Did you change the fan settings? Default is for fans to be quiet. If you go to energy management in settings you can choose “more power” or something instead of automatic. Your Mac will be louder but throttle less.
Do humanoid robots in America have any economic benefit over the exact same robots in, say, Mexico? Or on a lights-out factory on the ocean floor in international waters? Or on the moon?
Even if they're physically in the US, are these robots driven by AI, or remote control? If the former, does this re-industrialisation create any jobs? If the latter, why hire Americans to control the robots rather than much cheaper Cubans or Vietnamese or Salvadorans?
Marco Rubio said that USAID wasn’t listening to orders. They were a rogue agency.
From other things I’ve read it has been an issue for multiple administrations.
Orders can be given that are unconstitutional or unlawful. Congress appropriates and designates funds, it is illegal for the executive to impound funds Congress appropriate. Unfortunately the GOP is happy to hand over their power in Congress and walk right into a dictatorship.
Foreign policy is under the control of the executive branch. The President can order a pause on foreign aid to allow the new administration to review all foreign aid.
Once those orders were ignored, the administration had to take more drastic steps (as SOS Rubio pointed out).
No, the President cannot just unilaterally ignore Congressional spending requirements just because "the executive controls foreign policy". That's what got him impeached the first time.
They're also not "pausing" shit, they're cancelling contracts effective immediately & locking up the buildings. Elon tweeted a picture of the sign being removed from the front of the building. You're being dishonest about what is going on.
>Rubio assessed the agency, decided to keep 300 people and let go of the rest.
With all due respect this is a complete joke. Rubio has been basically cut out of the process and is along for the ride.
And no, the President can't unilaterally do that, and if they want to argue that they can, they need to have that proven out by the courts, instead of proclaiming that the executive branch is the arbiter of what is and isn't constitutional.
Do you have any facts to support your assertion?
The executive order named Rubio as the interim admin. Rubio did a press interview stating that the agency went rogue and he fired all but 300 of them.
Absolutely the POTUS cannot just cancel contracts he thinks are a waste of taxpayer money. Some, not all. The President cannot ignore laws passed by Congress unless he gets agreement, by way of a court ruling, that the law is unconstitutional. Now if you are saying he can ignore all that without consequences because people bend over and let him, yes that can happen if we are all very stupid.
Are we really going to do this? You going to grind people down making them demonstrate the sky is blue to your satisfaction? We can all point to multiple EOs in the last weeks that are clearly, or at least arguably, not under the authority of the POTUS. That is what the fuss is all about, no? If you can't agree to that then there is no point in going on because you are being dishonest. In any case, once a court is involved (case clear or not) you follow court procedures to conclusion. You know, the whole reason our POTUS isn't in jail right now.
Your statements are correct and I generally agree. Let the courts sort it out.
I was replying to this statement "USAID funding is controlled by Congress. Trump cannot just order them to redirect funds on a whim." which is clearly false.
> Do you really believe that the POTUS cannot cancel contracts he feels are a waste of taxpayer money (and that position will stand up in court)?
Let's assume you're right.
There's a video of a farmer going around who had invested some money in an IRA project (passed under Biden) and he's complaining that the money he is contractually obliged is being held up by Trump.
So assuming Trump had the right to cancel this contract and it will hold up in court, what does that do for the government's ability to stimulate economic activity by passing legislation? How can people trust a law if it can become null and void upon the next admin coming in?
The farmer in question says the only reason he engaged in this activity was because he determined in the contract that the money was guaranteed. Meaning that although he made sure he wouldn't be in this situation, he's nonetheless in it because of POTUS, making the contract he signed with the federal government basically worthless.
So in the future, if the government needs to stimulate production of a certain crop through economic incentives, are farmers going to listen, knowing that the money they will need to depend on in 4 years may or may not exist depending who wins the next election? How can we make long term plans as a country this way? What method will the government turn to if can't use statutory incentives to stimulate economic activity?
> How can people trust a law if it can become null and void upon the next admin coming in?
The law is not null and void with the next admin. The law specifies the exec branch can determine who gets the grants and how much. So everyone is aware that a new admin may not give grants the same as the old admin.
> he determined in the contract that the money was guaranteed.
Then he was misled. There is no contract between the US and the grantee making a guarantee over a time period. Would you complain if a new Congress passed a new budget cutting this fund? Is that breaking a guarantee??
> making the contract he signed with the federal government basically worthless.
You are not signing a contract with the federal government! You are getting a grant. very big difference
> depend on in 4 years may or may not exist depending who wins the next election?
It's even worse than that! Congressional elections are every 2 years. Everyone who gets federal money knows that money is dependent on their patronage, which could change every 2 years. That is why there is so much money and power in politics! $4T is a lot of money to allocate, so of course a lot of money is going to spent determining who controls the purse.
These kinds of arrangements happen all the time with the government. For example NSF gives me a grant, I get that money over a period of maybe 5-8 years, and I make hiring and equipment purchase decisions based on the availability of that money. This provides stability and allows for long-term planning. It's been the case over many revolving administrations over the course of decades.
What we are talking about now is a fundamental shift from that, and you're acting like it's business as usual. No. You mention congressional budgets, I would be fine with that because that's how things are done. The budgets are set by representatives who advance our local agendas, and then everyone agrees on a budget that works. Generally speaking this is a stable way of advancing the country.
Now you are talking about a system where the executive can come in and just upend everything because he doesn't like it personally. There's no accounting for local needs in a population of 300 million spanning 4+ time zones. My question to you was: how do we as country plan long-term when the guy in charge can just shut down all scientific research in the country if he doesn't like the topics people are researching? Or he can cancel all contracts laid out by the last administration? Or cancel all contracts just in blue states? That's the country you're advocating for, so now keep going with this concept, what do we do if in 4 years a Democrat comes in and decides to cancel all contracts in Red states?
> What we are talking about now is a fundamental shift from that
Agreed. And you arguing that a democracy (or constitutional republic) cannot make a fundamental shift in policy via elections. That administrations have to be bound to decisions based on prior administrations, even if that is directly against the will of the electorate. Did I state your position correctly?
No. I'm saying as our Constitution is the foundation of our government, any changes must be made within the framework provided by the Constitution. The "will of the electorate" comprises hundreds of millions of voters; it's varied, complex, multifaceted, and cannot be distilled into the agenda of one man or even the platform of an entire party. For this reason the Constitution puts most of the decision making power in the Congress, who represent the will of the electorate at a much more granular level than POTUS.
If the next administration want to make changes, they can go through Congress. They can pass legislation. They can amend the Constitution. They can express their budget priorities. But they cannot do an end-run around the Constitutional order just to get things done faster because it avoids the pain of debate and finding consensus. The whole point of the Constitution is to prevent that.
For all the talk of legacy media, I assume anything posted on X is misinformation. And Rubio only cares about possibly being POTUS one day. Please post an article of any other administration that has ever complained about USAID being 'rogue'?
... and please stay within the site guidelines, regardless of how wrong another commenter is or you feel they are.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. I realize this material is provocative and super activating but that's what this principle, for example, is intended to cover:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
You need to understand when he says "irrespective of whether its in national interests" he means helping immigrants and asylum seekers, who are here legally even.
They listen to orders from many parts of the government, some of those are even conflicting orders. It's not like they are just doing whatever they want 90% of the time. Their money comes from who again?
> That being said, such a split design may help with improved AI inferencing.
Unified memory is the only reason Macs are so coveted right now for local AI.
A single 192 gb ram Mac costs less than the equivalent in standalone GPUs.
The execution speed for LLM inference gets so slow once you reach models that even fill out a 64GB machine. I was tempted, too, but then realized it was unusable past 48GB-ish and stacking used 3090s was the best price / perf / vram ratio.
What are the good use cases for very large memory amounts?
48GB is maybe just enough to squeeze a quantized 70B model in, like Llama 3.3, but you'll need to raise the GPU memory allocation limit [1] and it might not be super fast.
You could also try Qwen 2.5 32b, which you should just work with ollama or LM Studio with no config changes.
I've got a 32gb M1 Max and a 24gb 4090, and I barely ever run models on my Mac, as the memory bandwidth and compute for prefill is much better on the 4090. But I'm essentially locked out of Llama 3 70B class models, which I only use via API.
It's slower than using just GPU RAM, but it's still faster than using a regular PC that has a much more limited bandwith between the main memory and the GPU. It's some sort of middle ground on how fast and how cheap you can do inference with LLMs that don't fit into a consumer GPU's RAM.
It's definitely usable past 48GB, I have a 96GB M2 Max and regularly run models that use around 70GB that are very usable.
I also have a home server with 2x3090 and 2xA4000 (80GB vRAM) - yes it's a lot faster, but it's a pain in the ass to build, it takes up a lot of space, uses 10x the power, and honestly - cost about the same as my MacBook Pro.
Large context has different perf than large model. Op was likely thinking of running 400b models and finding the compute wasn’t enough to make the memory useful.
This isn't splitting the unified memory, it's splitting the soc into a sip. The ram is still on the same interposer/substrate. The actual mm distance won't be regressing to say the distance of a dimm socket to the cpu socket.
Yeah, this is the edge Macs have right now in the AI space. It's why people are looking forward to the Strix Halo from AMD as it will also have a unified memory architecture and will probably cost a good bit less than a Mac.
Duolingo’s is designed to keep your streak alive so you use the app every day and are exposed to ads. That’s its main function and Duolingo is very good at it.
If they were serious about helping you learn a language they would use flash cards to memorize vocabulary as a main feature.
It did help me learn some words and concepts but I see it more as entertainment than anything else.
> If they were serious about helping you learn a language they would use flash cards to memorize vocabulary as a main feature.
I respectfully disagree. I think that learning a language is not only about learning thousands of words, for different reasons:
- First, Duolingo makes you practice vocabulary, in quite a few different ways. It has some kind of "flashcards" system where it makes you practice weak words or old words.
- There are often one-to-many relationships between words in two languages. For instance, on your flashcard you may learn that "to miss (english) = vermissen (german)", and then that "to miss (english) = versäumen (german)". How do you know the difference (there is one)? You need context. Duolingo helps you learning words in a context, and that is very important.
- By reading/writing full sentences, you can practice grammar. And I find that grammar is a lot more important than many people tend to think. It's similar to context: depending on the grammar, the word takes a different meaning (is it the subject or the object? etc.)
Duolingo is a good tool. It's very nice to practice many different things. But it's not enough. You need to seriously learn grammar, too. And at some point you need to start reading, and watching movie, and writing, and speaking.
Said differently: I am convinced that it is easier to learn a language with tools like Duolingo than without (i.e. 30 years ago it was harder). But learning a language is still very hard and requires effort and dedication.
Why flashcards and memorizing vocabulary? I'd think more customization settings would be best, so you could learn in a way that works well for you, gaining the skills you need. Personally, I often find myself wishing I could read untranslated Spanish literature, so some sort of way to say "no, for my purposes I just need to know how to read and I don't need to learn about restaurants or shopping" would be best.
Basically, give people a very customizable course (with defaults if you don't want to fiddle around in settings) and lots of side tools, and let them decide how to use it.
