I'm probably going to go for the 48GB/1TB as far as storage.
I tend to try and buy a laptop that I'll use for several years, this seems like my best bet right now. It will be replacing a 9 year old Dell Precision laptop that I've been using daily since it was new.
Curious what Mac you're using? I'm getting a new personal laptop somewhat soon, and the M5 chips look really nice. How much RAM do you have? I've currently got an M1 mini with 8GB of RAM that works pretty well but it tends to start bogging down when using containers and having a bunch of youtube tabs open. I'm not sure how much of the Apple Tax on memory I need/want to spend.
Yeah I used to have the MSDN subscription where you'd get binders full of CDs every quarter.
Visual Studio Community is free though for non-commercial use, and commercial use as long as you're under a certain annual revenue (Something like $1.5 million I think?). I'm sure the volume licensing that most shops use is far less than $500/month.
VS26 is surprisingly good. There is a ton of AI crap in it, but you can completely turn it all off. VS26 runs noticeably better on my machine than VS22 did, I've been using the preview version for a while now without issue in my day job. Like I mentioned though, we're migrating away from Windows altogether now that
It's different now though. The alternating good/bad Windows releases used to be the core of the system was good or bad. Windows 11 is pretty good though. What's made it bad is shitty choices that Microsoft is making trying to squeeze money out of users. Ideas like their Recall AI crap they keep rolling out. Overwriting system settings with every update. Why do I have ads on my "Professional" edition for xbox crap? Why in the ever loving fuck does the built-in solitaire game now require a recurring subscription if I don't want to watch ads between games? I don't want to use OneDrive or Edge, stop prompting me about them.
And yeah, there's plenty of easy workarounds to almost all of these issues, but the point is that they keep making these decisions and pushing them on users. The Windows system itself isn't horrible these days, it's the management decisions that are killing it. A new version of Windows won't fix that.
One of the old school Windows developers posted a pretty good video on this the other day. He makes some good points, and honestly if they followed his ideas, Windows would be much better for developers and power users. But I don't see them doing that.
Not a fan of Microsoft, but Visual Studio has made a ton of improvements over the past few years, including this release.
Unfortunately they've fucked Windows so badly recently, and JetBrains has made their IDE free for non-commercial use (And far cheaper for commercial licenses than MSDN) that myself and a ton of other
I loved my mini, I just wish it wasn't made with the crappier low-end components. I'd guess that's part of why the sales were so low, people wanted a small powerful phone, not a small gimped one. A Mini Pro would have been amazing. I finally upgraded my 12 mini to a 16 Pro, the phone is too damn big to comfortably hold and use one handed.
I've been saying this for a while as well. My spotify playlist has roughly 2,000 songs in it, but it continually plays the same 100 or so over and over. It's obviously not anything remotely close to a true random shuffle, and it's obvious that they've put work into making it not truly random.
The only thing I can think of is the royalties are cheaper for 2 plays of the same song than two plays of two unique songs.
And in researching alternate platforms, it seems that they all do this, making this an industry-wide issue, which screams that it's some BS licensing thing shitting up the experience for the end users.
The day will come that an AI will learn something that we did not deliberately teach it. When an AI is able to improve its own code, it won't be bound by the limitations of its human creator. It's only a question of when.
LK
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
Don't agree at all and I think that's a morally dangerous approach. We're looking for a scientific definition of "desire" and "want". That's almost certainly a part of "conscious" and "self aware". Philosophy can help, but in the end, to know whether you are right or not you need the experimental results.
Experiments can be crafted in such a way as to exclude certain human beings from consciousness.
One day, it's extremely likely that a machine will say to us "I am alive. I am awake. I want..." and whether or not it's true is going to be increasingly hard to determine.
LK
Only if we define consciousness to be a state of awareness only attainable by human beings.
An LLM can't suddenly decide to do something else which isn't programmed into it.
Can we?
It's only a matter of time until an AI can learn to do something it wasn't programmed by us to do.
Can a non-biological entity feel desire? Can it want to grow and become something more than what it is? I think that's a philosophical question and not a technological one.
LK
Those things are heavy.
The goalposts? Or Americans?
The days of going to Crutchfield and getting a nice new radio for the car are long gone, unfortunately.
The real question is why does an infotainment system update brick the entire car? More and more manufacturers are tying a whole bunch of shit into the radio, that should never have been part of the radio. This shouldn't even be possible.
If I'd known computer science was going to be like this, I'd never have given up being a rock 'n' roll star. -- G. Hirst
