devilsdata
I still have 2019 Macbook Airs sitting around, and I consider them completely unusable.
My wife has owned a 2020 M1 Macbook Air since then, and it's still working really well. To the extent that every time we talk about upgrading, we end up agreeing to wait.
But due to personal circumstances, my previous employer and I mutually agreed to part ways. I was gifted my work laptop, a Macbook Pro M4. So I will (un)fortunately never get to run the M1 Pro into the ground like I planned to.
The M1s are fantastic. If you have the 16GB model, I have no doubt that you will still be using it in several years. If Mac OS gets sluggish, Linux can be installed on it (I installed Debian Asahi on an M1 Mac Mini).
https://www.legislation.qld.gov.au/view/whole/html/inforce/c...
And of course have a chat with the traditional custodians of the land, and see if they're keen.
That said solar panels and batteries are so bloody good now, why even bother building nuclear reactors in much of the world? And geothermal looks promising too, with the new fracking tech they're using. But who knows.
God I hope this is sarcasm.
I've been hoping Cosmic DE improves enough to be usable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#:~:te...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Heinemeier_Hansson#:~:te...
When I signed up for AWS conference in Sydney this year, they listed out all the courses by codes in a vibe-coded React component. It didn't have any search function, so I had to manually scroll through it multiple times to pick my courses. The whole conference was AI-first.
AI is not as good as a team of developers. I don't know if it ever will be, but it definitely isn't today. AI is actually quite terrible at what it does. But it doesn't need to be better than that. Because the point of enterprise isn't to make good software.
The entire world is in trouble in the short term due to this. In my country of Australia, we consume the most diesel per capita in the world due to our distance and low population density. So for me, and a lot of other people in the world, the price of transporting anything will rise a lot. This means higher prices on all goods and services, as well as likely supply problems.
The increased prices will put upward pressure on inflation causing us to have to increase our already high interest rates. This will in turn cause a lot of people to no longer be able to afford to service their mortgages. In Australia, we mostly have variable interest rate, unlike the US.
There will be problems growing crops because crops require nitrogen which is dependent on oil production. There will be problems transporting goods because that is dependent on diesel.
In the short term, it is likely that a lot of people in the Global South will die. A lot of people in the developed world will suffer a great deal.
In the long term, I see this as the death knell in the USA's hegemony. Most countries will do anything possible in the next few decades to get themselves off oil and onto other sources of energy like solar or hydrogen. The USA will not have the same influence it once did. This will also mean the decline of the global technology sector, which is only as successful as it is because of US power.
You guys don't see this from where you're sitting, but the government in Australia has been trying to protect us against the harms of social media, only to be threatened time and time again by the US. Without the US oil hegemony, it is unlikely the US will have the power to enforce its tech-monopoly globally.
As an aside, I don't agree with how the social media laws in the UK and Australia dictate the collection of personal data to prove age. But that's beside my point.
Further reading: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-i...
I don't think these are enough to make me want to stay on the site, because I can join the Rust Programming Language forum. I'm sure there is a similar analogue for the writing and Sydney subreddits.
Peace.
Find the same article on AP news, or Reuters or something.
Do you just believe every bit of press release that you read? These companies have an enormous amount of pressure on them to make profit. They can and will lie to try and convince you that AI is better than it is.
Is there any evidence outside of these companies that AI is breaking new ground on literally anything? No. It can help a little with a lot of different types of work– none of it novel.
Other than that, it's a time waster.
You can reduce the likelihood of incorrectness by adding the real facts to the context, which is what LLMs do. But that in and of itself is not a guarantee that the LLM will be correct. Because its fundamental process of reasoning is probabilistic word-by-word hallucination.