I literally saw the smugness and confidence get wiped off their faces in real time. They thought they were going to win straight up in the 2nd round of the election, and by the end of it they looked like they were attending a funeral
Touché. Looks like both our sides got hit with the same issue: smug overconfidence before a "guaranteed" win. Your own satisfaction is earned.
This doesn't undo the earlier win though. It's the supreme court I care about, not Lula. If the senate gets the supreme court impeachments out, it's still an unprecedented win in my book. There's a chance we can both win here.
Medieval German didn't have fixed rules for writing. The same word was written in different ways on the same page, so many words inherited from the Middle Ages cannot be taken literally under modern writing rules.
>> German didn't have fixed rules for writing. The same word was written in different ways on the same page
One of the most common words from Willaim Clark's journals (of the Lewis and Clark expedition of 1804) was "mosquito" and he used over a dozen different spellings. Spellings were never really standardized .. until the internet giving us the ability to critique every little detail of each other's writings.
Which is really curious. Shortly after the printing press was invented, grammar books were one of the most popular genres as people learned to read but it took centuries more for languages to get standardized and nearly four hundred years for dictionaries to appear.
Dictionaries, in one form or another, are far older than the 16th century, far older than printing press. Word lists, particularly those translating words from one language to another, have been around for thousands of years. Arabic dictionaries exist from the 8th century. And there were catholic/latin dictionaries (alphabetical word lists) in the 13th century.
The race to make laptops thinner is pointless. I wish I could buy a thicker laptop that is more robust, repairable, expandable, and has better cooling, with the extra space filled with batteries.
Perhaps for you, but I very much care about my laptop's size and especially it's weight, as I carry it around on a daily basis.
Repairing or upgrading it aren't really of interest to me, as I wouldn't be able to aquire the parts where I typically live anyway. And performance and cooling have already been more than good enough for me in most laptops for the last decade.
I have lots of family and friends who bring me their broken "thin laptops." Their thinness makes them super fragile, and they break all the time. They're also getting harder to repair as assembly becomes more convoluted each year. Even basic maintenance, like cleaning the fans, requires increasingly super difficult disassembly.
The latest models require repeatedly disassembling the sandwich from both sides. You have to remove the keyboard to access a screw, open the bottom, remove another screw to lift the top, then go back and forth between both sides just to reach a fan that frequently gets clogged with dust and needs frequent, regular cleaning.
Even worse, the unavoidable cleaning voids the warranty.
I don't think most people do maintenance on their laptops at all, which is probably why they usually end up with that one friend/family member who does.
Laptop manufacturers would like to have you think cleaning them or removing a "warranty void if removed" sticker over a screw actually voids the warranty but it usually doesn't actually.
Most people do repairs all the time but that doesn’t mean it has to be ib their garage with their own tools and bare hands. Point is getting it repaired
Easily
Affordably
Anywhere (almost anywhere)
In other words: not having to face something like this: “ah, so your A and G key don’t work? Lovely. Let’s look. Got it! The chassis needs changing and motherboard which is soldered into it. Good news, we can let you reuse the battery” and all that a bright grin that puts my house’s brightest LED to utter shame.
I just had a MacBook fixed. The hinge area had accumulated crunchy food debris, and it ended up busting the hinge angle sensor. But this sensor is paired with the top case, so the top case had to get replaced too, so the entire bill came to close to one thousand.
So.. can someone tell me again why a humble hinge angle sensor is paired with an entire hideously expensive top case assembly ?
The post you replied to literally doesn't care about upgrades.
More enforcement also doesn't matter if its what you need to get specifically _what was asked for_, which is a thinner device in this case.
I also wouldn't like an X60 if it meant I have to leave things out of my bag.
I think this opinion is pretty out of touch, I can't think of a single family member who would say that upgrading RAM is important to them, I doubt most would be able to explain what RAM even is.
What is the profit for a manufacturer if you buy one laptop and use it for 10 years straight instead of buying a new one every 3 years?
Also they not only solder DRAM, now they solder keyboards so that you cannot replace it easily. My garbage keyboard broke after just 2 years of using and I had to solder ~100 plastic pins to replace it (and the replacement keyboard turned out to be not of a great quality).
Until very recently, the low power version of RAM had to be soldered to the motherboard.
If you want the battery life improvements, bear in mind that there is a hard limit on how large a battery you are allowed to fly with, so low power components are important.
I find it difficult to believe that any touch typist favors a thinner laptop, since their keyboards are inevitably worse to type on due to the reduced key travel. Typing on a Macbook Pro keyboard reminds me of this old toy:
I care more about weight and these things aren’t really light anyway. Also people, imho, unnecessarily obsessed about thinness — because the difference is not 0.5 inch vs 2.5 inch, it’s something that no self-respecting laptop bah will register the difference in any meaningful way, unless someone likes to stuff their 13-16 inch laptops in the jeans pockets :)
I wish that my MBP14 was as thin as my partner’s MBA13.
Not to mention how often I long for my MBA11 with the tapered body which almost made it feel like it was floating in my lap when working from the couch.
Framework does exactly what the GP claims to want.
Unfortunately, not many people making those claims _actually_ want them by revealed preferences. They overwhelmingly want the lower price laptops with similar performance specs.
Or… there’s a level of value that people will assign to the repairability offered by Framework, but the current cost is too high?
I like and support what Framework offers. But when I last bought a laptop (a couple of years ago now) the FW13 was almost double the price of a similarly-specc’d and thinner/lighter Asus. (From €1000 to ~€18-1900).
I’d probably pay a ~40% premium for FW, all else being equal, but 80-90% is just too much: it just doesn’t make sense to whatever value-assessment algorithms I’ve developed over time.
But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).
Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
I personally do think they're doing a good job of course, but i do also wonder the long term viability because their customers are so niche.
> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
If Framework makes the same margin as other manufacturers its viable. If they get more sales than they otherwise would because people want to buy something that will last it is better business sense than making something just like everyone else. its their USP.
Framework would have higher fixed cost compared to the incumbent manufacturers, if their number of customers are smaller. Therefore, to even get the same fixed margin, they'd have to charge a higher price (not to mention the same margin is unlikely to sustain them unlike the other manufacturers).
But with the current increase in prices of hardware, i expect people to start thinking about repairability and upgradeability, which would increase the total size of potential customer base.
Firstly, unless the manufacture themselves then the difference in fixed cost may not be significant. Its very unlikely that they are high enough by enough to require charging double. Most of the costs of manufacturing something like this will be variable cost.
This is also an entirely different issue from the lifetime value of a customer.
Depends on the margin on upgrade components. There may be a point that’s high enough for profit but still cheaper for the consumer than a new laptop of comparable specs.
> But a 40% premium is not enough to sustain framework imho. The business model of framework is that you don't buy a new laptop, but just upgrade. Therefore, the lifetime value of one customer on framework is less than that of an Asus buyer (who would have to buy a new laptop every new CPU generation or when batteries die, which is probably at most 5 years).
> Therefore, framework has to charge a lot more per customer to make the business make sense. 2x premium is not unreasonable under this sort of assumption.
If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective, but I'm more in the MBAs-are-ruining-the-world camp, and I hate it.
A few points:
- I suspect that private buyers of laptops rarely have strong loyalty to a single brand, so Asus et al can't assume a long chain of purchases over time - they have to continue to compete on price and specs. Framework can probably assume stronger brand loyalty than every other manufacturer out there, based on a) if you've paid their hefty premium, you're really into what they're offering, and b) you've paid the high price of entry for the promise of lower-cost upgrades down the line, which you can only get from Framework. So Framework can probably assume a longer guaranteed income from each customer than any other manufacturer, even if the actual value decreases over time (due to lower cost of upgrades vs. full systems). However, if the upgrades are profitable as individual items, they still win.
- I'd prefer to see Framework sell computers and components at the lowest possible price they can while still being a viable business, with the margin of those items each justifying their existence individually. I appreciate that their economies of scale are different to larger manufacturers and their designs may be more expensive to deliver - this would be covered by a (modest) premium.
- Ultimately, I'd characterise the business model you described as "we'll f*k you on entry, and you might claw back some value over time". I'd rather aim for "we'll sell you a good product for a reasonable price today, and then delight you with the bonus of upgradability later on".
- I wonder whether their issue might actually be scale of manufacturing: that they can't deliver enough systems quickly/reliably enough to compete for a broader market (which would require lower margins to attract more price-sensitive customers) thereby driving them to target a more limited market of nerds who love the repairability concept, and also price higher per system to make the numbers work?
> If this is their model, maybe it makes sense from an MBA perspective
It does not. An MBA would hopefully teach someone to understand it gives Framework a USP and they only need the same margins as anyone else.
> A few points
Of those the first and last are the sort of things an MBA should teach someone to think about. The second is much the same and part wanting an efficient market (i.e. what free market capitalism is supposed to deliver). the third is entirely right.
Speaking as someone who did buy a framework as my primary computer (and has been happy with it), my hesitation had much more to do with uncertainty about the execution than with price, which is pretty competitive when you diy. Especially because for the value proposition to pay off, the company/ecosystem has to survive for several years at least and continue making compatible product in the categories I would want. It's a big investment for most people and it's not surprising most go with a safe/known option.
My memory is more like 20% premium for the practical options that I could find on the market at the time (spring 2024). But ymmv depending what specs you actually care about. If the off the shelf thinkpads or whatever actually match the set of specs you want, then they will be cheaper than the equally-speced framework by a bigger margin. Also worth noting that there have been a lot of sales on the framework end, so that could give different perceptions depending on timing.
Oh, and also I'm talking about buying the memory and SSD elsewhere, not as part of the kit. That was a chunk of savings too.
Digging around with Wayback Machine, a DIY Ryzen 7840 (I wrote 8840 incorrectly earlier) with 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD, Windows Home, a power adapter, and four basic expansion cards would have been 1768 EUR in 1H 2024.
Instead, I got an ASUS Zenbook 14 OLED with those specs (albeit a slightly bigger better screen) for exactly 1000 EUR in a local shop.
Now, yes, I could remove the Windows cost (ahem), not pay for a charger, and save a little buying RAM and an SSD from elsewhere, but then it's not remotely an apples-to-apples comparison.
But that's exactly the point: removing the charger, windows and buying ram elsewhere is exactly the comparison that makes sense if you have a good charger, don't run windows, and don't mind your ram coming on a different day of the week. Ymmv as I said.
If you want to quibble with words, you're right that I could have hedged more in my original comment, e.g. "cost can be competitive depending what exactly you are looking for". I'm not denying your experience for what you wanted, but for what I wanted, the costs were pretty close.
I’m really not just trying to be argumentative, but it’s more than quibbling with words.
Pirate Windows and using an existing charger saves ~€200. You can shave a little more sourcing your own RAM and SSD but probably not huge amounts, from memory at the time.
So the comparison becomes something like “if you spend your time and energy sourcing multiple components, and don’t mind pirating your OS, and have an old charger to use, you can maybe reduce the premium you pay for a Framework to 30-50%”.
As a Linux user I didn't have to pirate anything, just one more way we are different. I also got one tier down in CPU from the one you considered, not surprised if it was a lower markup for that one. I could probably find the receipts for ram and SSD to prove my numbers make sense for me, but isn't that all profoundly uninteresting?
I got the Framework 12 for about 800€ by bringing my own SSD and RAM and charging. Specced that way it's only about a 200€ premium, which I don't mind in exchange for repairability and hassle-free Linux install.
That was before prices went crazy, though. Now the RAM alone is over 500€. Also, whether the repairability is worth anything I'll find out down the line, but so far it's looking good.
As someone who likes small-screen laptops: no. The screen size is not the problem (unless it is also low-resolution), it's the battery size, and what the battery can power for a "reasonable" amount of time.
13-14" is the sweet spot between power storage, size, and energy efficiency in my opinion.
13 seems to have emerged as the generally best compromise for using at your desk and traveling. Even a 15” is still small relative to an external monitor and is getting large to fly with.
I read it as being not powerful enough and didn't parse the size issue properly. What exactly is the problem? I'm regularly using 12" laptops and don't see much wrong with it. Just changes the workflow a bit, as I normally use a 52" screen.
It's not ideal, but then working on a laptop never is.
The problem is too few lines of code and controls can fit on a small screen. How many lines of code fit on your 12 inch screen? On my screen there are 40 lines and some space for window headers and top bar.
"bestest" CPU is not required, but with 13 inch screen you have to either make everything tiny and strain your eyes, or have only 10-15 lines of code in the screen. Also, modern websites and apps use gigantic font size and you will have like 3 paragraphs of text in one screen.
Companies have standardized on, mostly, 13” laptops with whatever accessories. But, honestly, for some people who never leave their desk, a desktop of some sort is probably a better choice— though just connecting to a server works too.
My lenovo work laptop is crippled by poor cooling and can only sustain ~1GHz clocks on extended tasks. An old personal laptop 10 years older outperforms it.
>I wish I could buy a thicker laptop that is more robust, repairable, expandable, and has better cooling, with the extra space filled with batteries.
It may surprise you to learn that the machine you describe has existed for many years now. I own one. It is wonderful, built solidly with high-quality components.
It is the Panasonic FZ-55 Mk2. The Mk3 is a bit newer. Both can be had on eBay reasonably priced, and Panasonic will sell you parts. (I recommend against the Mk1 because it is quite a bit slower.)
The FZ-56 is the newest, not yet available used.
These are from Panasonic's semi-rugged lineup, not nearly as heavy or thick as the fully-rugged.
Linux runs beautifully on it. I personally use Fedora KDE. Everything just works.
The civilization found at the Inca structures was most probably descended from barbarians who conquered the civilization that built them. It's like someone arriving in Europe, finding the Franks ruling over it, and assuming they built the Roman Empire.
I assume you're talking about the Atari 2600 console (VCS), which uses a limited version of that CPU, called 6507. It has the addressing space reduced to 16 KB.
This machine indeed has 128 bytes of RAM, but the code and data live on the cartridges, which can include up to 64 KB of ROM (exposing 4 KB at a time, with bank switching). Also, graphics is created on the fly ("racing the beam") at TV display, so there's no need to spend precious RAM on the framebuffer.
In comparison to the later constructions based on the 6502, like NES or C64, it was certainly not an easy platform to develop games, but not as hard as your comment is suggesting.
The very idea of "racing the beam" is madness distilled. How do you draw without a framebuffer and keep track of everything's position using just 128 bytes of RAM? This comment alone uses more RAM than that.
tl;dw - The background is defined with 20 bits, which are repeated or mirrored to make the background (eg 00000000111111110000 would either make the background 0000000011111111000000000000111111110000 or 0000000011111111000000001111111100000000). If you write to WSYNC ($D40A), the processor pauses until the start of the next scanline. Then you have to count machine cycles to make sure you modify the background at the right time to make the two halves different. Repeat on each scanline to fully define the background. There is no "framebuffer" per se
All the code is kept in the rom, as are all the assets. So you only need to track sprites that move unpredictably, and the average 2600 game had very few of those - pacman, space invaders, etc have very few actice objects, and most of them are strictly constrained in how they can move.
I don't know about Space Invaders, but Pac-Man on the 2600 used incredible hacks that were widely criticized, but essential to cramming the spirit of the game into that tiny cartridge and puny machine.
Essentially, the 2600 gives the programmer 2 sprites only. One sprite is dedicated to drawing the Pac-Man main character, while the other takes the role of all four ghosts. That's right, simultaneously 1 sprite for 4 distinct ghosts, wherever they are on the screen.
This singular sprite and the practice of "racing the beam" leads to a lot of flickering. I believe that the flickering is so severe that it impacts the collision detection, so that Pac-Man can slide right through a ghost in the right place and time.
I owned a copy, of course, and it was just so sad to compare it with its daddy in the arcade cabinet. However, once Ms. Pac-Man rolled around, they had learned a lot of lessons, and made that one a rousing technical success.
It's the other way around - 2600 Pac-Man didn't do any hacks and that's what made it terrible.
The signature hack on the system is to reuse sprites mid-frame. That's the "racing the beam": after an object has been drawn, reposition the sprite to draw something else further down on the screen, before the scanline beam gets there.
Pac-Man didn't do that. Instead, it draws only one ghost sprite per frame, and flickers between the four of them every four frames. The flickering and racing-the-beam are opposites, not one causing the other.
Atari's programmers knew how to race the beam for reusing sprites. Air-Sea Battle did it years before Pac-Man. What's different about Pac-Man is that the objects aren't constrained in their movement. They can overlap on the same scanline which makes drawing multiples with a single sprite impossible. The right solution to this and what Ms. Pac did is smart sprite reuse - if they're on the same scanline, flicker temporarily, but then when they move to be separated vertically, race the beam to display both together. This didn't happen for Pac-Man because Atari rushed it to release in too short a timeframe to implement that, and also the code wouldn't have fit into a standard 4k cartridge and would have needed more expensive hardware with bankswitching logic chips. 2600 Pac-Man's terribleness was a business decision, not a technical limitation.
> This didn't happen for Pac-Man because Atari rushed it to release in too short a timeframe to implement that, and also the code wouldn't have fit into a standard 4k cartridge and would have needed more expensive hardware with bankswitching logic chips. 2600 Pac-Man's terribleness was a business decision, not a technical limitation.
There's a lot of myths around 2600 Pac-Man. The game was made in around 5 months, which was a normal amount of dev time for a 2600 game. The ghosts flickering was due to insufficient RAM, not insufficient ROM. Tod Frye, the game's programmer, had a kernel that would reposition the sprites as the screen drew, but it needed additional RAM. Frye really wanted Pac-Man to have a 2-player mode, as the arcade version did and he felt that having a 2-player mode gave the consumer more value. This meant that there wasn't enough RAM to get rid of the flicker, since the game had to keep track of the game state for each player. The 2600 version of Ms. Pac-Man was 1-player only, which is how they avoided the flickering.
Graphics bitmap data was in the ROM - it was copied directly to the TIA's graphics or playfield data registers line by line by the CPU. No intermediate copy-to-RAM needed.
You still needed a counter (index) to determine which byte in the ROM to copy over. You probably also wanted to put the graphics bitmap data at the beginning of a page (e.g. $FD00) so you would only need to increment 1 byte in the pointer and not worry about carrying over to the next byte.
The horizontal resolution was 160, and generally you were generating less than 255 lines of graphics, so tracking the X and Y position only took 2 bytes, and maybe a few other bytes for metadata.
The VCS has some handy features that makes it easier.
First, there is no frame buffer (there could be no such thing in that memory space), but there are effectively line buffers for the different sprite types and background. These are not in the 128 bytes of general purpose RAM but memory mapped to the display controller.
Second, it maintains the patterns in these buffers until you change them and will repeat them on the next line unless you do anything to change them. This makes it easy to perform partial update, e.g. only update the background every 8 lines and only update sprite graphics on odd lines or whatever you need to do to save time.
Third, the video controller can be instructed (via a memory mapped register) to halt the CPU until the next horizontal "blanking" interval. This makes synchronizing to the beam position between lines much easier.
Fourth, there are no interrupts (except NMI, only triggered manually with the brk instruction) so timing is easily predictable.
Fifth, there is a hardware timer which makes it easier to keep track of your budget while in the vertical blanking portion of the screen, where you probably want to handle most if not all of your game logic. That way the game logic doesn't need to be strictly timed in the same way the screen is.
I made a game for it (https://text.garden/jupitersumo.html) expecting it to be difficult, but found that the simplicity and predictable timing made it surprisingly easy. On the C64 for example you will often find yourself wanting to synchronize to the beginning of a line or even every line for one reason or another, but doing that while dealing with the complexities of its timing is a whole science unto itself. For the main game screen I ended up using some 16 bytes of state in RAM to represent the stuff I need to keep track of while "racing the beam". The code that handles the display is maybe 150 instructions long and lives in the game ROM. The source code is linked from the page if you're interested in how it works.
Of course, in terms of what it displays, my game is very simple, only showing a background and the player sprites. There are much more complex display routines ("kernels") in the VCS game library. An interesting example is Pitfall II, which is very impressive considering the platform, but uses a coprocessor on the cartridge itself (called the DPC) to help sequence line register updates. From memory, I think it lets you enqueue data in advance, and during the display routine the CPU can just read a single register to get the next byte from a queue.
> It is so primitive that it is unable to multiply integers. If you want to multiply, you have to write your own algorithm.
That's a weird thing to say. There are a lot of otherwise quite sophisticated chips that don't do multiplication. Multiplication is a pretty high bar, so the 6502 coming in below isn't much of a surprise.
I always thought multiplication was one of the most basic things a CPU should handle. Weren't computers invented to perform calculations? Even a pocket calculator could multiply. I assumed CPUs handled arithmetic and not much else. I didn't even learn about bit shifts until much later, and none of the programming languages I was taught ever introduced them.
You can ask your favourite LLM agent to give you an overview over earlier CPUs, including pocket calculators, with regards to multiplication. The x86 family of CPUs actually trace its lineage back to a desk calculator.
For something more modern, have a look at how the basic variants of Risc-V don't include multiplication.
A very basic pocket calculator might not have multiplication as an instruction, but multiply by running a simple multi-instruction program. That's how people multiplied on a 6502, too. (Similar also for calculation cosine or square-roots or logarithms: you run a little program.)
I once read a theory proposing that primates got their minds from birds due to sharing trees with avians, and that viruses may have transferred genetic material horizontally from birds to primates.
It showed a chart of brain weight relative to body weight, and birds had a much higher ratio than any other animal group. Primates were on the same curve, which wasn't shared with any other mammalian group. Primates were literally on the avian curve.
But I don't remember where I saw that. I searched for it on Google and found nothing.
Profit is the driving force behind civilization, motivating innovation and progress and allowing us to live longer and better lives instead of remaining stuck in the Stone Age.
So the dude in the cave that invented fire on demand was chasing after "profits"? Progress and emerging "civilization" clearly could not have been motivated by profit. We could argue money has distorted a natural, inherent, human drive to improve his and group's living condition.
"AI" tech is actually a perfect specimen here: this could be a genuinely positive net for Humanity if only it wasn't controlled by the sort of scumbags that are only motivated by "profit".
Depending on how broadly or narrowly you define “profit”, your statement is either too weak to be useful, or false.
If you define it so broadly that the hunter-gatherer inventing a spear for hunting more effectively is “profit”, then your statement is a tautology. The spear innovation was driven by “profit” and the “profit” is having the spear. Great.
If you apply a narrow, capitalist definition of “profit”, the statement is false. Plenty of advancement of civilization was and still is being made without or outside of capitalism, especially if you go as far back as the Stone Age that you mentioned.
Profit is what's on the verge of destroying our civilisation, too. Ever heard of climate change and biodiversity loss? And of course the energy crisis.
And we are not trying to address them, we are just trying to make more AI and more techbros.
Yes, it is _a_ driving force, but its not the only one.
the enlightenment was driven by "we can do thing better" and "to know god, we must know the world". A lot of money for research came from the catholic church (including for Galileo who wasn't put in jail for heliocentric, he was put in jail for being a massive insufferable arrogant prick)
In england, a lot of research was carried out by bored vicars, on CoE dime. (well pennies)
So yes, profit can be a motivator, and it can be very effective, it needs to be tempered with humanity. We could go into who a lot of brands we see today that are old were founded by quackers, but we dont have time for that.
the TLDR is, yes profit is a motivator, but its often short termist.
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