For sure and the Mac Mini M4 Pro with 64GB of RAM feels like the sweet spot right now.
That said, the base storage option is only 512GB, and if this machine is also a daily driver, you’re going to want to bump that up a bit. Still, it’s an amazing machine for under $3K.
Perhaps. Another possibility is that the same societal shift that drove the UK to give up the right to be armed also pushed them in the direction of giving up other rights.
It's not "moving the goalposts." It's realizing that the principles behind perceptrons / Lisp expert systems / AlphaGo / LLMs / etc might be very useful and interesting from a software perspective, but they have nothing to do with "intelligence," and they aren't a viable path for making machines which can actually think in the same way a chimpanzee can think. At best they do a shallow imitation of certain types of formal human thinking. So the search continues.
No, it's still moving the goalposts. It just that we move the goalposts for pretty good reasons. (I agree!)
Btw, you bring up the perspective of realising that our tools weren't adequate. But it's broader: completely ignoring the tools, we also realise that eg being able to play eg chess really, really well didn't actually capture what we wanted to mean by 'intelligence'. Similar for other outcomes.
Are you using the Vision Pro, or are you relying on 3rd party information? I use the Vision Pro every day and I have several apps open at the same constantly. That said, it is currently only one macOS screen and macOS apps don't bridge. This isn't (to me!) a huge limitation as the applications I might put on a second monitor I simply run natively. So macOS has Xcode full-screened, and I have the relevant documentation website up in a native Safari screen (to my right), YouTube (Juno app) floating above the macOS screen, and the Music app on my left.
No one knows because it depends on a lot of variables that cannot be predicted in advance. The only major short term threat is that we default due purely debt ceiling debates / brinkmanship, not because of the burden of the debt itself.
The debt becomes a very real problem if hegemony of the US dollar as a reserve currency is ever disrupted. I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though.
> What's the future of the state as an institution?
Very high tax rates, unfortunately. Although there’s worse outcomes (currency destruction). These are the possible long term consequences.
If currency devaluation is so devastating, why do so many countries try so hard to do it? In moderation, of course: everything is obviously bad in the extreme. However, it's a constant source of international tension for a country to promise not to devalue their currency, devalue it anyway, and for this to make their economic neighbors upset. Often they will lay into each other without even bothering to explain why currency devaluation might be desirable, because it is such basic macroeconomic 101 / political economy 101 knowledge that is expected to be understood by everyone listening. How do these actions jibe with the idea that currency devaluation is a fate worse than death (err, very high tax rates)?
Level up your macroeconomics before you catastrophize over the prospect of currency devaluation.
If you don't want me to charitably interpret your words, I don't have to, but now you have to defend them. Explain why the US will be different from the last 500 years of reserve currencies to find themselves in this situation. Excessive government debt is a problem, but it isn't a new one. Youtube thumbnails with flames and red arrows are new, but they aren't a problem.
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