How many laptops have you personally seen be stolen on a train?
Depending on the train type and configuration, many actually seem like pickpocket paradise.
FWIW I’ve used my laptop on the train plenty, I’ve never had anything stolen nor felt in any danger of it.
So a little trick I figured out is to close my laptop lid and then slide it into a pocket of my backpack. I can then carry it with me when I get up and move around.
So then I can take it with me to eat lunch or an extended toilet break. Maybe some day all laptops will have that feature.
People get up to use the bathroom or the cafe car, the laptop is left behind for ten minutes, one of the train stops is while they're away from their seat, and someone sees an opportunity, snags it, and gets off at the stop.
This is an actual thing. And if it's worth a thousand bucks then it's very much worth getting off at an earlier stop then you'd planned, and continuing your journey on the next train.
Ticket inspectors or guards are irrelevant. There isn't one in your car 99% of the time.
I don't why you're trying to argue laptop theft on trains in first-world countries isn't a thing. It absolutely is.
So, yes, theft on trains for people that think they are 100% safe are a thing, but applying the same idea (to assume something is 100% safe and not be cautious) I wonder how do such people use the internet...
The attempted thief didn't succeed in taking the phone, but did knock the laptop onto the ground, damaging it.
If I would make a statistics of primary cause of remaining without a laptop among people I know, the biggest danger is liquids in glasses (that ends up on the laptops) ...
I don't think I've ever seen a human being do that before on a train. Not to go to the toilet, nor to grab a coffee in another car.
You can't be paranoid about everything. My friend in France had put his laptop back into his bag where it wasn't visible and assumed that was good enough, but someone must have seen him do it and just took the whole bag.
You are applying a totally unreasonable standard, to suppose that the thefts were due to unreasonable carelessness. What, do you think someone should take their large luggage into the bathroom too, every time they need to pee?
Talk about victim-blaming.
The standard is mine and I follow it. The same way I find absurd not to do it, you find it unreasonable to do it.
I find the expectation that things are not stolen (if unsupervised in public places) strange considering the huge amount of inequalities in wealth around even in civilized countries. I do not agree with the idea of stealing, thiefs should be punished, but expecting everybody "to behave" given the situation seems unrealistic to me.
That does not mean that I think that things are stolen 100% of the time. I have a friend that forgot a laptop on a bus (Netherlands) and the driver found it at the end of the line and gave it to lost objects so my friend got it back.
If you find it absurd how 99% of people act on long-distance trains, I don't know what to tell you.
My work policies state you simply cannot leave your laptop out of sight for any period unless it's in a secure location (work|home). I feel the same way for my personal laptop as well.
Obviously, nobody steals things while the train is in motion. They wait until the train is about to leave the station, snatch a phone or handbag and jump out just as the door is closing. The train leaves, the thief blends in with other passenger leaving the station, and by the time news of the theft has made it from the passengers to the driver to the station staff the thief is long gone.
Of course people drive around $6,000+ cars all the time, so....
Something interesting: I live near a train line where the doors are not automatic (they have to be opened manually on each stop), and there have been incidents where people get pickpocketed while the train is still in motion, and the thief jumps out right before the station, when the train has slowed down significantly but is still in motion. Many people have been hurt doing this.
Make sure the laptop is insured and that full disk encryption is enabled. If it’s a Mac, make sure you have it in Find My so you can wipe it remotely if that’s something you worry about.
Today's baseline laptops are really good as it is. 32-64 GiB of RAM is plenty, and at least on PC laptops you can do it fairly cheaply. Apple has been a consistent year or two ahead in mobile CPU performance but it fell out of my consideration ever since I realized the M1 and 7040 were both very sufficient for any local computation I cared about. (I'm not going to say I'd specifically go for less efficiency or performance, but it has become significantly lower priority over other things like repairability.)
Not really specifically hating on Apple, here. If I was going to get another Mac it'd be a Mac Mini or Mac Studio probably, ideally with a third-party SSD upgrade to both save on costs and get a slight bit of extra drive performance too. I've definitely considered it, even though I am very far from an Apple fan, just due to the superior value and efficiency they have in many categories.
Yesterday's entry: "... kind of a mind flex that you noted you used Meta Stories glasses to take that photo."
But yes, you're right. I've never personally seen a laptop get stolen. In fact, most people who have their laptop get stolen never see their laptop get stolen either.
I have, however, had coworkers who've had their laptops stolen. Multiple times.
What kind of timescale do you expect to be able to train a useful LLM with that?
That's because it's Apple. It time to start moving to AMD systems with shared memory. My Zen 3 APU system has 64GB these days and its a mini ITX board.
It's better to get (VRAM + RAM) >= 140GB for at least 30 to 40 tokens/s, and if VRAM >= 140GB, then it can approach 140 tokens/s!
Another trick is to accept more than 8 experts per pass - it'll be slower, but might be more accurate. You could even try reducing the # of experts to say 6 or 7 for low FLOP machines!