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You can run Linux on ARM. I do. And let’s not act like x86 wasn’t full of Microsoft-led efforts to undermine Linux. Anyone who’s had to disembowel their BIOS settings to the tune of “Your PC will be unsafe! Are you sure you want to run a LEGACY OS???” is familiar.
I’m not a huge fan of the idea of buying CPU+GPU+RAM+mobo all as one unit. But like… that’s what tends to happen. Audio cards, SATA drives, network cards, these things all used to be separated until motherboards offered features to streamline things.
The real problem is not form factor, but lack of competition. If there were 10-15 Qualcomms out there, offering different combos and a la carte options, there’d be no problem. It’s only because there are a tiny number of dominant players in the space that technical consolidation automatically translates to abusing consumers.
Well… modularity is kinda coming to an end anyway, regardless of supply chain moves. Apple’s M series has shown that op decoders and unified memory are the low-hanging fruit for overall system performance improvements, and that means less modularity.
I think Valve sees the writing on the wall and is trying to get ahead of the game via FEX and the Steam Frame. Intel and AMD are pretty much stuck playing Nvidia’s game at this point, and Qualcomm has an incredible opportunity here. I’m still rooting for RISC-V, and I think it may end up being the long-term winner in like 10-15 years time.
But either way, x86-style modularity is not long for this world. From a purely technical standpoint, I think that’s good. Adding the political and economic situation into the mix… well… fuck, we’re mega-fucked. About the only thing we have going for us as consumers is the fact that this is already headed towards a reset. So if we do gain some leverage, we can make a big change all at once. If we don’t though… things will get much worse.
The seal looks like this:
Code completion is probably a gray area.
Those models generally have much smaller context windows, so the energy concern isn’t quite as extreme.
You could also reasonably make a claim that the model is legally in the clear as far as licensing, if the training data was entirely open source (non-attribution, non-share-alike, and commercial-allowed) licensed code.
That said, I think the general sentiment is less “what the technology does” and more “who it does it to”. Code completion, for the most part, isn’t deskilling labor, or turning experts into accountability sinks.
Like, I don’t think the Luddites would’ve had a problem with an artisan using a knitting frame in their own home. They were too busy fighting against factories locking children inside for 18-hour shifts, getting maimed by the machines or dying trapped in a fire.
At the time, retailers were the customers. Before online storefronts took off, there was no way to sell one copy to Alice, one copy to Bob… you had to sell 50,000 copies to Best Buy with a promise to buy them back in a year if they don’t sell out. If they tell you up front, “we won’t buy that”, what are you gonna do?
Low Level Learning had a good video about this: https://youtu.be/VtHlMTc8lR4
The importer has to pay the tariffs.
Which in most cases is the brand-name company, incorporated in the US. Usually, the manufacturer is a separate foreign supplier.
The retailer usually receives the goods from a domestic distribution center.
So yeah, most laptop brands are paying the tariffs themselves.
Descenders
Idk why. Well, I do know why: I grew up in an era where Flash games started to do physics-based gameplay, and something about that just made them endlessly replayable and easy to do while focusing on something else like a lecture or whatever.
So many games these days demand your full attention. And that’s great, when you have time for it. But if I just have 45 minutes to derp around while I catch up with friends on Discord, I can’t dive into an epic boss fight that I was prepping for a month ago.
ITT:
People throwing shade at the devs who could easily be maxing&relaxing in IT but chose to make art instead, rather than the perverse financial incentives baked into the industry which encourage them to overpromise to secure funding and then underdeliver to abide by publisher demands.
But maybe I’m in the unreasonable one.
I’m down, but RISC-V has a looooot of ground to make up first. Last I checked, total number of RISC-V devices in existence was an order of magnitude less than what Qualcomm produces in a year.