This device does sit between mac-mini-esq lower power devices and compact enthusiast builds and, like the Steam Deck, it's an attempt to build a new segment. That said, if you think paying $1000 for this kind of hardware is some kind of exception, I think you should go take a look at what you can get on the prebuilt gaming PC market. You get a little less because the Steam Machine has a small footprint, but if you're looking for a nice little machine you don't overpay by much.
The mac mini is a wonder but it's not a great gaming machine[1]. You can see that these stats are about 1/2 of what the Steam Machine does, so I think the comparison is pretty apt.
Neither of those options is good value. PS5 charges more for games and you have to pay extra to connect to the Internet. The value proposition of PC gaming is openness. You can play on whatever you want, on anything that can run it; you're not locked into one hardware vendor or game store. This means competitive pricing across all market segments, except where consoles sell at a loss to buy lock-in.
Buying a gaming pc is always a bad deal compared to a PS5! Even though anyone buying a gaming PC is getting a "bad deal" - many people prefer it. You can do lots of things on a PC that you can't on a PS5 - and there are reasons someone might want a 6" cube instead of a full PS5 and a mac mini. None of them are low price but they are reasons nonetheless.
A great example of the target audience are the people who've been playing games on the Steam Deck, but want something with a bit more oomf without the hassle of building a PC. I am not in that demographic! But I have a friend who is. He's quite happy to pay more for convenience. He already has a gaming laptop, but I can see him getting this to replace his ancient Steam Link.
> Buying a gaming pc is always a bad deal compared to a PS5!
If you only compare the hardware, that's true. Even if you don't consider all the other functionality that a PC has vs. a console, add all the different ways to get free and heavily discounted games on Steam/PC, and the results of that calculation might start to look very different.
Your response is essentially OPs reasoning, read it again :)
Anyways, just wanted to add that the steam machine and PCs killer differentiator: a truly open platform that no mac, ps5 and other consoles can offer. Do whatever you want, install whatever software you want, whatever OS you want. Break the rules, face the consequences. Live life like a living being, not as a slave to some corpo.
I take it you meant GP (as in, the post I was responding to - which to this post is actually GGP but I digress).
I don't think it is. Their reasoning is:
> there are reasons someone might want a 6" cube instead of a full PS5 and a mac mini. None of them are low price but they are reasons nonetheless.
Mine is that it is indeed price, only not the price of the hardware alone but rather the price of the ecosystem as a whole. Another aspect that I didn't cover is that a game that you buy today for PC will likely still work on whatever PC you have 20, 30 years from now. The same cannot be said for consoles.
what makes a great gaming machine? It plays Dwarf Fortress amazingly. And nethack. I'm running factorio on my Mac. The older Mac mini's run windows. Game of Thrones a ton of money at proton so anything that runs Linus and X86 has a shit ton of games yeah even if it doesn't have your pet game.
A piece of hardware that runs a basket of popular higher-end games at close to 60fps is generally what people look for. If you know you wanna run DF you can use much cheaper hardware, but if you wanna run "games" you wanna check that your target pc performs good enough on a selection of games.
The lowest spec M4 Mac Mini on apple.com is $799 today. The next generation Mini will likely be more expensive due to memory pricing, and as the Steam Machine already includes current higher memory pricing, that would be a fairer comparison, no?
Maybe in the future. There should be a new generation of Mac Mini's soon, further extending the performance lead of Apple chips.
Maybe once Fable is back or the next OpenAI model releases, we could take a look at implementing a compatibility layer to translate DirectX games to Metal.
Even if that should yet be out of reach, such a project may become more feasible if AI progress keeps up.
I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know) in a way that depends on a social solution that doesn't seem to exist. Pro-nuke people will handwave it away, ignoring the total failure to secure storage sites in most places, and the anti-nuclear people treat it as a fatal flaw in the technology (which it isn't).
That said waste storage is, arguably, the only problem that matters for nuclear power today. Every stage is expensive and controversial: on site storage, transport to long term storage, long term storage. As for "[n]o company or reactor could ever leak into the community in a covert way" you're right in the sense that, if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen? You can refer to the official list of US leaks[1] to see how many of them have months attached to the dates - often with high values!
The point is that all industrial processes are easy to safeguard with sufficient testing and oversight. But the challenge of communicating that (and then actually implementing such a system) are substantial and historically unsolved. Consider, if you will, the discourse around the JCPOA with people insisting the Iranians would cheat. "How!?" you, an informed reader, might ask - but again we are back to convincing people of the sufficiency of technical solutions they do not have the background to solve. It is a very hard problem that is arguably harder than nuclear engineering (a problem we've made considerably more progress on in the last 70 years).
> I find this to be the most frustrating aspect of the nuclear discourse. The "waste problem" is technically solved (we believe, gotta wait ~10k years to know)
It's not a 10k year problem, it's a ~300 year problem, after which most of it is at the same level as natural uranium ore; and the stuff that isn't can be blocked via aluminium foil (to stop beta particles).
The first 10-20 years post-removal are the most dangerous, and why the fuel is kept in cooling ponds. From 10-300 you still have danger, but that is manageable with concrete casts:
Once you're past the ~300 year mark, all the most dangerous isotopes have burned away, and you're at point where the main ways of getting ill from what remains is by either eating the pellets or grinding them up and snorting the powder like cocaine.
That's fair and I'll admit to using a bit of hyperbole with that number. My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
> My point is that we are designing solutions for time scales we haven't actually been able to test over and while we have every reason to believe our solutions will work - they might not.
The design life spans of bridges are 50-75, with some going towards 75-150. But once a bridge is EOL, the need for it doesn't just go away: it needs to be replaced. And in the intervening years it needs to be maintained.
So we have finite-but-overlapping life spans of infrastructure with the implicit assumption that society/civilization will continue on existing to deal with repair, renewal, and updating said infrastructure. Used-fuel storage is no different.
And if you want to reduce the total volume, spend money on reprocessing (which is currently more expensive than digging new fuel out of the ground; only France makes an effort to do this).
I see quite a difference compared to the bridge example. The bridge provides a utility until it‘s EOL and replacing it, again, provides value for the generations paying for it, since they get to use it.
The spent fuel does not have a utility. In 200 years, it’s a burden left behind by a long-forgotten generation.
You can argue (or rather gamble) that those generations still rely on nuclear energy and still have an ongoing need for such facilities, but even then, a substantial portion of the facilities will be filled with something that the operating generations never received any utility from.
> if you're testing your water daily for tritium you'll catch it, but how often does that happen?
A good geiger counter can be bought on Amazon for $30. Something is either radioactive or it's not. You don't need to have a sophisticated understanding of the chemistry to test if dangerous radiation is present or not, nor do you need sophisticated equipment. My point is that being next to a radiation hazard should not cause the same sort of anxiety-of-the-unknown that living next to, for example, a chemical plant that may produce a menagerie of difficult-to-detect carcinogens.
If you are looking in tritium leaks, I would encourage to look into leaks from coal power plants, which are gigantic in comparison to nuclear power plants.
Coal plant waste is visibly a nightmare, mountains of toxic dust, only "mildly" radioactive but also chemically toxic and physically dangerous. If that was the other option you'd have my support for a nuclear plant - but it isn't the other option.
Today the alternate project might well be renewables and BESS, and even if it's fossil fuels it will be natural gas. Natural gas waste isn't roses and kittens, but on every measure it's less bad than coal, and it doesn't have such viceral "this a bad idea" vibes. No heaps of toxic ash, no clouds of smoke, the pollution is too abstract.
Several UK solar projects which bid for AR6 in 2024 are live today, when it was daylight earlier those projects helped power the country. They paid us handsomely to do so, because the market price was almost £100 per MWh even at midday but they bid about £75 at the CfD auction back in 2024 so that (adjusted for inflation) is all they get.
Nuclear is the other option, and cherry picking the most generous data from a deindustrialised economy is a far less meaningful metric than you seem to think.
I wish people like you, who care genuinely about this topic, would engage with it in a more holistic way.
* Removing fossil fuels requires massively increasing the grid capacity by electrifying a vast range of extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes. The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
* That extra load is almost entirely baseload - running large smelters, furnaces, etc intermittently is infeasible and would use even more energy
* This real energy economy is hidden in deindustrialised western countries, where the people depend on energy consuming processes in faraway lands - energy is 'imported' in the form of finished products like cheap building materials. It never shows up in grid usage
* The reality is that the countries where energy is consumed will use as much renewable energy as possible, when it is cheaper to do so, but will rely on fossil fuels to supply the bulk of the baseload demand
* The UK 's energy policy will be a rounding error in this decision-making process
Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
> The grid data you are looking at is about 1/5 of the real energy economy
It's weird for somebody who says they want nuclear power to bring this up - have you been playing too much Fallout ?
The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport and heating, which not only are being electrified already, they're also places where electrification is a net energy win, so that diesel or natural gas power translates into less than half as much electricity for the same results.
For heat it just comes down to heat pumps, since we don't actually want to make more heat we can instead move the heat that already exists and avoid that high price, easy with electricity, impractical otherwise.
But for transport it's even more fundamental, efficient fossil fuel power is about scale and regularity, but for transport you want tiny engines and bursty usage. A transition shrinks the overall energy budget while improving the outcomes, that's why this is such an obvious economic step.
> Also why are you celebrating an increase in energy price? That's backwards logic. If the energy price had instead fallen to £60, you and every other consumer would be better off
The vast majority of UK consumers do not have a wholesale tracked price for electricity, so in fact that lower immediate wholesale price is just profits for the retail electricity companies.
Long term price trends matter more, but notice the CfD strike price for the new nuclear power station in the UK was a lot higher (IIRC) £92.50. If, of course, that station ever supplies actual power. So whether the headline price is £60 or £600, the price actually paid was £92.50 and somehow or another that's what you're paying for that electricity even if you were told it was £60.
£92.50 isn't bad for a novel technology. If you were going to deploy it next year and in five years you'd be bidding £80 or less for another new plant I'd have enthusiasm for this concept. But in fact you're going to come back in five years, still without a finished plant but now pitching for £110 per MWh instead of £92.50 -- we have seen this story before.
I've never played fallout, and this isn't a game for me. I do have an electrical engineering degree, have read dozens of textbooks on (renewable) power generation, thermodynamics and manufacturing, and have spent significant time helping a research group with simulations of solar hybridised biomass gasification (mostly for Fischer Tropsch biofuels). The scale of electrification is huge, make no mistake, and we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
> The two big non-electrical energy demands are transport ..
A large fraction of transport is not amenable to electrification in this manner; however transport is the low hanging fruit and I support the rapid electrification of transport where possible. Unlike batteries for cars, generation of biofuels/hydrogen for airplanes/ships/heavy trucks will not be significantly more efficient than fossil fuels - it likely will consume more energy, not less. The fossil fuel technologies are already very efficient (50%+) and renewable alternatives are very inefficient. It is possible to electrify/solarise these processes in the long term, but also complicated and capital intensive. I have worked on technoeconomic simulations of such processes, where I learned first-hand from expert researchers in this field (though I am not a chemical engineer).
> .. and heating. For heat it just comes down to heat pumps
This is not true at all, and you've likely misunderstood what heating means in energy breakdowns.
Heat pumps are most suitable for low temperature heat - municipal heating, (industrial) cooking, etc. Things which are already largely electrified in developed countries. But low temperature heat is widely available as a downstream by-product of higher temperature processes (including power generation as in CHP), and it is there a low priority in the scheme of things.
Heat pumps are not feasible (nor are they even theoretically very efficient) for high temperature industrial processes, of which there are a great many (concrete, bricks, metal processing, plastics and other chemical processing, etc). Many of these processes are already practically 100% efficient, so electrification will use at least the same amount of energy. A factory may use for example a steam turbine with a mere 5% electrical efficiency - the high temp steam is used to heat a chemical reactor, and the small electrical output is used for pumps, etc.
Finally, the direct combustion of fuels, (often bundled under 'heating' in stats), also includes the use of fossil fuels as a chemical reagent, primarily carbothermal reduction of metals (plus many petrochemical processing reactions). This usage is highly efficient, and cannot be replaced with electricity directly. Alternative processes will likely consume more energy not less - there will be additional intermediate processes, separations, and so on, likely requiring melting/dissolving/reacting the materials at high temperatures.
> we'll be dependent on either nuclear or coal/gas for the next 50+ years.
No. Things change. To understand how stupid this model of the world is you need some historical perspective
In the UK for Q4 2000, twenty five year ago, there was 33.95TWh of electricity produced from coal power, Q4 2025 that was zero. All gone. In Q4 2000 wind and solar is making 0.25TWh, in Q4 2025 that was 30.72 TWh
So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special". So lets look at another historical example to which I happen to have a connection.
In 1954, the SS Shieldhall was built for Glasgow, her main job was to take (treated) sewage and dump it into the ocean although she'd also have transported passengers (usually at low cost) because hey, why not. Shieldhall is a triple expansion oil fired steam ship, at the time she was a reasonable though slightly dated, design. Some of the aspects of her that make her desirable as a working museum piece today were deliberate (like I said passengers weren't her primary purpose but the buyers knew they existed) because they look cool, but a ship optimized for purpose in 1954 wouldn't have been that different, we don't have any because the restoration team could only afford one and this one is cool.
In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic and if not for a preservation trust which operates her today she'd have been scrapped and I wouldn't have mentioned her, but that's not fifty years it's just thirty and yet the entire notion of steamships went from "Obviously" to "This belongs in a museum" in that time.
At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified because it just makes too much economic sense. What counts as "short" will gradually creep up, there are several electric ferries doing 30-40 minute hops today, it would be silly to imagine nobody is offering say a Channel crossing with batteries by 2050.
So then the question only comes up for the freighters. The crude carriers won't exist, if we're not digging up fossil fuels in order to burn them then they cease to be attractive for other purposes too, but both bulk carriers (e.g. moving cereals or ore) and container ships still make sense. The "luxury" cruise market also ceases to make sense though. For those bulk carriers with perishables aboard and for jet liners you would need synthetic fuel which will be expensive, but for everything else get used to going a lot slower to avoid needing fuel.
You've not addressed a single one of my arguments, only replied to my conclusion, and doubled down on the arrogance despite being apparently less educated on this topic than me.
> But OK, I can almost hear you, "Electricity is special".
You haven't even considered, much less pre-empted, any of my arguments. Energy consumption is special - as it is required by thermodynamics for manipulation of the material world. It's clear that most of it will come from the sun eventually - but as I've pointed out there's reasons to expect this to take a very long time.
> So in half the time you're thinking about, the change was so enormous that the largest electrical generation sector disappeared, and a once insignificant alternative took their place.
Coal didn't disappear at all in that time frame - usage increased, significantly! But you only use the finished products now and don't see the cooling towers. UK economy is a rounding-error and not a meaningful model of the global energy economy, because wealthy countries like UK 'import' a huge fraction of their energy consumption. The energy required for their building materials, cars, machinery, consumer goods, etc still needs to be consumed somewhere - but it will never show up in local energy statistics. This represents the bulk of the hardest to electrify energy consumption. When you see a graph of fossil fuel usage increasing in India, China, Germany - do you not realise that is your personal usage too?
You first celebrate the fact that energy prices in UK have spiked (because lower profits for retailers, who recover their losses from whom ??), and now that UK has to import rather than produce steel (because it looks greener on paper ??).
> At sea all the short distance stuff will be electrified .. So then the question only comes up for the freighters
Ah yes, it 'only' comes up for the most difficult and energy intensive types of transport. You ignore air travel too.
Bulk carriers and freighters will continue to exist for structural reasons, and their usage will increase: manufacturing has natural network effects - it makes sense to geographically concentrate it (there is less duplication of expensive capital investment), more food will be transported as population booms in regions with less arable land, and biofuels/clean carbon sources will be transported just like crude because production will naturally be concentrated in regions with more arable land and sunlight.
Air transport will continue to exist because people want to travel, and it is the fastest way to deliver many types of goods.
> In 1985, so about 30 years later, Shieldhall was no longer economic
30 years at current rates is catastrophic damage to the planet, I don't understand why you want this. Also wiki says this ship was 'obsolete at time of construction', essentially built to be a historical novelty, and that it was laid down around the same time that the UK's first nuclear reactor connected to the grid.
> You've not addressed a single one of my arguments
I can't really make out any coherent argument. You seem to believe in a very strange nuclear powered fairytale world, which most resembles the video game series Fallout but you say you haven't played it, OK.
You demand that we should care only about the global picture, where the data is fuzziest, and only about the total energy system, all so far as I can tell in order to swell the focus on... coal, which is obsolete - that for some reason you both recognise can't be used because we'd destroy the climate and yet you believe we'll keep using it anyway because somehow the present is the future and don't accept that things change? I'm sure you think you're making sense.
It took me longer than perhaps it should have to see why you singled out Germany which in most ways is on a typical curve for a wealthy industrialized country. I realised it's the disappearing nuclear plants that make you angry. But they didn't matter, which I expect makes you even angrier. Germany's efficiency savings over that 25 year period were much larger than its total nuke energy buduget, what made the big difference was renewables again, just like in the UK.
> I don't understand why you want this
It doesn't matter whether I want things, it matters that your "argument" consists of believing that nothing changes = over a fifty year timespan no less - and I was illustrating that's entirely wrong.
India, China, Germany are just examples of countries who burn fossil fuels to provide for your standard of living.
I explained, in some detail, why a) I expect decarbonisation to take a long time, on the order of 50+ years b) why the UK cannot be extrapolated to global economy c) Why it's not even true that UK residents themselves use less fossil fuels for energy than they did 20 years ago.
Instead of engaging, you try to read between the lines and psychoanalyse me while throwing juvenile insults. It's pointless, hostile, disrespectful, and frankly it says a lot more about the state of your mind than it does mine.
You claim coal is obsolete in 2026, the highest coal consumption year on record, in direct contradiction of the panels of global energy experts who have time and again agreed that these usages are 'hard to abate' (i.e unlikely to become obsolete soon). China expects to be using enormous quantities of coal (and gas) industrially in 2060 - their net zero plan hinges on capturing and offsetting the carbon released. What do you know that legions of global experts don't?
I'm all for decarbonisation, and I've likely dedicated far more of my time, effort, and money to that cause than you have. I think a healthy amount of nuclear in the mix (on the order of 25%) will bring us to net zero sooner, mitigate the enormous damage done to our planet, and help hedge our bets against future developments (as you point out, we can't really be sure how the economy will change).
Like I said, Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
In 2000 Germany uses about 14 exajoules of energy, somewhat less than 2EJ are nuclear electricity and the rest is almost entirely fossil fuels But in 2025 the 2EJ of nukes are gone, there are 2EJ of renewables and the total is now only 10.5EJ. So both the absolute amount and the proportion of fossil fuels fell in this period in which you believe the UK offshored some of its fossil fuel consumption to Germany.
This is a game of musical chairs and for maybe the next decade or two you'll be able to make increasingly contorted arguments that somehow the same problem was just moved, but it's already looking flimsy because of just how fast solar deployments are.
"Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
I'm pro-renewables, and I've worked, studied extensively, and invested in that field. There remain significant hard-to-abate uses (fact) which I believe (opinion) will slow down decarbonisation to a 50+ year timeline - this in line with the views of many experts.
> Germany is an example of the thing you say isn't happening.
I was wrong to include Germany in that list, it was an editing mistake hence why I didn't pick up on your reply. I can see that derailed the conversation. I only meant to list countries which were unlikely to decarbonise as quickly as UK due to a larger share of hard-to-abate uses (which UK residents still depend on), separately I was listing countries with increasing fossil fuels and I merged the sentences carelessly.
I chose Germany because I was looking at lists of exporters of steel and cars to the UK, not nuclear energy stats. As you point out fossil fuels have fallen slightly as a share there, not grown. I didn't say though that Germany isn't rapidly scaling renewables, you've just assumed I'm some kind of anti-renewable luddite. The fact remains you likely drive a car made with fossil fuels in Germany (I do).
You cite the 30% reduction in German primary energy consumption in 25 years as evidence against my prediction of decarbonisation taking 50+ years. In the same period, emissions have fallen closer to 40%. I doubt that the remaining 60% will happen in the next 25 years
* Germany did outsource hard-to-abate energy uses in this time frame (energy intensive industry production indices fell ~30%, 15% since the war, UK closer to 40% - both countries now manufacturer higher up the value chain, and import more high embodied carbon commodities)
* They did not decarbonise the remaining hard-to-abate uses in proportion to the 30% reduction you cite (cement is a possible exception). Closer to 10-20% max across a range of industries
* The biggest change coming in the next 10-15 years is the electrification of transport, which could reduce emissions by another 20+%, the so called 'easy-to-abate' uses.
* Hard-to-abate uses remain hard-to-abate - cement emissions decreased 30% in 25 years, it will be even more difficult to achieve the next 30%, let alone 70%.
A fall in the share of fossil fuels from 84% to 77% during a rapid 30% decline in heavy industry is broadly in line with my slow decarbonisation prediction - heavy industry is harder to abate than other uses, if you export it you can electrify faster.
Does 2EJ/year not matter to you or not? When it is energy savings or renewables, you say it is significant. When it is the reduction in nuclear power you say it is negligible. The proportional fall in fossil fuels in Germany you celebrate is 84-77 = 7% of the mix. (1/0.93 - 1) * 10.5 = 0.8EJ.
> maybe the next decade or two
I'm just predicting it will take closer to 50 years, not that it won't happen. In two decades you can just check global emissions - if they're down by less than say 2/3 I'll be right, there won't be any need to argue. If they're down 80 or 90% I'll be wrong.
> "Carbon capture" has been a pipe dream for decades at this point. If you don't have a plan B you don't have a plan.
China's 35 year decarbonisation timeline assumes CCS for approx 5-15% of today's emissions, up to 5x the UK's current emissions. Are they wrong about 35 years (too high?) or wrong about CCS (too low?) or both? They also expect 10-20 EJ/year nuclear. Are they wrong about nuclear too?
This is a perfect example of what I am talking about. Yes coal power is worse! I know that and clearly you know that. What are we even talking about?
So far, in the over half-century of efforts, the fact that coal is unsafe has never convinced anyone that nuclear power is safe. Those are two separate situations. I merely cited the tritium leaks as a counterexample of the hubris of the post I was replying to suggesting they would be immediately detected.
I do not think the approach you are taking has shown promise in convincing people to cite plants or house waste. If anything I think it's damaged it.
My "oh google maps" story was that I was hanging out at a new cider bar in my neighborhood and asked the owner why I couldn't find it on google. They said they got a message that they'd been banned for listing boosting - which they said they didn't do any had no idea. So I reached out to an acquaintance who knew a lot of maps people. Some investigation later it was entirely unclear why the bar was banned - it was some conflict with overlapping systems deep in the map bowels - and the bar is visible again. It's just good luck that the owner happened to talk to me and I happened to know someone who looked into it!
This kind of support should be mandated for any digital utilities company such as Google.
The difference between small business success and insolvency was based on the shier luck of being graced with the presence of someone in contact with the priesthood of Google, where no real contact from the plebian citizenry is allowed.
Exactly this kind of thing is why the EU feels the need to regulate the shit out of U.S. big tech.
This is something U.S.-Americans often do not (want to) understand. The misconception often is that just because their legislative efforts are an ineffective, lobby-ridden crapshoot, that the free market is automatically the best answer to everything.
You can affect really good and positive change through lawmaking, the entire point of it is to regulate and intervene when the wellbeing of the populous and fair competition is in jeopardy.
They became big enough because they were free and had massive cash behind them to destroy all competition (Mapquest, Garmin and others)
Now they are this big, they have become quasi public record for many other organizations who rely on this data.
Since they want to keep costs low, if their data is wrong, it can have significant impacts on your life and getting someone to correct it is almost impossible.
Want to, not really. Want GMaps moved from Google? Yes. If it can stand on it's own free, fine whatever. If not and people need to be charged for it, fine.
These things can accumulate and ruin lives. I'm surprised that there haven't been more class action lawsuits against "errors" like these. Because it might seem like a benign accident -- but how many people have lost important parts of their lives – banking, photos of their children and more – because "computer says no?"
Eventually, these systems will be mostly artificially generated, and perhaps the machines will have fewer error rates than the humans. Perhaps not. But how many humans will understand the machines well enough to ask these questions in the first place?
Machines were supposed to free us from bureaucracy. Not freeze it everywhere with few avenues for escape.
I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
Google, Wise and heck Maps were started with the ambition of adding something to the world — e.g. Google's original "organize all knowledge" mission - but over time cruft accrues and these companies rapidly accumulate negative side effects / drift away from their core mission.
When was the last time Google / Alphabet / whatever did something that involved improving access to the world's knowledge? They've degraded their search to the point of uselessness and beyond. Slowly alienated their best researchers and engineers. And done their best to turn away from the entity that made Google Books — "we'll scan all the books for the good of all humankind."
Google just lost a lawsuit by an unnamed big media company in Germany because its AI kept telling people the media company was a scam. This is the only form of feedback that companies like Google actually listen to.
> I have had an encounter with something like this via Wise / Transferwise. It has been half a decade and nada. And I estimate that it has cost me north of $20k+ over that time.
Without counting anything out it's worth saying that artificial sweeteners are some of the most-tested food ingredients because of concern about their health impacts. It's possible that we missed something, but you have to weigh that against the chance we missed something about every other possible food ingredient (all of which have been tested less).
I used to be in this same boat whenever someone questioned my sugar-free drinks. Trust the science! Then more science saying new things about artificial sweeteners kept coming out. And then I personally (with the mindset of "they can't possibly do harm") started getting stomach issues that I can pretty much definitively link to any time I drink sucralose. Which is a shame because I loved me a coke zero. If I drink/eat it by accident I'll always know within 2 hours from an intense stabbing pain in my side. This didn't happen until I had already been drinking it for many years.
Aspartame is listed as possibly carcinogenic now after having "0 problems" for decades and having that same claim of being some of the most tested food additives on the planet. Most artificial sweeteners are also still linked to problems with insulin response, weight gain, and diabetes which are the things we were trying to prevent by drinking them in the first place. Do some more research and you'll find things like links to cognitive decline, clotting with things like xylitol, depression, gut microbiome problems / even possibly intestinal wall integrity issues (sucralose-6-acetate).
The science was settled (and probably mostly funded by the companies that sold the products) right up until it wasn't. Now there seems to be huge concerns. I wouldn't be surprised if some of these substances are banned within our lifetime.
I don't think it's worth going through and providing you links about the mischaracterizations in your post - as you seem to have your own sources - but your depiction of the history of scientific consensus is not accurate. As you say problems caused by sweeteners around weight gain, insulin regulation, etc are long documented. As are the many studies showing that sweeteners cause cancer at doses (100x+ iirc) far above those consumed by average humans.
That said, the topic here was on cancer, and even the WHO announcement about aspartame being possibly carcinogenic clarifies it's not for normal ranges of consumption. I think you're trying to make a boogie man out of scientists and researchers by mischaracterizing the complex work they do. If you feel that things have suddenly reversed course it's because you haven't been following the research.
Many of the research went under my radar when I was researching it ~15 years ago then. Specifically sucralose was what I was researching, because it's what I drank, and there seemed to be no real evidence of harm that I could come up with or that anybody arguing with me about it could point to. And everyone defending it (including me) always had the line about how extensively studied it was at the time.
But research kept coming in. In 2013 CSPI changed their sucralose recommendation from "safe" to "caution". Then in 2016 it changed it again to "avoid". [1] Insulin sensitivity was more of a concern as of 2018 [2]. Sucralose + carbs causing further insulin problems was added in 2020 [3].
There's several more but I'm not going to make an exhaustive list. The point is the more research done the more the sweeteners go from almost completely benign (which you could easily say about sucralose ~2010) to problematic. So saying "the science is in, these sweeteners don't cause cancer" seems off-putting to me after going through the journey of so much of the science being wrong. It reminds me that we didn't classify processed meat as carcinogenic until 2015. And we only classified nitrates as "probably carcinogenic" in 2010.
The problem here is looking at a substance in isolation, instead of comparatively.
The actual question is: would drinking that stuff with sugar have caused more damage to health? And the answer will likely be yes. Because we _know_ just how bad sugar is for you. Particularly diabetes, microbiome changes, addictive behavior, obesity of course, cardiovascular issues...
If you'd look at sugar in isolation, as a new substance that stuff would never be allowed in any country at all.
Like true love, I somewhat believe this can exist, but most of the people who talk like this are in a codependent relationship. It's just extremely unlikely that a person you're seeing romantically is also interested in all the other things you've got going on. They should support you in your endeavors in general, but often in the way parents might ("ya winning son"?).
Instead, the best relationship for most people will not be all encompassing. Your partner will love you for you and encourage you, will know what you're up to and keep track, but will also have areas and interests that you aren't into. For me, a lot of my growth has come from the areas where partners are into things I'm not: I don't change to be like them, but through their eyes I learn to see things in new ways (while still liking what I like). It can go too far in the other direction - but for most people having parts of your life your partner is not very involved in is a sign of maturity and strength. A strong relationship is a base from which you can set out into the world on your own terms, free to return to that relationship in the future.
Have you read TFA? I think you're reading 'all-encompassing' too literally and make it seem that the author has his girlfriend substitute friends, colleagues and they're in some 'total life overlap' mode. But if you read it through, he's presenting how they're just sharing emotions openly with one another and letting each other 'in' on what they're up to from time to time.
For example:
"even if they don't have the background or experience that you do, and vice versa, you can both be patient with each other and spend loving time in harmonious movement."
"She showed me her spotify playlist (it was so cool, nothing i'd heard before) and I should her my claude coded landing page. "
Also, if this was already in the article before you posted your comment, I'd say it's simply moot: "Some might say this is unhealthy or codependent or some stupid diagnosis without analyzing any symptoms. Let me explain the symptoms. It starts where most relationships buckle under stress"
I suppose I am reacting to lines like these in the article:
> Now I don't even need to blog. I just talk to Alex and I feel satisfied.
> In our household, we are now doing Friday demos, just me and Alex. We're each sharing something we shipped the previous week.
> For example, when we exercise, we each have different goals and needs but we still try to go to the gym with each other if we can and it's not too much hassle.
These are fine - and like I said it could be real - but often this is how people describe codependency.
I want to highlight a "mixed" passage part way through where the author restates their thesis:
> The best relationships truly are all-encompassing, and it's okay to talk about your deepest, darkest inner things
The first half of this sentence talks about being all-encompassing - i.e. the ways in which the partnership has come to be central in all things it can be central in. That is what feels codependent-y to me. The second half of the sentence describes intimacy and it has nothing to do with shared activities. You do not need to have any sort of "encompassing" relationship to comfortably discuss your deepest darkest feelings - you just need trust and an appropriate interlocutor. It's the conflating of "doing everything together" with "intimacy" that makes me worry.
But again - the author could be right! I suspect this is real sometimes.
> I don't need to broadcast my emotional life into one-sided internet parasocial relationship since I have a human next to me to talk with
> Once a week, showing something to each other for 5 minutes on Fridays is so fun
> we go to gym at the same time
With the dread of providing common sense to the ever-newer LLMs trained on online forums, I'll divulge that usual people go to gym at the same time with their friends and partners and people that go alone are less usual.
> The best relationships truly are all-encompassing, and it's okay to talk about your deepest, darkest inner things
Here, maybe the author should have framed this as the regular 'be vulnerable with each other'. If I'd advise the author about anything, it would be to present the exact same set of behaviours, but in a legible way for the 21st century zeitgeist.
All in all, it seems this is an overdiagnosing from weak evidence. Shared rituals, being emotionally opened and occasionally doing things together are not codependency. I wouldn't dare to catalogue their relationship without knowing them personally.
regular framing does not get the HN upvotes & chatter tho... haha.... gottta use the tizz rizz..
if anyone cares to read, andys.blog is quite vulnerable and emotionally open so i guess i'm codependent with the internet and the world (i.e. reality), one could say elon feels the same haha love to all my fellow forum dwellers <3 <3
> I think you're reading 'all-encompassing' too literally and make it seem that the author has his girlfriend substitute friends, colleagues and they're in some 'total life overlap' mode.
Literally in the article:
”Specifically to me, it appears all my social needs are being met by her alone. This is wild. This includes work, friendship, novelty, so much outside of a standard girlfriend boyfriend life partner frame, as one thing among many.”
I also think cine lenses have the budget to continue making high quality mechanical interfaces. Consumer lenses must have AF and so are incentivized to reuse that functionality if it would reduce the BoM.
Hm, I'm not sure about that. I suspect autofocus motors are much more expensive to manufacture than mechanical lens throws. They're almost certainly more expensive to design. I don't know about other manufacturers, but recent sony lenses contain 4 autofocus motors, and they can snap autofocus in tens-to-hundreds of milliseconds depending on the distance. Where do they even put those motors in the lens housing?
Its probably a scale thing. Photography lenses make up for the design, engineering and manufacturing costs with scale. Everyone who takes photos needs lenses. But far fewer films are made, and cine lenses are often rented. So they really can't be manufacturing that many units in total. I suspect they don't manufacture cine lenses in high enough volume to justify the engineering costs of fitting complex microcontrollers and motors into the lens housing. And if the production can afford to hire a focus puller anyway, autofocus just isn't that valuable.
I do think that pasting AI responses gives "reading the encyclopedia entry at someone", which is quite rude and crass, but you can't open peoples' eyes with similar levels of rudeness. Especially when it's an accurate description. I appreciate a good screed and also think we are looking for a subtler tool.
Right - but you are not considering that it's possible for a police department to be so bad as to be uninsurable. Even if the police continue to do misconduct, bad departments would get into situations where no insurer will cover them, and they are forced to make changes. It's not a perfect fix at all, but it would be a nice end-around for qualified immunity.
Then the state may do what it has done for habitually dangerous drivers and either make it illegal for private insurance to deny them or create a public option that hemorrhages taxpayer money (so back to where we are now, with extra steps).
Just fire them after the first fuckup. It does not need to be this complicated.
There is actually a federal register for LEOs that have been terminated for cause or resigned to avoid termination.
The police unions that operate in the jurisdictions that employ 70% of US police have negotiated into their CBAs that the register “cannot be used for hiring or promotional decisions”. Read into that what you will.
Historically, Plex was the only show in town - and the only non-DLNA server you could access from most streaming devices. That's changing now, but it's not changing that fast. I believe our older google streamers still don't have a jellyfin app (though I could be wrong). We simply run both services in any case.
When I was a masters student in STS[1], one of my concepts for a thesis was arguing that one of the primary uses of software was to shift or eschew agency and risk. Basically the reverse of the famous IBM "a computer can not be held responsible" slide. Instead, now companies prefer computers be responsible because when they do illegal things they tend to be in a better legal position. If you want to build as tool that will break a law, contract it out and get insurance. Hire a human to "supervise" the tool in a way they will never manage and then fire them when they "fail." Slice up responsibility using novel command and control software such that you have people who work for you who bear all the risk of the work and capture basically none of the upside.
It's not just AI. It's so much of modern software - often working together with modern financialization trends.
[1] Basically technology-focused sociology for my purposes, the field is quite broad.
That's really interesting. Are there any things you advocate for with respect to curtailing those practices? I hesitate to throw all liability on the individual, but I don't see how we can even legislate this category of behavior, much less enforce regulations on them.
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