Better in terms of raw specs. The original M1 Air also came with 8GB of RAM, and the A18 Pro in the Neo is faster than the version of the M1 that shipped in the base model Air
"juniors are useless": Maybe y'all should consider updating this hyberbolic language. Nobody is born a "senior developer", so surely all of your training as a "junior" is not useless. There is always a disconnect between what younger people know and what older people expect them to know, so training is required almost universally.
> The problem might end up being that the value created by LLMs will have no customers when everyone is unemployed.
I'm not a professional programmer, but I am the I.T. department for my wife's small office. I used ChatGPT recently (as a search engine) to help create a web interface for some files on our intranet. I'm sure no one in the office has the time or skills to vibe code this in a reasonable amount of time. So I'm confident that my "job" is secure :)
> Im sure no one in the office has the time or skills to vibe code.
the thing you are describing can be vibe coded by anyone. Its not that teachers or nurses are gonna start vibecoding tmrw, but the risk comes from other programmers outworking you to show off to the boss. Or companies pitting devs against each other, or them mistakenly assuming they require very few programmers, or PMs suddenly start vibe coding when threatened for their jobs.
I once had a job mopping floors and was quite successful at it, even if I say so myself. Based on my experience, do you think it is reasonable for me to claim that I will eventually develop techniques for cleaning the oceans of all plastic waste? Folks are criticizing the pie in the sky claims, not that they can do anything at all.
Seems a bit of both. But no disparagement to your floor mopping (as I once was a dishwasher in a commercial kitchen myself), but there's a big gap between cleaning a floor, or a dish, and creating frontier models and spaceships.
That said: I think solar is niche, and a moon-shot for how they want it. Nuclear is the future of reliable energy for human civilization.
I think the K-scale is the wrong metric. I don't think we should be trying to take all the sun's energy as a goal (don't blot out the sun! don't hide it in a bushel!), or as a civilizational utiltiy - I'm sure better power supplies will come along.
Data centers ultimately need to provide power and remove heat. Solar might be a little easier for power in space, maybe, but heat is an absolute no-go, stop, this will never ever work. You can't engineer your way out of the fact that space is a vacuum.
if the thermal radiation panels have ~3 x the area of the solar panels, the temperature of the satellite can be contained to about 300 K (27 deg C). Ctrl+F:pyramid to find my calculations.
I looked, and you outlined a solution that would be hard to achieve in a vacuum chamber on earth. Now we're going to launch it into orbit and it will work great?
Building data centers in Antarctica with nuclear power would be easier. And still way harder than necessary.
Yes, how would you simulate a 4K background in a vacuum chamber on earth... or you could just trust a law that has withstood 150 years the test of time by physicists...
Units is a cool piece of software, but I have since switched to qalculate.
Mostly units has some silly defaults like needing to type tempC(30) instead of 30C; and it's nice to have a full calculator.
I know it's a way to specify that the conversion is absolute rather than relative, but qalculate just asks you about it the first time you convert, and since converting oven and outside temperatures is most of what I do, I don't havr to bother with remembering a different syntax.
Also qalculate is an awesome piece of software in general, so if you're excited by units you should check it out!
Favorite feature: you can type in any equation, writing 'x' for an unknown quantity, and it will solve for x. This comes in handy to avoid having to engage brain even for simple calculations. How many pixels per mm is 96 DPI? Just type 96/inch = x/mm. Sure you could rearrange it yourself but why bother?
They were talking about instability. I had an old Radeon workstation card in my desktop at home for at least a decade, but with the most recent AMD drivers, Firefox (with hardware acceleration turned on) would crash Gnome and the system when watching videos on YouTube. So I wasted money on one of those new Intel graphics cards to get the stability back (in addition to the time wasted diagnosing the problem).
That seems more of a gnome issue than otherwise. Right now my firefox process is clocking +8h of cpu time, I have 3 youtube videos on pause. My last crash was 2025-07-31, so yeah, I would ask you all what kind of system are you rocking instead.
I don't game, but all my computers run Debian Stable, and my oldest child wastes considerable time gaming on Steam. I had to tweak one or two things for him early on, but it all seems to work fine.
People who don't use Debian misunderstand Stable. It's released every two years, and a subset of the software is kept up to date in Backports. For anything not included in Backports, its trivial to run Debian Testing or Unstable in a chroot on your Stable machine.
I moved to Debian Stable ~20 years ago because constant updates in other distros always screwed up CUPS printing (among other things). Curiously, I was using Ubuntu earlier this year and the same thing happened. Never going back.
