the average person isn't going to use a locally hosted model, ever.

True.

I don’t think that’s true at all.

Platform vendors have already started shipping small LLMs for translation and for AI assistance. If you use Apple Intelligence you’re using local models to some extent for the smaller tasks. Consumer hardware is perfectly capable of running much larger models too if you give it enough RAM, and is only held back by RAM being expensive. My five year old laptop can run 30B-ish LLMs, and if RAM prices hadn’t exploded, then by now surely those 64 GB wouldn’t be an outlier and newer devices would be running more powerful models for “average people” too.

But prices for RAM will eventually come down again and hardware in general will keep becoming more capable. It’s weird to me to suggest anything else, considering that we went from 8 bit PCs with 64k of RAM to modern smartphones in my lifetime. Why would hardware stop improving exactly now?

The same applies to LLMs themselves. Qwen 3.8-27B beats expensive online models from two years ago in its stronger areas (e.g. coding). Why would that development suddenly stop now? There’s a hard limit here somewhere regarding the compression of knowledge (just based on information theory, not specific to AI) - which is why smaller models hallucinate more - but that doesn’t rule out e.g. improvements to how external knowledge can be integrated at runtime.

Accordingly, the AI models shipped with consumer devices will keep becoming more powerful and online models will be needed less and less for “average person” tasks.

One part of the AI bubble is the assumption that AI will remain compute intensive, which is what drives the data center buildout. But historically, new technologies have often started out as expensive and barely obtainable for average people and then became cheap and ubiquitous within fairly short time frames. It’s weird to me to suggest that LLMs will be an exception especially while also suggesting, at the same time, that the technology will accelerate research and development across the board.

I guess it depends on what you think prompts look like. If it’s “Claude, write GTA, make no mistakes” then yeah that’s probably never going to be programming. It’s also not what prompting looks like that produces these results that make people like the author see a gap. Although personally I think a big part of the gap is the automatic verification coding agents can do and that’s impossible in many other areas.

As someone who barely (i.e. not professionally yet) wrote assembly almost 40 years ago, structured languages were well accepted by that time, but compilers were legitimately not that good at optimization, so much like today, we did have to do things by hand instead of using a compiler if we wanted good results. That compilers got better at this than humans in most cases is a somewhat recent thing. Personally I’m too young to have ever thought of structured languages as “not real programming”, but I know people who definitely did think that. The other thing that wasn’t considered real programming is scripting languages. The perception of those changed dramatically in my lifetime.

One argument I see often is that even though a modern structured language’s compiler does generate a ton of code from a small amount of input, at least you know exactly what that input does. Which is funny to me because for the last 20 years I’ve been complaining that people don’t understand what the machine does when it runs their code does anymore, because how are they supposed to learn that when they started on Java or similar.

I was hoping for mapo tofu since it’s a Chinese model, but a biscuit is a biscuit

That’s true, but it could still be more specific.

For example there’s a comment about symlinks on exFAT. Steam could say “failed to create symbolic link” instead of “disk write error” in that case.

There typically are a few different error conditions for normal writes too that Steam could pass on. E.g. on Linux there are separate errors for out of quota, files becoming too large for the fs they’re on, the fs being out of space, and low-level I/O errors.

Microwaves have been immensely successful though. In some countries >95% of all households have one. In the US they’re more common than cable TV ever was. They went through a boom in the 1980ies where that number shot up from 10%-ish to 80%-ish. If AI is like microwaves it’ll be considered essential in another 10 years.

They have different fixed lengths, no prefix needed to tell them apart.

He just picked the wrong one. There’s probably quite a few illegal Mexicans who’d do a better job than Hegseth.

As a developer I routinely compile projects that Apple has never seen and run them on my iOS devices. It’s not locked down in the sense that it’s impossible, but that the barrier is too high for normal users (who also don’t have a developer program membership).

Im Europe we have alternative app stores on iOS too.

But at the end of the day, even as a technically adept person, I don’t care that much about what my phone can do beyond the actual phone things, and just want it to be a reasonable smartphone that doesn’t need me to be technically adept just to be useable.

If we’re talking about AI performance the software is there, and models often get ported to MLX.

1. Nethack
2. Dark Souls 1
3. Monster Hunter 3U
4. Kerbal Space Program 1
5. Baba is You

With this definition, it’s not different from before. Pretty much any smartwatch or smartphone or noise cancelling earbuds record by this definition. The new thing is the automatic summaries. But for example, all modern Apple devices can listen for Hey Siri constantly, and other brands have something similar. Noise cancelling earbuds record and process the noise they’re cancelling (and Apple’s can listen for Hey Siri). Laptops do it too.

Part of it is that EU countries charge VAT on digital sales and prices must include it, while in the US there’s sales tax instead, which depends on the state and is only added at checkout time (and also often lower or even zero for digital goods). For example if I pay 80 Euro in Germany, then Steam gets to keep 67 because those 80 Euro include 19% VAT.

The other part is that in a market economy, prices are determined by what generates the most profit, and not necessarily related to cost or based on fairness. EU customers apparently pay 80 Euro often enough that it makes more money than 60 or 100 Euro so developers set their price to 80 Euro.