quantumink

The case of your 5090 having become a coveted artifact of great rarity in these times - may be a nuance of some measure.

Also, the following two have very different 'needs' to feel good enough:

1. heavy agentic workloads via harness vs 2. a simple private chat interface with a local instance

Even if an MBP's bandwidth were higher, it's tough to see a reason to run it as a constantly loaded 24/7 inference machine due to heat degradation.

P.S. still extremely awesome to be able to host and chat with a decently quantized 27B model on your laptop. ...and to be fair even a 32GB Air would do that! It is a thing of beauty: the amount of folks this may add to the hacker/tinker community.

It may sound strange, but cooking is one of the most intense and attention-consuming tasks I encounter.

I have to do it every day too.

So I fully agree with this line of thought... Many a time I have considered that I would happily spend more on a personal 24/7 chef than I ever would on a car. Cars to me are utilities and should simply be efficient and optimized to purpose - food is luxury and taste, it is sublime experience and art. Maybe that's why I can't make it, treating every recipe like a strict command chain isn't how art is done. Can my taste buds be scanned?

Imagine if Gabe went the Yvon Chouinard way? (founder of Patagonia refused to IPO, never sold controlling stake, recently left the entire company to an environmental conservation trust - certified LEGEND)

Gabe seems like the kinda guy who is in the Game for the love of games.

It would be a legendary legacy indeed to commit Valve and it's profits to a trust which defends digital rights and freedom.

Of all the translations of the Tao I've come across, none dissolved me into the flow as deeply and effortlessly as Ursula's.

I try to keep multiple copies around so I always have a couple to gift to someone...

The book is a source of primordial wisdom, boundless serenity, and transcendent signal

P.S. my encounter with it completely redefined what I considered language to be capable of communicating and distilling - inexpressible, ineffable experience... divine poetry

I would argue its not the millions though, but rather that sweet rare compute - OpenAI has more of it for his interests than anyone - it is understandable why an exceptional mind would prioritize access to greater capabilities above all else

A Holmes indeed... your deductive powers are piercingly perceptive! (the event chain was a joy to follow, gave me ai2027 vibes, but slowdown like)

Of course, the world is not filled with rational actors, and the probability of the current administration allowing the market to tank like that seems next to null, so Occam's razor (or whatever) would point to another TACO inevitably incoming

I'd certainly bet on your scenario if it was reasonable to assume the US and China could get over the 'race to the top or die at the bottom' dynamic

so far ai2027 seems to be playing out to an almost uncanny accuracy, realpolitik obliterates the façade yet again

Cosmo is his brother, wow! (have deeply adored his solo work since discovering it last year)

Aaah, it all connects - a web within a web indeed...

I have got some weekend reading and listening to get to now - thank you all kindly. As a contribution wanted to mention Paul Stamets and his works - it's all somehow about fungi (and bees sometimes!), and all deeply fascinating

This! The famous Zen Koan of the Master, the Professor, and the overfilled tea cup illustrates this beautifully... I'd highly recommend checking it out! (Overall, the Blue Cliff record is a treasure trove of Koans, for anyone keen on the theme comes highly recommended)

The Zen approach, more than any other, seems to precisely emphasize the purity of 'sit down and shut up'. Shikantaza - literally means 'simply sitting'. It fundamentally involves no staring at walls, no koan to grasp and struggle over, even following your breath is not really a part of it... It really, really is 'just' sitting, in every systemic sense. A practice which has no clear goal or intent, instead focused on removing anything that could act as such, act as any tether over awareness. Awareness untethered, unbounded, past distinction.

Lao Tzu comes to mind... he said it much more succinctly: Wei - Wu Wei (do - not doing). The action of effortlessly being adrift with the flow, the action of surrender of your 'self' and the infinite schemes/designs/narratives that it builds (as someone in the discussion above here aptly suggested). Another quote comes to mind from elsewhere: 'Let go your earthly tether, enter the void, empty and become wind.'

While I concede that powerbanks may satisfy the proximal problem - literally making charging available on demand... Consider that it does not in any way resolve the distal problem of having a 'portable computing device', which heavily compromises on the 'portable' aspect - by forcing a state of permanent battery anxiety without external life support (i.e. no power source - dead in minutes of intensive work) The powerbank is a fine workaround to be fair, but as I see it: still a workaround at best. The ability to swap a battery without getting into things like soldering - allows for far more flexible functionality and longevity than a powerbank could.

That is without even mentioning the ultimate problem of parts sustainability and longevity. When you can swap individual components as they degrade, it's possible to use the rest of the machine for far longer than a degraded battery or a failing SSD would allow.

Powerbanks simply feel like treating symptoms, instead of rehabilitating the system itself (obviously still use them for phones and such of course)

Yeah... Took a moment to look it up now:

Apparently they stopped making the Developer Edition which came with Ubuntu in 2022-2023 (which was definitely cheaper by 100-200 bucks or so than the Windows version with exact same hardware, I recall the developer edition os discount very clearly)

Now the XPS line has fallen as well, as apparently even the SSD now gets soldered to the motherboard, no longer possible to service with basic tools really once it starts failing. My old 2018-ish XPS has an M.2 slot and a battery that is relatively simple by modern standards to replace with some screwdrivers and careful handling (something I think is vital for a workhorse computer, as batteries 'decimate' in capacity within 2-3 years or so in my experience)

I don't even know what's left out there anymore among major makers... when I have to look again, maybe framework... Been hearing about them for a bit now and they seem quite relevant to the discussion - haven't seen one live yet to be fair

Last I checked: the XPS was one of the few laptop product lines offering native Linux (Ubuntu) as an alternative default configuration option to order

It's how I got mine about 6-7 years back anyways, still works great (except the battery) ...never let windows get it's claws into the machine in the first place

Edit: to add, I realized over time that having a battery that lasts longer just can't seem to beat my older laptop experiences: being able to just swap an extra battery in and have full charge at will (without soldering and all that 'ish) In that sense I feel that the future is coming full circle to modularity, swapability, repairability - to the point they're becoming my primary considerations for the next portable computing select I will need to acquire.

I follow your line of thinking and mostly agree... however, would like to also point out that barring apocalyptic scenarios - there are always deep safe value sinks if you consider your needs from first principles.

Consider for example having the capacities to produce your own energy (food and electricity/heat) - these are core expenditures for most people besides a place to live. All these are direct consequences of productive land control (you can even live on the land you grow food and have solar panels on).

So if one owns and develops an environment to supply their fundamental needs autonomously and near-automatically - that would seem to be a deep value store that is about as long term as the environment can hold up.

Edit P.S. we've observed what industry has accomplished with vertical integration... why not apply it to our inputs, to increase autonomy of abundance in outputs?