My main point isn’t about caring or not, the point is that 4GB RAM in a laptop/desktop is incredibly rare for how outdated it is.
The PS4 came out in 2013 and has 8GB of RAM. In case you need help counting, that’s 13 years ago.
And that’s an optimized game console with no general purpose operating system and limited multitasking capability.
10 years ago, Samsung phones were shipping with 6GB of RAM. Not many phones even physically last that long.
My uncle bought a $350 trash Windows PC a couple years ago, literally the cheapest thing I could find on sale at Staples, and it came with 12GB of RAM.
The price of memory is insane, so if anyone wants to increase performance/dollar, they're likely going to have to do it in software. I would suspect 4Gb computers are going to come back if the hungry AI beast doesn't cool it soon.
> The biggest shortcoming of the decade-ago MacBook “One”, aside from the baffling decision to include just one USB-C port that was also its only means of charging, was the shitty performance of Intel’s Core M chips.
MMMMMMM.....I don't know. I think the biggest shortcomings of that laptop were super common keyboard (dustgate), SSD, USB-C port, display, battery, and CPU (popcorning) failure.
> The only people I've ever heard complain about the slight difficulty are techies
Because everyone else has never heard of mastodon or this fediverse shit. Of course you don't hear complaints from people who don't know what it is.
> I'll take normies over
There are no "normies" as you call them using federated services. They don't want to need to think about server to server federation rules. They want a global central feed.
Eh. I'm not going to defend OP's use of the term "normies". It's pejorative and fundamentally othering.
> plenty of non-techies
Viewing the concepts and consequences of federation (no global search, disjoint moderation by instance owners) as "tech" is a fundamental category error.
I've seen plenty of "normal" and non "techie" people on Mastodon.
And the point is the complaints about the "complexity" of Mastodon - which isn't really that complex you can literally join an instance as easily as signing up for a subreddit - are disingenuous coming from this crowd.
People don't want to join "an instance". People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
And I don't know what it's like now, but cross-server following used to be quite annoying.
Being able to join an instance with its own culture, while still being able to connect outside that culture, is the only reason I use any social media at all.
I understand it can be confusing for people coming from Twitter or Facebook or wherever, the local instance culture is Mastodon’s greatest strength. That, of course, and the lack drive to turn a profit from users.
Facebook groups and subreddits became so popular because they're all on centralized websites so you can join many of them all in one place and you can talk to people in all of them through the same platform. Single service, single login domain, single thing to tell your grandparents, and, very very very importantly, single global search.
There are major differences between "subs"/"rooms" that are fundamentally joined and independently operated protocol hosts that are fundamentally not.
Those differences are not so complex and confusing that you need deep technical skill to figure them out. You can follow anyone from any instance (per the rules, if you're on someone else's instance) or follow hashtags or use relays if you run your own instance (for which numerous services exist.)
The most difficult part of Mastodon is linking to other instances but even that just involves using the search bar.
> Those differences are not so complex and confusing
One might ask why Bluesky has more sign-ups and monthly active users acquired in less time even without the facestagram login power funnel that Threads has. And of course Threads has waaaaaayyy more. The evidence of what people want from a social media service is right in front of us and very clear.
This reads to me very much like the timeless words of Seymour Skinner, "Am I so out of touch? No! It's the children who are wrong."
Bluesky is, as the article mentioned, basically trying to be old-Twitter. More people want that than want the fediverse. That doesn't mean that nobody wants the fediverse, and they won't necessarily appeal to quite the same audience.
Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers and Threads is owned by Meta and is integrated into Facebook. What is that supposed to prove, beyond that advertising companies are good at advertising themselves?
The marketing people are the ones who tell you to not use terms like "federation," "instances," or "tooting" when designing a social networking product.
They're the ones who tell you not to force dark mode down everyone's throats by default, when usability studies going back to the 1980s say that's a bad idea.
The marketing people are sometimes wrong. But on the whole, not usually.
> Bluesky had the benefit of marketing, association with Twitter and the support of influencers
Everywhere that people have ever asked why people join Bluesky and not Mastodon, the objections to Bluesky are always philosophical (not actually decentralized, corporate overlords, and so forth) and the objections to Mastodon are always practical (signup sucks[ed?], search sucks[ed?], feed curation sucks[ed?]). Bluesky's selling point has always been "like Twitter, better control, none of the bullshit of Mastodon". That's exactly why any influencers went there and not to Mastodon. Look... I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm communicating the common message given over and over and over by everyone who looked and bounced and talked about it. And when people say over and over and over that Mastodon is frustrating, and people have indeed said that over and over and over, all you need to do is believe them instead of saying they're wrong. Threads has the trifecta of like Twitter, not Twitter, connected to maybe the biggest central platform in the world.
>Everywhere that people have ever asked why people join Bluesky and not Mastodon, the objections to Bluesky are always philosophical (not actually decentralized, corporate overlords, and so forth) and the objections to Mastodon are always practical (signup sucks[ed?], search sucks[ed?], feed curation sucks[ed?]).
Untrue. People complain about Mastodon's politics and make many of the same "philosophical" arguments as they do with Bluesky. People even argue Mastodon isn't even decentralized.
>Bluesky's selling point has always been "like Twitter, better control, none of the bullshit of Mastodon".
None of Bluesky's marketing has ever mentioned Mastodon as far as I'm aware.
>Look... I'm not telling you my opinion, I'm communicating the common message given over and over and over by everyone who looked and bounced and talked about it.
No, you are literally telling me your opinion. Your ever-increasing use of hyperbole rather than sources demonstrates that you're making an emotional argument grounded in hypotheticals.
>And when people say over and over and over that Mastodon is frustrating, and people have indeed said that over and over and over, all you need to do is believe them instead of saying they're wrong.
I think a lot of them are wrong, and are intentionally overstating how difficult Mastodon is because they view it as "leftist" and feel obligated to shit on it as much and as often as possible. I find it difficult to believe so many of the brilliant technically gifted minds on HN can't figure out how it works, but George Takei, random scientists, gardeners, musicians, authors and other "normal" people can. And a lot of those people also have accounts on Bluesky.
> overstating how difficult Mastodon is because they view it as "leftist"
That's an absurd/hilarious thing to say given the demographic breakdown of Bluesky users. Ain't no rightwingers promoting Bluesky because of their opposition to leftism, my friend.
> I find it difficult to believe so many of the brilliant technically gifted minds on HN can't figure out how it works
This is specious on multiple levels. First, "can't figure out" and "not willing to give energy to" are different things. Second, reading this website has no bearing on being either brilliant or technically gifted. Third, there's a big world outside of this website. Fourth, nobody is responsible for what you find difficult, not even you. Fifth, wait a minute, did you just say you find it difficult to believe the perspectives of others? Shouldn't brilliance and giftedness make it easy?
> People don't want to care about what "an instance" is which also means being asked to be aware of things like instance-specific moderation rules.
I can tell you how this reads to me: "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I am a happy user of Lemmy. Was there more to understand than how to join Reddit? Yes. Is the fediverse simple enough to understand that people on HN should be viewed with incredulity when they make statements that it's too difficult / too much? Unless they're speaking about people who aren't HN commenters, also yes.
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders. Being asked to understand pretty simple concepts is too much for me."
I think I can clarify the framing here. People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about. For most people, I bet almost all people, decentralization can really just get fucked, because decentralization is not what people are there for. Connection is. What federation offers is just not important to...as a percentage, almost anyone...in relation to what it removes.
Think about it this way: many things are too annoying for you to put up with, even if you technically are capable of dealing with them were you willing to give more energy than you believe is reasonable to give. See also, juice vs squeeze. See also, the iron imperative of writing ("don't waste the reader's time") applies to more than just writing.
Also...
> "I consider myself among peers with coders, scientists, and founders."
One might call it empathy to commiserate with the perspectives of people who are not those things. It's a judgement error to expect a platform to be something other than niche without that. One can also be all of those things and have zero patience for software that has an annoying user experience.
> People of all walks are extremely uninterested in being told that they need to care about something that they do not care about.
You don’t care. There it is. Just say it. It’s not a crime. I’m not judging you. I’m really not.
I care and it might not matter, but I do. It’s not for you. That’s ok. Don’t bag on it for reasons other than this. It’s not difficult and I don’t care if you don’t care. It’s fine.
I'm wondering if the context has been lost because of the length of the chain that this thread is a conversation about why people, especially non-technical and non-philosophically-motivated people, people for whom the concepts of federation and disjoint instances are actually detrimental rather than beneficial because they fundamentally erase some of the most useful features of social network platforms (e.g. global search), don't use Mastodon over something else.
> You don’t care.
Forget about me for a moment. We're talking about people. Most people, in fact. Actually the upstream comments use the term "normies", which is a term that I personally object to because it's pejorative and gross behavior. It's imperative that you evaluate this thread within the given context.
Side note on upstream calling people "normies": It's absolutely nuts to me that the groups most sensitive to othering will themselves engage in mindless othering. But anyway.
> It’s not difficult
To you. In fact one of the things that makes something difficult is how much a person is forced to deal with things that they don't want to deal with, especially when those things are the opposite of what they want from a service.
> I’m confused, you’re talking about 16 GB of RAM but OP said:
Having only 8 GB
Look at the list of things they said they have open. Divide in half and it's still a lot because that set of running software is very hungry. PostgreSQL, Slack, Docker, Brave, Cursor, and iTerm2 running on my system puts RAM usage at 23.5GB, and yet modern macs have both very good memory compression and also extremely fast swap. Most Mac users will never realize if they've filled RAM entirely with background software.
Thanks, I can see the point being that a smaller subset of that would work on 8 GB, but I don't think you can really just divide by half? (Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS/unified GPU needs compared to the 16 GB model).
e.g. using hypothetical numbers: if base MacOS/typical GPU usage requires 4 GB, then the 8GB model would have 4GB available for running apps (but multiplied by memory compression/swap to fast SSD). Whereas the 16GB would have a much more comfortable 12 GB for multi-tasking in that scenario especially with the multiplier effect of compression/fast swap on top.
So it still feels like a bit of an apples to oranges comparison as far as what an 8 GB model could handle in real usage. I have a friend who does light dev work on an M1 Macbook Air so I don't think an average user would have issues on the Neo day to day, but using the 16 GB as a yardstick doesn't seem that useful.
> Considering a much larger portion of the 8 GB would be dedicated to base OS
Sure, but, by the numbers I'm seeing, their much heavier load than mine would be waaaay into swap territory for them and is still doing just fine. That's really my point. That's why I think it's actually pretty reasonable to look at half their load and say "man, even half their load is a pretty heavy load for most people, so half their RAM will almost certainly be more than plenty for the target market".
Also, just for the info, my Activity Monitor says that the non-purgeable OS RAM (wired) usage is around 3GB on Tahoe 26.3.
Guess what? Both Windows 10+ and Linux have memory compression, too, yet 8 GB are good only for light usage unless you're willing to "destroy" the flash with intensive swapping.
> Charge habits with batteries make a huge difference.
> Hot take: people should get used to, and expect to, replace device batteries 1 or 2 times during the device lifetime.
I agree that people should get used to replacing device batteries, but if you accept that then you should just stop worrying about charge habits. An MBP that doesn't have a defective or extreme-heat-damaged battery should stay above 80% battery capacity for at least 600 charge cycles without any special care at all. That's many years of regular charging, and 80% capacity is still good for all day usage.
Agree, and this is in fact how I treat my devices. I can easily do my own battery replacements on laptops, although I still approach phones with suspicion due to the water ingress problem.
Your battery is defective if it's at 82% after 63 charge cycles. My M1 Pro has 87% capacity after ~5 years and 412 cycles of giving zero fucks and regularly draining the battery all the way down to almost 0% and charging back up to 100% every time. I plug in to charge at like 2% super often. Babying the battery doesn't make any sense IMO.
yeah, I am really interested in how they will justify retiring M1 chip when it's still so good. Some kind of security thing again like with T2 I presume
Be careful. Output formatting doesn't prove what you think it does. Unless you work inside google and can inspect the computation happening, you do not have any way to know whether it's showing actual execution or only a simulacrum of execution. I've seen LLMs do exactly that and show output that is completely different from what the code actually returns.
There is being critical of something and then there is being a conspiracy theorist. Code Execution is a well-known feature of Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. and it's always shown in special blocks and it runs inside a sandbox.
Yes. "Show Code", not "Show CPU cycles". There's a difference. Writing code is not the same as running code. It looks to you like it ran the code. But you have no proof that it did. I've seen many times LLM systems from companies that claimed that their LLMs would run code and return the output claiming that they ran some code and returned the output but the output was not what the shown code actually produced when run.
In my experience, models do not tend to write their own HTML output. They tend to output something like Markdown, or a modified version of it, and they wouldn't be able to write their own HTML that the browser would parse as such.
What, in your view, does sending one markup language instead of another markup language tell you about whether the back-end executed some code or only pretended to?
The front-end display is a representation of what the back-end sends it. Saying "but the back-end doesn't send HTML" is as meaningless as saying that about literally any other SPA website that builds its display from API requests that respond with JSON.
You cannot know that anything it shows you was generated by executing the code and isn't merely a simulacrum of execution output. That includes images.
Hmm. Is it ragebaiting to respond to a tired and wrong statement by saying that it's tired and wrong and that the situation is merely the product of piss poor management decisions? People get understandably frustrated seeing the same wrong talking point that people with domain knowledge in computer vision and robotics have repeatedly explained is wrong in extremely fundamental ways.
> I don't own a Tesla.
n.b. The shoe/foot comment was not about you. It was about Musk. It wouldn't make any idiomatic sense for the expression to be about you given what you said and what you were responding to. If they'd said "pot, meet kettle", then it would have been about you. In that context, saying that you don't own a Tesla feels like a weird thing for you to insert in your comment. It potentially comes across as suspiciously defensive.
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