animatethrow

A classic anticompetitive case of 'the rich get richer'. The world's wealthiest corporation, Apple, which closed today with a $2.8 trillion market cap, uses its money to (1.) ensure none of its competitors can make 3nm chips, so competitors cannot initially offer the same performance per watt, and (2.) force TSMC to eat costs that smaller competitors normally must eat. Apple did this same thing when launching the M1 and many praised the M1 as revolutionary....

If you compare Geekbench scores[1][2] and top 500 "green" supercomputer rankings (gigaflops per watt)[3], you see x86-64 still reigns supreme not only at peak performance but also real world scientific performance per watt:

[1] https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

[2] https://browser.geekbench.com/mac-benchmarks

[3] https://www.top500.org/lists/green500/list/2023/06/

Apple's laptops nowadays essentially amount to ultra premium Chromebooks. Nice rigs for running a web browser and doing npm+JS dev. Everyone doing serious AI and science is on AMD64 though, particularly AMD64+nVidia, running either Linux or Windows+WSL. The cheapest Apple you can buy with 64GB is $2399 (Mac Studio). Go to pcpartpicker.com and you can build a nice 64GB rig for under $1000 and get minimum 3 to 5 year warranties on all the individually user replaceable components you buy. But if you buy a Mercedes for 2.5x the price of an equivalently comfortable Toyota you get to flex that three pointed star badge on the front of your car....

The TLDR summary: "Blade Runner" comes from another SciFi dystopia:

> Universal health care has been enacted, but in order to cull the herd of the weak, the “Health Control laws” — enforced by the office of a draconian “Secretary of Health Control” — dictate that anyone who wants medical care must undergo sterilization first. As a result, a system of black-market health care has emerged in which suppliers obtain medical equipment, doctors use it to illegally heal those who don’t want to be sterilized, and there are people who covertly transport the equipment to the doctors. Since that equipment often includes scalpels and other instruments of incision, the transporters are known as “bladerunners.”

> I've been trying to explain to people how certain I am that doing work in headsets will become mainstream but am (understandably) met with doubt

Tech enthusiasts underestimate how much the general public hates having gear strapped to their faces and over their hair, especially more than half of women who put considerable effort into their face makeup and hair.

Stack Overflow and Reddit want money for AIs to train on their data which is why they made these changes, so which companies are next? Could HN get crappier in order to milk AI money for its valuable comments? I guess Wikipedia at least can't do jack to get AI cash for its valuable data.

Several billion dollars is the minimum initial investment cost to compete in this space, to deal with all the patents and legal and regulatory to make your own phone with its own marketplace. If I don't use an iPhone my non-technical family members can't conveniently share photos with me the only way they know how. My friends can't AirDrop me videos. Apple has ensured its products won't interop well with non-Apple products.

I want to animate video game characters with as much automation as possible because hand drawing frame-by-frame takes forever and ever. Is this my best bet?