Dear journalists/others: for the love of all that is good, please for f's sake stop calling these people "artists". It reinforces the lie they tell themselves.
They are nothing of the sort.
They are, at most, and even this is overly generous, someone commissioning a "fake artist" (AI) to make something for them
I always wondered why there was an immediate rush to call them AI artists despite the first and predominant use being writing. Even a prompt is just writing text. Even with all the fancy visual tools, you still need to write a prompt somewhere along the lines.
Yet “AI writers” isn’t really a thing journalists/bloggers refer to them as. It’s interesting from the outside, as neither a writer or an artist.
I'm a Kagi user myself but I'm not going to extrapolate that to thinking that because I use something that it points to the downfall of another product's dominance.
Just because a few techy or aware people use Kagi (or another alternative), is still a drop in the bucket of overall search engine choice
Google search is still widely dominant, as much as we might not want it to be.
Same for me. Applies to any caffeine intake, really. I usually taper down to lower amounts slowly to avoid withdrawal symptoms then ramp back up. I can really feel the effects after I'm on no/low caffeine for a short period- however, for daily intake- I think if you fluctuate intake amounts enough between days that could help from a maintenance perspective and is realistically what I do most of the time.
This is what I use most often these days for loading any system with a Linux install (or to test drive distros it's an awesome tool).
I have found some hardware seems to have weird issues with drives of a certain size (I tried using a 256GB external SSD and have encountered a laptop that will not boot from it, and will only boot from USB storage if it's like 32GB or lower or something weird like that). But that appears to be a particular quirk of that laptop and nothing to do with Ventoy in particular.
While I'm a full-on ad-blocker user and will almost never disable an ad-blocker to use or support any website, I also think it's fine if a service wants to block my access for using one.
I pay for YT Premium because right now it's worth it- it and Twitch (I use Turbo) are both essentially my only video entertainment (instead of paying far more for cable or something- I don't watch regular TV shows or movies anyway).
I would rather a service cease to exist, require a subscription, than view ads. My attention is not for sale to the lowest bidder.
Yes, I understand that some of what survives on the web today is because it has been ad supported- and that it's one way we have democratized / made content available to the masses, including those that can't afford to pay- I just think we'd find another way if ads went away and it's sad that advertising ever was allowed to have the foothold it has today and become the industry it is. Its very existence is repugnant.
I subscribed to Nebula and honestly there hasn't been any content there that has ever kept me coming back. Been subscribed for a year and all the content I want is still only on YouTube.
They're going to have to screw over creators bad enough for creators to move elsewhere before there's any remotely significant change in critical mass
Why would you want RAM to swap to fast SSDs when you can avoid it with more RAM in the first place, though? Sure it's not a molasses-slow spinning HDD..... but SSDs are still far slower than RAM, and having swap hit the SSDs means unnecessary writes/wear... especially on systems where the SSDs can't even be replaced
I think whether or not people always encounter it "feeling slow" is a different concern as to whether or not 8GB of RAM should ever even be offered by Apple on a system that will for sure eventually swap to disk for users. Adding Apple's huge margins on RAM upgrades on top of this just makes it even more disgusting... they should start their models at a higher baseline- it costs them next to nothing (8GB RAM vs 16GB RAM is not a cost-to-Apple issue, it's an extremely cheap component), but then of course they can't squeeze customers for ludicrous amounts of upsell margins (their cost-to-consumer RAM upgrade margins are absolutely appalling)
Selling suboptimal hardware configurations might be a good business decision but I wish our standards weren't so low for companies, especially ones selling $1600 machines with 2013-amounts of RAM in them
I don’t really care if it swaps to disk if there’s no noticeable slowdown. I understand that some people just take it as axiomatic that 8GB isn’t enough, but I think it makes more sense to look empirically at whether the majority of users would notice a significant improvement for their workloads. Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model? That’s money Apple can spend on more important features of the base laptop (e.g high quality display, speakers, trackpad - all the stuff that 90% of plasticy Wintel machines at the same price point fail on).
I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping. It’s a natural consequence of virtual memory and is pretty much required for optimal exploitation of available RAM. Let apps allocate as much RAM as they’d ideally like to have, and then leave it to the OS to keep the most frequently used pages in physical RAM.
> Some users do need 16GB (or more), but I suspect they’re a fairly small minority. So why put it in the base model?
Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too?
More RAM in the base-model Pro signals that it is a higher-end product. It raises the bar for the entire product category and makes it easier to not depreciate an entire year's worth of functional computers (you know how Apple is). It decreases the write pressure on the soldered SSD, and ensures that future MacOS releases, AI features and games don't get bottlenecked by a $15 component. It reduces the friction when casual users want to use their current Mac for more demanding workloads. It future-proofs against needing a newer machine and increases the value of said laptop secondhand.
In every way, the old Macbook Pro 14" pricing model was a more sustainable, attractive and user-friendly. This spec drop is a sad excuse to direct would-be 13" owners to a more expensive alternative.
> I’m puzzled by the idea that there’s something inherently bad about swapping.
If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.
>Most users don't need 3 whole Thunderbolt ports either, why put that on there too?
At a guess, because varying the number of physical ports between models complicates production more than varying which RAM chips are soldered to the board. (Apple has generally shunned having physically identical USB-C ports with differing capabilities.)
>If you're doing it to non-replaceable flash storage, then yeah there is something inherently wrong about relying on swap.
All modern multitasking desktop OSes rely on swap and have since the mid 90s.
SSD lifetime concerns are way overblown in my opinion. The first MacBooks with soldered SSDs came out in 2016. I'm sure there are individual instances of SSDs failing, but the much-heralded SSD lifetime apocalypse seems not to have materialised.
What you really want with an SSD isn't the theoretical highly-conservative estimate of its lifetime write limit, but the probability that it is going to be the thing that fails on your laptop after n years, in comparison to all the other things that could fail. My guess is that by the time the SSD has a significant probability of failing (which is going to take many years, even with heavy usage), then many other components are going to have a higher probability of failing.
Then you can buy a MacBook or MacBook Air. The pro line is meant for people doing more than browsing and zoom calls. The probability that a person buying a n 8Gb pro will find it limited is very high. I can’t see how Apple would be in the right here.
>The probability that a person buying a n 8Gb pro will find it limited is very high.
Perhaps, but I would like to see evidence for this based on actual tests. Most of the commentary here just takes it as axiomatic that 8GB won't be enough and isn't based on actual comparisons of the 8GB and 16GB models.
My employer provided 8GB mbp has a hard time running some nodejs container workloads. The build step is particularly resource intensive to the point it slows down the whole system. So if you're developing with auto reload enabled, you're in for a hard time. So my solution is to use a separate intel server I have around, with VS Code remote extension. So now I'm tied to that server and my MBP is reduced to being an expensive terminal. If I travel, I can't work without a stable connection to that server. But that was exactly why MBP exists, to allow professionals to do their work. Had I not had the server, that'd be impossible.
Seems like you’re putting a lot of effort in stretching the definition of pro to defend Apple. I have a personal 16GB mbp, they both struggle. Still don’t see your point.
I don't have a definition of 'pro', and my point is not based on any assumptions about what the word means. I don't care how the Apple marketing department decides to name their laptops, and I can't imagine why anyone else would either.
Fully agree. For a long time I was heavily biased against it because of the versions of it I saw, growing up in a conservative religious family and seeing other far more conservative religious families in our church/etc do a very extreme/strict/sheltering form of it- and then becoming non-religious, kept that bias.
But over time I've come to realize that is only one very specific form of 'homeschooling' that is nothing like other forms
I've had good experience with Porkbun. I like it more than Hover, which I had previously. But both of these have been far better than most of the "big" alternatives.
They are nothing of the sort.
They are, at most, and even this is overly generous, someone commissioning a "fake artist" (AI) to make something for them