It's weird people are shitting on a company for attempting to do cheap, fast body imaging. This is a holy grail. People pay lots of money out of pocket for Dexa Scans now and they're pretty meh on accuracy. We desperately need a cheap way of measuring bodyfat and muscle composition. If you can accurately measure these, fitness enthusiasts will pay a fortune out of pocket and many doctors will order this for a variety of conditions. If you can get these for $100 a piece...which it sounds reasonable given they ask you to stand in a ring in a pool and wait a minute....it will revolutionize medicine and fitness.

I am losing weight through diet and exercise. The scale is scientifically accurate, but when I lost 1.7lbs this week...was it fat? muscle? bone? Was it shit? (literally) piss? was I dehydrated because it was a warm day today and I enjoy my morning coffee? I don't know if that 1.7 lbs in this week's weigh in was me keeping muscle and losing fat or did I have to take a huge dump before last week's weigh in?

MANY MANY MANY would pay $100 to walk into an area in their gym and get measured very precisely as to their progress. That's just for deterministicly repeatable muscle/fat ratios.

Now if this thing is safe and can detect major medical issues? They've got a fucking goldmine. People will get these every week or 2 just to monitor their health? Uh oh...got a scary mass?....see your doctor and get a real medical test, like the MRI or CT scan or biopsy to take action...but you caught it nice an early.

If the hype is real, this could revolutionize health and medicine...detect diseases effortlessly and early....determine if your fitness routine is helping or hurting...oh you changed up your cardio to strength training ratios last week?...well, let's see if that helped....not to mention various medications for diabetes and weight loss...that a scan like this can measure efficacy for...or tracking cardiac blockage, etc, etc.

The premise is...what if detecting major diseases was as easy as detecting cavities?

Nice insults, bud. So your point is people are using AI, but you can't name a famous example of a household name company that is upending established non-tech markets through AI? "Household name" means it's known by ordinary people. Tinder is a household name. Cloudflare isn't, despite having a 10x valuation. However, it's safe to say few outside of IT or investors who target technology could explain what CloudFlare does. And you name Zeiss...an optics manufacturer who is arugably a household name for expensive lenses...although they largely failed in their original market and pivoted towards industrial products....Also ASLM???...who the fuck is that?...you mean ASML? Did you bother Googling?...

However, Zeiss and ASML are pick and shovel manufacturers. They're selling products to chip makers to pump into this circular economy.....no....ASML doesn't count (assuming that's who you meant), nor does nVidia. They're not disrupting markets, just selling chips and chip making equipment to support this bubble.

Every technology revolution we've had has been used to disrupt existing markets...not create them or just support people who enjoy playing with technology. The internet, after it's initial research days, was a place for nerds to have fun...it was a revolutionary technology once you could order books and games and pizzas off it. It killed Blockbuster. It killed Sam Goody and every major music chain. The majority of customers prefer to order online today, even for basics like toothpaste or fruit. However, the internet didn't just sell goods and services to internet fans...it disrupted real, established markets.

AI will be a serious technology revolution once it actually SUCCESSFULLY disrupts and existing market to become a household name. No, not some company we've never heard of that I have to google who "promises" they're using AI. Netflix didn't have to "promise" they were using the internet...Grindr/Tinder didn't have to "promise" they were leveraging mobile app technology...the results spoke for themselves. People saw it with their own eyes. All we have today is companies promising to investors that AI is making them more efficient...with no evidence...no reduction in cost...no tangible boost in service...nothing other than promises.

I use Claude daily...it's nice. Sometimes it's even helpful. I am glad I have it available, but my tickets don't get closed much faster...it's no revolution. At best, it's current impact is similar to the Spring Framework 20 years ago....helpful...but not enough that outsiders could notice.

It's foolish to think that AI won't someday bring about a revolution. I do believe I'll see it in my lifetime, but no...it hasn't happened yet and there's no sign it'll happen within a year. The shit has been out for 4 years now...If it was going to set the world on fire, we'd be smelling the smoke already...not just hearing promises from tech vendors that someday this will pay off!

Like the article said...most of us who actually professionally use these AI tools are unsure if there's really a tangible benefit. I think there's some...but not enough you'd know from actual output...other than it gets shittier the more you vibe-code.

Citation? Who is a household name leveraging AI to upend an established market...who isn't merely just reselling AI, like Claude/Cursor/etc. Has anyone disrupted a non-pure-technology business? entertainment? logistics? retail? transportation? dating?

Who is the grindr/tinder/uber/salesforce/netflix/amazon of the AI age?

All I know of are pick and shovel vendors. People selling AI to you so you can figure out how to make money with them.

There are only bad options and worse options, depending on your world view. If you're an arrogant asshole with a cushy life, then small population growth is a terrible idea because of climate change or whatever bullshit ideology you embrace without thinking of the consequences. Reduced population means your economy either finds a way to mass murder the elderly or the functioning economy can barely function with all the load caring for the elders. If you're rich and comfortable and far removed, this seems like a great option: reduce climate change by reducing the population...and completely ignoring the impact to the people running things day to day.

What rich assholes fail to see is that it's very demoralizing and demotivating to work your ass off for a lower middle class existence. Many of us go to college, get good jobs, make all the right decisions, but still can't feed our kids as well as we were fed as children. When I was a kid, beef was a staple....now it's a rare treat because it's so expensive. It was like this with eggs for many years recently. I bring in a lot of money...and I spend very little....only to see very low growth in savings because costs have risen so much, especially in the Trump years. I realize the Bush/Clinton/Obama years were economic anomalies...but I thought with the income I have today, I'd be living a luxurious life...but with 2 kids, we're living the same lower middle class existence my parents provided for us...and they had more kids. So limiting taxpapers means we're paying even more in taxes for barely enough to live off while our elders enjoy an earlier retirement age than we could have dreamed of and keep voting for entitlement increases for themselves while ensuring their assets don't get taxed the way my income does. This leads to quite a bit of resentment and negative energy that tends to support politicians that flirt with fascism...or openly embrace it as MAGA seems to today.

If you're less concerned with climate change, we can increase the population via immigration as well as modest incentives so that having children is less economically impactful. History has shown, you can't make people become new parents with incentives, but you can bribe someone to have a 3rd kid or more...unfortunately, that's EXPENSIVE. People with many kids are usually not swimming in money. You can fix this with universal childcare, like we have with education...but....then you deal with the racists complaining that immigrants are moving there for subsidized childcare. From a climate perspective, those people would be consuming resources whether they were in their home country or not. However, adding productive workers reduces some of the pressure on those of us actually keeping the world running.

Unfortunately, there's no simple answer. The best I can see is to try to keep things just under replacement level. It's a burden on the people making the world work, but at least it means resource utilization is slowing. I think most don't appreciate how important it is to keep the economy running. It's not just about making the rich richer...it's about producing goods and services needed at prices people can afford. Once your economy breaks down, food and absolutely necessary goods become scarcer. It's not just about ensuring rich kids have the latest iPhones, but that all households can have a working refrigerator and that if one fails, replacing it is not a massive life-changing economic burden.

Of your options, if #1 was the correct answer, we'd see a gap between those who have experience and mastery and those who don't. Sure...some suck at AI...but not everyone would...unless it was the AI that sucked. Like all tools/frameworks...if they're valuable, those who embrace it well reap the benefits, outpacing those who don't. A great example was cloud or big data. Startups came out of nowhere to overtake established players by leveraging these technologies.

To date, there's no AI success story, outside of pick and shovel vendors. No startup has leveraged AI to disrupt an existing market and become a household name. Netflix famously leveraged the internet to disrupt Blockbuster's stranglehold on home movies....first with DVD by mail and then with streaming. Salesforce, love them or hate them, disrupted many established players.

If AI ACTUALLY improved productivity, smaller companies would come out of nowhere and eat the lunch of more established players by out-innovating them. Some obvious examples are entertainment. Some game studio from some surprising location would come out with AMAZING AAA games at twice the speed and half the cost. Various business platforms would take on the many fat targets: Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, etc...leveraging AI to out-innovate larger competitors.

You and I may suck at AI and improve with experience...but someone out there is waaaay ahead of us....waaaay more gifted and would theoretically be leveraging AI to build massive projects with tiny teams. But for now, the only people making money are selling tools or computer chips or building data centers for this circular AI economic bubble.

MacOS has a ton of tiny widgets...good luck pressing the red vs yellow button in the upper left corner reliably....same thing with the extensive use of right click. The desktop OS is heavily optimized for precise pointers. A tablet OS is designed for fat sausage fingers and fudging. MacOS is great for creation: IDEs, Office software, writing, creative arts. IPadOS is a consumption-optimized platform that "can" do things like compose e-mails or write code, but it's just not as good. It might be Good Enough for your needs, but even something like Lightroom or Photomator...with a tablet, they have to use huge widgets spread apart. With a desktop OS, you can cram the controls in nice and tighly so you have more monitor real estate to look at the images.

Phones, Tablets, and Computers are distinct devices..akin to motorcycles, passenger sedans, and pickup trucks. Each is optimized for a specific subset of use cases. Yes, you can haul lumber in a prius...I have many times...and it suuucks...it's much better to haul large goods in a van or truck. It's much nicer to do a family road trip on in a minivan than a harley or F150. It's much nicer to navigate small streets on a Harley than a cargo van. No one wants a prius optimized to haul lumber. They want it to be a family car.

I can't think of a single good reason to make a laptop act like a tablet. I know many people with windows touchscreen laptops. I've NEVER seen any good use case for them. In fact, I've never actually seen someone use the touchscreen on theirs. The pointer is just so much better and more convenient...and then your screen is cleaner and your flow is not interrupted.

Apple says there are very significant performance boosts. I wonder...did they just finally prioritize performance on their roadmap (the performance has been going SEVERELY downhill on my macbook each year)? Were they able to get performance gains by dropping Intel support? Was it something else?...maybe just getting better at AI tooling?...I have been saying all along that AI will no longer be a bullshit technology when all the major companies use the AI tools to find performance efficiencies...and suddenly everyone will be flooding /. and other outlets with announcements of faster tools and software that ship with smaller runtimes, etc.

Typical nostalgia story. You must have forgotten how many repairs were made when you were a kid. My 15 year old prius has never failed once. I have only taken it in for routine maintenance: oil changes, AC recharging, bulbs replaced, battery changed every few years. It's never broken down or failed to start or made a funny noise and I live in a frozen hellhole. When I was a kid, this level of reliability was UNHEARD of. My parent's Chevy's were being repaired constantly. We knew the local auto mechanic well. I remember being stranded on the side of the road and getting a ride from a stranger to a pay phone to have our 5yo car towed. I was probably 8 and the lady driving had a bag of sour cream and onion chips open she was eating and that was my first time eating one (and I didn't like it, but was so glad she gave me a snack). It was kinda scary being stuck and seeing my dad stressed out in the days before cellphones on a rural road.

Some innovations are important and useful, some aren't. John Deere has been ABUSING their customers for a long time. This is not about technology, but about John Deere. Those ancient cars were unreliable AF. The computers help a lot. My POS GE washing machine? Failed pretty quickly. My expensive LG machine with computers?...identified that a bird set a nest in our 2nd floor vent and shut itself down automatically and messaged me to contact a service pro. When done right, these technologies are amazing and give new capabilities. Others are solutions looking for a problem.

Everyone wants repairability. But for example, in computers, I don't miss having separate sound cards. Embedded sound cards work just as good these days and are far cheaper. It's one less thing for me to worry about. However, I do prefer user-replaceable batteries in everything. So technology is very mixed and the answer is refinement, not regression. We obviously want useful and helpful technology without being financially raped by grifters and horrible companies like John Deere or HP or many others who abuse their customers.

If you ever convince a woman to reproduce with you, you will see why this is so huge. I used to have patience for science experiments and computing projects, but now I just don't have time...I need shit to work. Apple supports their devices better than all the PC vendors and the Apple ecosystem is both amazing and popular. I converted a few years ago and love how seamless apps are between tablet, computer, and phone. Moving from Lightroom to Photomator was a godsend. If you embrace it, the ecosystem simplifies your life. With a mac, your family protection/sharing settings transfer across devices. Life is honestly a LOT easier in a single ecosystem. We tried Windows laptops and chromebooks for the kids and it's a lot of extra work and duplication.

Your daughter won't care about specs. She wants simplicity and something cute. Half the boys on the planet don't care about spec, either. If you're a PC gamer?...well...what are you doing with a laptop? Why not a desktop with a nice graphics card? Also, most kids don't like PCs. They like the consoles or an iPad better.

My wife and I both own Macbook pros and enjoy them. In the past, we had to save our computers and hand them down to the kids. it works...but the battery sucks...the kids abuse the devices, so when it breaks, we have to buy a more expensive one...things start breaking with age, etc.

With the Neo as an option, they can use our apps, use our settings, and we can buy them their own shiny new device with a new battery that is fairly kid friendly. They stay off our more expensive devices and if it breaks? $600 isn't THAT painful...windows laptops are priced similarly and have horrible build quality and are mostly unsupported garbage. Try replacing the keyboard on a budget laptop...you MIGHT be able to find the parts...the Apple?...you definitely will. Weird driver error code?...with the Macbook Neo, you will find tons of support articles...not so much from a budget Acer or even Dell (my last dell laptop was a huge mistake).

People have wanted this for a very long time and frankly it was stupid of them to hold off on this. A smart company offers budget offerings AND luxury ones for families. We bought windows laptops and chromebooks out of necessity in the past. Now we don't have to deal with that shit. When the old ones die, my kids are getting neos. They can buy the cool shells and decals and protectors and whatever to make it their own. It will work and be less of a headache...and honestly, not even more expensive than a standard windows laptop from Best Buy these days. Apple is ensuring I forget how to use Windows and never touch it again. TBH, every time I go onto our gaming pc and have to do anything with it, I forget how bad the OS has become. I don't miss it.

No, it's not a re-invention. It's a nice upgrade, based on specs alone, but will likely be priced at conventional levels. It honestly just looks like you're catching up to Apple Silicon....which is a very good thing...but no, having a decent GPU at a lower price doesn't fit the definition of "re-invention."...nor revolution...nor do I see any way this will change personal computing. Any updates to how we use computers would have happened regardless. Unless they sell these for less than $100 or some insane price drop, no...this is a modest upgrade for Windows users. If these actually ship in fall...well...computing will be EXACTLY THE SAME a year later. No revolution...No "reinvention"...just an actual spec upgrade for a change, which we haven't even been seeing in chips in the last few years, but used to be the norm, just 10 years ago.

AI contributions are garbage. AI is a powerful tool, but everything I've seen Claude write as new code in Java is SHIT. I tell it to write unit tests for working code?...verbose garbage...logic errors, insultingly stupid code, like testing getters and setters. I finished all my tasks early last week, so was assigned to help another team who had been struggling. I had to alter some working code with an open source big data platform I've never used. The code was very low quality, the comments were complex and baffling and ultimately wrong. It worked, from what I can tell (I had Claude write it because I don't have a replica of the customer data to test on).

However, I am not proud of the code it generated. I wasn't given enough time to learn the new API myself, so I relied on Claude. It took forever and was expensive...had I know what I was doing, I know I could have done it in 15 min. Fortunately that team had 2 AI advocates...those guys who think AI is a religion...all hail the AI...every conversation is about how awesome it is. Their brains are so atrophied and rotted from AI (one used to be a REALLY good programmer, I've worked with him for 10 years), they just approved my PR because it looks like the shit they keep submitting and I flag for being garbage.

However, that example illustrates the danger. If you know what you're doing and think an LLM will help? It's great. If you're not an expert at the technology, you should be forbidden from making any contributions...even if AI does all the heavy lifting. As many have said, it usually look pretty good. Those verbose comments resemble the writing style and documentation made by a competent professional. The code is structured without the usual tells of a clueless moron. It is pattern matching from very good programmers, but it really has no clue what it's doing.

The poor often have nicer devices than the middle class. If there's no hope for the future, why not? $900 is within most credit card limits. However, you knew this and wanted to just be an asshole. People who have hope for the future ensure they pay their bills. If you can't make ends meet and will get evicted either way, why scrimp and save? Maybe that's your choice?...but most poor I know have nicer shoes than me, nicer cars, spend more on booze and drugs and even food. Why?...not because I'm better, but because I have hope and my savings lead to a higher number in my investment account. The Amazon driver that delivered my dog leash last night?...probably not the case.

This is irrelevant to the economy and just a hopeless and shitty indicator of how devastating the AI bubble is. While you seem to scorn at a "gaming device," it's a computer.

Computers are important and for the first time in history, increasing in cost per capability. Yeah, The cheapest laptop I could buy in 1999 was $2000...more expensive that Apple's cheapest MacBook Pro. Sure, the iPhone 17 is more expensive than the iPhone 1, but it's has very tangibly improved. Until now, each cost increase was accompanied by a spec upgrade, often significant one. Now we're just paying more for old technology to keep this AI bubble financial scam running.

This is horribly depressing and has been going on for far too long and there's no end in sight. I've been holding off on upgrading or replacing multiple devices among my family to wait out this catastrophe...and even if the bubble crashes tomorrow, it'll take months to reach all the suppliers for sophisticated devices like a steamdeck. I wanted a steambox, but it probably won't be a low enough price for me to make a whim purchase...and I don't want it enough to suffer.

AI advocates want to believe in their vision of the future and won't let reality get in the way. That's the massive problem here. Visionaries are picturing a future based on science fiction notions of AI, not what LLMs can actually do. AI is useful and interesting, but the capabilities are greatly overstated...both by the pick and shovel vendors, but their best buddies who are captains of industry and want to believe. They want to achieve new levels of productivity with lower numbers of people...rather than hope for the best, but carefully evaluate if it's real...many have chosen to trust in their vision and ignore all evidence that doesn't support their new religion. We've seen it before in smaller ways...just nothing this bad or excessive.

This reminds me Free-PC.com. Their pitch was that they'll give you a free computer...you watch ads. Their vision was to give you something you really want and hope that somehow if you can't afford your own computer, you'll be a valuable enough target for advertisers to not only subsidize the cost of a desktop computer, but to make a profit. It was a cool idea...but the math never supported it. Also, all that happened was that half of them were grabbed by nerds who used them as a second computer. I had lots of buddies who did that. The company went out of business and didn't want to pay for free shipping, so now they have a dedicated server from their home projects. Like these CEOs...it was a cool vision, but impractical....don't let reality get in the way of that!!!

If you dream it and believe in it hard enough, it has to come true, right?...you're a smart Silicon Valley executive. No reality can get in the way of your massive intelligence...only a lack of faith, right???

We've had code-generation technology for decades. Are you saying no one can read HTML because we have tools for that as well?

Your theory is only valid if they want to do last year's output and 1/20th of the cost. In nearly all historical examples of productivity gains, unless they were hiring large masses of the mindless, the productivity gains were used increase output more than cut costs. As many have pointed out, this is AI-washing. They were already going to lay off these employees.

Why would Oracle lay everyone off vs use these tools to overwhelm and crush all their competitors? Is there really no room to expand? No new projects to try? Are all these tech companies happy with last year's revenue and have they saturated their markets? Their investors are HAPPY with market stagnation at lower costs? NO!!!! That's not how publicly traded companies work. They want growth growth growth until there is no more to be had.

AI is a complex topic. It definitely boosts some productivity, but far less than advertised. It will cause job loss, but far less than feared. Most of the hype is bullshit, but there's real substance as well. Some of the layoffs were AI related...but most were just CEOs using it as an excuse to hide economic headwinds and their mistakes.