I guess a counterpoint might be Apple's "strategy". Scare quotes because I truly don't know if it was deliberate or just a happy accident. But somehow they've managed to not get so intensively exposed to the downside risk--if the wild claims about AI don't pan out they're not going to lose very much compared with the other megacorps.
Apples plan has been pretty obvious. They invested in small locally running features that provide small utility rather than massive hosted models that cost a fortune and aren’t profitable.
There also doesn’t seem to be much risk in falling behind. If you wait longer you can skip buying the now obsolete GPUs and training the now obsolete models.
I wonder what was the imagined use case? TBH I was seriously thinking about buying a framework desktop but the NPU put me off.. I don't get why I should have to pay money for a bunch of silicon that doesn't do anything. And now that there's some software support... it still doesn't do anything? Why does it even exist at all then?
At least part of it is probably Microsoft's 40 TOPS NPU requirement for their Copilot+ badge. Intel also have NPUs in their modern CPUs. Phones CPU manufacturers have been doing it even longer, though Google calls theirs TPU.
I use an older Google Coral TPU running in my home lab being used by Frigate NVR for object detection for security cameras. It's more efficient, but less flexible than running it on the GPU.
Don't know if I need an NPU for my daily driver computer, but I would want one for my next home server.
The NPU is entirely useless for the Framework Desktop, and really all Strix Halo devices. Where it could be useful is cell phones with the examples mentioned by @naasking (audio-text and text-audio processing), and maybe IoT.
Small models aren't entirely useless, and the NPU can run LLMs up to around 8B parameters from what I've seen. So one way they could be useful: Qwen3 text to speech models are all under 2B parameters, and Open AI's whisper-small speech to text model is under 1B parameters, so you could have an AI agent that you could talk to and could talk back, where, in theory, you could offload all audio-text and text-audio processing to the low power NPU and leave the GPU to do all of the LLM processing.
You could always offload some layers to the NPU for lower power use and leave the rest to the GPU. If the latter is power throttled (common for prefill, not for decode) that will be a performance improvement.
That seems like a really niche use case, and probably not worth the surface area? The power savings would have to be truly astonishing to justify it, given what a small fraction of compute time your average device spends processing voice input. I'd wager the 90th percentile siri/ok google/whatever user issues less than 10 voice queries per day. How much power can they use running on normal hardware and how much could it possibly matter?
You can't actually push back as an IC. Tech companies aren't structured that way. There's no employment protection of any kind, at least in the US. So the most you can do is protest and resign, or protest and be fired. Either way, it'll cost you your job. I've paid that price and it's steep. There's no viable "grassroots" solution to the problem, it needs to come from regulation. Managers need to serve time in prison, and companies need to be served meaningfully damaging fines. That's the only way anything will get done.
I'm hoping the Ladybird project's new Web browser (alpha release expected in August) will solve some issues resulting from big tech controlling most browers.
> There's no viable "grassroots" solution to the problem, it needs to come from regulation. Managers need to serve time in prison,
No, yes
Yes, giving these people short (or long, mēh) prison sentences is the only thing that will stop this.
No, the obvious grassroots response is to not use LinkedIn or Chrome. (You mean developers not consumers, I think. The developers in the trenches should obey if they need their jobs, they are not to blame. It is the evil swine getting the big money and writing the big cheque's...)
Yes, what I meant was there's no way ICs will change any of this. Using this or that extension, or choosing not to use some service won't really change anything either. The popular appetite just isn't there. Personally I use a variety of adblockers and haven't had a linkedin or anything for many years, but I fully accept that's an extremist position and most consumers will not behave that way. The only way these companies' behavior will improve is when they are meaningfully, painfully punished for it. There's very little we as consumers or ICs can do until then. Unless of course their risk management fails and they alienate a sufficiently large number of users that it becomes "uncool" to use the product. But all we need to do is look to twitter to see just how bad it'll get before then...
> soon you'll need to pay every website 5.99 a month
No, I won't. I'll just stop using them. So will almost everyone. I don't think there's a single ad-supported product that would survive by converting to a paid subscription, because they're all so profoundly unnecessary.
This is the guy that ignored warnings that Iran would respond by closing the Strait of Hormuz. He was briefed on exactly this scenario and decided he knew better. That is to say he's been proved capable of making incredibly bad decisions, it's just a matter of who speaks to him directly before. One of these days it might be the wrong person.
Comments are great until they diverge from the code. The "no comments, just self-explanatory code" reaction comes from the trauma of having to read hundreds of lines of comments only to discover they have nothing to do with how the code actually works, because over time the code has received updates but the comments haven't. In that case it's better to just have no comments or documentation of any kind--less cognitive overhead. This is a symptom of broken culture, but the breakage is the same kind that has managers salivating over LLM vibeslop. So I totally get where your colleagues might be coming from. Working within the confines of how things actually are it could be totally reasonable.
This is honestly such a bad argument against comments.
I'm gonna note down my reasons for doing things and other information I deem useful, and if some other dipshit 5 years from now when I've moved on comes along and starts changing everything up without keeping the comments up to date that's their problem not mine. There was never anything wrong with my comments, the only thing that's wrong is the dipshit messing things up.
Doesn't matter what I do, the dipshit is going to mess everything up anyway. Those outdated comments will be the least of their worries.
IME unfortunately that's not actually the case. It very much is your problem, as the architect of the original system, unless you can get yourself transferred to a department far, far away. I've never managed that except by leaving the company.
To be clear, I don't believe it should be this way, but sadly unless you work in an uncommonly well run company it usually is.
I really can't imagine this ever becoming a real problem. Not once have I ever worked in a place where any kind of leadership would ever give a shit about comments nor anything else in the code itself. The lowest level leadership has ever gone is click a button to see if it works.
And if anyone has a problem with comments existing it's trivial to find/replace them out of existence. Literally a one minute job, if you actually think the codebase would be better without them.
This is such a humongous non-issue it's crazy man.
Leadership doesn't need to give a shit about the code to cause the cultural defect that leads to comments not being maintained. All they need to do is set the conditions which prevent code owners from having the agency to reject shoddy work. In my experience this always happens. It can manifest as either:
(1) "flat" organization where everyone owns everything and therefore nobody has the authority to reject a PR
or (2) "rubber stamp" culture where people who reject shoddy work are "not a team player" and therefore performance defective.
So far every company I've worked at has one or both of these symptoms. Working in the confines of those systems, it's not an irrational choice to decide that comments and other forms of documentation aren't worth trying to maintain, and are therefore detrimental.
You may be a bit overconfident about how clear you will be with your comments.
The “dipshit” doesn’t mess everything up for fun. They don’t understand the comments written by the previous “dipshit” and thus are unable to update the comments.
Oh really? I'm overconfident in my ability to write and read simple clear text notes?
Here's what I think. I think you guys heard the "self-documenting code" BS and ate it up, and now you're grasping at straws to defend your cargo cult position, inventing these "problems" to justify it.
If you're looking at some code and there's a comment saying something that doesn't make sense to you, maybe that's a clue that you're missing a puzzle piece and should take a step back maybe talk to some people to make sure you're not messing things up? Maybe, for a non-dipshit, that comment they don't understand could actually be helpful if they put some effort into it?
Also just to be clear I don't think this is a likely occurrence unless someone doesn't know squat about the codebase at all - my comments generally assume very little knowledge. That's their whole purpose - to inform someone (possibly me) coming there without the necessary background knowledge.
It just isn't feasible to include the why of everything in the code itself. And it sure as hell is better to include some info as comments than none at all. Otherwise a bug will often be indistinguishable from a feature.
And I don't think dipshits mess things up for fun. I think they just suck. They're lazy and stupid, as most developers are. If I'm there I can use reviews etc to help them suck less, if I'm not they're free to wreck my codebase with reckless abandon and nothing I do will make any difference. I cannot safeguard my codebase against that so there's no point in trying and the fact that this is your argument should make you stop and reconsider your position because it's far fetched as fuck.
I’ll also note that I’ve worked with developers who didn't like git blame because someone might misinterpret the results. I think some people want excuses for poor work, rather than just working as correctly as possible.
I hope editorial departments everywhere are taking careful notes on the ars technica fiasco. Agree there's room for some kind of quick "verified human" checkmark. It would at least give readers the ability to quickly filter, and eliminate all the spurious "this sounds like vibeslop" accusations.
until then, there's a simple rule which works well: never talk to a cop. Or at least say the minimum number of words possible, give them nothing to use against you. Present ID if they ask for it, but never admit anything. If they persist, "lawyer". That has worked for me.
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