If the AI-based product is suitable for purpose (whatever "for purpose" may mean), then it doesn't need to be marketed first and foremost as "AI". This strikes me as pandering more to investors than consumers, and even signaling that you don't value the consumers you sell to, or that you regard the company's stock as more of the product than the actual product.
I can see a trend of companies continuing to use AI, but instead portraying it to consumers as "advanced search", "nondeterministic analysis", "context-aware completion", etc - the things you'd actually find useful that AI does very well.
It's basically being used as "see, we keep up with the times" label, as there is plenty of propaganda that basically goes "move entirely to using AI for everything or you're obsolete"
The problem is that there are virtually no off-the-shelf local AI applications. So they're trying to sell us expensive hardware with no software that takes advantage of it.
Yes it's a surprising marketing angle. What are they expecting people to run on these machines? Do they expect your average joe to pop into the terminal and boot up ollama?
Anyone technical enough to jump into local AI usage can probably see through the hardware fluff, and will just get whatever laptop has the right amount of VRAM.
They are just hoping to catch the trend chasers out, selling them hardware they won't use, confusing it as a requirement for using ChatGPT in the browser.
I agree with you, and I don't want anything related to the current AI craze in my life, at all.
But when I come on HN and see people posting about AI IDEs and vibe coding and everything, I'm led to believe that there are developers that like this sort of thing.
I see using AI for coding as a little different. I'm producing something that is designed for a machine to consume and react to. Code is the means by which I express my aims to the machine. With AI there's an extra layer of machine that transforms my written aims into a language any machine can understand. I'm still ambivalent about it, I'm proud of my code. I like to know it inside out. Surrendering all that feels alien to me. But it's also undeniable that AI has sped up a bunch of the boring grunt work I have to do in projects. You can write, say, an OpenAPI spec, some tests and tell the AI to do the rest. It's very, very far from perfect but it remains very useful.
But the fact remains that I'm producing something for a machine to consume. When I see people using AI to e.g. write e-mails for them that's where I object: that's communication intended for humans. When you fob that off onto a machine something important is lost.
Partly it's these people all trying to make money selling AI tools to each other, and partly there's a lot of people who want to take shortcuts to learning and productivity without thinking or caring about long term consequences, and AI offers that.
Even as a principal software developer and someone who is skeptical and exhausted with the AI hype, AI IDEs can be useful. The rule I give to my coworkers is: use it where you know what to write but want to save time doing it. Unit tests are great for this. Quick demos and test benches are great. Boilerplate and glue are great for this. There are lots of places where trivial, mind-numbing work can be done quickly and effortlessly with an AI. These are cases where it's actually making life better for the developer, not replacing their expertise.
I've also had luck with it helping with debugging. It has the knowledge of the entire Internet and it can quickly add tracing and run debugging. It has helped me find some nasty interactions that I had no idea were a thing.
AI certainly has some advantages in certain use cases, that's why we have been using AI/ML for decades. The latest wave of models bring even more possibilities. But of course, it also brings a lot of potential for abuse and a lot of hype. I, too, all quite sick of it all and can't wait for the bubble to burst so we can get back to building effective tools instead of making wild claims for investors.
I think you've captured how I feel about it too. If I try to go beyond the scopes you've described, with Cursor in my case and a variety of models, I often end up wasting time unless it's a purely exploratory request.
"This package has been removed, grep for string X and update every reference in the entire codebase" is a great conservative task; easy to review the results, and I basically know what it should be doing and definitely don't want to do it.
"Here's an ambiguous error, what could be the cause?" sometimes comes up with nonsense, but sometimes actually works.
I don't agree with some points, but I share the feeling in terms of "failed promises".
The fact that most well-known Rust crates are becoming huge bloat are becoming a problem to me, which is something that has been critized years again by the community itself.
As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
> As an example, I still do not understand why simple HTTP crates require more than 50 to 70 dependencies to execute a simple GET call...
Looking at ureq [0], for example, its direct non-build/non-dev dependencies are (counting duplicates):
- base64
- flate2 (4 transitive dependencies)
- log
- percent-encoding
- rustls (26 transitive dependencies)
- rustls-pki-types (1 transitive dependency)
- ureq-proto (7 transitive dependencies)
- utf-8
- webpki-roots (2 transitive dependencies)
The vast majority of the raw dependency count comes from Rustls and related crates, and I'd imagine reimplementing a TLS stack would be somewhat out of scope for an HTTP crate. I'm not sure there's much room for substantial reductions in dependency count otherwise.
So let me get this straight. You want the benefit of being able to re-use other peoples' codebase by using an HTTP crate you didn't write. But you don't want those people to also use that benefit of depending on other crates.
Insisting that you should depend on code which itself has no dependencies is a bit hypocritical if you ask me. If you want a simple HTTP crate that doesn't have dependencies, you should follow your own philosophy of not using other crates and write it yourself.
I think this is rather hostile. There is moderation from not using dependencies or from using too many dependencies. I don't think GP is advocating for no dependencies, either. Even vendoring and pinning dependencies provides benefits.
I think it's the perfect amount of hostility. People shouldn't complain about things given to them for free built by amateurs in their spare time. Including fewer dependencies adds more time to developer's effort. Including packages into std requires more work from the Rust team (mostly volunteers). If top comment isn't satisfied with the stuff given to them for free, they can make their own software.
Time functions are a prefect example of somewhere there should be expanded support for in the STD. I'm also of the opinion that there should be a generic and reasonable async runtime in STD, since having `async` in the language, but to direct way to use it without a crate or writing your own executor is awkward.
Then there are things like serialization and logging, which I like the idea of having promoted crates which are essentially just better advertised for newcomers. (Maybe included in the distribution already in some way).
But what if we did that 5 years ago? Oops. And even Java's API has problems too. Why not let it be provide by the ecosystem where it can qctually evolve?
It lacks a hybrid duration type. Instead, it splits durations into calendar and time durations and conflates the length of a `day` depending on whether it's in `Period` or `Duration`. And AFAIK, it doesn't support time zone aware duration rounding. And I don't see a way to compute a `Period` from two `ZonedDateTime` values in a way that respects time zone transitions.
To be clear, it's good. But there are mistakes that the Temporal project learned from and fixed.
(Temporal's single `Duration` type does have pros and cons, so I don't mean to frame having two distinct types as a strict negative. But it's very clunky.)
No, I think the idea of blessing a set of crates (with versions!) is better. The stdlib has a high burden of maintenance, and ideally should only be added to if changes are always backwards compatible. A blessed set is more flexible but still provides a high degree of reliability, unlike the present situation.
This stuff is ridiculously important for healthcare: It’s a demographic fact that both the US and the world at large are simply not training enough doctors and nurses to provide today’s standard of care at current staffing levels as the population ages.
We need massive productivity boosts in medicine just as fast as we can get them.
I sincerely doubt this understaffing of medical professionals is a technology problem, and I believe it much more likely to be an economic structural problem. And overall, I think that powerful generative AI will make these economic structural problems much worse.
It's a gatekeeping problem. Doctors don't want more doctors because it dilutes their own value, so medical school and residency spots are kept artificially limited.
This is oft-repeated truism, but what evidence do you have for this?
Here are some facts:
- Ultimately, the main chokepoint for the number of trained physicians is the number of residency spots. You can cut the price of med school to $0, you'll eventually end up with minimally more fully trained doctors because they need a residency spot.
- Residency spots are paid for by the federal government. Congress controls the number of available spots. Medical professional bodies do not determine this.
- The AMA has consistently asked members to support legislation increasing funding for GME positions (https://www.ama-assn.org/about/leadership/more-medicare-supp...). At one point (late 90s) they opposed expanding the slots, but this has not been true for some time. And, even if it were true, it's ultimately still not their call.
What huge productivity boosts will this provide that doesn't include "the time you spend with the doctor is shorter than it once was?"
My sister is in a healthcare field. Automatic charting is useful, but not a game changer. Healthcare companies seem to be largely interested in placing AI in between their nurses/doctors and their patients. I'm not terribly excited about that.
It doesn't take super intelligence to give my elderly father a bath or wipe his ass.
I think the main problem is we would almost need an economic depression so that at the margin there were for less alternative jobs available than giving my father a bath.
Then also consider that say we do have super-intelligence that adds a few years to his life because of better diagnostics and treatment of death. It actually makes the day to day care problem worse in the aggregate.
We are headed towards this boomer long term care disaster and there is nothing that is going to avert it. Boomers I talk to are completely in denial of this problem too. They are expecting the long term care situation to look like what their parents had. I just try to convince every boomer I know that they have to do everything they can do physically now to better themselves to stay out of long term care as long as possible.
For once I agree with Sam Altman (it feels weird...).
I don't feel the hype for coding assistant tools using LLMs (sorry for HN nerds here).
However I am incredibly excited with all the new research and tools produced by DeepMind since years now, like "AlphaFold 2". "AlphaFold 2" has more potential to save lives than every other LLMs produced in the last decade.
This kind of AI tools and research need to attract news (unfortunately it does not... yet?).
We saw that there was a gap in the market for laptops that treat Linux as a first-class OS target, and we design our products with that audience in mind. That there are other people in the world who don't need Linux is totally ok.
First-class Linux support is the reason that half the regulars in my local Linux Users Group have Frameworks. It's probably the most common laptop brand I see in my tech circle, and anecdotally I can say that it has eclipsed thinkpads in my specific community.
My kid is a bit young, but this is the laptop he'll be getting in a year or so to replace the garbage Chromebook he's currently using (which has steadily gotten flakier since purchase).
First class Linux support is requirement #1; Framework's repairability on top of that means there's not even anything else to consider. It will be the third Framework in our house. My wife is happily using the second, having easily switched to Ubuntu from Windows 10(?) when the video cable connection in her Dell XPS flaked out and made the screen useless.
It would be “eventually good” if, and only if, Vision problems were solved at 100% F1-Score. Which is absolutely not! So, to me, I expected bad and I received… bad results.
Paying for this crap is just throwing money out the window.
Those startups should solve problems and them let people pay for it, for 99% accuracy, not at minimum of 66%.
I'm always surprised to see that tech newspapers will ask for opinions and technical information from the people who have the most to lose by giving a real state (positive AND negative) on their products (and the world in general).
I even find it extremely stupid to be honest.
Rule number 1 if you want an honest view of a product and its status in the world today: believe independent reviews, not a CEO...
If Valve was serious about Mac as a platform, they would port their Source games, like they ported Portal 1&2 for the Switch. To some extend I understand this, because Apple isn‘t serious either, no matter how often they show me a Dual Sense loitering near a Mac screen.
There were some volunteers working on this topic that kind of backed away from this topic. But they got quite far with this.
What I don't get is why Valve isn't backing such efforts financially. There are millions of wealthy mac owners out there with pretty capable hardware. That should translate into quite a bit of steam purchases.
I just got a shiny m4 max laptop. I run Steam on a much less capable crappy old Samsung laptop (via manjaro). Would I run that on my mac if I could? Yes. Would I be tempted to spend a bit of cash on some fun games. Probably. Am I doing that currently? No, because that crappy old Samsung is too old and most games don't run on it. And I'm not in a mood to buy a dedicated gaming machine. I might at some point but just not a priority. But I don't mind dropping a few euros on a game to entertain myself once in a while.
And with Apple's hostility towards gamers with moves like refusal to support OpenGL or Vulkan (adding extra Metal support work to their developers) and refusal to keep stable APIs for a long time for game developers, it makes sense for them to rather focus on a crowd that is easier to support.
When it comes to gaming, Apple is its own enemy since forever and has been similarly failing to gain serious traction even on iOS (considering how powerful the iOS hardware is). iPads could be Steam Decks of their time and Apple just never cared enough.
Overall I agree, and I'm not about to refute the statement, but I never thought the phrase "Linux users are easier to support" would be taken seriously - I find that marvelous and hilarious.
Unsurprising because unlike Linux, almost no games work on steam for mac. There's barely any point in running it on a mac. It's actually a pretty high percentage if you consider that.
My point was that volunteers got quite far getting steam and many games running on macs with decent framerates. The main person driving this recently moved on from working on that. Likewise, Asahi linux is getting quite capable at running steam and lots of games. That too is being driven by a handful of people.
Supporting stuff like that doesn't sound like it should break the bank for Steam. Basically sponsor a few people; maybe hire a few more to support them. It's basically all working at this point, it just needs a bit of love and attention. This wouldn't take years of additional development. And once steam runs properly on macs with thousands of games running smoothly, a lot more people might be using steam on their macs.
Yes, they'd be picking a fight with Apple. But as Epyc (Unreal engine) is showing, those fights can be won if you have deep pockets. And Apple is under a lot of pressure to moderate their anti competitive behavior. Perfect timing for Valve to make some money of all this with a minimum of investment.
> When it comes to gaming, Apple is its own enemy since forever and has been similarly failing to gain serious traction even on iOS.
Tell me you're only interested in talking about the gaming you care about without telling me directly.
In simple terms, iOS is the only growth market in gaming. Consoles and PCs are basically stagnant, with around 200 million people worldwide in that market and that number hasn't moved in decades. The only growth being made is by raising game prices and making ever more expensive Pro consoles.
iOS is the biggest game market in terms of revenue. You can disregard the games on there, but Apple is laser-focused on that gaming revenue they're making. Apple is the biggest gaming company in the world by revenue.
But it's a kind of gaming that is so different (by its interfaces) that it's almost offtopic : it's a bit like starting to talk about plane freight when the discussion is about cargo bikes...
Android is the main competitor here, and is struggling (low profit/sale). I guess handhelds like the Switch and Steam Deck might somewhat be relevant ?
You may be interested in purchasing a Steam Deck, or similar product. I am in a similar situation, where home machine is a Mac Mini. I wanted to play various games, but did not want to purchase (and maintain) a Windows machine. A Steam Deck—plus USB-C dock, connected to monitor and speakers—has been a good substitute for me.
Steam is already available for macOS and there are numerous games available for the platform.
If Valve were getting high numbers of people installing the macOS Steam client, and you can bet they do already have that telemetry, then they would take the platform more seriously. But most macOS users aren’t interesting in gaming on their Mac.
The problem is, Epic is not going to tie themselves to the arbitrary deprecation whims of another company again, and Apple is truly infamous for that. No matter if there could actually be some serious money to be made from the huuuuge catalog of titles that already have a Nintendo Switch port.
Curious to why they (both Apple and Valve) are not serious about it. The MacBook Air could actually be a great gaming device. It has extremely capable hardware at a very low price point. And for Valve it would be an instant expansion of their user base with a large number of new potential customers.
Apple's app store is hard to compete with. Which is probably also why Valve invested aggressively into Linux when Microsoft tried to establish a similar closed environment.
Boot camp was just a way to literally run windows.
Gaming on Mac died when they killed 32bit support and didn’t support Vulkan. Apple has pretty consistently shown almost no effort in making gaming on Mac work so everyone else has just ignored it.
I believe that Microsoft does not care about Gaming those days, so it is definitely time for Valve to jump in and win some percentages in the market.
We know for sure that Windows shares will not drop drastically based on this move, and that the tendency will progress among years (not months). Now, we have to make sure that Valve is not evil... and I do not believe they are angels they claim since the beginning.
To me Valve is like Google was in beginning of 2000s : invest on open-source, have a good fanbase, ... and once you have a significant percentage of the market share / users then you can move evil.
I think they’re showing us how mature user-facing Linux in 2025 really is. With a little focus and investment on the UX for the end user on top of the open source core OS it has already beat any console OS by a mile.
It does not use any of the popular desktop environments (unless you drop into Desktop Mode). It heavily curates hardware, kernel, and drivers to keep the platform from breaking and install with sane (performance) defaults for gaming. It doesn't rely on a common package manager.
Beside a Steam Deck I also use a Linux PC for gaming and even with 25 years of Linux experience I still struggle sometimes to keep hardware acceleration working after a driver update, sometimes spending an evening of troubleshooting instead of gaming. Certain parts of the desktop environment sometimes lock up to the point where I have to SSH into the PC to fix it. It's like owning a vintage car in a certain way.
And yes, I prefer all of that over the Windows experience, but it's not seamless and not simple enough for anyone to just jump into.
They have a custom window manager because they had to build a controller friendly UI from scratch since one didn’t exist already. Not because existing DEs are broken.
Their package management also isn’t that exotic. It’s a lot like Fedora Silverblue where the OS is an immutable image and user software is installed with Flatpak.
I'm not saying existing desktop environments are broken, my point is that SteamOS does not show that KDE / Gnome / etc are "mature" because it doesn't actually use them. In the same way that we know all dogs are good dogs but my house doesn't show that because there is no dog here.
That's a pretty weak argument given that I use Pop!_OS, Ubuntu, and Debian and have had these issues with all of them.
You can look for things like "nvidia drm broken" and find thousands of threads of people all types of problems spanning decades, meaning; old and new. Some of them are pure driver issues caused by NVIDIA but that doesn't matter because we're not trying to assign blame, but we're trying to see if the ecosystem is "mature".
Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use.
In essence Linux suffers from a Lisp curse. Whenever two OS nerds disagreed on something they made their own slightly different distro.
This means wasted effort on multiple DE, window managers, app flavors, installed libraries. To this day, almost no two distros can agree on baseline libraries every Linux must have.
> Linux biggest problem as a consumer OS was rarely tech and mostly just the schizoid amount of options, and lack of consensus on what to use.
It's only a problem if you think it is. In practice I use at least 3 or 4 different distros on a daily basis and I never have any issue juggling between them. For most of the typical use cases it does not even matter, and on the desktop side flatpak resolves many issues.
Except the user-base wants infinite customizability, and users are often to mess with it. And getting the code to just work together nicely is a nightmare, where OS updates can break drivers, forcing you to try to jerry rig a solution that partially works.
Yeah, duplicating/triplicating/n-cating bugs, feature development and support effort, really paid off for the Linux desktop ecosystem. Which year will be the year of the Linux desktop? One, when we get brain to brain communication and abandon desktops entirely?
Haha, you may be too young I'm sorry; it was meant to be a joke.
Back in the 90s when linux came out and started getting traction, Richard Stallman was adamant that people should call the operating system GNU/Linux , because Linux was only the kernel, but mlst of the userland utilities were the GNU software (which were planning to make a full OS like GNU/Hurd).
Some people made fun of that, and I was just kind of paying the joke.
By in essence using none of desktop Linux... Steam Deck shows just how bad things are. Regular users will spend their entire time in very limited application launching other applications. Distant way from any traditional personal computer model.
Spending billions to buy Activision-Blizzard-King ? I haven't heard about Microsoft giving up on Xbox ? And in the last few months Windows 10 has started nagging (via notifications!) about Game Pass.
Valve is a private company led by Gabe Newell. Once he's gone and Valve goes public, Valve will become evil too. And people who relied too much on Steam will be sorry.
>is difficult/impossible to install without tying up a Microsoft Account
Gamers probably already have a Microsoft account as its required for games like Minecraft or services like Gamepass. A Microsoft account is needed for Windows Hello to function.
>has ads baked in
Do you have an example. I think it's more likely the user installed malware if ads are showing up unexpectedly. Gamers are more likely to install malware like this and Windows's security is not good enough to stop it especially when gamers use admin accounts and disable uac.
>is trying to force feed everyone Copilot when most people just don't care
How is it being forced? I haven't seen it on my machine. I assume people who don't care could just ignore it or disable the feature if they don't want it. Being able to look up help for games using Copilot seems like a feature that gamers may find valuable.
>comes preinstalled with bloat
Bloat is subjective. Actual performance issues caused by unneeded things running while in games would be. The mere existence of unused pteinstalled applications doesn't necessarily cause problems to gamers.
> Gamers probably already have a Microsoft account as its required for games like Minecraft or services like Gamepass. A Microsoft account is needed for Windows Hello to function.
If I want to use these things let me opt in.
> Do you have an example [of ads]
There are hundreds or thousands of articles on the subject. Here's one.
If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
When people have taken the time to write debloating scripts it's fair to say some people think it's bloated.
This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
>Here's one.
An app store recommendation is not an ad. The OS is helping the user find content that they may be looking for. It isn't an ad surface where companies are bidding to show up for keywords. The word ad is used by the article to stir drama and drive clicks.
>If I install an operating system and there's a Netflix logo in the application menu when I don't havw a Netflix account and was never asked if I wanted it, it's bloat.
But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
I'm sorry if I seem completely out of the loop as I haven't used windows at all for at least a decade at this point.
> This is a case of whether the device should be secure by default or if the user should have to opt in to security. Microsoft has chosen the position that account security should be there by default which is why it's not opt in for using an Microsoft account. I think this is a reasonable design decision to make.
Opt-out security is the better model to have but I don't see how security features require a microsoft account to function. This isn't the case on any other operating system as security is not bound to having an account for some external service. Rather this seems like an artificial limitation that microsoft has created to push other microsoft services on the user as someone that only uses windows to play steam games that don't use a microsoft account have no use for one regardless if they use windows or not.
Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?
> But there are plenty of people who do have a Netflix account and Netflix showing up there is helping them accomplish something they want to do with their new computer. You have to understand that most people are not that good with computers and surfacing these things in more places can legitimately help them out.
Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient unless the app store is so complex that it's practically unusable for the majority. The majority are also capable of using phones to install games, netflix, and other applications without having to be tech savy to do so.
Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store (usually the elderly) either have family that help them set things up or simply aren't your customers as they don't own computers.
>Can you point to a particualr security feature that would stop functioning and that needs to have an account and that couldn't use a hardware security key for 2FA (if 2FA is a requirement)?
No, as the security key can provide the identity instead of the Microsoft account.
>Helping users use the app store which the majority are capable of should be sufficient
If you want to provide a good user experience you shouldn't stop at sufficient.
>Those users which aren't capable of operating the app store
It's not about a binary yes or no. It's about making it easier to accomplish what users want to do.
Pray tell then, what do you do your computing on? I get those prompts for features the manufacturer thinks I might want to use (but don't) on my Android phones, my iPads, the YouTube app, Firefox, and pretty much everywhere else.
Finding relevant ads is a search and recommendation problem, but not all search and recommendations are done for ads. In this case there is a search over popular apps in the store as opposed to an search through an ad inventory.
Reducing costs in Xbox and development partners, the state of the Xbox games submission (and the SDK... as a game engine developer it is the worst and the buggiest of all three major consoles), and finally all the communication and the investment in (crappy) AI from Microsoft and the large reduction of investment in gaming from them.
I know this comes from the Microsoft management side, and not from the devs.
When something is a default, it's not by choice. So people play on Windows because they have a computer running Windows, not because it's made for that.
Unfortunately investors are not ready to hear that yet...
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