I don't even understand why they are following a cash cow strategy of milking their current customer base dry when they could be growing massively.
They have amazing hardware that is far superior to the competition and that they can build at very competitive prices while still making good money.
Building a PC in 2025 absolutely sucks. The prices are getting insane. Plus Windows 11 is super hated. It is the perfect time for Apple to win over people.
They just need to stop kneecaping their great hardware but the shitty software side. Just open it up a little bit. Add Vulkan support. Actually make your GPU usable. Actually help Steam to do their magic like they did with Linux, no one is going to buy games on the bloody Apple store anywhere. Show some respect to the developers.
Shareholders giving up massive growth for short term profits. So frustrating.
Because the CCP under Mao liberated China from foreign oppression.
Now whether you might argue that it was thanks to or rather despite Mao being in leadership is another matter and believe me I am in the "despite" camp but it still makes sense that he would have strong symbolic importance for the Chinese people.
People that will argue "oh he killed millions of people" need to get their head out of the cold war propaganda. I do believe his economic policy was criminal and was done against the advice of Soviet advisors but it is still not murder. His policy was idiotic, he was neglectful maybe but he did not purposefully cause a famine.
Saying it is the same or even worse are the purposeful, planned industrial scale mass murder that Hitler was responsible for under the Nazi regime is pure holocaust apologia. Plain and simple.
The 5 - 10 million Congolese who died under Belgian rule is probably much higher as a percentage of the population than the great leap forward.
Great leap forward killed 4% of Chinese population. Vietnam war killed 10% - 12% of people in Vietnam. I do not see condemnation of US here..Rather, I see the celebration that US has a democracy.
I will always condemn the Vietnam War, as well as Leopold 2's murderous regime in Congo Free State. Those do not excuse Mao's murderous policies, no matter how necessary it was to repair China after the destructive Opium Wars. It was under Deng Xiao Ping that China's recovery began.
The Vietnam War caused a lot of changes politically and militarily in the US because the US is a democracy. We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.
War has never been nice, but peace is supposed to be. It wasn't some foreign invader that killed that 4% of China's population, it was their own government - the organization whose primary purpose is to look out for their welfare.
Are you sure? The US still killed a lot of civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention the unconditional support for Israel's intentional murder of civilians and children.
Yep. It's an order of magnitude difference. Civilian casualties happen with any non-trivial war, but the US set policies and added training for military members to try to minimize it. You can thank the hippies for that.
Israel is a different matter, and it's all a political mess.
But bear in mind that these are foreign deaths. A government is responsible for its own people, not those of other countries. I realize hating on US is the popular thing these days, but at least we don't let large percentages of our own people starve.
Sounds to me like the US still doesn't care enough about civilians yet. More than in Vietnam, but still less than many other countries, who also don't let their own people starve, but also don't let them die from preventable disease or school shootings.
"Better than China" is too low a bar for a democracy.
Not exactly. It’s just that much more effort is put into making crimes acceptable to the general public. Embedded 'independent' journalists, collateral damage, precission weapons, 'mistakes’ everywhere, and the usual ‘but we are a democracy' - along with a bunch of similar justifications. It still results in over a million deaths, but now it’s perfectly acceptable to the majority of people.
Well, I suppose we should start killing our own civilians then, since that seems to be what people approve of these days. "Only 4%" should be about right, yes?
> We make a lot more effort not to go around slaughtering civilians these days. Nobody wants to be a babykiller.
Citation needed.
The only effort US is making, is for hiding its crimes. Killing all people at a wedding because there is a "terrorist" (which was earlier trained by US) present there, is no excuse.
If I plan out how to kill someone, get the right weapon and execute on my plan, yeah that is murder.
If I see a donation stand for children in Africa and decide to rather buy a video game from that money, well some children are going to starve because of my decision but I haven't exactly killed them.
Blaming Mao for a famine is completely insane if you are not super brainwashed. He was a human not a god.
But considering you took the highest death toll estimation you could find already shows you are not interested in facts but in pushing a narrative.
If only Mao had been aware that he was human and not a god. He didn't allow any criticism of his ideas, and that makes him entirely culpable for the results.
But I honestly don't see the point. The journey is the whole point when making music or any art really. AI doesn't solve a problem here. There never has been one in the first place. There is more music out there than you could ever listen to. Automating something humans deeply enjoy is misguided.
I actually used to have the exact same position when stable diffusion came out.
All my artists friends where criticizing it and I was thinking it was some form of Neo-Ludditism that they were following. Why not embrace progress? No one is stopping them to not use it but if it helps lower the barrier of entry isn't that great? Surely generative AI could be used to enhance of the workflow of an artist?
Oh, how I have been wrong. In reality it has only been used to replace artists. To devalue their work. It has not place in a artists pipeline.
I think the use of generative AI or at least of generalist LLM's is something fundamentally different than artists embracing new media and new processes. Like digital drawing is still roughly the same process as drawing on paper. The process is largely the same and most skills carry over. You are still in control. Using a prompt to create images is something that is not drawing.
I see the argument but can’t agree. To me it feels like pining for all of the lost typist jobs when word processors appeared.
Artists aren’t entitled to a job any more than I am; to the extent they (or I) do work that is easily replaced, by AI or offshoring or anything, that’s a career risk.
Those same tools enable artists to be more productive, more creative, more capable. The people suffering are those who are attached to the tools they learned with. We in tech know that’s a bad long term idea, and it is surprising in the arts. But on the whole, human creativity and overall output of great art will benefit from this change.
Your initial opinion was the right one. Too bad you let yourself be bullied into changing it by the vocal minority of online personalities. Artists that are not influencers have already embraced AI.
Generative tools and AI are great for finding inspiration. Same as using presets (which many do still think is "cheating" despite everyone doing it). Ultimately all listeners care about is the end result, not how it was made.
There wouldn't be a point in seeing artists play live if people only cared about the end result.
Listening to the studio mix on my headphones at home will always be better sound than being in a crowded concert.
I mean you are right to a certain degree, if it works, it works and if generative tools inspire you to make better music that is great. I am not so sure about that though.
I am forced to vibe code at work and it has not make me more creative. Is has made me want to quit my job.
Artists playing live is the end result though. If anything, the fact that people go to see Katy Perry in concert and not Max Martin, or how Tiesto is still a massive festival draw despite everyone knowing he's used ghost producers for 2 decades, are great examples of how little people care about the process of music being made versus the end result.
I'm not saying you need to use generative tools, but if it helps you make music you should do it. Ultimately what you're sharing with the world is your taste, not your technical abilities. To slightly expand on a famous quote in the music world -
> I thought using AI was cheating, so I used loops. I then thought using loops was cheating, so I programmed my own using samples. I then thought using samples was cheating, so I recorded real drums. I then thought that programming it was cheating, so I learned to play drums for real. I then thought using bought drums was cheating, so I learned to make my own. I then thought using premade skins was cheating, so I killed a goat and skinned it. I then thought that that was cheating too, so I grew my own goat from a baby goat. I also think that is cheating, but I’m not sure where to go from here. I haven’t made any music lately, what with the goat farming and all.
Not really. Even humans regularly get lifetimes wrong.
As someone not super experienced in Rust, my workflow was often very very compiler-error-driven. I would type a bit, see what it says, changes it and so on. Maybe someone more experienced can write whole chucks single-pass that compile on first try but that should far exceed anything generative AI will be able to do in the next few years.
The problem here is that iteration with AI is slow and expensive at the moment.
If anything you want to use a language with automatic garbage collection as it removes mental overhead for both generative AI as well as humans. Also you want to to have a more boilerplate heavy language because they are more easily to reason about while the boilerplate doesn't matter when the AI does the work.
I haven't tried it but I suspect golang should work very well. The language is very stable so older training data still works fine. Projects are very uniform, there isn't much variation in coding style, so easy to grok for AI.
Also probably Java but I suspect it might get confused with the different versions and all the magic certain frameworks use.
The most infuriating thing is that there is no technical reason for vertical filming sucking so much.
The phone camera sensors often have a aspect ration of 4:3 but the sides are cropped in software. So the videos just get mutilated because convention.
Though at least 4:3 format is making a come-back because it is the prefect comprise format. Looks great on a tablet, is usable in both landscape and portrait mode. On Desktop it leave space to read comments. Perfect for youtube videos.
It is orders of magnitude easier to write an game engine for yourself than it is to create a monster like unity or unreal that needs to appeal to everyone and support every kind of game.
If we are talking 2d, it can be months to hack together a basic engine. 3d can be a bit harder but far from decades.
Thing is, if you designed your engine well and implemented great tooling, it should make it faster to implement the actual content of the game.
So upfront cost to be faster later. At least in theory. Obviously you might end up with subpar tooling that is worse than what a commercial could offers. But if you do something like an RPG with a lot of contend, every bit of extra efficiency in creating that content can help a lot.
Now, obviously from a purely commercial standpoint, not using an established engine makes nearly never sense. Super risky. Hard to hire outside talent. You are only justified when you have very, very specific needs that are hard to implement in a generic engine.
Also for us with an ADHD brain, hard things tend to be easier and easy things very hard, so yes the extra mental stimulation of writing an engine can help.
> Plus nobody is forcing you to use AI to write code, you can be as involved with that as you'd like to.
I had management "strongly encourage" me to use AI for coding. It will absolutely be a requirement soon for many people.
The more generative AI you use the more dependent you become of it. Code bases need to be structured different to be friendly to LLM's. So even if you might work somewhere where you technically don't have to use AI, you will need it to even make sense of the code and be competitive.
The job of an software engineer for the most part will change fundamentally and there will be no going back. We didn't know how good we had it.
The problem in this discussion is that people here seem to miss that both an excessively authoritarian parenting style is bad but also going full liberal and just letting them run wild is not the solution. Sometimes children need guidance an a gentle push.
Even as a adult I sometimes need to get pushed. I sometimes take guided courses so I don't skip over the hard but important parts of learning a new thing.
Just don't push your children too hard or you do more harm than good. Accept that they are not you and have different interests and needs. Like make them practice an instrument but give them a choice which one. And if after a few years they still hate it, well you tried. Maybe it is not for them.
I think much can be learned from modern American kids sports vs the Soviet youth sports system.
Kids specialize almost immediately now in a sport that is most likely because the parent likes that sport and wants the kid to be good at it.
The Soviet system was the athlete as a kid should try as many different sports as possible until 12 or 13 because you don't know what the kid will have natural talent at for before then.
That is not pushing the kid to practice something they hate but it is also not letting the kid be free to not do anything besides play on the phone.
Kids ultimately like what they are good at. If I had a kid, I feel like my job would be to figure out what they have some talent at and then fan the flames so that talent turns into a passion. I think many parents though are trying to live out their own dreams through the kid, if the kid has talent for the activity or not.
Not sure what the point was but I was happy I could.