ti

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1tcc7h5/24_toks...

100 tok / second on a 4070

https://old.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1tjh7az/110_tok...

Keynes lived through two world wars and learned that global trade does not in fact mean that nations won't irrationally attack each other. In Keynes' view, the purpose of the economy is to lift up the average person out of poverty, and is so doing greatly eliminate one of the causes of war.

Just a few decades after world war 2 Friedman would come along and talk about the power of "freedom" (ie, keeping the current status quo). He would repeat the ideological lies that led to people being unprepared for WW1 / WW2, namely being that free trade means nations won't attack each other, that there is a price at which racism is reasonable, among many other things.

Friedman on segregation for example:

“...consider a situation in which there are grocery stores serving a neighborhood inhabited by people who have a strong aversion to being waited on by Negro clerks. Suppose one of the grocery stores has a vacancy for a clerk and the first applicant qualified in other respects happens to be a Negro. Let us suppose that as a result of the law the store is required to hire him. The effect of this action will be to reduce the business done by this store and to impose losses on the owner. If the preference of the community is strong enough, it may even cause the store to close. When the owner of the store hires white clerks in preference to Negroes in the absence of the law, he may not be expressing any preference or prejudice, or taste of his own. He may simply be transmitting the tastes of the community. He is, as it were, producing the services for the consumers that the consumers are willing to pay for. Nonetheless, he is harmed, and indeed may be the only one harmed appreciably, by a law which prohibits him from engaging in this activity, that is, prohibits him from pandering to the tastes of the community for having a white rather than a Negro clerk. The consumers, whose preferences the law is intended to curb, will be affected substantially only to the extent that the number of stores is limited and hence they must pay higher prices because one store has gone out of business.”

I suspect an honest implementation could actually work - that is, only if all the people that "matter" would not boycott this fair implementation and go off and do their own thing.

What this does is make it so anyone with a pulse gets a passing grade.

What teachers actually want and need is the ability to fail people. At one district the math department wanted to fail a bunch of kids until the principal intervened, saying they should pass more people, and make exams worth less of the grade.

Teachers need the support from the state and the district to be allowed to fail students early in their academic journey so that students can get the help they need immediately and prevent them from reaching high school and still not knowing their times tables.

Look, for example, at the obvious, immediate, practical example of illegal Mexican immigration. Now, that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as it’s illegal.

Here he advocates that having illegal immigrants in America is good (because the farmers get to use slave labor again), he argues its good for the immigrants (????), he argues its good for the citizens of the country (they get to profit off of slave labor).

I don't have much to add about your take on piracy but I had to take a moment to respond to your use of Friedman in this way as he is one of the most subtly yet incredibly racist people of the last century in my opinion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahgjEjJkZks

Not sure about the malaria cause, but it is true that the South of Italy has traditionally been far less free and far more dependent on agriculture than the north. It has a history of being conquered over and over again by different foreign powers which led many times to extractive regimes (and inevitably less innovation - some parallels to the American south before the abolition of slavery). Such an environment led to them invent something even worse than a disfunctioning state, namely the mafia.

Until reunification in the 1860s Italy had a bunch of city-states in the North, tight fisted control by the Church in center Italy, and an extractive / agriculturally dominant economy in the south ruled by the aristocracy.

14th gen intel have "big" and "little" cores. Unless you specify to pin cores in the VM, if at any point the virtualization swaps cores then your X86 performance on Intel goes down the drain.

Also laptop perfomance is incredibly suspect. Not only does cooling, etc have huge effects, but Intel is clearly behind AMD since many years (14th gen is a refresh of an old architecture).

Laptop benchmark: https://www.phoronix.com/review/snapdragon-x1e-september

Server benchmarks: https://www.phoronix.com/review/ampereone-a192-32x/12 https://www.phoronix.com/review/google-axion-c4a/5

Based on server performance while ARM is making strides, AMD still has the performance crown.

Anyone interested in seeing what the web when the search engines selects for real people and not SEO optimized slop should check out https://marginalia-search.com .

It's a search engine with the goal of finding exactly that - blogs, writings, all by real people. I am always fascinated by what it unearths when using it, and it really is a breath of fresh air.

It's currently funded by NLNet (temporarily) and the project's scope is really promising. It's one of those projects that I really hope succeeds long term.

The old web is not dead, just buried, and it can be unearthed. In my opinion an independent non monetized search engine is a public good as valuable as the internet archive.

So far as I know marginalia is the only project that instead of just taking google's index and massaging it a bit (like all the other search engines) is truly seeking to be independent and practical in its scope and goals.

If someone knows 80% of the topics on an exam like the back of their hand and doesn't know the other 20% they shouldn't get a B, they should pass the subjects they know and be asked to retake and relearn the subjects they don't know.

When people know they can make mistakes and the result is not a perpetual black mark on their record (any grade not an A) but they are given the chance to improve and demonstrate this improvement then perhaps they might be more willing to admit and understand mistakes instead of cheating.

People taking a good idea and extending it to do bad does harm twice: in the bad act itself and in making a good thing seem bad.

I am strongly against US starting wars and as you say blowing people up.

I am also strongly against the US being defenseless in the case of a national emergency.

No one is running LLMs on current gen NPUs so if we will in the future its a long time coming. Unless they can demonstrate some real (and not marketing) wins I remain skeptical that a large NPU for LLMs is the future.

I can totally see NPU accelerating simple tasks, but to be worth the silicon they have a ways to go imo.

99% of people don't need or want a dev workstation. My travel laptop is 7+ years old and I couldn't tell you the difference between it and a current flagship in terms of browsing and everyday tasks.

I will not lie, I find LLMs useful but the desktop experience is pretty polished already. NPUs seem to be an attempt to ride the AI bandwagon with very little to show for it so far.

For desktop TPM at least to me they seem a bit of a black box with many past vulnerabilities https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trusted_Platform_....

I think at cold boot as long as one doesn't store the encryption key in the TPM (external hardware key?) then one should be secure. I am not so sure about post boot however, once the system is already running.

This actually prompted me to research a bit on the scale of the security impact of SMM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode

https://doc.coreboot.org/security/smm.html

It seems that coreboot is aware and supposedly for some computers can be implemented to catch calls to SMM (ideally this would prevent the attacker from triggering SMM - if they do it's game over).

I do suspect though that if the system bus is not protected from malicious calls then someone can trigger SMM and have carte blanche to one's computer.

https://www.infoworld.com/article/2167684/hackers-find-a-new...

https://hothardware.com/news/researchers-discover-rootkit-ex...

I don't know what processes Apple / Android use but I suspect ARM chips don't have SMM and that they tie certain functions to their secure enclave. In X86 its backwards, with SMM having control over the TPM (at least in some implementations).

Though some SMM vulnerabilities are patched by now given its history I take X86 security with a grain of salt. I think the potential for a secure platform is there, but I suspect one would want to make their own boards engineered with security in mind to be certain (I hope this happens in the future - it seems to be happening in the server space already).

"Trusted Boot" is a meme on x86. If you really want something like that you need to do what Oxide Computer is doing and rip out UEFI for good and implement your own secure boot chain.

Qubes is great but at the end of the day cannot protect against evil maid attacks to the level that pixel or apple phones can. Its great at making sure a browser exploit cannot steal your banking credentials you have open in a different virtual machine but cannot overcome the limitations of the platforms it builds off of.

So I understand why the GrapheneOS folks do what they do.

See also: "X86 considered harmful" by the founder of Qubes OS (posted in 2015!)

https://blog.invisiblethings.org/papers/2015/x86_harmful.pdf