The current regime decided lawlessness was beneficial to them. Cuts both ways. I suppose people should consider carefully whether signing bonuses and the chance to abuse marginalised people with impunity is worth it. I'm fine with people making it riskier to throw in with corrupt authoritarians for personal benefit.
I can't think of a feature I care less about on a laptop. I have owned several laptops with touchscreens, and literally the only thing it's ever done is misclick something when I inadvertently touched my screen. I have a tablet and a phone if I want to tap a screen.
Unrelated: I find it amusing that the screen they showcase looks like a very broken display panel.
> I can't think of a feature I care less about on a laptop
This is how I feel too, but at 49, a Mac user since we bought our 128k, I'm no longer certain I am the market - fairly sure I am not. I have two kids, 10 and 7, and we've had a handful of cheap Chromebook laptops, some with touch and some without, and I can say that my kids always prefer the ones with. I don't get it, objectively it doesn't make sense to me, but it does to them. They would absolutely prefer a touchscreen, even in laptop form factor.
Kids preferring the touch screen seems more and more like letting kids in a typing class continue to hunt and peck rather than go through the work to learn a method that is faster and will ultimately benefit them by making their life easier.
I might change my mind on this later but right now I'm having a hard time seeing it any other way.
I think it comes from early exposure to phones and tablets and getting used to it. My 2 year old tried to swipe on my computer screen.
And I agree, watching kids swipe feels, to me, like passive consumer induced computer illiteracy.
As long as you can’t fundamentally reprogram the device with your input method, you are at the mercy of other people. (And yeah, sometimes a keyboard is not enough, either.)
My 2018 (maybe 2017?) 13" 2-in-1 HP Spectre x360 was one of the nicest pieces of hardware I've ever owned (albeit not that powerful by today's standards), it's just a shame that Windows was so inadequately designed to support the hardware.
I definitely think that a distinct mode is needed though, the inverse of attaching a keyboard to an iPad to make it more desktop-y.
The surface book had what you mention, it's a laptop with a detachable keyboard, and it can be attached to the keyboard in normal laptop orientation or reversed just like a tablet on a stand. Can be used as a standalone tablet with pen/touch input, or a normal laptop.
Pretty great device, it's unfortunate Microsoft discontinued it.
I never had such a laptop but I'm very curious to see how this can work in practice. I really don't see what could be done on efficiently on the screen. In regular computer use, my wrists lay on the computer or desk and move very little. On the other hand, lifting the arm requires some non-negligible effort and break the flow.
I've been using touchscreen laptops for more than a decade now. It's been really useful when working on mobile stuff and occasionally handy in some games or when sketching something, but other than that - it just stays unused.
I agree with you 100%, however I think this will be a game changer in productivity for device testing (ipad/iphone etc and all different screen sizes) no longer need to do device testing till the last step for touch based features. other than that its not great imo.
I think it's good to continually remind oneself that these are next-word/token-predictors...you can wrap them up in a harness, you can feed them into each other, you can influence the likelyhood of a given word through weights and system prompts...but that's literally all they can do. They can't reason, but they can predict what reasoning looks like.
None of this means they can't be useful tools, but when they fall down, we should remind ourselves of why that is, and be honest with ourselves about what they could ultimately be capable of.
we don't know how the brain works yet, and I don't see a thread on hackernews "new paper describes how brain works by mannytv" with 1000 comments so don't talk out of your ass
It’s equally useful to continually remind yourself that a Turing machine is just a spool of tape with a magnetic head, and that a human brain is just fatty lipids in a chemical bath.
The majority of humans is not delusional all the time. But every human is delusional some times.
Same as the majority of LLMs hallucinating some times but not all the time.
So if the bar for proper reasoning is never ever being delusional then humans and LLMs sit in the same bucket.
They are delusional in ways that don't overlap, though. An LLM will not be delusional in the way Van Gogh or Howard Hughes was, but humans (sane ones anyways) will not hallucinate the exact kind of odd, unpredictable LLM output that makes you go "huh? why the heck did it do this in this way or write this." Things which are extremely obvious well within the limits of even elementary human reasoning are completely outside the purview of model capability; it's much easier for a model to "reason" when it comes to systems and ideas that are very discrete (which is why it's so useful when writing code, esp. in higher-level languages -- little uncertainty there and a round-robin verification process for workflows like mathematics. However once you ask it to intuit anything that falls apart quickly; its main utility lies in being able to compensate for these deficiencies with sheer volume and burning through tokens)
Even on the frontier models these blips still happen fairly often and it's intrusive to a lot of workflows.
Calling it delusion is too severe. Our reasoning fails us all the time. For example, if you get a problem wrong on a math test, you’ve simply made a mistake, and with a little more “prompting” (even of your own volition) you could often easily arrive at the correct answer. Now if you stubbornly persist with the wrong answer even in the face of evidence to the contrary, then you could call it delusion. But my point is, there’s a spectrum of mistakenness.
Well, the human is just a big bag of neurons. So in what sense is its "understanding" more real?
It is perhaps sad, but with our current knowledge of neuroscience, we can't really argue that humans are somehow special. All we can say is that in practice we are still more intelligent/understanding/meaningful/conscious/whatever than LLMs. But for how long?
When you use "next word predictor", it sounds like slow process, like each word take few seconds to minute to be generated. Why not call it "sentence predictor", or "paragraph predictor" ? i would argue it's the same in principle.
It's like calling a video clip a "picture sequencer".
It's literally what a LLM is, and it's not even a word it's a token which is about 2/3'rds of a word. It has nothing to do with speed of producing tokens. Others are not responsible for correcting your bad understanding of a true statement.
To torture the analogy a bit: You didn't sculpt bridges out of clay - critical infrastructure was built from stone. Even if you wanted to use clay, you made bricks, and architected the structure from those units. You couldn't just throw a lump of clay across a stream and vibe-build a bridge...
If we want to use LLMs responsibly, to build substantial pieces of infrastructure, we should be using it to create discreet "bricks" of code, that can be tested, relied upon, and used to implement human-driven architectural decisions.
The onus is on whoever presents the theory to provide evidence for it. This isn’t even the case of “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” because horseshoe theory isn’t an “extraordinary claim”, it is a mundane claim and thus only require mundane evidence. However, as of today, not even mundane evidence has been provided to back up this theory.
"Sarcasm I now see to be, in general, the language of the Devil; for which reason I have, long since, as good as renounced it."
– Thomas Carlyle, Sartor Resartus, describing how he stopped using sarcasm in his essays because it provokes hostility. He goes on describe the ironic person as a "pest to society."
I am running a Cray Simulator at faster than full speed on a cheap Raspberry Pi knockoff called "Le Potato" and I spent the weekend vibecoding weather forecasting software for it as a tribute to NCAR.
I spent the weekend setting up the open source Cray simulator on a really cheap SBC then vibecoding a weath forecasting application that uses the Cray's vector processor to process raw weather data.
Mine is a lot smaller, but it can run Cray workloads at full speed.
I spent the weekend vibecoding software for the Cray 1.
I installed the open source Cray Simulator on my "Le Potato" SBC, then installed UNICOS, then tasks Gemini with writing a weather forecasting program that ingests raw data from METAR weather stations and uses the simulator's vector processor to generate the forecast. It renders a nice little weather dashboard viewable in the terminal. A python http service runs outside the Cray and serves up a nice little web page with a virtual terminal that displays the dashboard.
Is it useful? No...but it's cool as hell. I plan to print up an enclosure for it along with a mini terminal with a 4" LCD to display the live dashboard. Then I'll have a nice little baby Cray to put on the shelf in my gameroom.
My little tribute to one of the first deployments of a Cray at NCAR.
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