Comment Re:Expensive AF (Score 1) 59
I was in the market for a tablet a couple of months ago because I needed something for reading sheet music.
Cheapest 13" Apple Tablet: $949
The generic Android tablet I bought instead: $179.99
I'm not saying they aren't being impact by memory prices, but they're either incompetent at supply chain management or they're milking this for much higher profits. Either way, there's a reason why this Mac and iPhone user uses 4 Android tablets and zero Apple tablets.
At this point, if I weren't locked into the Apple platform by the software I use, I'd probably be looking for alternatives on the Mac side as well. The prices have simply become absurd when compared with the rest of the industry. It actually seems worse now than in the beleaguered period when everything was custom hardware assembled by hand.
Case in point, I was seriously considering upgrading my M1 Max MacBook Pro, which cost me about $6k when I bought it. The base model of MBP ostensibly starts at $2999, but to get 8 TB of storage (which I could add externally for just $900), between all the forced upgrades that I don't care about and the whopping $3,000 for the SSD upgrade, the price leaps to a jaw-dropping $7,549, or $4,550 total just to get $900 worth of extra storage. And really, less than that, because an 8 TB SSD would give you 9 TB of storage, and that's only 8.
Apple pricing is just plain nuts now. I mean, it was painfully high before, but even as a software engineer, I'm having trouble justifying the cost of staying on the Mac platform now, with a 25% increase in prices since 2020, and I think even higher increases for some configurations.
Comment Re:Needs an official Linux boot camp (Score 1) 59
Notarization is Apple's strict code signing process, which makes it hard for non paying and anonymous developers to distribute third party Mac software. Linux lets you run unsigned software without compromise.
Thanks for the definition.
So far, I've not run into a problem with this....
And with specific regard to my local AI and OpenClaw experiments and tools required for that....haven't run into a problem at all yet.
So, not a barrier of merit.
Comment Re:Needs an official Linux boot camp (Score 1) 59
Especially with AI and ARM64 server development. Having to go through brew, containers and Apple's notarization process makes MacOS not a serious platform compared to bare metal Linux. In a twist of fate it is MacOS that is not ready for the AI desktop. Asahi is stuck on M1 and M2 so can't help you with M6 Macs.
Err...actually, OSX, so far in my experience is quite adapted to local AI.
Brew? What's wrong with that...pretty much the equivalent of of apt-get on some Linux installs, or whatever package manager you use there...
Docker is easy to run on Mac...actually it seems to give a bit more isolation they way it works on Mac...but set up is a breeze and while containerization is not required to run AI or OpenClaw on a Mac, it IS a good idea for security reasons to do so....Mac or Linux!!
Not familiar with any 'notarization" on my Mac set up, please explain?
OH...and running stuff on ollama, you get to take advantage of of the MLX framework for running local AI models....really speeds things along....
So, not quite sure why you are trying to say Macs aren't good for AI work....they actually are quite good for it AND I guess a bit more plug and play to get things set up and running.
And with any platform the more secure you make it, well that adds complexity, but it's worth it....I'd not want to turn OpenClaw or the like free on any platform without guard rails....
Comment Re: Uhoh (Score 1) 130
"[Racism] is right twice per day" is the phrase that comes to mind.
Racism....where does that come into play with this?
I don't see anywhere where any specific race was targeted or any restrictions were based on skin color, creed or sex, etc.....it just says that H1B (which could be anyone in the world) would be more $$ to bring into the US.
You're really reaching on this one.
If I'm mistaken PLEASE cite and point out where this is meaded out by race in the exec order or rule....
Comment Re: Uhoh (Score 0) 130
The money is already earmarked to go to funding ICE and enforcement. Which, well, I'm not even sure how to word what that vibe is.
Hmm...how about:
Amazing!!
Fantastic!!
About fucking time...
Getting what I voted for...
Were you looking for something along those lines?
Comment Re:Slippery Slope (Score 1) 309
Border agents have been able to conduct searches of persons and their effects entering the country since the first Congress in 1789.
First, searches of their persons and effects does not mean reading and making a copy of their letters and books. It means looking in the trunk and verifying that it is just letters and books.
Second, there were no border agents in 1789. You could walk or swim into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico freely for (statistically) most our nation's history. The first border patrols began in the 1920s to restrict immigration from certain countries. There were laws in the late 1700s regarding import of *cargo*, and that was handled by the folks who ran each individual port, but again, that's not the same thing as searching a passenger's person and making copies of their letters. Those laws applied only to identifying goods that were likely intended for sale, for tax policy/import duty reasons.
This bastardization of border policy to include searching the contents of people's papers and devices is a late 1900s perversion of the Constitution.
So no, pretty much everything you said is wrong.
Comment Re:The gift of High Motivation. (Score 1) 58
But you simply can't rely on homework scores to be a proxy of learning or time spent studying anymore.
You never could. Parents do their kids' homework all the time, or siblings, or friends.
Homework used to be a measure for yourself to indicate whether or not you really understood the concepts being taught. Math is a prime example here. If you found your homework speed accelerating with confidence as you worked through problems correctly and accurately, it was a pretty good indicator of how you would perform on a test.**
It still is if you do it yourself and don't have ChatGPT do it for you. But it isn't a useful indication for parents or teachers, because the kids can just have ChatGPT do it for them, and moreover are encouraged to do so by the pressure to get good grades. By making the homework be graded only on adequate participation (which may be per-student) rather than on correctness, you shift the focus back to the homework being a way for students to get ready for the test and make it clear that having an AI do the work will prevent the teacher from knowing how well the student is doing, and will likely result in a lower grade on the test. Once the motivating factor of grades is eliminated and, in fact, reversed, they'll stop doing it, or will use it only to help them understand or to check their work, rather than using it as a crutch to actually do the work.
Ideally, teachers should give a large pile of optional homework.
For those students gifted with high motivation, they already recognize the value of optional homework that exists today. Any child gifted with high motivation wants to practice more, and is likely being raised by a parent who is more than capable of presenting those challenges. And does.
Any child gifted with high motivation and broad interests wants to practice stuff they already understand less so that they can do other things and learn other things. A child's time is a zero-sum game. The more time they spend doing things that are less useful, the less time they have for doing things that are more useful.
The ones who mindlessly work more problems because they are motivated to get good grades are the ones who aren't doing band, orchestra, chorus, or theater, who aren't going on field trips to learn about the world, who aren't getting the breadth of education that will prepare them for the real world, and will mostly end up in boring (but probably reasonably well-paying) jobs for the rest of their lives. They won't ever be the rockstar in their field, but they probably won't fail horribly. And I guess that's okay, but IMO it's not what we should try to inspire kids to become. The motivation should be to learn for learning's sake, and excess repetition is the opposite of that.
This is unfortunately no longer a valid measure because testing has become an exercise in psychological coddling. With time limits, bright lights, and the concept of failing, removed.
Meh. If that's your experience, then there's no hope for improving anything, because the kids who don't do well are going to pass anyway. This is how we end up with a bunch of graduates who can't actually do anything. I'm not saying you're wrong, but if you're right, then it's critical to fix that at the same time.
Comment Re: Get rid of homework (Score 1) 58
When I was in high school we got detention for not doing homework (Catholic school). I was a "smart" kid in honors classes, and at this time (late 90s early 2000s) Google was new as was SparkNotes and Wikipedia. I used them all. I plowed through homework just to get it done and avoid detention rather than actually caring about the material. I absolutely hated the strict and conservative environment of the school, so I refused to take notes in class (doodling instead) and almost never studied for tests. I'm probably in the top 1 percent of successful graduates of that school, and the most successful I'm aware of from the honors program in my graduating year. So yes absolutely, smart kids and rule-following academically hard working kids are not an overlapping group.
They're overlapping, but not the same group. Some smart kids are hard-working and eager to learn. Some are rule-following. Some are both. Some are neither. What I think you meant is that they are not dependent variables.
Comment Re:Get rid of homework (Score 1) 58
First, the smart kids who understand the material quickly will do just enough to make sure they understand it and then will stop wasting their time, but will still have feedback on the work that they did do.
I love that you didn't explain what the effect of this will be on the "not smart kids." Do you think they're going to hit the books and do a bunch of non-optional homework to learn the material? Have you met a single child?
The effect of this would be that the teacher would quickly intervene and tell the kid that they need to do more of the work, because they don't seem to have fully grasped the concepts. If the kids ignore this, then at the parent-teacher conference after the first six-weeks period, the teacher would encourage the parents to either make their kids do more work or put their kids in an after-school program that would do so.
And if that doesn't work, you can also make the participation points be contingent on whether they are grasping the concepts, where if it is clear that they're not getting it and aren't doing enough work to learn it, you tell them that they won't get participation points unless they do more of the problems.
Comment Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons (Score 1) 123
More like heâ(TM)s lazy and his talent was being at the right place at the right time
I'm thinking "talent" may be a strong word here....
I mean, the words "rap" and "music" are mutually exclusive terms after all, eh?
Comment Re:America's lack of nuance is pissing me off (Score 1) 108
That's not the problem. The problem is we already are in a scenario where we have two good jobs for every five people. A good job here is something that lets you afford a one-bedroom apartment by yourself in a city that consistently has employment.
Apparently you and those like you, ONLY consider a city to be the equivalent of of NYC....which is quite the outlier.
Most other cities across the US, with plenty of good jobs, allow you to afford MUCH better than a 1 room apartment.
Comment Re:Elsevier (Score 2) 21
Elsevier is being sued? The gatekeeper of knowledge from public institutions? Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of guys.
Nods. Sadly, it's probably not enough to bankrupt them even if this company wins, but it's a good start.
Comment Re:This isn't the EU. He's going to win. (Score 1) 309
But instead he intentionally took actions to destroy evidence, so none of that matters anymore
Actually he did NOT wipe the phone.
The officer that put a code in wiped the phone.
The officer was in no way obligated to put any code into the phone from any source....