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Yeah, I'm optimistic we're getting really close to "forever laptops" once competing hardware catches up on efficiency. What do I need any higher specs for, oth

Yeah, I'm optimistic we're getting really close to "forever laptops" once competing hardware catches up on efficiency. What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?

skohan 1mo ago
As someone who does a lot of work with local LLM's, today's systems feel woefully under-powered. I'm looking forward to a future where my laptop has 10x the memory, 100x the memory bandwidth, and optimized cores to make inference workflows that currently take minutes or hours go down to seconds or milliseconds. While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.
- simonask 1mo ago
  Right now there isn’t really a convincing use case for local LLMs outside of enthusiast or specific niches. It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment. That might change, but it would require either that hardware gets much cheaper or everyone’s demands for LLMs increase significantly.
  - skohan 1mo ago
    That's what I mean though. The comment I was responding to was talking about "forever laptops" - my point is there's plenty of room for new capabilities which will make current hardware obsolete. Just like how GPU's didn't exist at all, and became a standard part of computing. And given how fast the hardware and software is evolving, I can easily imagine a future where we all have very capable models running on our own devices for an embedded intelligence layer that's doing most of the day-to-day tasks, and only have to outsource to a super-smart cloud model for specific things.
psd1 1mo ago
I do family tech support. Hardware refresh is driven by facebook adware js knobbery. Proof-of-work bot countermeasures, too, although i don't really resent that. If you run noscript then yeah, why not keep rocking your pentium.
preg_match 1mo ago
> What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life? To run poorly made software. Despite Apple having the best hardware around, they still manage to slow down M1 devices on Sequoia. Somehow. I think it’s a double-edged sword. Powerful hardware means powerful hardware. But it also means developers get lazy, and start writing poor quality software because it still runs OK on the latest and greatest. Luckily Linux doesn’t have that problem, which is why you can easily add 10 years to a laptops lifespan just by using Linux.

Yeah, I'm optimistic we're getting really close to "forever laptops" once competing hardware catches up on efficiency. What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life?

skohan 1mo ago

As someone who does a lot of work with local LLM's, today's systems feel woefully under-powered. I'm looking forward to a future where my laptop has 10x the memory, 100x the memory bandwidth, and optimized cores to make inference workflows that currently take minutes or hours go down to seconds or milliseconds. While we're at the point where traditional software is pretty much fast enough for all but extreme use-cases, with LLM's it feels like we're back to the days where you press compile and go have a coffee or chat to your colleague.

simonask 1mo ago
Right now there isn’t really a convincing use case for local LLMs outside of enthusiast or specific niches. It takes a lot of expensive hardware, and most people don’t have extreme enough requirements to recoup that investment. That might change, but it would require either that hardware gets much cheaper or everyone’s demands for LLMs increase significantly.
- skohan 1mo ago
  That's what I mean though. The comment I was responding to was talking about "forever laptops" - my point is there's plenty of room for new capabilities which will make current hardware obsolete. Just like how GPU's didn't exist at all, and became a standard part of computing. And given how fast the hardware and software is evolving, I can easily imagine a future where we all have very capable models running on our own devices for an embedded intelligence layer that's doing most of the day-to-day tasks, and only have to outsource to a super-smart cloud model for specific things.

psd1 1mo ago

I do family tech support. Hardware refresh is driven by facebook adware js knobbery. Proof-of-work bot countermeasures, too, although i don't really resent that. If you run noscript then yeah, why not keep rocking your pentium.

preg_match 1mo ago

> What do I need any higher specs for, other than battery life? To run poorly made software. Despite Apple having the best hardware around, they still manage to slow down M1 devices on Sequoia. Somehow. I think it’s a double-edged sword. Powerful hardware means powerful hardware. But it also means developers get lazy, and start writing poor quality software because it still runs OK on the latest and greatest. Luckily Linux doesn’t have that problem, which is why you can easily add 10 years to a laptops lifespan just by using Linux.