Some of that has to be offset by shipping, importing fees, etc. But I do think the end goal is to get Apple/Nvidia/etc back on US soil manufacturing wise.
Don't these chips still need to be sent to China for assembly by Foxconn? If anything this will increase costs even more and seems like import fees could potentially be even higher due to the current US-China trade war. Unless there is a plan to assemble everything in the US/Mexico as well. But then the costs would be way higher to assemble outside of China: certainly in US but probably also in Mexico, and I don't think they have any factories there.
Are you suggesting that flood prevention only happens in higher income neighbourhoods? Flood prevention tends to lie on the county engineers. Not so much private individuals to dictate. Doesn't matter how much money you have, you can't just dig up a road to put in proper flood prevention measures like drainage and grade.
The Army Corps of Engineers also does a lot of flood management work, and they use a cost/benefit analysis when deciding which projects to approve that takes into account the value of the real estate being protected. And even then, the local community has to put up a large share of the funding. So it definitely ends up favoring richer communities.
99 Percent Invisible did an episode about this recently:
In seriousness, it was really cool to see the counter proposal's "nature-based solution" which would design 39 acres of distributed barrier islands around the coastline, to block storm surge naturally.
Would be an interesting relationship to explore. I think you can look at it as both cause and effect. Effect in that flooding destroys wealth and often-flooded areas will not have longstanding infrastructure or buildings - hits to the local real estate that result from flooding can affect non-flooded buildings as well. The cause could be because property and income taxes in low-income regions may be insufficient to fund infrastructure or public works that prevent or mitigate flooding and flood damage.
I mean every UI software, even the ones built into the different OS's has bugs like these. So what is the alternative? Throw Chromium into the code and build the UI with HTML and C++ backend? JUCE or some other UI package?
There really is not a ton of other options.
I think for most companies, paying for QT and maybe a few extra for bug fixes as needed makes sense. And lets you tone down the hardware expenses that say Chromium would require.
It obviously depends on your needs, if your software needs complex controls, responsive layouting and tries to achieve a smartphone-type UI, then yes I using chromium is the way to go with a c++ backend that does the heavy lifting.
Qt has a big advantage if your content is rather static and you can just top-down layout everything via anchors and rather fixed positions. But in those cases you also generally don't use complex controls that layer ontop of each other.
In my opinion it should be communicated quite clearly that QML is very good for "small" embedded UIs like for general home appliances, but if you are planning to create a rather complex application with demands like responsive layouting, custom data structures, interfacing with existing apis, then you far better off just using chromium with a custom backend. That has far less UI-breaking bugs.
Or just use Qt Widgets? Yes, the default sizes and styling might not be suitable but these are easily and fully customizable. The one disadvantage is that Widgets is not hardware accelerated.
If youre a python dev, pygame is an often overlooked option, it’s quite nice if you're targeting a specific screen resolution. I’m using it in production….
Doubt what? QT is very popular. Just look at video game launchers, Battle.net, EA Origins, all use it. VLC, teamviewer, telegram, tesla UI, etc all use it. I can list about 100 different apps without even trying.
Since I no longer work on big projects, I actually prefer Codeigniter. It's just simpler and yes, it doesn't do nearly as much as Laravel and I'm OK with that.
Ha, this reminds me of a time I was proposing our team use Symfony rather than Laravel for a new project. It was such a battle.
Eventually I wrote up a document (I must have spent 20 hours on that thing) showing the pros and cons according to our needs and what each options offered. The gist of it was that Laravel was a nice wrapper over Symfony components at the time (though it did offer more as well, too - it just wasn't the more we needed), and since we were kind of like power users (data heavy backend with tens of thousands of users, rapidly growing), we should go direct to the source and use the Symfony components without any abstraction.
I mean, we shouldn't have been using PHP at all at the time, but what can you do.
Literally no one arguing for Laravel knew it was based around the Symfony components. Once the CTO saw that and heard me out, we didn't actually end up reviewing the Laravel option at all. I was so relieved.
Those were weird times. I'm not sure how much Laravel has changed since then. At the time it was kind of like an easy way to build simple stuff fast, but it didn't strike me as a great tool for our use case. We needed to make the most performant php-based booking system possible, and some basic benchmarking showed that Laravel introduced some incredible performance penalties that didn't make any sense for us.
Sometimes I miss that product. It had massive potential. I still stumble across it while booking stuff. The UI has barely changed. I suspect they haven't made many changes or made much progress since I left 7 years ago. I really wanted to build it into something better.
Long story short: Laravel wasn't the right choice for that kind of application, no one who wanted to use Laravel had any idea about its architecture but argued with me about it for weeks, haha. Write detailed documents to support your case, it works wonders.
Laravel hasn't changed much. I mean, it did, PHP also changed a lot in the last years but the whole idea behind the framework is the same. Full of features, easy to set up, many tools built around Laravel to deploy your app, to build your own SaaS, etc but it's highly opinionated, you have to do it their way.
Symfony on the other hand takes more work but it's more flexible. One of internal apps is made with Symfony and after working on it for a couple years, if I had to set up the whole thing again I wouldn't know how.
Back in the day we used Symfony at work. I have a vague feeling that some of my coworkers looked down on Laravel. Less dependency injection, more weird magic.
> I have a vague feeling that some of my coworkers looked down on Laravel. Less dependency injection, more weird magic.
Well, you can rest easy knowing it probably wasn't just a vague feeling, because I'm pretty sure every moderately experienced programmer who has tried both and went with Symfony feels that way.
Laravel was clearly written from the ground up with one goal above all else: to make it was easy as possible for beginners to write babby's first website as fast as humanly possible. Every other essential aspect of such a framework (maintainability, modularity, code clarity, ease of debugging complex issues, etc) was thrown to the wayside in favor of that one main goal, which is why there's so much "magic" everywhere. You're expected to just blindly trust the magic and never look behind the curtain. Unfortunately, beginner programmers that have no intention of ever evolving past their beginner phase are a huge audience nowadays, so you end up with many people who have never had to write or maintain a complex codebase hailing Laravel as the next coming of Christ.
This is all heavily reflected in this article: the author picks one of the most extremely simple use cases to implement, a 99% static page with a single dynamic variable that doesn't even seem to use a database. And despite the code being extremely simple, he still has to ask AI to write 90% of it for him because he isn't interested in learning how anything works, he isn't interested in expanding it or maintaining it in the future, he just wants to pump out the minimum viable product as fast as possible.
Laravel follows dubious practices: god objects (like a parent class which has hundreds of functions), static functions etc. The kind of practices our product is actively moving away from (originally based on Symfony 1 which had all the architectural issues Laravel has now), because it didn't scale beyond CRUD (makes it easy to write hard to support spaghetti code etc.). So it feels like a step backward... Especially when you learn they base it on top of Symfony which is already great and nicely designed.
Count me as one of those disgusted by weird magic people. Unfortunately for us, the majority seem to love it. The more coding resembles throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks, the happier they are. "What do you mean this could have been 10 lines and no frameworks; that can't possibly be complex enough [for some ETL thingy]."
The first one is pretty easy, it’s because direct bank payments in EU are popular with things like klarna, SEPA, etc. so they are just competing with existing players.
I have, but only as an idiom, never literally. E.g. "Microsoft just keeps hoovering up companies", but the literal act of vacuuming is only called vacuuming.
growing up in India over past 4 decades .. 'Xerox' was/is the default and most common word used for photocopying ... only recently have I started using/hearing the term 'photocopy'.
every town and every street had "XEROX shops" where people went to get various documents photocopied for INR 1 per page for example
The answer is obvious, we put up gates to prevent competition. Every industry has so much red tape and list of approved products that it is impossible. Have a new product to solve house building in a timely fashion, hopefully you have hundred of thousands to pay for certification and then wait years for some government agency to approve your product for building.
It's rather disgusting how we grid locked ourselves with regulations. There used to be thousands of ISPs, banks, grocery stores, etc and we added red tape after red tape to restrict and allowed them to be all bought by the company that did the best.
Now we got like 3 banks, 3 ISPs, and 3 grocery stores with different names.
"no no, it's not that the technology has reached it's current limits and these companies are bleeding money, they're just withholding their newest releases not to spook the normies!"
Here's an experiment you can try, go to https://www.udio.com/home and grab a free account which comes with more than enough credits to do this. Use a free chat LLM like Claude 3.5 Sonnet or ChatGPT 4o to workshop some lyrics that you like, just try a few generations and ask it to rewrite parts you don't like until you have something that you don't find too cringe. Then go back over to Udio, go to the create tab turn on the Manual Mode toggle and type in only 3 or 4 comma separated tags that describe the genre you like keep them very basic like Progressive Rock, Hip Hop, 1995, Male Vocalist or whatever you don't need to combine genres these are just examples of tags. Then under the Lyrics section choose Custom and paste in just the chorus or a single verse from the lyrics you generated and then click Create. It'll create two samples for you to listen to, if you don't like either of them then just click Create again to get another two but normally it doesn't take too many tries to get something that sounds pretty good. After you have one you like then click on the ... menu next to the song title and click Extend, you can add sections before or after and you just have to add the corresponding verse from the lyrics you generated or choose Instrumental if you want a guitar solo or something. You'll wind up with something pretty good if you really listen to each sample and choose the best one.
Music generation is one of the easiest ways to "spook the normies" since most people are completely unaware of the current SOTA. Anyone with a good ear and access to these tools can create a listenable song that sounds like it's been professionally produced. Anyone with a good ear and competence with a DAW and these tools can produce a high quality song. Someone who is already a professional can create incredible results in a fraction of the time it would normally take with zero budget.
One of the main limitations of generative AI at the moment is the interface, Udio's could certainly be improved but I think they have something good here with the extend feature allowing you to steer the creation. Developing the key UI features that allow you to control the inputs to generative models is an area where huge advancements can be made that can dramatically improve the quality of the generated output. We've only just scratched the surface here and even if the technology has reached its current limits, which I strongly believe it hasn't since there are a lot of things that have been shown to work but haven't been productized yet, we could still see steady month over month improvements based on better tooling built around them alone.
Text generation has gone from markov chain babblers to indistinguishable from human written.
Image generation has gone from acid trip uncanny valley to photorealistic.
Audio generation has gone from 1930's AM radio quality to crystal clear.
Video generation is currently in fugue dream state but is rapidly improving.
3D is early stages.
???? is next but I'm guessing it'll be things like CAD STL models, electronic circuits, and other physics based modelling outputs.
I've tried Udio when it appeared, and, while it is spectacularly fascinating from the technical perspective, and can even generate songs that "sound" OK, it is still as cringe as cringe can be.
Do you have an example of any song that gained any traction among human audience? Not a Billboard hit, just something that people outside the techbubble accepted as a good song?
Have you tried the latest model? It's night and day.
Edit:
There's obviously still skill involved in creating a good song, it's not like you can just click one button and get a perfect hit. I outlined the simplest process in my first comment and specifically said you could create a "listenable" song, it's not going to be great but it probably rivals some of the slop you often hear on the radio. If you're a skilled music producer you can absolutely create something good especially now with access to the stemmed components of the songs. It's going to be a half manual process where you first generate enough to capture the feeling of the song and then download and make edits or add samples, upload and extend or remix and repeat.
I think the frontpage/recommended on Udio and Suno both have some decent music these days. By decent I mean on the level one could expect from say browsing music on say YouTube in areas one is not familiar with. There is of course a lot of meme/joke content, but also some pleasant/interesting sounding songs.
The really good stuff probably will not be marked as med with AI - and probably will also go via a DAW and proper mastering.
- someone responds with a Gen AI-enabled service that is
1) really impressive
2) is currently offered pretty much for free
3) doesn't have that many tangible benefits.
There's many technologies for which it's very easy to answer "how does it improve life of an average person": the desktop, the internet, the iPhone. I don't think Udio is anything like these. Long-term, how profitable do you expect a Udio-like application to be? Who would pay money to use this service?
It's just hard to imagine how you can turn this technology into a valuable product. Which isn't to say it's impossible: gen-AI is definitely quite capable and people are learning how to integrate it into products that can turn a profit. But @futureshock's point was that it is the AI investment bubble that's losing hype, and I think that's inevitable: people are realizing there are many issues with a technology that is super impressive but hard to productize.
I wrote a song for my girlfriend this way. It turned out pretty nice. A bit quirky is not necessarily a bad thing when making personalized content.
Took me a couple of hours to get it to my liking, including learning all the tools and the workflow for the first time. And fixing up a couple of mispronunciations of her nickname using inpainting.
Overall a very productive environment, and will probably try to make some more songs - an replace the vocals with my own using the stems feature.
I have some audio engineering skills, dabbled in songwriting, guitar and singng when I was younger, but actually never completed a full song. So it is quite transformative from that perspective!
That's great to hear! It's uses like this that really make Udio and other tools shine. Even just making up silly songs about things that happen in your life is fun or doing them as a gift like you did is always nice. It's also great to have the option to add music to other projects.
The ride to what? The place where human musicians can't earn a living because they can't live on less than what it costs to have an AI regurgitate the melodic patterns, chord progressions, and other music theory it has learned? This benefits who, exactly? It's a race to the bottom. Who is going to pay anything for music that can be generated basically for free? Who is going to go to a concert or festival to listen to a computer? Who is going to buy merchandise? Are the hardware, models, and algorithms used going to capture the public interest like the personalities and abilities of the musicians in a band? Will anyone be a "fan" of this kind of music? Will there be an AI Freddie Mercury, Elton John, Prince, or Taylor Swift?
It sounds like you're arguing with yourself. You provide exactly the reasons why generative AI isn't going to take us to a "place where human musicians can't earn a living". It's my understanding that most small bands primarily earn their money from live performances and merchandise, gen AI isn't going to compete with them there, if anything it'll make it much easier for them to create their own merch or at least the initial designs for it.
AI generated music is more of a threat to the current state of the recording industry. If I can create exactly the album or playlist that I want using AI then why should I pay a record label for a recording that they're going to take 90% of the retail price from? The playlist I listen to while I'm working out or driving is not competing with live band performances, I'm still going to go to a show if there's a band playing that I like.
Yeah I didn't really state that very well. My point was mostly what you say: because people are fans of artists, and because AI music is/will be essentially free to produce, AI music isn't something that will make money for anyone, unless it's the default way anything online makes money: ads are injected into it. I'm not going to pay for it. I'm not going to buy merchandise, or go to concerts, or do anything a music fan does and pays money for. I'm not even going to put it in a workout playlist, because I can just as easily make a playlist of real human artists that I like.
I disagree that it's a threat to the recording industry. They aren't going to be able to sell AI music, but nobody else is either, because anyone who wants AI music can just create it themselves. Record labels will continue to sell and promote real artists, because that's how they can make money. That's what people will pay for.
Fair enough but I'm not sure you're even going to realize if you're listening to AI generated music or not. One way of using these tools is to take lyrics and create several different melodies and vocal styles. An artist or a professional songwriter could do this and then either record their own version or pay musicians to perform it. That could be any combination of simply re-recording the vocal track, replacing or adding instrument tracks, making small modifications to some of the AI generated tracks, etc. The song can then be released under the name of the singer who can also go on tour in the flesh. You might also just come across a 100% AI song on a streaming platform and enjoy it and add it to a playlist. Who vets all of the music they listen to anyways? and if the producer manages the web presence of the "band" and provides a website it would withstand a cursory search. You'd have to look closely to determine that there are no human band members other than the producer. For the types of electronic music that aren't usually performed live and are solely attributed to one artist it might be impossible to tell. The line would be especially blurry there anyways due to the current extensive use of samples and non-AI automation.
There are a lot more fuzzy edges too, you can use AI tools to "autotune" your own voice into a completely different one. You can tap out a quick melody on a keyboard and then extend, embellish and transform it into a full song. You could even do the full song yourself first and then remix it using AI.
The point I agree on would be that one-click hits are going to be few and far between for a while at least. If no effort is put into selecting the best then it's really just random chance. I'd be willing to bet that there will be an indie smash hit song created by a single person who doesn't perform any of the vocals or instruments within a year though. It'll get no play time on anything controlled by the industry titans but people will be streaming it regardless.
Yes, I do think it’s plausible. You’re talking Microsoft and Google. Two companies with extremely close ties to the US government. And Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic. It doesn’t take a conspiracy if the folks with majority stake in these companies are all friends and handshake agree over a steak dinner just off Capitol Hill. We live in a world where price fixing is a regular occurrence, and this is not so different.
I think we will see a very nice boost in capability within 6 months of the election. I don’t personally believe all the apocalyptic AGI predictions, but I do think that AI will continue to feed a nice growth curve in IT investment and productivity growth, similar to the last few decades of IT investment.
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