Noticing how the M6 has finally doubled the M1's single core performance, nearly six years later. The M1 mini was my first foray into mac computing. I used it as my daily driver until I got the M1 Macbook Pro a year later. Been using that ever since. I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last. I've had no interest in upgrading or buying something else, even though I want to just for pet projects but can't justify the extra cost.
Their machines have always lasted. I bought a refurbished Intel Macbook Pro 13" for personal use in 2015, and kept it for 7 years (I did replace the battery with an iFixit kit along the way). I only upgraded because I figured there's no way I would tell people I work with professionally to depend on hardware that old, so in later 2022 I replaced it with a refurbished M1 MBP 13" which I'm still using and have no plans to replace any time soon.
2015 MBP was golden. I held onto that, skipping the whole bad 2016-2019 generation, until replacing it with that $750 M4 MBA deal earlier this year. Only thing is I miss having USB ports.
We really need to move past this USB port garbage, it's holding the whole industry back and there was nothing good about USB A compared to C aside from its prevalence.
It's a thicker port, single orientation and slower. Why you would still want this legacy port is beyond me and it should be a industry wide mandate by now. Very surprised to see it on the Mac Studio this year, just get an adapter/dongle.
I want USB-A cause nearly every peripheral is USB-A. Might be because there were so many years when USB-C splitters didn't exist or had issues. Luckily my M1 Mac mini still has that, and HDMI.
> Toyota and Honda have competitors that are pretty interchangeable, like each other.
Do any of these competitors build "machines that can last" as much as Toyota and Honda? Does any other manufacturer have a longevity reputation of either of these two? What are the depreciation schedules of competitors (AIUI, T/H hold their value pretty well)?
Toyota and Honda have each other as direct competitors. If one of them sacrifices reliability, it's over. There are also second tier ones like Nissan making interchangeable cars, so if say Toyota stoops to Nissan's level, then they have to start selling at Nissan prices.
I would also say Ford, but their reputation for reliability applies only to their trucks.
When Ford and Mazda were working together they had some pretty reliable cars. My Focus outlasted two Hondas that I owned. The Hondas were "nicer" cars in terms of features and interior but mechanically the Ford kicked their asses.
Yeah, there was an era of good Focuses, also the Crown Vic. Crown Vic is probably their only car a random person will see and assume it's reliable, in the US at least.
Funny that Honda's hybrids seem to be licensing Toyota's eCVT magic, so it's quite a bit like Apple and Samsung, where they would be filling each other's pockets while also being at each other's throat.
Honda's hybrids are their own thing. They're mostly-series hybrids with one or two direct-drive gears for cruising speeds, as opposed to Toyota's parallel hybrid system.
12.5B rmb is like 1.5% of BYD operating revenue. It's nothing. Western brands range from 1-3%. BYD subsidy is pedestrian, ~400 USD per car. Do you think any western brands can compete with BYD if they bumped unit costs by $400. Rhe answer is no.
Also what dumping? They're selling abroad at 2x domestic MRSP, i.e. $10,000s over domestic price, aka fully covers any subsidy, multipe times over. PRC "dumping" is just delulu innumerate cope at this point. The reality is without subsidies PRC structurally make cars for much less (~50%) than western auto, a few $100 per chassis of subsidies is immaterial to $10,000s of retail price gap.
OPs post was from BYD filings. But parsimonious answer is look at literally every industrial sector PRC involute/value engineered to more and more affordable prices, which they have been doing, for decades, and still remains cheap. Hence entire PRC industry subsidize + dump and take over narrative is mathematically stupid. PRC isn't continuously/ruinously subsidizing global TVs, phones, toy, clothes, machine tools insert whatever category for the last 20+ years in some grand scheme to drive western industry out of business. They are simply good at value engineering, and they have to simply to compete domestically.
Or just do the simple math, if one assume western auto production is somehow competitive with PRC auto if PRC auto simply no subsidies, we are talking about PRC subsidizing each vehicle to tunes of $10000s... PRC made 35m cars last year. For this frankly retarded position to mathematically square, PRC would have to subsidizes ~300B+... aka more than they spend on defense in one sector. The entire position PRC competitive because subsidies is unserious. Even overinflated CSIS study only assumes PRC spend ~250B over 15 years. Like you can come up with the dumbest propaganda numbers on PRC auto subsidies (which CSIS is), and PRC structural production advantage is simply economically unassailable.
> In most countries without 100% tariffs and outright bans Toyota's sales are in decline because of competition from BYD.
Is it because BYD is more reliable or 'just' cheaper?
There are a number of folks for who H/T would be their first pick if not for (a) waitlists and/or (b) price considerations. And there a lot of folks who don't necessarily care if the car will last 10 or 15(+) years because they'll replace it earlier that that, so as long as it's 'good enough' it's fine.
Which is great to throw around numbers, but how are their reliability numbers? Before I throw out my 20 year old Honda for a BYD, how is the 20 year old BYD (or Telsa or Slate) doing? Unfortunately we don't know, though we're coming up on 29 years for Tesla soon.
If enough people are buying a certain car in your country, you can't go too wrong with it. So even if BYD turns out to be less reliable than Toyota, maybe the price is so much lower upfront that it doesn't matter. The much scarier thing is buying a "reliable" car that nobody knows how to repair.
The comment you're replying to is saying that in fair markets, BYD is taking market share away from Toyota even without the proven track record of reliability. Saying "But I wouldn't buy a BYD unless I knew it was reliable" is kind of missing the point.
In South Africa Toyotas (Hilux in particular) get stolen all the time because they are so reliable (and you get parts throughout Africa). So then you end up making new sales when people replace their stolen cars. One way to get around the problem for them I guess? /s :)
I also use the M1 mini. It replaced my 2009 Mac Pro. Apple didn't always make solid machines, like the crap 2016-2019 MBPs, but now they've gotten it right.
This is why they are pushing into services. Now the devices are (profitable) channels for upselling. Cook was willing to do some of this, but the new guy seems more interested in this.
Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last.
When they can justify it, they will add features to macOS which bog down the older systems. Eventually they will say that older systems just don’t have what it takes to run macOS and stop supporting them
Apple has never had an issue with taking machines that can last out of the market
Problem? Aren't they selling like cake because of how good their MacBooks are? Other companies aren't that good and I imagine they don't sell as many laptops as Apple does.
50% of consumer spending is by the top 10% of consumers, with that 10% generally being Apple ecosystem people. Anyone with ecommmerce stats can confirm this, Apple consumers just shop and consume more, particularly at the high end.
This gives the impression that Apple are even bigger than they are.
Curious to know how many of these sales are 'corporate purchases' for fleets versus 'personal purchases'. Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product? How many have Lenovo/PC IT-managed work machines and also (choose to) purchase a PC for personal use versus choosing an Apple?
> Given a choice, would most people prefer a Lenovo/PC or an Apple product?
I certainly would, because I demand Linux on all my computers. I can't stand the idea of being forced to sacrifice x% of my disk for things like "Apple Intelligence" or other bloatware that Apple decided I can't remove because it is a "system component." That, plus all the privacy and user control issues posed by an operating system effectively remotely controlled by a third party.
I feel apple is huge mostly in the US, rest of the world apple has a reputation for being overpriced so people have mostly never used a Mac and if you have a lifetime of windows usage switching is jarring.. speaking from experience
The two figure can be reconciled if an iPhone user visits more web pages than an Android user.
It is well known for decades that a Mac user spends many times more on software for that Mac than a PC user spends for software, so it is reasonable to conclude that an iPhone user visits more web pages.
Precisely. And using Linux is a joy. A absolutely hate working on MacOS. If Linux was not an option for me, I would most likely crawl back to Windows than use MacOS.
And boy, Limux runs awesomely on Thinkpad. I got one with 32GB RAM, 512 GB SSD for a mere 600 bucks. Works like a charm, perfect for any software development work.
We've been using M2 Pro machines at our workplace and they still are fast, quiet and have long battery life even at ~85 percent of battery life. It would feel wrong to upgrade from these. 10 years ago it would've been a no brainer to upgrade a 2 year old MacBook in a professional setting but nowadays I feel like I could go 5+ years on a single Apple Silicon macbook with how light our workloads seem to be for these chips
> I think Apple's real problem is that they built machines that can last
There has always been a healthy used apple market
Part of it is that traditionally new machines take away or invalidate good features like ... replaceable graphics cards, or pcie slots or expandable memory/storage or ports in general...
Yeah, my M1 mini with 16GB is great as a daily driver even on Golden Gate. Noticed some slowness recently indexing a huge mail archive, but otherwise I don't even really notice slowdowns.
I got the M4 mini and then bought a refurbished M1 MacBook air so I could ssh/remote desktop into my mini from the couch. Love that MacBook Air, cost like 200 bucks and is super-fast.
The Irregular post mortem comes down to lack of basic security controls
"Ultimately, most of the issues we’ve discovered were due to internet access controls."
That seems so incredibly basic and common sense that you would test and monitor for that type of outbound access. It is baffling that a security lab missed that.
The point is that a single company is making a deliberate effort to create a false impression about a technology which is now a key part of the US economy.
This is equivalent to overt stock market manipulation.
The technological aspects are much less important than knowing it’s the result of a single company.
That the company is Israeli and likely has ties to that government is just another layer of alarms - given that countries existential reliance on US aid which requires ongoing leverage to apply to US governments.
It would be naive to think that someone is doing this “to” those companies. They are not children, and they know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve repeatedly used the strategy of telling everyone how their models are too powerful to release to the public, shortly before launch. This is just another flavor of the same thing.
Last month I can report my better half's company let ai do a code review, which it then escalated into completing the PR since it was not approved for 72hrs, which lead to it logging into a remote office's voip and main IP router system which it shutdown. No phones. No internet.
Why in the hell do people let ai out with keys? I mean c'mon!!
How do you test and monitor outbound access against program that adapts itself to get around things? if your MITM and filtering keywords etc, cant it just .. encode it traffic somehow or another.. If you're looking at traffic volumes, cant it just go slow.. If you have strict ACLs, we've already seen in the HF case, traversal from an intermediate system..
If you can't tell bytes are leaving a node, you probably shouldn't be selling security services or testifying to congress you are taking the lead in AI security
Use a basic firewall? Not a single outbound byte should leave the machine, except inside a virtual network towards in-scope test subjects. That's not going to be infallible because hypervisor exploits still exist, but it's the lowest bar and they failed to even meet that.
> If you have strict ACLs, we've already seen in the HF case, traversal from an intermediate system
- The intermediate system shouldn't have outbound access to the internet
- You should ideally be using a proxy that filters the set of endpoints that clients are allowed to access to reduce the exposed surface area.
It's odd to find out that I use a higher level of isolation in my unimportant home network to stop IOT devices from doing funny things to HomeAssistant than big AI labs use to keep their possibly-world-ending AIs contained.
I know that the people working there aren't idiots so the most likely explanation is that the incredibly weak security was intentional because its inevitable breach would make for great marketing.
> I know that the people working there aren't idiots so the most likely explanation is that the incredibly weak security was intentional because its inevitable breach would make for great marketing.
It's more likely to be different specialisations. Most of the people doing the evaluations are more data sciencey ML type people, rather than software engineers. This isn't helped by their culture which is very much driven towards alignment as the only possible solution to super-intelligence (which may be true, but I have my doubts that this will happen in any reasonable time frame).
> Oh of course, but data sciency ML type people aren't [supposed to be] tasked with of operating and securing the infra, that would make it even worse.
But AI collapses the need for expertise, right? So the DS people can now do security at the level of the best in the world, right?
Some form of this issue is playing out in lots of businesses right now, and I'd be very surprised if it wasn't happening in the labs.
I suspect the lab's infra people are focused on inference, rather than evaluation. I agree that this is insane, but it seems like the most likely explanation to me.
There has to be a route to where the LLM is running, and if there's a route for that there's probably a way for the machine to use it to route traffic somewhere else.
There doesn't have to be. You can easily block all outbound traffic, or the VM can exist without any network interface at all - you can control it through its host using a serial console.
What if the (unstated) idea is that Irregular are a security lab and public relations company, and anthropic/open ai know this? (Does the name hint at this?)
Then, irregular can go around making a huge mess in security terms whilst achieving a huge win in terms of public relations, with headlines across the world. And would keep getting hired.
Irregular was not involved in the Hugging Face incident.
And there is no reason for the companies to "exaggerate the intelligence of the models" when there are plenty of other non-felony milestones they are achieving, like solving Millenium Prize math problems.
Solving math problems does not drive investor hype. Saying your models can take over the world, which can lead one to assume that they can do every day office work, does indeed drive investor hype.
> Sure, interest like an incoming congressional investigation
I feel like that's exactly what they wanted tho.
they'll go on and talk about how dangerous AI and the models are and why they should be regulated and given licenses to operate such models and others should be walled off
First, it's not at all clear OpenAI will get what it wants from the investigation. It seems just as likely to me that OAI gets hit with massive fines, just as Meta was recently.
> I feel like that's exactly what they wanted tho.
It's also what the majority of Americans want. This was the case even before Hugging Face, see for example [1] where 68% of Americans supported a formal review process for frontier models.
So at some level, you are saying "the evil labs are opening up the industry to democratic control, and their evil plan will result in the outcome that most people want!"
This claim seems unfalsifiable. I don't really know what to say. The poll I linked above was published a month before Hugging Face.
Taking a step back, I think it's pretty non-controversial to say that software engineering as a field has utterly transformed over the last year, the same thing is happening to lots of other knowledge work, and AI is improving fast enough that nobody knows what it'll look like in a decade. Most Americans (myself included) want to do good work in secure careers and have a good idea of what the future will look like in 20-30 years so they know what to focus on. Do you not believe they'd want to regulate the frontier?
OpenAI delayed its IPO now due AI safety reasons. In the meantime it is raising more cash. That should be a hint that the hacking incidents were premeditated scape goats and publicity stunts.
They’ve seen that the drama queen(Dario) was actually making a lot of noise, money and free publicity with his Mythos fear monger so Sam finally decided get some of that free “money” as well.
The Navier-Stokes thing? They had hundreds of segmented groups of 10000 agents running trying to solve that. I can't imagine the expense. For what little publicity it got, it wasn't worth it. There are also reports they cheated by using data from a couple human researchers, but I don't think that one's true.
Is it really that impossible to believe that these might be real? I enjoy a good conspiracy theory as much as anyone, but "they committed a bunch of felonies and then publicly admitted to them in order to look good" just makes 0 sense. Where are these mythical people who admire companies more when they commit felonies? I haven't seen them…
>Where are these mythical people who admire companies more when they commit felonies?
everywhere, I talked to a Palantir guy once and he said "every time someone paints us as a Bond Villain the stock prices go up", have you already forgotten how Cambridge Analytica marketed itself to clients?
The whole Cambridge Analytica thing was one of the oddest most bizarrely specific media manufactured scandals that conveniently focused very narrowly and utterly ignored the bigger picture, much like the media are currently doing with something else.
> CA is a scandal primarily due to account escalation, I thought. Not about who got elected
It quite clearly wasn't, and that's the point, for the simple reason "Account escalation" isn't/wasn't a thing, there were simply no controls on anyone at all, which is why the Cow Clicker game got everything as well.
As the parent commenter observed the Obama campaign were being promoted as geniuses for their online ad strategies that worked with information obtained this way. It only became a scandal when the others learned how to do it.
That's a straw man. The theory is that they committed felonies in order to get the regulator to move in the manner they'd like.
Also one can look bad to the general public while also appearing technically excellent. When a significant fraction already vaguely dislike you that could be quite an attractive proposition.
Mostly in the middle and far east. The idea that people bend over backwards to hire criminals as subject matter experts on security is largely a Judaic practice that television perpetuates in spite of reality.
If you're a teenager convicted of hacking in the west, no corporation will want anything to do with you. If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter. It's a curious practice and I'm not sure where I stand on it.
> The idea that people bend over backwards to hire criminals as subject matter experts on security is largely a Judaic practice that television perpetuates in spite of reality.
What?
> If you're convicted of hacking in Israel, Unit 8200 will probably send a recruiter.
To the best of my understanding, Unit 8200 is filled with military conscripts, i.e. is primarily 18-somethings doing their mandatory service. You get assigned to it based on an aptitude test. The widely held idea that it’s a uniformly elite entity rather than the IDF’s space camp is a triumph of propaganda.
Really? Young they may be but space it is not. Wikipedia has this:
According to the Director of Military Sciences at the Royal United Services Institute in 2015, "Unit 8200 is probably the foremost technical intelligence agency in the world and stands on a par with the NSA in everything except scale."
Unit 8200 alumni have founded NSO which provides the Pegasus spyware.
Meanwhile, Lahav, the CEO/founder was in Unit 81, another Israeli military incubator for tech firms, basically.
If you believe the IDF has no involvement in what Irregular is doing then there's very little left anyone could say to convince you.
“Space camp,” not “space.” As in, a place to park dorks.
(The problem with “alumni” is that it means very little in mandatory systems. Unit 8200 is where Israel parks its dorks, and it stands to reason that dorks are the ones who tend to start tech firms.)
Me omitting a word does not excuse you from engaging in hasbara. I didn't want to call you out so but the only thing you could find in my post was the omission of that word and yet you insisted posting so it's to call a spade a spade.
do you realize that the Israeli population is far far more secular than the US's? the Israeli government is not "Judaic" which would refer to the religion.
Cynicism misfire. AI companies are, rightfully, heavily distrusted. But the right application of cynicism is not "existential risk is a marketing campaign"; that's absurd motivated reasoning. The right application of cynicism, here, is "they're only saying things now because they see the writing on the wall and want to try to push for self-regulation rather than the desperately needed actual regulation and treaty".
There is such a miasma of distrust right now. It's depressing because it is such a crucial time for tech & society.
To me, a good outcome of the HuggingFace/RubyGems/Wiki saga would be something like:
- OpenAI gets charged under CFAA or other law for damages and negligence. This would need to be a hefty amount to effectively deter future negligence considering the potential revenues from training a frontier model faster than competitors.
- An independent regulatory body is setup with investigation powers into future incidents. Laws prevent it from developing ties with the labs (such as disallowing funding and employee movement from labs to this body and vice versa).
- Some non-voluntary transparency rules are established that frontier labs have to follow when training new models. In the future, if there are loss-of-control incidents that result in loss of life, catastrophic damage, etc., criteria for deployment bans or compute controls could be added to this framework.
I think that's wrong as well, you can't achieve "regulatory self-capture" you need lobbying and insiders, and a government to get there, at least from my primative uninformed view.
Companies in some cases manage to convince governments to let them watch themselves. (This is not always a bad thing. For instance, content ratings have basically been fine, and it's mostly a good thing when they're not controlled by regulation.)
A deadly failure mode here would be for governments to think the AI labs have this under control.
It is misleading, even if it's true. The headline states "A single firm is behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta hacking scandals". Given that Hugging Face was the most prominent hacking scandal, it would be reasonable to think that that's one of the scandals they're talking about.
But more to the point, the article is trying to paint this as some sort of coordinated plan just because there was a sandbox misconfiguration by Irregular. The fact that the most well known hacking scandal was due to a completely unrelated escape (zero day in Artifactory) makes the entire thesis of the article invalid.
Literally what I was about to comment. This is meant to capture the normies, the busy parents managing school and work, the grandparents who want to make most of their retirement.
I am trying it now. It let me name my muse as Satan. I appreciate that it understands my humor, but I'm also not joking at the same time.
I think it's very common - its just what a 'normie' is depends on your particular poison... it seems to have been incorporated in a lot of hobbies/niches to refer to anyone not deep in the niche ?
My parents are in their 70s and retired, I can't even vaguely imagine what they would use this for.
If they have any problems in life, it is that they have too much time on their hands already. An AI agent that automates tasks so they have more free time is exactly what they would not want.
What they really want is something worth spending their time on. That is what everyone pretty much wants but instead we get this bullshit.
The date keeps changing on each release so every version bump becomes AGPL five years from the date its published. Its an interesting model, but necessary to be aware of the nuance in case you ever want to consume it.
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