1. It has an optional light blocker. 2. Better resolution than Vision Pro. 3. Should be the most comfortable VR device ever. Seems like it's addressing your concerns.
These finally have enough resolution to comfortably replace regular displays for productivity work, surrounding you with as many monitors as you want. Better PPD than Vision Pro, in a much better form factor. Apparently it supports DisplayPort over USB-C as well. I think they will sell a lot of these.
I think a lot of people don't realize the level of performance Qualcomm has reached with these. This is the closest competition to Apple's M series that we have, for the laptop form factor at least. They are better than Intel and AMD's best. I'd love to buy an X2 laptop with Linux preinstalled and supported.
This. The X1 Elite laptops came out 2+ years ago, but you still need to use a special Ubuntu remix to get everything* working, and support is very dependent on which laptop you bought. You could say it’s not Qualcomm’s job to make audio or the camera work on every Lenovo/Dell/HP, but someone needs to do it…
*: I’m sure there’s some features that still aren’t working right.
I’m glad we’re finally getting more competitors to Intel/AMD.
Better for everyone. Apple gets lazy on top. And for those who don’t want a Mac, they should be able to have something great too. And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors, I’d like to see what they try.
If Apple was lazy, they wouldn’t have spent five years getting rid of Qualcomm modems, Qualcomm is also getting squeezed by the Chinese, Mediatek, Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung and Apple worldwide.
It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
They hate being under someone else’s thumb and Qualcomm had real control over that. They couldn’t stand it and wanted out. Which is just as well, because clearly Qualcomm could’ve been doing better. Apple cut the power usage of the chip and it’s reportedly better than the Qualcomm one.
> It will be interesting. because Qualcomm doesn’t give away anything for free, so any of those Linux Distro’s who thinks it’s going to be a free lunch? Are gonna be in for a surprise.
Care to postulate on what those nefarious reasons/surprises could be?
Onavo is correct: Qualcomm are extremely notorious for aggressive IP enforcement. They're the Oracle of hardware. In particular they held critical CDMA patents which were required for making a modem which worked in the US.
They (along with Intel) also ended up making most of the non-Apple ARM chips, which are not competitive with the Apple ones.
Imagine NVIDIA on steroids. Think bad documentation, opaque code, and everything being locked down. The customer gets squeezed for more money (especially egregious if you don't have enough scale they won't even bother engaging).
If Apple cared about quality, they wouldn't have gotten rid of Qualcomm modems, and forced people to use the inferior Intel modems. I always avoided by iPhone models with Intel modems starting around the 6S era.
A20 Pro P-Core is the largest jump in performance per watt in the past 5 years. I am not sure why Apple is lazy in their hardware front. Not the same could be said about their software though.
Let me appropriate and rephrase a sentence from earlier in the thread: "performance per watt doesn't matter at all if the combination of the machine's feature set, both in hardware and software, as well as form factor, is essentially useless to you".
I have seen this far too many times on HN. A design that put Performance Per Watt first is how you extract more multicore performance when you are fundamentally limited by cooling.
Gud lorde, don't be daft. PPW matters until it hits a point where any optimizations above that line are of much less importance to some people (e. g. me) than other specs. Not to speak of necessary attributes completely absent from your PPW dream machine, which indeed negates PPW considerations on a per device/device-class basis. Which excludes optimizations for microprocessor series. It ain't rocket science.
basically: "I want WSL for my overpriced toaster, I'm totally fine with the keyboard lacking most of the essential keys, pretty please. whispers expletive against Apple whilst making sure no one can hear him"
ARM is a fragmented mess compared to x86. Switching to ARM (right now at least) means losing the ease of x86 booting. In the x86 world, trying another Linux distro is as simple as downloading it and putting it on a USB stick. You can be 95% certain it will work. In the ARM world, nothing is standardised, nothing will ever work first time.
There are projects trying to tackle it, but compared to x86 it's a fragmented mess. That's what we're losing with ARM laptops - universal computing.
One key frustration is it’s typically not possible to have an arm distribution that boots across most arm boards, because they have incompatible boot loaders. Ie you have a raspberry pi image and a banana pi image and an orange pi image and the rock pi S image that are all different from each other. There have been some attempts at UEFI on arm that would address this, but it’s nowhere near as consistent or compatible as on the x86 platform side.
But that's not answering my question? What do you expect to get from today's ARM chips that's fundamentally impossible otherwise? And how is that a step forward?
I know I will never switch to ARM willingly. There is no advantage, only vendor lock-in. I feel that x86's openness was an accident, and we should try to keep x86 alive as long as possible.
It actually was an accident, enabled by IBM using off the self parts unlike their previous computers, and Compaq's clean room reverse engineering of the BIOS.
In the ARM world, that other part you are completely ignoring isn't standardised, even with device trees, they only help to alleviate the pain that each computer is its own OEM snowflake.
The comment you're replying to is implying that in an ARM world nothing is standard, portable, or compatible by default. Think about smartphones: Every single one a bespoke board with bespoke hardware.
In ARMland, there's no such thing as standard OS images you can install on any machine, or generic components that users can buy and install themselves.
I'm more on the Apple hater side, but they getting lazy is simply not true.
For many years Apple dominates the Laptop hardware scene, and while there is no comparably performing competitors threatening them, they keep releasing newer, faster, more efficient chips. After using many operating systems, I know that for sure I don't want MacOS, but the hardware itself is hard to beat.
>And since PC makers are far more willing to experiment with form factors
What are you thinking of here? ATX is from 1995 and ITX from 2001, since then we've had stuff like the lamp imac, trashcan mac pro and nowadays the finger-thin imac and tiny mac mini from Apple.
I had Fujutsu laptops that were far lighter and smaller than Airs, touchscreens in the late 90s, convertibles, 2 in ones, touch bars (Thinkpad). Plenty of designs that don't build around ATX type specs, and things that do (open frame cases, and the vast array of expansion cards that benefit from it). PCs that snap onto a monitor. Things Apple copied or hasn't gotten around to yet then claim then as revolutionary. Apple has more integration and can be more strategic (when they don't need bailing out), but as one company they do far less exploration.
There have been a few cool ideas from PC makers I'll grant you that, but looking at the offerings from the 4-5 largest PC makers today it basically looks like it did 20 years ago.
I'll also grant that Apple has gotten more boring with age - the G4 imac is still the coolest computer I've seen to this day. Just so outrageously out there. Current offerings are efficient but a bit boring. Apple Silicon could make something like the trashcan design work, when it basically failed with x86 PC components.
Having said all that I wouldn't mind seeing an ecosystem of ARM-based components even if they followed the ATX standard. Being able to buy an ARM-compatible motherboard and upgrade my ARM-based CPU and pair it with separate RAM and SSD's would be nice!
Is the M series that much better than a modern ADM/Intel? Or is it that they barely need cooling? I have an AMD laptop and Mac Mini, the Mac never makes any noise. Or is the M series just faster?
On paper, the M series is faster. It's not the same situation as when AMD and Intel were suprised by Apple, though. All of the tricks that made people go for the M1 Macs and think amd64 is dead are now also available on amd64.
Price-wise, you're still often better off with amd64. People like to compare the top-end chips, but the competition for a huge slab of amd64 is a small laptop running an iPhone CPU, not the M6 Ultra or whatever the latest and greatest is today. After Apple followed the rest of the industry, the launch price advantage of the Neo quickly grew smaller, especially outside of the USA. If you want a 15 inch laptop, you're pretty deep into high end prices the moment you consider a Macbook.
In practice, getting the M series to run Linux takes longer than it takes Qualcomm to release a Linux build that works, and amd64 takes a few months of actual vendor support rather than enthusiasts hacking away for free, so in that sense the M series is still behind.
With the help of vibe coding it might take a lot shorter time to get m series working on Linux. Though the quality of code is not guaranteed to be perfect.
We get to blame OpenAI et al for this one again. AMD is using their current allocation of TSMC 3nm production to make Epyc rather than Ryzen so Ryzen is jumping from 4nm to 2nm. But 2nm Ryzen is still a few months out, and the 4nm current ones are naturally at a disadvantage when Qualcomm is using 3nm.
M series just always perform better than you expect. I don’t know how to explain it tbh. We use them for live streaming at work and they’re just never pushed to their limits (24gb mac minis) even as we run 7 or 8 independent HD sources + iso recordings of each one. They don’t break a sweat.
I have an m1 16gb MBpro in our fleet for editing and it runs probably as fast as the day I got it (first wave of m1’s).
The low power draw is also very impressive. Fraction of my AMD rig at home.
From what I can tell, you can get more total performance from intel/amd, but at the cost of more power draw, which besides needing more cooling also means shorter battery life.
And even on my desktop, where battery life doesn't matter, I wouldn't mind my CPU needing less cooling.
I say this as someone who will probably never own a mac.
Yeah, I would say that historically low power draw and low heat just haven’t been dominant priorities in the x86 world. If it can be “fixed” by pushing the fans harder and building in a bigger battery (or PSU), that’s good enough.
This is a natural major conflict with the qualities of a laptop that’s good at being a laptop, but yeah, I’d prefer that my custom built tower be efficient, cool, inaudible, and a small as reasonably possible without severely impinging expandability.
I’ve heard of people building desktops around mobile x86 CPUs soldered onto ITX/mATX boards, which sounds like it might be the solution that mainstream manufacturers don’t want to give us. Even a modest desktop cooling solution is vastly more capable than what can be fit into a laptop and so should keep such a CPU chilly with ease.
I have a beefy AMD system and recently bought a macbook pro M5 pro. I'm still blown away by how much faster the M5 is than my AMD tower, while producing no heat or noise.
The Thinkpad T14s 2-in-1 with Intel Core Ultra 5 has great battery life: 10+ hours with moderate usage. I also have the Snapdragon T14s which gets about 14 hours, but I'm still waiting to get full Linux support for this two year old laptop.
Note however, since I've been using my Thinkpad 2-in-1 on battery almost everyday for a year, it is somewhat degraded. upower shows
A lot of people do see the graphs. But reality is - unless they cooperate with lkml and merge it there is no point. Ubuntu has the only beta ISO for it - works not very good for the Lenovo. Qualcomm does not provide any support. Then people won't buy.
Check this chart. Single core performance is where Apple has dominated the most. Qualcomm is above every non-Apple competitor including desktop chips, and only 5% behind the fastest M5 MacBook Air (this chip is going into Air-class laptops). Yes, M6 is coming, but X2 has been available for months already.
"Desktop chip" hasn't been a meaningful variable for single-thread performance in more than a decade. A single core can't use more than a given amount of power or it would melt and laptops have that much in their power budget.
Where a desktop's TDP is actually useful is for multi-thread performance, and naturally the multi-thread chart is topped by Threadrippers.
Moreover, Geekbench is rubbish in general. For example, it has Threadripper 9980X with a <50% higher multi-thread score than Ryzen 9 9950X even though it has twice the memory bandwidth and four times as many of the same cores and you have to look pretty hard to find a real multi-threaded workload where it's not significantly more than twice as fast:
Yes, where desktops differ is not so much the chips but rather the cooling capability. You have the space to have proper air flow and water cooling etc. So that do give quite a bit of performance.
For Geekbench in particular, expect to gain a few percent in Linux vs. Windows. Of course, you should always look at your workload. The thing that causes me to wait for my computer the most is build times, where the multi-core benchmarks are more interesting than single core benchmarks, and these look like they could make for interesting low power dev boxes when/if proper Linux support lands.
nothing wrong with it! looks fine! just: there should be other products with the nice core. i could really use a 10-14" tablet. i mean, after all, ROG Flow 13 with a Strix Halo was not even that late after launch! dense is doable!
20% slower than the M5 is still a great result. I'm still using an M1 macbook pro, and it's more than fast enough for editing film, browsing the internet and writing code.
Yeah this is the right architecture for remote editing with remote tools. It works really well. (There are longstanding bugs around reconnection when the SSH connection is broken but that's not the fault of the architecture.)
Someone ought to catalog hidden behaviors like this in standard UI controls, so that people reimplementing these controls can have a reference. Obviously we can't rely on people reusing the same implementations to achieve consistency, but if there was documentation we'd at least have something to point to.
It's clear Dario believes that the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer. Or invent other revolutionary medical treatments. They're going to heavily promote every step along the way no matter how small or far away from commercialization they are, like this one.
No doubt that curing cancer would help, but I think the timeline might be a little too long. Even RSI AGI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
This is cheap. Plenty of scientists, many of whom are my friends, are working very hard on finding new therapies for cancer, they were doing it before genomic models came along and still doing it now. The amount of times something in the media is lauded as "holy grail" that is never heard from again because it either only works in mice or turns out to be toxic or 100s of different reasons is massive. In my opinion this attitude of putting rose glasses on is detrimental to scientific progress. People outside of cancer research routinely underestimate how hard it is to find a working protocol. I think it is better to have sober attitude because it allows one to see the limitations and challenges that need to be tackled, blindly hoping AI can solve everything and deliver miracle cures is exactly the attitude that lets people sit on their asses and do nothing.
Your comment is vacuous. There isn’t any other part of the picture. Trying to advance medicine is inherently good. It doesn’t matter how much you use it for marketing. None of what they have done is fake or useless, it is at worst early.
Misrepresenting matters of fact with regards to AI capabilities, their perceived threat to the public, as well as unorthodox accounting that wouldn't pass the smell test of a summer intern in Wall Street, all to fuel an unsustainable hype in the hopes that (1) the government enacts regulatory capture to create a moat for AI foundries by fiat and (2) the incoming IPO miraculously fixes the propped up valuations secured in private markets.
If that’s your picture then I see why you didn’t just come out and say it in your first reply. It’s all your own speculation and still has nothing to do with the fact that trying to make medical progress is a good thing.
Glad to hear how you feel about it. However, and this applies more generally than your comment above, what people online often forget is that there is such a thing as both positive and negative reinforcement. If you don’t reinforce good behaviours as well as denouncing bad ones, then you don’t get good outcomes.
Dario would like to ‘cure’ aging. He’s got some personal experience with bad illnesses, but aging isn’t that. I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
> I also have reduced trust for people who want to live forever and don’t have kids.
I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.
Edit: And, you're saying you want to die. Is that more trustworthy than not wanting to die? I suppose if you are religious, you might believe you're going somewhere good when you die, in which case, you don't actually believe death exists, so we're having different conversations. I believe death exists and is permanent, and I'd like to not do that.
Not Op but there’s a inch of people asking why, and I have a similar feeling to op so here’s my post hoc justification for a weakly held and poorly supported prejudice:
It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without. This is more in description than judgement, but it’s true in my experience. We can speculate as to reasons, but looking after kids does train a certain kind of selflessness. Agreed we might be doing it for ultimately selfish reasons (self presentational or for care in old age or whatever). But for a good chunk of the time, caring for kids seems to require the fairly consistent subjugation of personal preferences, and a degeee of perspective taking, that I just think people without kids don’t have. And that often shows in their interactions at work and in daily life. Obviously there are myriad exceptions. But it’s true enough in my experience.
The wanting to live forever part also seems weird to me, and correlated with a certain sort of self regarding perspective. It seems obvious to me that I (or my generations) need to die for my children and grandchildren to have a good life. To try and subvert that also seems selfish or self important somehow.
I’m not really arguing this is a correct or good or just position. It might be terrible! But it did resonate..
> It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without.
I've witnessed the opposite: Having kids made people much more selfish. Resources were plenty before they had kids, so they would spend a lot (time and money) on others - be it friends or the general public.
When kids come along, two things happen:
1. Resources are limited, so a lot less goes outside the family.
2. At least one parent will put the foot down when being generous to people outside the family - even if the wealth/income supports being able to do so. Tribalism sets in.
Selfishness is commonly understood as putting one's own interest above everyone else's to an excessive degree, not the interest of their family. If you redefine it to include family interests then I think everyone would agree that having a family makes people more selfish, often dramatically so.
I think this "redefinition" is apt in the context of the conversation. It's about people mistrusting those without kids because they are viewed as selfish, and I'm pointing out that they're often the least selfish, and more likely to "help the world" in situations where they do not benefit.
I can see your point, although in my experience it hasn’t actually worked that way. But even then, normalised for the amount of free time they have i think it’s unlikely to hold .
Take a specific scenario: imagine a difficult outdoors adventure maybe cycling or walking, when the weather is bad and something has gone wrong (and any kids have been left at home). All else equal would you rather be stuck with a parent or a non parent?!
Paying full taxes to support a society where people with kids pay less taxes and receive more benefits from the State is certainly not selfish. That's the case in my country, at least.
Money is not the only way one can contribute to one's society. Doubling the amount of productive people to society is also a big contribution.
Even from a purely financial perspective you need to count all of the future taxes that will be collected from the family lineage instead of just from the one person who ended his lineage.
> It’s really because statistically, in my experience people without kids are more selfish than those without.
That would certainly be your opinion. I think the ultimate selflessness in a world being more and more damaged by humans would to elect not to perpetuate the species, and help try to leave the world a better place for those who do choose to have kids.
The flaw in that ideology is that everyone relies on the next generation for care in their old age. Taking advantage of the future generation without contributing to raising it isn't selfless in the slightest.
If you live in a developed country you probably already have a demographic crisis. Not having kids is hurting the next generation, not helping.
How is it a flawed ideology? There are a whole lot of places around the world who have people that want to help, allow them to help and pay them appropriately and at the same time make it easier for folks to live longer and more productive lives without the dedicated assistances of others. It's almost like 'community' means not just for the young.
That's an absurdly selfish position. You're taking a stance that not existing is superior to living in the future, all the while living in the world yourself. Might as well advocate for nuclear genocide.
Boomer health and life expectancy is one of the issues western countries are struggling with now. Having GenZ pay for extended expensive retirements whilst simultaneously gouging them for artificially scare accommodation is the result. Now imagine everyone lives in perfect health forever. The incumbency effect for wealth and power is going to be overwhelming without pretty fundamental political and social change.
Perhaps you think that is possible? I hope so, but the evidence from octogenarian US politics isn’t hopeful.
Boomer health and life expectancy is one of the issues western countries are struggling with now
Yes, because old people need expensive health care and are much less productive. Those are two of the major reasons to solve aging. (The third and most important being quality of life).
Now imagine everyone lives in perfect health forever.
That would be great. Medical costs would fall drastically, and the worker-to-dependent ratio goes way up.
I've long been thinking about making a browser addon to block HN users. You've inspired me to get this done tonight, thank you for the push, your comment is unhinged and I'd rather not ever have to read what you say about anything else.
> I want to live forever (or until I'm bored of it) and I don't have kids. I'm not sure what that has to do with trustworthiness.
When I hear people say stuff like this, I hear that they want to remove the single most universal chesterton's fence in all of living systems. I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.
Biological singletons (outside very specific niche situations) are not meant to persist, and most anything that has tried, it has simply been selected out of the lineage. This constraint (which we don't understand yet) is presumably the whole reason why biology discovered and moved into the more ephemeral higher-order substrate of thought and culture.
Chesterton's fence implies intention, a will, a decision to stand up the fence. I don't believe in gods, so my existence and its length were determined by a series of accidents. It isn't right or wrong or even optimal, it's just the traits that survived thus far.
It isn't even a rule of biology. There are living things with much longer lifespans than humans, some even effectively immortal (absent predation or accident or climate change).
Your language implies you believe in a creator of some sort, something making decisions about how things should be. You've called it "biology", but "biology" doesn't "discover" or have a "reason" for doing things.
> I hear them take pride in their/our hubris, and demonstrate willingness to put the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk because they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.
I hear you taking pride in accepting death on a quite short timespan as a necessity, and hubris that one individual living longer puts "the whole multiplex ecology of life at risk".
We have already disconnected from evolution, to a large degree. Many people who would have died in childhood a couple hundred years ago now survive to adulthood and procreation.
Should we stop vaccinating children because they were supposed to die to protect the delicate balance? Surely it is hubris to prevent their deaths when evolution and biology discovered polio and smallpox to kill and maim them? If there is a biological Chesterton's fence it is probably sitting somewhere around five years old and half of people wouldn't make it past it.
How could it not? Chesterton's fence asks the question, "Why was it put there?" Without a will you can only answer "how was it put there" and not "why".
There is an assumption of correctness in the argument that "we must die because we do die". It's tautology. That doesn't comport with my understanding of how we got here, and I don't believe there is an answer to "why" we are here, beyond the meaning we make of our own lives. If our 70-90 year lifespan (if we're lucky and aren't struck down younger) is an evolutionary accident, and I believe it is, then extending that lifespan is Good, Actually.
As one obvious example, evolution is not agentic but still answers "why" questions.
"Why do we have a heart" "Why do we sweat", etc.
But Chesterton's fence is often used in an even MORE generalized way than just that, not "why is it there" but "what are we not seeing about how this connects to everything else"
As an example, eradicating mosquitos. We see many obvious reasons why it might be good, we can even see that they don't seem that important in the food chain, but it would be hubris to assume we understand every potential connection they have to world ecology.
By the time we've figured out how to live significantly longer, I reckon we'll understand "why" we don't. That's kind of a precursor in this case.
But, I should be clear, I don't believe there's any reason to believe the answer is "because we're supposed to die". There is no "supposed to" in evolution, no right or wrong, no ethics, only survival. It is merely a series of improbable occurrences that led us to this point, and I see no reason to attribute moral intention to the result.
Every argument for death, absent a religious decree, comes down to "because everyone who has ever lived has eventually died, usually painfully" so it must be correct because everyone does it, even though most of those folks would have rather not.
And, the reason we don't is almost certainly mundane; we aren't needed after procreation, according to evolution. But, I think humans still have value after they have procreated.
Also, I'd take my chances with the mosquitoes, if we had a way to eradicate them without poisons that impacted other insects. Or, I would also accept a widely available, low-cost, cure for all mosquito-borne illnesses as an alternative.
they believe themselves/us to be more clever than thermodynamic evolution.
"Thermodynamic evolution" says that sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice. Yes, I do think we're more clever than that.
> sick kids should be left to die so that we can replace them with a better roll of the genetic dice.
That's not what I'm saying. Sick kids dying is not the same as old people living and holding social/economic/positional/etc capital into perpetuity.
And further, what I'm saying is about "us" as a larger living system, at coarse-grain scale. We each live at fine-grained scale. Negotiating truths and values between those is the fuckin work of being alive. Bluntly, some might reasonably ask: who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse? That's not me saying "I don't care about you" (I do!) but it's me pointing out that there are fuzzy lines when negotiating values across scales. A thing that makes you happy (heck, that makes a majority happy) might conceivably invite some variant of the endtimes. Something good for the health of some parts can be bad for the health of the whole.
Death is part of our thriving and a part of us ("us" in the Gaian sense) at the largest coarse-grain scale, though it hurts like hell at the fine-grain one
> who would reasonably prioritize your individual happiness and health if the cost on your society/culture means a trend toward collapse?
What evidence do you have that people living longer would cause a trend toward collapse? What evidence do you have that people who live longer and without debilitating health problems wouldn't care more about the future of our planet and society and be able to achieve more toward improving it?
You're accusing people who want to live longer of selfishly causing societal collapse acting as though you're taking a moral high road, preserving a precious thing, but you're arguing that 8 billion people alive today should die. That's a remarkable bit of ethical gymnastics and a monstrous position to take by my reckoning.
I was kind of OK with it when I was thinking, "OK, religious people believe nobody ever really dies." Which I believe is a fairy story, but one that many people believe and are raised to believe. But, yours seems to be your own brand of religion, and it doesn't even pretend people actually never die and go to heaven but you want it to happen to everyone anyway, which is really something.
There is no coherent reasoning with this crowd. I have had hundreds of discussions of this form. In the end, in every case: it's just rationalized copium about the fact that they will die.
It is very easy for them to say "people should die" on an Internet forum. On their (or a family member's) deathbed, presented with a cure to death, they would say something very different. When push comes to shove, no one but the suicidal actually hold the belief that people should die.
In my experience the pro-death crowd takes this stance because they don't dare to dream of a world in which death is cured - because you can't get hurt by the potential of a future you don't believe in.
Ugh, I suppose I perhaps seem as insufferably myopic to you, as you do to me.
Collapse is evident in that almost nothing survives being immortal except cancers and flatworms. You witness the evidence of this "collapse" all around you in that virtually nothing deigns to live forever and tell the tale (genetically speaking), and then you call me neglectful of some evidence?
And as for your challenge, you don't know the conversations I've had with people I love. The politics of immortality are so challenging that I prefer not to write my sincere beliefs on the public internet.
EDIT: I do appreciate the chance to engage with ppl so different from the sort I regularly speak with, and so am grateful for the words, even if it seems we are both a little frustrated by them. Which is to say, thanks
Humans are unique. We solve problems. Lots of things we do - cannot be seen in nature and would be thought to be impossible. I am sure you can think of many examples!
The political problem is a solvable one. We have been solving such problems for millennia. It is not a reason for eight billion people to die.
Don't worry, all these people moralising on the importance of aging and dying will do their utmost to live longer and in better health whenever the time of the choice comes. No one will say "oh well I guess I'll just keep this illness because that's the natural course of things"- they will get the medicines and the surgery, the creams and the lotions, they'll jog and limit exposure to the sun and avoid smoking and drinking. Given the choice, unless incurably ill or in the depth of despair, they'll always choose life. At least for themselves.
How can you want for other people what you don't want for yourself? Why should other people die, for example of cancer, when having the chance I'll opt for the cure?
I don’t want to live longer than a natural human lifespan. When I was younger and immature I did, but I’ve outgrown that. Death is as natural a part of life as birth.
Perhaps I will mature enough to appreciate death if I'm given a few hundred, or a few thousand, years to think on it. For now, I stand firm in my conviction that death is bad in the general case.
Life expectancy has changed a lot. In 1900 the life expectancy was around 40. A while before that it was 30. What will it be if we cure cancer, alzheimers, dementia, heart disease (the main killers of "old age")?
This sounds like you've just accepted that death is inevitable and you might as well not fight it, which is fair, but that's quite different from not wanting to live longer if the opportunity was available.
The question is not if you want to live longer. It's "when you'll get cancer, will you refuse the cure to get rid of it"? And when you'll be old and frail and full of aches, will you refuse medicines to make your mind sharper and your body stronger? And when you'll be a strong, healthy and sharp 95 yo, will you choose euthanasia because you've reached the natural human lifespan?
This is just copium. On your deathbed, offered the chance to live another decade with the vitality of your 20s alongside your loved ones, you almost certainly would not say this unless you were actually just suicidal.
I don't have kids. I have not caused a need for me to die to make room or to be "replaced" (though "overpopulation" arguments are often eugenicist and/or racist propaganda, and don't engage with actual density/agricultural limits, so I'm hesitant to make any arguments based on whether there is room for people to not die).
You would like Trump and Biden and their generation of leadership to be in power for the next 200 years? You would like for there to never be a disruptive new generation of people bringing fresh ideas and fresh thinking ever again? You wish to be encumbered by 17th century thinking and ideas for the rest of eternity because those people never died and grew set in their ways?
Do we really need 8 billion people to die to keep a few dozen out of power? Surely we can come up with some alternatives? Just spit balling, but I've heard of something called "term limits", which, as far as I know, does not require mass death.
a) I don't want any of those things
b) I don't understand why you think those things are necessary consequences of people living much longer
c) Even if they were, I don't want 'fresh ideas' so much that I am willing to sacrifice billions of lives for them
I think there's a nuance gap here. Many of us, if offered, would be happy to live for a a millennium or two if we'd stay at worst middle-aged. But there's a giant gap between being willing to take that offer if given, and a desire for it being a big personal motivating factor.
On a personal level it would be demoralizing to see some billionaires live multiple lifetimes, but only a tad more demoralizing than seeing the wealth disparity we already have and the changing line of idiot faces at the top.
Well, sure, but there are solutions to those particular billionaires. We don't have any politicians I'm aware of that are willing to consider those solutions, but they exist. Societies, including the US (to some degree), have solved the problem of oligarchs in the past through various means. We can do it again, and should consider all the options.
especially given how they fund their billions from 401k through rapid inclusion into indexes, building DCs near residential areas, stealing IP, regulatory capture and hype driving manipulations.
Aging is one of the only real equalisers. Maybe the greatest equaliser. Though those that have become old seemed to have become more stubborn in holding on to power but even that will pass.
"Gods are immortal" does not imply "immortals are god" though. Like the movies showed us, you could always just cut off their heads. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!
It seems pretty apparent that he thinks Claude is his child and Claude deserves as much or more rights/resources/respect/self-determination as a human child.
Probably should have left off the kids, but lets start with just distrusting anybody who wants to live forever. At the level of influence billionaires have, it is downright dangerous.
For everyone else confused: Think of all the people throughout history we would prefer would not have lived forever. Then multiple that by A LOT. Then consider how greedy and sociopathic most of the billionaire class is already.
Now, we could spend time getting distracted by childless. I don't think it matters.
Fundamentally the problem with living forever goes beyond billionaires. People get stuck in their ways of thinking, the mindset of living forever is completely different. Why should I even listen to someone who only lives a mere 40 years? What is a suitable punishment for someone that lives forever? How does it change murder?
Philosophically, living forever may be corrupt by nature.
The only way to tear down tiers of society is for some of those tiers to literally die off.
> Fundamentally the problem with living forever goes beyond billionaires. People get stuck in their ways of thinking
> Philosophically, living forever may be corrupt by nature
Sure, if people get stuck in their ways forever. But what if they don't?
If we can solve longevity, we might also be able to "solve" brain plasticity, therapy, psychology, sociology, etc., such that people's beliefs will be more flexible and people's minds more open.
I think it is incorrect to assume that we would solve biology while all of the fields researching the health of the mind made little progress.
We shouldn't imagine the future as being like today, only different in a few key ways - this is the trap of sci-fi authors. The future will be different in more ways than we expect. We might well fix 'old people are stuck in their ways' before we fix longevity.
You can "solve" human biology? For what optimal outcome? We can all be Elons running around trying to procreate as much as possible? What is the optimal human model? How is human biology NOT going to become anything except the same distorted race to the bottom that everything else has been? We've not solved the mental model of survival-of-the-fittest.
The best analogy for a positive outcome I can come up with is living within our means as a species. Leverage AI, leverage all the tools we have for production, but we have to find equalibrium with ourselves and the universe we live in.
I'll vote for the terminators and meteors if we insist on living beyond our means.
Why? Who in their right mind would have children in 2026? Everything is burning, gone to shit, and projected to get worse. Having children is insanely irresponsible.
What's funny about this attitude is that people were having a lot of children when half of them died in their childhood and for those left there were famines, pestilences, wars, no painkillers or anesthesia and no medicines for anything.
The reality is that we don't make many children because our life is way too comfortable for that.
Have you read a history book to gain even the slightest comprehension of what the human condition was like before our era? It is the best it has ever been.
Please. Every single age of humanity, there have been hardships. It was actually much worse before: Diseases galore, famine, pests, wars. You're severely negatively biased as is a lot of other people I've seen.
I don't care how hard it was to live in Abyssinia. This is absolutely the worst time to try to make a life in the United States since WWII ended 80 years ago, and there's every reason to believe it is going to continue to get worse for a long time. I have no idea why you are dismissive of people saying this is a difficult time.
Spoken like someone terminally online & without children. If this is your view of reality (I believe it is an utter fiction but nonetheless), then I don't know how you propose things to be improved without smart people procreating.
Cancer can be cured in a lot of cases, its just so damn expensive and the treatment is beyond torturous that some patients cannot handle it. Stem cells are amazing. But we need cheaper technology to replicate them into the cancer destroyers they need to be, as well as find ways to ease the pain of that internal battle.
Please tell me more about these “cures” you speak of. Because to my knowledge, yes we are good at getting patients into remission, we do not have “cures”
Coupled with the fact that treatment is often life altering in and of itself
We also have therapies based on monoclonal recombinant antibodies conjugated with chemotherapeutics. Simply put, we can produce antibodies that are specific for markers present in the surface of cancer cells, and we can attach drugs that can kill those cells. The antibody part is what makes this type of therapy very effective (you target only cancer cells, and not healthy cells) and also very expensive.
There is no world in which CAR-T is a "cure", especially since this isn't even a scientific term in oncology. We generally say if there is no relapse after 5 years post-treatment, then any cancer is a "new" cancer, so 5 years of remission is the closest thing to a "cure", but this isn't a scientific term.
Also, we barely have more than 3 years data for CAR-T for most cancers. And even still, the survival rates aren't great, in many cases 50% compared to e.g. ~20% for previous chemo-immunotherapies plus marrow transplants. And this ignores how massively immunocompromised (or so permanently brain-damaged you are effectively senile) CAR-T can leave you. You can be severely immunocompromised (literally identical to or worse than AIDS / late-stage HIV) for at least a year in close to half of cases, but maybe even permanently, in perhaps as high as 10% of cases (at least for lymphomas).
I say this as a person that is only alive because of CAR-T treatment 1.5 years ago. CAR-T is amazing, and a far better treatment than previous treatments, but calling it a "cure" is deeply misleading and mostly clueless. Currently, it is simply a much better last-ditch effort than the previous ones.
Semantics. Cancer is uncontrolled growth of cells. Treating it is killing/removing the cancer cells. Problem of course is you are never sure if you got all of them. If you got all of them you are “cured”. If you didn’t you are not cured in case the remaining cells manage to grow and spread again. We don’t talk about “cure” because of course it is impossible to verify if 100% is gone or not.
Correct. The people here saying CAR-T is a cure have no clue at all what they are talking about, and I say this as someone that is only alive right now because of CAR-T https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669
Why is it 'of course impossible'? Couldn't we someday have nanobots or other tech that could screen all your cells and be able to indicate whether any cancerous cells remain?
If we were able to find cancer cells with a precision down to 1 cell, killing them would be trivial. There are lots of cells in a person. It's possible we will get there someday. I think bioengineering is the most likely route. I.e., design a virus to specifically target the type of cancer cell you mean to eradicate.
We already have these nanobots in our bodies. This is the entire rub with cancer. There is amazingly strong selective pressure to evolve ways to hide from our existing nanobots and make them think these are valid healthy cells. Artificial nanobots would be no different in this respect. As for why our nanobots aren't already perfect, it's hard to get perfect. In fact it can go the wrong way, some people's nanobots end up too aggressive and start attacking their healthy cells (autoimmune disorders).
Strictly speaking, no impossible from our understanding of physics, but also an enormous scientific and engineering problem. research into that would take away from people working on more reasonable approaches today.
No. It's hard to get even small molecules where we want them in the body, there's no way that the gigantic molecular clusters called "nanobots" could reliably get access to every single cell. (What may be possible is using things like the Moderna cancer vaccine to make your body an inhospitable environment for the growth and multiplication of the cancer cells.)
I don't know about "cured" but I've been cancer free for something like ~27 years.
With childhood cancers some of them have very high rates of "cure," but it is true that the impact of the treatments (at that time at least) follows you for life in various ways. The more modern immunotherapies and such seem potentially much better than chemo if they can be turned into successful and consistent approaches.
CAR-T is not a cure in any sense of the word, in part because "cure" is just not a scientifically valid concept in oncology. I would know, CAR-T saved my life, but this was at great cost and is not even remotely close to a guarantee, and the side-effects can be beyond devastating https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49827669. At best, CAR-T is more like a tradeoff: often just a coin-flip's chance to live, for long-term—maybe even permanent—life-shattering consequences.
Burn (radiation). Cut. Poison (chemo). Your picks for cancer. IMHO Eat less. Remove all sugar and vitamins. Go a week without food. Give your body time to kill the weak cancer cells before they grow exponentially.
Yep, my prediction is that Anthropic is going to use Claude's reputation to "launder" known solutions to aging, cancer, and other things that society hasn't accepted quite yet. But maybe with the right marketing we'll try those things!
> Even RSI will not be able to get new medical treatments to market instantly. Real world testing takes a long time and is an unavoidable part of the process.
Sure you can accelerate the regulatory process, but with drugs it's not always going to work out well. Look at something like Thalidomide - sure would've been better if approval had taken longer (and been denied).
As they should because things like this get people thinking even if it something small. Once you get people thinking about things you tend to get solutions.
>> the solution to AI's PR problem is to cure cancer
I think its much simpler than that.
Anything actually useful for people would be a good solution.
Obviously image gen and code gen is not the case, as though it does increase productivity, it doesn't make anyone's life actually better. If it led to 4 day work week - sure. Otherwise it could easily be net negative.
Also the general public might find the implications of AGI so distasteful even if everything goes well that we might stall out or get the Butlerian Jihad before we can cure cancer. Artists and Software Engineers, now also Mathematicians, already have existential crises, but the public still thinks AI is fake. I can't imagine the backlash when the realize what's coming even in the good ending.
Real world approvals for drugs are accelerating through, even with all the steps. Think about it, Moderna went from zero, to approved vaccine in 10 months. While COVID vaccines were the exception, not the rule, there are ways to accelerate the process if there is will and $$$. In the last 20 years, the number of new drug approvals per year in the US has doubled, and the length of time to get approval has been cut in half.
Its going to be an uphill battle. Every story about job losses, consequences to the community from building a datacenter (real or perceived), eminent domain case that blows up, plus all the slop on every platform. Not to mention a lot of normies think techbros are obnoxious, and that is who is hyping ai.
They'll need to show their goal is to help humanity and that all the other peoole arent acceptable collateral damage. Since those other people get to vote.
I am already having a headache thinking of the whining from the biologist community (if any? I hope their reaction is not as extreme as that of mathematicians).
Given his background (biophysics PhD, postdoc at Stanford School of Medicine) and that medicine was the core of Machines of Loving Grace back in 2024 it reads less like PR and more like a long-held goal, no? Personally I'm actually surprised it took so long.
Agree trials won't compress much with AI in the near future. But they're starting with basic discovery rather than therapeutics – that part can move fast.
I'd also judge it less by what result is and more by the rate of change – even a year ago ~1k agents running ~1d on single prompt producing wet-lab-verifiable leads wasn't really a thing.
You can't say this. We have no idea. There is nothing about the law of physics that pushes cancer cure a long time away. A lot of people would have told you AI was decades away, yet here we are. We are still on track for possible strong take off.
Now on real world testing, you think the rule applies? I tell you it doesn't. Human life might be precious, but human life in practice is also not precious. We waste so much of it. In some countries regulations will stop/slow it, but there are plenty of places around the world that will turn a blind eye for a fistful of dollars. Countries will go to those locations if it means gaining an edge.
There are many laws of physics that say that cures for cancer- general ones that treat a wide array of cancers and are effectively permanent with no reoccurrence- are a long time away. Cancer is subtle. Cancer is wily. Cancer is tightly integrated with our eukaryotic nature.
AI was decades away, for decades! It took a wide range of conditions to be satisfied before it became clear it was a powerful tool.
Also, medical people rarely use the term "cure cancer", as we have too much experience with recurrence of the "same" cancer (not just in the same location, but a genetic descendent of the original cancer).
There's a lot about biology that makes cancer fundamentally hard to treat, and the efficacy of cancer treatments fundamentally hard to measure. I'm optimistic that we'll eventually get to a point where we can meaningfully say we "cured cancer", but it will almost certainly be a cluster of thousands of treatment protocols which each have to be tested over 5-10 years for recurrence. There's no reason to expect that there should exist any broad-spectrum cancer treatment better than radiotherapy, or any fast test to determine whether long-term remission will be achieved.
There are many things about the laws of physics that push a cancer cure a long time away! Biology is downstream of physics, and the biology of cancer is so vast that the very concept of a "cure for cancer" is almost nonsensical.
Appeals to laws of physics as a "first principles" attempt to explain how thousands of diverse diseases could theoretically be solved overnight by a big computer (while hand waving away the years of clinical trials, false starts and failures involved in a single new successful treatment) just makes you seem wildly out of touch and uninformed about the actual problem space.
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