It appears that every 5th or 2nd German likes them a lot, depending on the state. Why is that?
Is Russia going the have Soviets 2.0 where this time the Orthodox Church is part of the administration and Germany will be Nazi Germany 2.0 but this time Jews and Homosexuals are welcome?
Are you sure about that? Landslide surely implies dissatisfaction with the others but it also implies tolerance. Apparently Germany will give it a go. The turnout is extremely high, they didn’t just not go voting, they actively showed up for AfD.
Since I live in a area with high AfD support, yes I am sure that they don't "like" this party in the usual sense you would use that word. For some it is rather cult like, they are united in hate, in not much else. If they really would succed and take power - they would start bloody infighting very, very quickly (it shows quite often already).
Calling it a cult fits quite well. Like Trump supporters, AfD can do anything. They do a different style of politics? Sure, they aren’t like the “old parties”, their budget is projected to have a 2 billion deficit? But the “old parties” are increasing the debt as well. Arguments are bent beyond recognition. Facts don’t matter.
The term “pigeon chess” was coined for taking with AfD: while you comply to the strict rules of the game, the pigeon just randomly moves pieces, throwing some off, and shits on the board.
How much would you say that US billionaires can be credited for this? It’s very weird to watch US billionaires, UK right wingers, Putin and other long time rulers seem like having a group chat and being in sync.
Not much probably, the sentiment existed before, but Musk's support for instance did made an impact. You know, richest man supporting a party, and poor people thinking, oh, I also want to be associated with being rich and I also am angry at X. It made more people seriously considering them I suppose.
You’re probably right but how come the solution for their(any anti establishment across EU and US) problems always somehow involves being on good terms with Russia? How those groups of people have become natural allies? Is it some psyche? For example I noticed that pro-Russian people often don’t accept agency beyond “the west”, the russian, the jews, the British and the Americans and their solutions revolve around accepting the superiority of Russia and not being persuaded by the sneaky Brits, West, Jews. That’s why their solution to the war in Europe is just West not attacking Russia and let Russia have what is rightfully theirs. Just really weird school of thought that denies agency.
I heard some really weird stuff about Ukrainians from some people, some of them otherwise very much not right-wing, and I can only attribute it to the internet. They certainly wouldn't give me a real source for where they got that from, but kinda just dropped it and moved to something else.
Oversimplificated, they are just oversimplificated. The world is good and bad. The current establishment of government they know is clearly bad to them, so the enemy of their enemy must be a friend and part of good then.
But speaking of it, Putin was stationed as a KGB officer in saxony in the cold war(allegedly being responsible for radical west german left terrorists) and speaks german. I surely noticed lot's of russian propaganda channels. They became a big thing during Corona and became obvious russian (at least to some), when the channels that propagated antivaxx before suddenly reported anti Ukrainian propaganda and also openly support for the russian aggression.
Europe is a vibe based concept, a place can be European or not depending on the vibes. Even the east west central etc. are completely vibe based. Portugal for example is Eastern European country, meanwhile Romania is central according to some textbooks.
EU isn't a single identity. Usually overt displays of nationalism is frowned upon in Europe, especially in Germany. Moreover I have a strong guess that if there would be a flag, it would be the Bavarian one for a company called "Isar".
EU is a single well defined entity, the frowned upon flags are the German flags, EU flags are well tolerated especially in international settings.
For example the first electric plane that recently flew was originally European until last year and they had an EU flag on it. When eventually flew in USA they had the US flag.
Fun fact: French Guiana is a part of France -- and very much part of the EU -- despite not actually being in Europe. In roughly the same way that Hawaii is a part of the United States of America, despite not actually being in America.
Including those who pushed for Brexit. Farage gave a speech accepting a defeat around midnight, the value of GBP skyrocketed for a moment etc.
The referendum was supposed to be a tool for the political class to wrestle each other, not a real life changing decision. Turns out if you fuel enough BS you may not be able to control it.
The same for this fear mongering about evil people messaging in secret each other. It’s not a real discussion, if someone should lose their privacy its the people in power. Make it illegal having secret messaging for politicians and people rich beyond some point. The danger doesn’t come from some regular people talking about something nasty in secret, the danger comes from billionaires talking secretly with politicians. We should have been able to see the messages that led the pro-brexit billionaire "gifting" Farage 5 million GBP. Of course the secrecy is needed even for the politicians and the super rich but we should be able to "debug" them, we should be able to have a committee or something of that sort that will be able to decrypt and check all their communications when needed.
In my more cynical moments I think that was the whole point of Brexit. An awful lot of the big names in the pro-Brexit movement were in one sort of investment-management business or another, and I'd love to see what positions they and their companies held in June 2016.
Debatable. Optimus will be programmed by watching thousands of YouTube videos and by indexing the entire NEC. It is entirely possible that a single Optimus can be a master welder, electrician, and HVAC technician. What Optimus can't do is take responsibility for the completion of the work as being done to code. Nor is it clear how much Optimus will cost to buy or operate.
Underestimating humanoid capabilities is a mistake; the real challenge will be the economics and the flow of responsibility. But imagine a future where every structure built has a pov video documenting its construction. I don't like the implication for the trades any more than I like the implication of Claude for putting me out of work either.
Latest LLMs that have good visual understanding (Gemini and GPT) are able to tell if construction work is up to code. You can give it a picture of electrical wiring, plumbing, framing and it will tell you if it's up to code with very good accuracy.
Nope, it won't. Won't stop the government from advertising the failed California high speed rail, either. But I think Musk is more likely to deliver on Optimus.
Apple Studio with maxed out M5 Ultra, 256GB RAM and 16TB storage is 18,299$. The 512GB RAM version apparently is coming in October, considering that the difference between 96GB and 256GB is priced at 4000$, the 512GB upgrade must be eye watering.
So, on the mini the RAM upgrade runs at 25$ per GB on all tiers, the same as the Studio therefore the upgrade to 512 will probably cost 6400$.
The fully maxed out Apple Studio then will be 24699$. It's 17199$ if you don't upgrade the storage(1TB).
So is downpayment on a house. I would buy the house and just pay for tokens as needed. The house will get more valuable and that wealth would buy a lot of tokens in the future - which will probably get cheaper.
EDIT: or buy AAPL. If I had bought Apple stock instead of buying a Mac LC II in 1992, then I would have about $2 million in Apple stock.
Or more simply – $25K (+ tax) put in a savings account will earn about enough interest to pay for a $100/month AI subscription indefinitely. And at the end of it you still have the $25K.
Not 'more simply', there are basically zero savings accounts that are going to net you a 5%+ interest rate to give you that $100 a month. And that $25k becomes less valuable over time. $25k is now only worth $19k because inflation.
Do you think monthly AI 'subscriptions' are going to be $100 a month in 5 years? These people using these would probably be on $200/month subscriptions and with that OPs assertion of 'shoving away and paying with interest' makes no sense.
It’s basically impossible to compete on economic terms with deeply subsidized hardware that is widely available to rent or as a service with zero commitment.
For general inference there’s no ROI that makes this work vs subscriptions.
25k for computer now, plus 9-10% sales tax, plus operating cost, plus time and cost for R&D tinkering with models, harnesses, and infra (assuming highly capable engineering talent that can get paid for your human inference) vs a HEAVILY subsidized subscription at 200 per month with free R&D has a pretty long ROI (15 years?)
At API costs, it’s like 6 months if you’re heavy on inference.
For training, specialized models will have their own ROI that makes this worthwhile. Then debate renting capacity and the platform to choose
Yeah I think you call out the right incentives. Lots of people are very interested in renting out the hardware, and it gives us lots of flexibility vs buying.
If the pace of hardware change is what the jensens of the world say, then the rents on existing hardware will decline.
Why are we comparing to the maxed out model only? The M5 Ultra with 96 GB, 1 TB, and 64 GPU cores is $5499.
Apple lets you lease that model for $110/month for 36 months.
If you can settle for a M5 Max base model that would be a $49/month lease.
Today, you should be able to run Qwen 3.8 - 27B amazingly well on either which is giving comparable performance to 5.6 Luna on SWE Bench. The local models are now getting better and more efficient and this should give you headroom. Tools like turbo fieldfare are really reducing the memory requirements to run large models and I don’t see it stopping soon.
I don't need privacy, so it would be financially imprudent for me to spend 20 grand on such a machine. But I have a financial management client who does need such privacy, and if I get more fully engaged with them then I would be able to justify getting a loaded Mac.
Currently m5 max has a prefill rate for Qwen 3.8 27B of 400+ tok/s, then generate at ~60 tok/s. (And it can be improved further, the software is not yet at the level it is for CUDA)
That means for context under ~5k or so ttft (time to first token) it's going to respond faster than Claude. If the answer is less than ~1k I think the request finishes sooner. And it's ~claude 4.5 or 4.6 level intelligence.
I've had it work for more than a day on a pi.dev "loop engineering" project involving writing software.
Depends on where you live. Also keep in mind population decline so long term, im not so sure. Prices already dropping in less desirable places (everywhere outside of most blue areas) (Assuming you are talking about the US sorry if not)
Maybe they had the cash on hand, maybe they didn’t. Assuming they are in the family formation stage of life with young kids, an outlier risk appetite would be required to sleep well at night.
Well, this is all assuming a 20% down payment, which anecdotally as a 26 yr. old, nobody I know is able to achieve. All my home-owning friends put 3-7% down. Granted, most are using first-time homebuyer loans which are generally more favorable.
I tripled my money on my RAM purchase of three years ago. So, yes, for short-term appreciation that's hard to beat. But I don't think it's something that will continue.
Regarding the $25 price per GB RAM. These chips use LPDDR5X RAM. Looking at the Framework site, they are selling LPDDR5X LPCAMM2 modules for the following prices:
Apple hasn't been selling just ram for a long time, they sell vram. Try getting 512 gb of HBM on current Nvidia cards - it's gonna cost way more than $ 24k. And here you get the same amount of memory for weights right in a quiet unit under your desk
Put together a similar build with a couple of rtx 6000 Ada cards and Apple's price tag suddenly looks pretty damn reasonable
HBM itself is very expensive but it’s not really fair to compare to LPDDR or GDDR
They’re very different things.
The more logical argument to me is that Apple uses its upgrade price points as more than just direct BOM and rather as a proxy for things that are amortized across all their sales like support/warranty/etc so higher SKUs subsidize the costs of the lower ones.
"Nobody" puts down 20%. That hasn't been a requirement for decades (in the US).
And there are plenty of places in the US where you can buy a house for $150-$200k. Maybe not places you want to live for one reason or another, but they're there.
i remember when SGI boxes were $50k and then literally worthless just a couple bears later. i remember my university had a pile of them for free outside the deans office.
Ten years ago a bought an expensive MBP because I do a lot of stats in R, Python etc that benefited from it. But the next Mac I’ll buy will be a much lower-end model, because it’s just easier these days to do that work in notebooks in the cloud.
I recently had to buy RAM for some on-prem servers at work. 256GB was around $3800, and it wasn't even particularly fast RAM... it also wasn't ECC, because that would have spiked the price still higher.
I don't think 16TB storage is a right choice. Going 2TB and it's 11,299. Probably, if you buy the storage and install it yourself you can go higher and quite cheaper.
I think the reason they offer these options in the first place is the discontinuation of the MacPro and their remaining need to offer high end solutions.
It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
It shows up in the stats, citizens almost always trust EU more than their governments and want EU to have more power but all this means those local governments becoming less important and therefore no one is really pushing for it.
Fingers crossed Trump invades Greenland so things can start moving.
> It's always like this, EU is in urgent need of becoming a country in some form and local government deal with local stuff only.
The lesson is the opposite: The EU needs LESS power, not more. If the member states didn't have a cartel to tyrannize their collective population, this regulation could never have happened. Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Nope, less power means the current situation will be the default as each country by default will have their own body and rules to govern instead of one rule and one body that handles the whole continent.
Unlike what you appear to believe Europeans are not some libertarian captured by the EU socialist, most europeans do want less wasteful and less harmful packaging.
Do most Europeans want all of their E-commerce to be only handled by American and Chinese megacorporations without local players? Because that is the effect of this regulation. Instead of a SME shipping a cardboard box, it will be Amazon or Temu.
This also negatively affects smaller trading partners, and makes (bi-lateral) trade with the EU much less appealing to them. This means that countries like Canada are less likely to maintain trade agreements which open their market to all sorts of EU goods.
No, we absolutely don't need to give more power to Orbans and other corrupt selfish pricks across Europe to line their pockets at everyones expense and the future of Europe.
> Any single country that would try to enforce this would be on its own.
Actually they'd have no retroactive way to enforce it at all, and the most they'd be able to do would be to charge an import duty on a per-parcel basis, which would ultimately be borne by the importer.
This would be a huge improvement over the utter nonsense they're implementing!
People often forget that the world is not just US or "the West". What he is investing in is a phase that the West certainly is headed into and we will be testing the idea of creating a feedback loop that gives more and more power to people who are successful in one thing to call the shots in all other things. I would say so far those people demonstrated very low efficiency and inability to match the ranks of the China Communist party in pretty much all metrics, including the creepy stuff. One may argue that the Western way of doing dystopia is a self-correcting loop, so maybe eventually we may have more advanced and optimized dystopia than what China or Russia can achieve through centrally held power. Alternatively maybe the human nature will prevail and all this will actually lead to another run of freedom and democracy. Considering the history of Europe, both can happen as stages of a continuous loop.
Anyway. China, India and others will have their own futures with their own theories on how the society is supposed to function, so no the future be it bleak or bright is not the future of humanity but USA and to some degrees Europe and the rest of Americas.
Some of the creepy things like the 'phone farm' have been done for many years in China and other locations. I follow the social media of a low-budget 'phone farm' operator in Pakistan who has about 400 phones which are used for various forms of paid "boost your post/boost your business" social media manipulation domestically in Urdu lanuguage social media.
He's doing it a somewhat more labor intensive way, not using fully automated software tools to drive each phone (he can hire people for the equivalent of $280 a month USD salary converted into PKR currency), but the results are much the same.
Particularly in the past five years I have seen a rapidly growing trend of people doing stuff that I would categorize as "importing sketchy shit people have been doing for a long time, and can often get away with doing in a developing country, to the US/Canada/Western Europe" as a business model. Like, you think the loan apps that some US based startups have launched in the last couple of years are sketchy? Look at what's been done in India for years now. Just as one category example.
Wouldn't be needlessly expensive and risky before the bubble pops? Just buy the scraps after it pops and If it's not bubble, they can alternatively just buy a fab dedicate its output to build ridiculously large infrastructure in Norway and power it with their wast hydro and wind sources, then bring the talent by providing freedom and resource access.
Is Russia going the have Soviets 2.0 where this time the Orthodox Church is part of the administration and Germany will be Nazi Germany 2.0 but this time Jews and Homosexuals are welcome?
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