What's particularly frustrating about the discontinuing of the Mini is that it really didn't sell badly, just below _expectations_. Compared to every other model of phone sold by other manufacturers, I suspect the Mini outsold all but the most popular models.
From that perspective, the discontinuation feels more like an act of embarrassment by management than the result of a rational cost/benefit analysis. Given that reportedly the Air is selling substantially worse than the Minis, and I suspect the Duo will also fail to match its internal sales target because IMO Apple _usually_* overestimates the number of buyers willing to drop $2k+ for personal purchases (lots of corporations are willing to buy laptops for $2k+, but I suspect that almost all AVP/iPhone purchases are direct to consumer), I wonder if Ternus be willing to adopt a strategy that will keep profitable products around even if they don't meet their target. I suspect this is sort of an effect of the predictors being in some kind of high income bubble where _everyone_ they know has enough cash to drop $3500 to try out an AVP.
I had a Mini 12 and upgrade every 3 years, so I didn't bother with a mini 13. I ended up buying a base 15 and hoping that I wouldn't mind it, but my regret has only gotten stronger over time.
* Exception: they have dramatically underestimated the number of people wanting to buy high ram minis/studios for local AI.
> I suspect that almost all AVP/iPhone purchases are direct to consumer
I have worked for multiple companies that provide iPhones to employees, but neither of them would budget for the newest best version, unlike with the macbook pros. Companies know that if they buy devs computers with more ram and a bigger high resolution screen, we will get more done, but the main reason to provide a top end iPhone is as a perk.
Might be different with the Duo because I can see an argument for it being a better productivity device for people who need to send a lot of emails from a mobile.
I think there's a strong consensus that the idea of an "AI art scene" is a misnomer. There's an AI slop scene, and some of the prompters sure do call themselves artists.
Consensus among whom? AI is a tool, that can be used differently and AI art is well-recognized, admired and exhibited the same way as any other art forms.
Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc? The latter may at least have more audience.
I disagree with this assertion. I don't think it's at all well-recognized, and in fact derided and shunned by the general public.
> Is someone selling their impressionist paintings today on a fair more an artist than someone who has put equivalent or more effort in creating prompts, references, final renders, image curation and postprocessing etc?
Emphatically, yes. Considering the latter is not an artist at all.
Please review the above comments. I have not made a single statement that leads to exluding either of those. My comments did not seek to define art, or the artistic process, only to exclude a specific category of media.
That's so long ago I honestly can't see that being true. It used to be a funny home video hosting platform in those days. The quality of content you can get on youtube these days is incredible.
Okay, Google bought YouTube earlier than I remembered (2006). For some reason, I remembered the purchase being somewhere around 2009-2012.
So, if I may change my opinion, early YouTube was better, despite being owned by Google. I feel like the platform has been atrocious in the last decade or more. Constant clickbait, a new NordVPN or Raid Shadow Legends ad every 15 minutes, politics being injected into every other video, creators trying to game the algorithm to escape the rat race, the obnoxious algorithm itself, and now I am getting an absurd amount of LLM generated videos.
I would not dare claim there is not great content though. I am listening to a YouTube video as I type this. Though, I have been listening this particular creator since 2006, if that tells you anything.
Nevertheless, I cannot help but feel YouTube is just getting the slow squeeze of death -- like everything Google wraps its tentacles around.
The LLM scripts has been a plague but I don't think that's Google pushing it, it's youtubers optimizing to create the most minutes of video as quickly as possible.
Paying for views is both why we have high quality content, and why the site is so gamed.
Really? I don't remember it from back then, but right now must be better in terms of the content available, the player (not the shorts one; that's awful), automatically generated subtitles with transcripts that can be searched, automated translation, dubbing, etc.
I would enjoy automatically generated subtitles more if they weren't wrong about 10% of the time.
I constantly get something like "Today, we are going to discuss which model is better at programming. Is it an tropic's latest model, Cloud Fable? Or is it, Open AI's Chat G pity?"
It's as though Google hired my dyslexic ass to write the subtitles. It trips me up even more because I can't tell if I misread something or the chat messed up sometimes.
I cannot comment on translation or dubbing. English is the only language I can somewhat understand.
> The underlying product, the model keeps improving and therefore increases its value.
I think this is true, but a customer's willingness to spend is based on _perceieved_ value, not actual value. For many companies, the _perceived_ value of AI has been trending down as internal projects fail and cost skyrocket, even as models on paper improve.
I think there's a valid argument for this pattern when you know most people are on 3-ish year upgrade cycles. Also, if you compare against the most recent generation, you risk creating buyer's remorse for recent purchases.
I'd imagine most are on longer than 3 years for computers. Most (non developers) I know hang onto their laptops and computers until they die or get spec constrained, and that ends up being around ~6 or 7 years, so in this case the comparison to the M1/M1 Max makes sense, as for the next couple years that's going to be the cohort that's looking to upgrade.
The people who read Apple press posts would skew towards upgrading more often. Ultimately there is no number that would satisfy everyone and you are reading a marketing piece from Apple.
Wait for the product to be publicly available if you want in depth testing.
Voting is choose between two terrible candidates, neither of which represent the majority of any group’s interests. No one ever elected has delivered 100% satisfaction to the majority of their constituents.
I love approval voting the most by pure simplicity and effectiveness. How does score voting work better than STAR? I thought STAR degenerates into score voting when clone candidates run?
I haven't heard much of an argument against proportional voting before. Your article just casts doubt, but doesn't really make a decisive argument against. I actually don't like proportional voting because it reifies parties into the system, but I only support it because I think it can break the party duopoly and step towards better systems. I should rethink that.
And are able to capitalize on the fact that some voters are more afraid of terrible outcome A than terrible outcome B, and others are the reverse, to shoehorn both A and B into policy.
Edited this after the fact to reduce the intensity of my tone.
This “both sides” nonsense is not particularly convincing when one party literally has masked goons on the street sending people extrajudicially to concentration camps.
Given that the Republicans claim to be the “party of personal responsibility”, I utterly reject this attempt to frame its voters as the poor and unfortunate victims of manipulation and choose instead to hold them personally responsible.
Like most marketing you can basically invert it to arrive at the truth. Republican propaganda continually harps on about personal responsibility because Republican voters are lacking it and desperately wish they had some. The propaganda is a coping mechanism.
Many people do not have a choice to not use it at their jobs due to internal mandates. Regardless of their own use, many people are subjected to externalized cost of AI proliferation (data centers, layoffs, electrical bills, etc).
One cannot choose to not be affected by it. But even if one were personally not at all affected by it, it is still reasonable for someone to push back against what they see as a negative effect on society, even if it's not hitting them personally. Climate change's effect on me personally is pretty minimal, and I still deeply care about it.
and if all the jobs that are available are for bashing puppies on the head with a hammer, you'll do the noble thing and watch your family starve to death, right?
> No saying you're wrong but how is it making their lives worse?
Data centers and their side effects (higher electricity prices, etc) and job layoffs attributed to AI; plus a bunch of industry specific objections (like say, how it's currently destroying the educational system).
> Most people know use AI for basic applications and seem to enjoy it
Not sure what crowd you're running with. Myself and coworkers use AI and are generally positive about its effect on our productivity. But I don't think they'd say they 'enjoy' it, and we're probably the _best_ case. Who in the world 'enjoys' using AI?
Depends on the person, I never really had fun telling someone else what I wanted built or drawn. I've always enjoyed the process more than just the results, and having the results without the intellectual activity is boring.
For software, the increase usage of AI code makes my team move much faster, but our software isn't robust anymore and I fear that our longterm mission is being compromised by the endless slop. Favoring quick implementations that AI can make versus good implementations, and lazily relying on AI makes my teammates not develop a deep understanding of the work, which ultimately limits the solutions they can develop. YMMV.
Also, I don't understand what's funny about your image? Is it that it's bad?
It's that I asked for an SVG of a circle and it created a beautiful gradient filled animated technical diagram. I wanted something closer to <svg><circle cx="50" cy="50" r="40"/></svg>
Qwen 3.8 27B on xhigh is a delightfully weird over-achiever.
Here's another fun one: "Generate an SVG of a pelican eating caviar and drinking expensive wine in a tony SF restaurant" - it thought about that for almost an hour! SVG and thinking trace here: https://tools.simonwillison.net/markdown-svg-renderer#url=ht...
Aside from fun with over-engineered SVGs, I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
> I'm finding the challenge of getting AI-generated code to be robust, maintainable and better quality than if I'd typed it out myself to be deeply intellectually stimulating.
Yea that's why I started my comment with "it depends on the person", in response to you asking what's not fun about having AIs do what you tell them. For many, coercing a tool to do something you can likely do yourself better isn't ideal, and at least for me, is just inefficient use of time (in the long run) and a headache. It also zaps the fun out of any task since now you move from searching for a good solution using your priors, to now validating that the LLM has a solution that works, even if it's not optimal. The searching for a good solution is for some, the fun part, which is eliminated by agentic coding, since that search inherently relies on you writing code and seeing what works IMO. The coding is an essential part of the thinking here. An analogy would be doing a math problem by hand versus reading the solution in a textbook. I can give concrete examples if you'd like.
For your SVG examples, I have used AI for a similar use case, the construction of 3D scenes for robotics via a text prompt and an asset catalog. I wish I could get the same richness as your SVG examples, the LLMs fail too hard on all 3D tasks given, even after spending a high amount of engineering effort on a suitable harness + tools. Also like your SVG example, it often doesn't give a realistic, or even nice output, and coercing it to do so, likely takes longer than just creating the image/3D scene yourself.
I love using AI. Getting my crazy ideas turn into software has never been easier. I like to architect software, not the code itself. The code has always been the means to my ends. I also love learning complicated concepts, from academics, math, physics, to art, philosophy, religion. It's wonderful to translate knowledge that is already out there but hard to understand somehow, because you can ask about it over and over and over and in the way you understand about things. Like a professor who understands you and never gets tired about silly questions. I don't know, it's just amazing at so many things. Of course, it's also pretty important to know how to use it, and when. I would never use it to replace my speech when speaking to someone else. That's bad. I would not like other people to do that to me either. Otherwise, why would I want to talk with that somebody when I can just ask an AI instead. We can love human beings and AI, and be critic of both at the same time.
Have you ever asked an expert in these areas to evaluate your knowledge? My experience is that people using ai to learn think they are learning but really aren’t.
Have you ever wondered how ridiculous it would be to say you love cars and then not have a clue about how it works? As in, "I've built a wonderful car", but have no idea how the engine or any of the components work.
Replace "car" with "application" or "software", and that's what you're doing. Would you get in a car "built" by someone who knows nothing about cars?
This doesn't sound like someone who is uninterested in understanding software though, everything they said talks about how they like being able to learn from it. They didn't say anything about making slop or replacing the need for knowledge
From that perspective, the discontinuation feels more like an act of embarrassment by management than the result of a rational cost/benefit analysis. Given that reportedly the Air is selling substantially worse than the Minis, and I suspect the Duo will also fail to match its internal sales target because IMO Apple _usually_* overestimates the number of buyers willing to drop $2k+ for personal purchases (lots of corporations are willing to buy laptops for $2k+, but I suspect that almost all AVP/iPhone purchases are direct to consumer), I wonder if Ternus be willing to adopt a strategy that will keep profitable products around even if they don't meet their target. I suspect this is sort of an effect of the predictors being in some kind of high income bubble where _everyone_ they know has enough cash to drop $3500 to try out an AVP.
I had a Mini 12 and upgrade every 3 years, so I didn't bother with a mini 13. I ended up buying a base 15 and hoping that I wouldn't mind it, but my regret has only gotten stronger over time.
* Exception: they have dramatically underestimated the number of people wanting to buy high ram minis/studios for local AI.
reply