an interesting variable in all this is China. the whole crisis, and maduro being kidnapped by his american counterpart dictator, has left them only russia left as a major source of petroleum overseas.
If I had to guess, the UAE is looking to form petro-alliances, and have a negotiating leverage. They're have to compete, and they can't beat saudi. So, either the US caters to their demands, or they'll be forming alliances with india and china, where currently OPEC's price setting was a limiting factor.
that's not what I meant, I meant how their actions and involvement keeps drawing them back to the origin of their name, thus their name having a deterministic effect on their fate.
Is framework aiming for mass market breakthrough? if so, I hope they're planning on the macbook neo. I have no reason to recommend it outside of tech-enthusiast circles over a macbook now, thanks to the neo. But I really don't think they want mass market, it wouldn't be a win for anyone. By design, it's a "repairable" computer, so people who want to repair their own laptop are the main customers.
You can't repair macs easily, but they last long enough for that to not be an issue. and honestly, the apple care experience is ideal for most people.
I do hope then that they stick to the tech-enthusiast market perfecting Linux-friendly laptops. The laptop market hasn't learned from framework's success, so I was hoping at the wake of the neo's success, someone could prove a similar quality laptop is possible by a non-apple company, keeping the competition alive.
My biggest concern for them is, one of these bigger laptop makers panic because of losses from the neo, and takes over framework.
I have zero reasons to recomend paying 800 euros for a mobile SOC with 8 GB, and the Apple experience is pretty much hit and miss, it certainly isn't worthwhile the extra cost when one needs to top it up with Apple Care, and get lemons like buterfly keyboard, Tahoe and many other issues that get had waved because "It is Apple!".
Then you get the nerds that get Apple because "I know this, it is UNIX!", when in reality what they wanted was GNU/Linux, and then complain all the time it isn't, because they skipped the class where UNIX, POSIX and all differences throught history were explained.
mass market consumers don't even know what "SOC" is, and would pretty much disagree with the rest of your sentiment. I think I was clear on the context being for them, not tech enthusiasts like yourself.
They will disagree when they find their phone powered experience to be sluggish, after a couple of Electron garbage powered apps are running, which they also don't care are making use of.
People considering the Neo aren't thinking they're being constrained by a mobile SoC when it performs just as well as M1 with a slightly reduced core count.
The fact that they're selling incredibly well is a testament to that.
There has been plenty of reviews and comparisons of the neo in this area, they disagree with your take. Comparing with similarly priced alternatives, it comes out on top. Every reviewer is trying hard to prove the neo sucks by comparison, it helps contrarian takes get better views.
Framework laptops are selling like crazy. The pre-orders on their highest end configuration of the new pro are completely sold out, and the pre-orders on the two lower variants are backed up until their 9th batch that wont ship until August.
It looks like theyre selling more laptops than they expected to, not less.
Their laptops are niche, but that niche seems to be growing quite nicely. There's a big cultural wave of frustration with Big Tech companies and their rent-seeking practices, and Framework is doing a good job of riding this wave.
Your concern about their being bought out is unfounded. They're not a publicly traded company and dont need to sell equity to anyone if they dont want to.
It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell, and likely dont have enough allocation of at least some of those chips.
Sure, they could have thought it'd only sell a tiny number of units, but if they thought that, they wouldnt have launched the product.
> It's at the very least indicative that they are selling more units than they expected to sell,
Hate to be contrarian here but this is a known marketing trick to make product appear as selling faster than it does to create hype. I'm sure you waited in line to a club/bar for 30 minutes only to realize club/bar was empty?
They are still a for-profit company and I totally expect those batches' shipping times to actually reduce soon. An order placed right now would ship in August and at this point it must be cutting into their earnings because any regular, walk-in type of customer is not gonna wait this long for their laptop.
This seems unnecessarily cynical. Telling your customers
> 'No, we won't sell you our most expensive new laptop config at all, and if you want the other cheaper configs, you will need to wait at a minimum until August'
is not a very effective marketing stunt.
Besides, Framework has a very consistent history at this point of quite frank, open communication. If they didn't have this history, I might lend more credence to your point of view, but my experience is that these are people that are pretty allergic to that sort of bullshit, and will just say what they mean.
I really can't imagine why they'd try and undermine that reputation just to counterproductively tell people they can't buy a laptop from them.
I am not saying you're wrong, I am just saying we can't draw serious conclusions based on pure speculation. They absolutely need to built their brand first and foremost to scale up and hyping up the brand by "selling out the stock on first day" is a legitimate way to do so. They can't stand clear of regular, high-school marketing for too long. Again, this is a for-profit endeavor with serious investors expecting a return.
It's less about repairability and more about modularity and upgradability. The repairability is just a bonus as a result of its modular-first design.
The whole point of the Framework is that it's your "final" laptop. Just buy it once, and upgrade whatever part you wish as and when you want to. For instance, folks who got the original Framwork 5 years ago can still buy the latest mainboard or chassis and keep using the rest of their gear, if they wanted to.
Of course, most people don't care about all that these days. Heck, most people don't even care about owning a computer, since smartphones have taken over.
The framework 12 is comparable in cost to a macbook neo, plus can work with a stylus as a tablet. I would say that is huge reason to recommend it. As well as that it can be repaired and upgraded as and when you want which is handy. Likewise it also can be used indefinitely theoretically as you can replace broken parts and a computer from 15 years ago is still usable today, so I am sure computers from today can still be used in 15 years.
> The framework 12 is comparable in cost to a macbook neo
No it isnt, not by a long shot! Only if you buy the basic entry level version (DIY) without any RAM, storage, ports or a charger. At which point we arent remotely talking about the same thing anymore!
It's approx £80 to £100 more for the same ram and SSD configuration as a £600 MacBook neo (No charger given in many countries as most people have a usb c charger). That's comparable. It's not a huge difference and the feature set is far greater for the framework.
(£545 with the device with ports,
£80 for the ram
£50 for the SSD.)
Firstly, you had to pay so much money for that screen that you had to consider buying a new device.
Secondly, Apple Products seem specifically engineered to easily break catastrophically (see SSD power supply below speaker grill, zapping the NAND modules if liquid enters the conveniently placed holes. Or a loose metal plate slicing a crucial ribbon cable when the phone was dropped. And many more such cases
This mix of overly fragile design and ridiculously expensive first-party repairs combined with parts pairing and the resulting inability of third-party, non-apple-certified repair shops to level the playing field is what I call a scam.
I like the form factor, screen quality (even though I prefer 16:10), the fact it works, the ports, but I'm lowkey pissed with the atrocious battery life - my new 13" AMD dies after 36h in sleep mode, unplugged and put to sleep at 90%
All the firmware updates are installed, there's nothing concerning in the logs.
Weak and laughable. Not even a few years old xps13s with hundreds cycles are this bad.
For office work, fine, plenty of horsepower, easy to fix, but not for private use at this point.
Opposite take here: the west is resisting AI too much, and not implementing guardrails to protect the public from human-hostile AI usage. I don't predict that will be its downfall (I think other factors have already started the process), but it will lead to losing a competitive edge over China and the rest of the world.
Right now, silicon dominance is what's keeping silicon valley afloat. that and the power of the American consumer base. The world is having to adapt to not relying on the US for consumption due to tariffs among other things. Not only that, attempts to curb competition from China by restricting chip exports, and imports of their tech (I don't disagree in principle with either) has led them to be more self-reliant and invest more on domestic R&D.
All this to say, there is no way around winning, and the fact of the competition is also real. You can't deny the competitive advantage proper use of LLMs brings. It's also hard to deny the destructive power of LLMs to societies.
In China, companies are heavily regulated by the state. This means being competitive against the west is a state matter, it also means harming citizens is somewhat tolerated if the economic benefit to the whole country is good, but companies chasing their own profit at the expense of the public good isn't tolerated. I don't agree with their way of doing things, but the only thing limiting their victory over the west is their hesitation and intolerance to all things outside of the SE-Asian sphere of influence. But then again, the anti-migration trend of the US also removes that slight technical advantage the US always held.
There are many problems that can't be solved by LLMs, and expecting developers' value to be the number of lines they type is silly. It doesn't matter so much if you use LLMs or don't use them, what matters is results. Westerners attitude in general is to resist LLMs. This is partly a result of (in my opinion), not realizing that there is non-western competition. It is absolutely possible to use LLMs to ship high-quality, performant and secure code, you just don't take the dumb approach of letting LLMs do everything and a human "reviews it"; how exactly depends on each development team and company.
Keep in mind, that for decades outsourcing developers offshore -- where usually sub-par code is tolerated because of lower cost to ship -- has been a prevalent trend. If companies can't get Western devs to learn to use LLMs, then they can just ship it offshore to companies that do use it. That didn't lead to the west forgetting to code, and LLMs won't either.
What will hopefully happen is you'll get less developers learning to code, which means the developers that do the work, will get paid better (it's been on the downturn) so long as they learn to sue LLMs.
What people are having a hard time coping with, is the expectation of needing armies of developers to get things done being an antiquated concept. Computers, and then the internet have done this to many industries. You used to have lots of travel agents in the past, you still do, but very few.
The bigger issue is refusal to learn from history. Concepts like capitalism, communism, market economy, centrally planned economy, etc.. are like half a century out of date. There was no "capitalism" 200 years ago (not in so many words at least). Economists and politicians aren't catching up to changes in technology. Historically, adapting to these changes has been brutal.
I won't claim to predict what will happen, but one way or the other, LLMs won't go away in response to resistance from western workers, similar to how other changes in tech didn't go away like that. Economies will have to adapt or get decimated until they do. In the mean time, there is ample opportunity for the dominance of the west to fade within our lifetime, should that opportunity be taken advantage of by the competition. If China starts being less dependent on local companies, and starts importing a lot more, they can displace US and EU consumption needs, and perhaps even force the west to be producers for their domestic demand. unregulated western companies (from Coca cola to Disney!) have been trying to achieve just that, because of the large earning potential in China. But again, China could take advantage of all that, they could have more influence over the west, but they're too inward thinking. They're so afraid of relying on a hostile west, they're preventing the west from becoming reliant on them completely. But this new image of an ineffective and declining US/West, and perhaps some success over Taiwan, and establishing a solid non-western global trade economy can give them that extra confidence?
I thought the cause of the bronze age collapse wasn't known (it wasn't a single civilization either), and the end of Rome, whichever "end" you ascribe to isn't caused by failure to manage or adapt to new technology. they weren't out-teched by anyone, or forgot how to do some technical work.
look at the roman roads and compare them to the contemporary ones. Those ancient roads are superior in some aspects (unbreaking, not filling with water etc), and still people try to find out how were they made.
Having that said, I agree with you: the forgetting of the technology was not a direct reason of the fall, it was a feature though...
I'm from Poland, and I have comparison with my colleagues from east. They can fix things we've already forgot how to fix in Poland. My friend fixed a broken Sony TV with a microscope and a soldering gun. I'd pay just 1000$ for the new TV, as he got advised in the official repair store, but since he was Russian, he fixed it by himself.
I'll say that I know nothing about this, but just commenting on the economics of it all: Cancer and HIV have been at the forefront of disease research, in terms of public interest and financial investment, and cancer is more like an umbrella of similar diseases than a single disorder. HIV is manageable these days, and cancer research is slowly seeing leaps in progress.
Alzheimer is very important, and affects a very large number of people, it is getting lots of research funding and attention, but perhaps not enough? If it takes a certain combination of time, human-hours, money, and lots of smart people being interested in doing research in that field. Is the economics of disease research that simple? it is unknown what numeration of those variables is required to tackle Alzheimers, but if it is a lot more than cancer for example, then it might be decades or more away from being well understood.
I hate to say it, but cancer and HIV feel more like things we can get, Alzheimers feels like something only old people get, and it's to easy to forget that we'll get old, and it's hard to think our older loved ones might be affected. If no one in your sphere has been affected, it's harder to prioritize the disease.
My opinion is, money is the biggest obstacle, and I don't mean money for research, but money for education for researchers, and the talent pipeline. If higher education (at least for medicine) was literally free, that'd be a start. then you need lots of people getting paid to do the research independently. Right now, it feels like most disease research is being done by big pharma, so they can find the next insulin they can use to maximize profits. The incentives are all wrong on all sides, for potential researchers, the public and R&D companies.
I can't see why HIV treatment would generate more profit than dementia, that doesn't make any sense to me. Dementia affects a lot more people, and it affects the wealthiest possible demographic. What is your logic there?
> Nonfamilial early-onset AD can develop in people who are in their 30s or 40s, but this is extremely rare, and mostly people in their 50s or early 60s are affected.
Depending on what you consider "old", this might not change much
I've heard one way to acheive this is by using api proxies/gateways. you can store secrets in a vault if you wish, but with a proxy, your app makes requests as usual without using secrets, its requests are then intercepted by the proxy to add authentication information transparently.
The added benefit is that you can also manage things like api rate limits, and implement all sorts of cool monitoring and api-specific threat detection centrally. I don't know of a way to do this outside of cloud provider services though.
Architecturally speaking, you have an environment that is at the same level of trust with respect to the data it processes, anything in there is unsecured, but all interactions outside of the system passes through a gateway proxy that manages all of what i mentioned earlier, including secret management.
- send traffic to the proxy (either in a non transparent way or using routes or even ebpf to redirect traffic to the proxy transparently)
- trust the proxy certs or use plain http/TCP to the proxy
With kloak, the app don't need any modification and you avoid a single point of failure (aka egress proxy). Each app has an independent ebpf program attached to it that can survive the control plane going down and don't need to trust any special certs or change the endpoint it sends traffic to.
cool, but the single point of failure (it could be HA-proxy) is the point, it's a choke point. I get both architectures have pros and cons, with the proxy approach you remove secrets from the application environment entirely. Plain HTTP shouldn't be an issue, neither should internal certs whose only point is to allow applications that refuse to work with plain-http to function. I would prefer the best of both worlds, where the proxies are per-node personally.
But not everyone wants to, or can afford to run a proxy for credential management. I started looking into this mostly to regulate API usage, especially burning through tokens when calling LLM apis, the credential benefit only occurred to me afterwards. Great work with it, no idea how the eBPF magic is making it work, I'll have to find out.
Thank you!
I agree, each architecture have its pro and cons. If an egress gateway is available and can handle secrets it's definitely a viable solution.
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