It is ironic, but there's a sound technical reason here. They wouldn't be able to get the same memory performance using upgradeable slotted DIMMs. I do appreciate that Framework offers the motherboards for sale so you can use them with your own case and power supply.
The GMK X2 doesn't have the Framework motherboard, but it's the same AMD APU, so the characteristics should be similar.
This really ought to be a consumer-grade LLM powerhouse, but the results were underwhelming. Due to the APU design, bandwidth between the APU and the discrete GPU is limited. From the Reddit poster "In this case adding the 7900xtx is effectively like just having another 24GB added to the 128GB."
Running an AMD GPU with the AMD APU should save the headache of dealing with both Nvidia and AMD drivers on the same host. It's possible that an Nvidia GPU might give better performance here, or there might be other optimizations to be made.
The Not Just Bikes channel really makes clear the benefits of living in an environment that isn't designed around cars, but also the challenge of designing such an environment. You can't just plop in some busses and bike lanes and expect immediate improvement, you really need to think about transportation holistically. This means considering how cars, trucks, busses, bikes, pedestrians and everything will interact.
The Netherlands is lauded as a model, but it took them decades to get where they are today. This isn't to say that we can't do it in the US or Asia or anywhere else, but that we should be clear-eyed about the magnitude of the challenge.
This is true, but urban mobility in the Netherlands was already great a few decades ago. It's just that once you get to that point, further improvements aren't that controversial anymore, because the benefits are obvious. Thus, the situation just kept on improving, and is doing so to this day.
While true, it's also important to remind that until the 70s we were on a path to MORE car traffic, MORE traffic deaths, etc. It took a significant protest for the tide to turn. Google around for "Stop de kindremoord" -- which translates to "Stop infanticide" -- to see the sheer scale of it all. There's plenty of english language articles on the topic.
Long story short: change is possible, but rarely easy. Even in places where it seems like things have always been like they are now.
Yes, it's hard work, but it is possible to see massive improvements in your own lifetime. It might even go faster now that there are so many clear examples already, at least when it comes to the technical aspects of urban planning. So hopefully more people decide to put in the effort :)
I graduated from McLean High School in 1990. I had some fantastic teachers. McLean is absolutely an outlier.
McLean's formula for success is to be located in an upper-middle class district with parents who value education and are wealthy enough to provide a stable environment, but not so wealthy they must send their kids to a private school. This formula isn't something that can be easily replicated or scaled out nationwide.
The aspiration is to make excellent education available for all children, regardless of what school district their parents can afford to move into. This is a problem that looks easy on the surface, but it seems to be extremely difficult in practice. Education is a social benefit, and a lot of people seem to have rejected the notion that taxes should even pay for social benefits.
Agreed, I believe its success can potentially be replicated to some degree, but not its particular formula. I left a few thoughts on that in a follow-up comment below, but fundamentally my thinking is that comprehensive well-designed integration of AI throughout the system could allow schools to move toward leaner administrations with smaller numbers of higher-quality better-compensated teachers. Furthermore, technology like Waymo's could potentially make it viable to shuttle larger numbers of students to a smaller number of higher-quality schools.
I'm also optimistic that physical goods as a whole will become much more affordable over the next decade or two for various reasons, which would further enable the median public school to approach the level of 00s MHS without relying on local concentration of a disproportionate share of national wealth.
All that being said, my point wasn't "look how well-funded my high school was". Regardless of the reasons, it's a bright spot in a narrative of doom and gloom. Only the horror stories seem to get any attention, and if you listen to anyone with strong political views on the topic you'd think each state's governing party had turned its entire school system into a network of indoctrination camps. It's also clearly the case based on my disturbingly bad elementary school experience, and from what I've heard of some other local schools that should have comparable financing to MHS, that money isn't sufficient to provide a top-tier educational experience.
I think it's important to look at schools and counties that perform well and carefully evaluate which elements can be used as a model to help improve public education as a whole, rather than assuming that absolutely nothing is replicable without gobs of cash. For example, off the top of my head, what if the federal government provided an annual budget for a handful of top-ranking districts across the country to have their best teachers of different subjects at each grade level oversee production and maintenance of open source course materials, video lectures, and possibly LLM chatbots? What if teachers all had some equivalent of GitHub to share and collaborate on that stuff? It wouldn't fix problems like rundown facilities or availability of computers and textbooks, but it would allow the worst Latin teacher in the country to provide something a lot closer to the Mr. Bigger experience, and that's just one idea.
I fully agree. Just to add some nuance, walking away means pulling back, but it doesn't have to entail completely abandoning all social media. Obviously, the advertising here on Hacker News is very mild, just Y Combinator launches. But even Facebook and Reddit and Twitter can convey useful information. You do need to curate your feeds, but more importantly, know when to step away when the muck and the outrage seep in.
Optimistically, the cynicism you describe could develop into a sophisticated ability to discern fraud.
> Can we just admit once and for all that it's going to be the norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things?
Capitalism, as opposed to what economic model?
Capitalism (or more precisely, a competitive free market form of capitalism) has proved extremely successful at producing material wealth. Automobiles, clothing, toaster ovens, food, all of these are Nice Things to have. Command economies have consistently failed to produce material wealth at the scale of free market economies.
Capitalism has not been successful at producing other Nice Things, such as justice and equality, or a social safety net for people who happen to run into bad luck. If you have any kind of ethical compass and you care about these things, you should want other social structures like governments that are accountable to the people and so on.
Democracy and the welfare state aren't alternatives to capitalism, these are non-economic models. They can exist with or without capitalism.
Capitalism can't be the only organizing force in society, unless you're prepared to abandon morality. But if your stance is not to have capitalism at all, what economic model would you propose in its place?
Let's look at what's currently working, which is China's hybrid model of keeping hard checks and bounds on instances of capitalism coupled with a long term vision that benefits its society instead of its uber wealthy.
China's kicking our asses in energy production, and they leverage AI and tech in general in socially beneficial ways.
It turns out when you set meaningful goals and punish abusers, the goals can be achieved.
Instead in the US we have "but if we raise taxes, the rich will leave" types of nonsense while any reporting on China is through a heavily biased lens, brought to us by bought-and-paid-for capitalist media outlets:
An enormous amount of China's economic progress since the 1980's is the result of Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms. These reforms were essentially to move away from Communism and allow free markets. Much of the early games were simply making up ground that they lost during Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward.
China has some reasonably good industrial policies, like pushing for developing their own solar panels. Obama tried to push for solar development in his first term, but Republicans threw a fit and the US had to abandon that effort. Industrial policy is hard to get right, and a lot of that effort is wasted. China's record there is mixed and it's not clear that the CCP's interventions have caused more good than harm for their economy.
Chinese individuals have very little power to stand in the way of development. The benefit, such as it is, is that China can ignore NIMBY type groups that prevent coal plants from being built in their neighborhoods. The downside is widescale pollution and abhorrent working conditions for millions of Chinese laborers.
Authoritarians like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, or wanna-be authoritarians like Donald Trump, claim to work for the benefit of the long term interest their countries. They lie. In all of these cases, they're enriching themselves and their cronies at the expense of the nations they rule.
The person you're replying to isn't at the opposite of your stance. They complimented China on several occasions. All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you. This isn't just about western-style capitalism vs. semi-planned Chinese capitalism, it's also one-party authoritarianism vs democracy. You just tossed a crass, ideological one-liner back at them, as if "big number = very good" with no nuance refutes what they said.
China does some things right. Our current system encourages deception, abuse and rent-seeking. But that doesn't mean that there's no self-serving interests in China or that we should follow them like a perfect ideological beacon. There's got to be more options to tame our system than full authoritarianism.
> All they did was add more nuance and bring up the fact that these benefits may come at a cost. Authoritarian governments can be very well-managed and efficient (something something trains run on time), but there's nothing to stop them if that efficiency starts being used against you.
Have...you been following the recent events in the US? And/or forgotten what the OP is about? Also, I'm not arguing for full authoritarianism. Just pointing out the tradeoffs in China compared to our crumbling empire.
Maybe we should couple China's benefits with the more democratic looking solution they found in Taiwan:
Respectfully, you should follow recent events in TW and realized they're slightly behind or slightly ahead of US in political shitshow schedule, and it's no small part due to Audrey Tang / DPP crafting a pro/anti PRC culture war political machine that exploded into great recall drama last month... which contained some not very democratic tactics by DPP (Tang's party). TLDR is DPP thought they could sustain domestic politics by hammering antiPRC narratives without delivering on the home/economy front... and eventually constituents saw through the bullshit when they realized mainstreet was not improving and political system likely not capable of delivering mainstreet improvement. It actually maps pretty aptly to US situation, except instead of rotating through villlians TW/DPP had the luxury of just focusing on PRC for a few years post HK crackdown. But now TWers realize villainizing PRC (however legitimate) hasn't actually improved their economic well being. Something I think US will learn eventually too, as in there's probably "legitimate" reasons for US to villainize PRC for geopolitical competition, but unless US policies deliver on the homefront, it's only going to distract for so long, i.e.make the underlying economic system is work for masses.
I will be interested to read about lessons learned from all perspectives. As it stands, the open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock with tangible legislative results that benefit ordinary citizens. Surely there have been competing interests along the way to set them off course, but I trust they will prevail.
>open systems they built have successfully addressed longstanding gridlock
TW democratization started in 90s, the system is young by democratic standards, IMO more accurate to say sufficient time has passed that TW system has now accumulated gridlock problems like other consolidated democracies which partisan politics are increasingly unable to resolve. Hence partisan brawls, long delays in budget bills, stalled constitutional reforms. The patient is getting sicker.
On one hand, the recall failure is sign that system is working, on the other hand it's your generic democracy is referendum on incumbent, i.e. voters can express dissatisfaction of party in power, but that really doesn't resolve the underlying problem that structurally intractable issues likely also can't be resolved by alternate parties because addressing them is too politically costly - switching leadership will get you back to square one because no party can square the political calculus of doing difficult things without rapidly losing power. So they don't, choosing to slowly bleeding power as voters get disenfranchised and realize there is no change coming. Which is not to say they can't, but IMO one of the reasons why norm under capitalism to not have Nice Things.
Your second paragraph suggests you don't have any familiarity with the novel design of the digital systems that were built to work around the inadequacies you described.
Nearly impossible for anyone who isn't proficient in Mandarin to do this. Western journalists tend to be extremely biased in favour of the DPP, because DPP's anti-PRC rhetoric aligns with the West's own anti-PRC biases.
That is an interesting story, thanks for sharing. However, the prospect of speaking to a serial killer does not make me more likely to want to strike up conversations with strangers.
I'm glad to see a European company succeeding here, especially since Mistral has released open weights models. But you're deluding yourself if you think Mistral is any more moral than its American counterparts.
Taking the morality of a company on its own isn't how I look at it, it's also the context. You might be right that if Mistral was born in the U.S. instead of France it would do the same shady stuff Anthropic and OpenAI are doing, but it wasn't and therefore it isn't. As a result it's a company I personally can work with for now.
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