To quote myself in the post you responded to "It just wastes space that could be used for a larger battery, while limiting the number of ports that the laptop can fit at any one time."
The ports I personally need are HDMI, lots of USB-C ports, sometimes USB-A (but less and less), and sometimes an SD card. I know everybody has different requirements, but I'm also sure that's at least somewhat typical. And given that, I can't be the only one who thinks it's silly to reserve space for several 4x3x1 cm large USB-C-to-USB-C converters in a space-constrained device.
The replaceable ports are not interfering with the battery. The battery is under the touchpad, not up near the hinge like the ports. [1]
I love my Framework 13. The battery life on it is fine, I'd estimate probably 6-8 hours and charges quickly. The touchpad is quite large which I really enjoy, I believe that's thanks to the 3:2 aspect ratio? It took a second to adjust back from a haptic touchpad to a physical one, but doesn't bother me at all anymore. The arrow keys are a none issue, the half sized up/down arrow is standard on most 13" (and even some 16") laptops I've seen.
As far as I know, those aren't wasting the space for a battery. Framework opted for their current battery sizes. Larger capacities are available for the same size of battery they do have.
For example, my other favorite laptop, the Redmi Pro Books basically have the same physical size batteries but at 80wh/99wh ratings.
I just think Framework can't find a contract manufacturer for higher density batteries at their volume.
> As far as I know, those aren't wasting the space for a battery. Framework opted for their current battery sizes.
I don’t get that logic. There’s extra space; more battery could fit in there. The fact that higher density batteries exist in no way invalidates that.
(You might perhaps have a point if battery life was already excellent and the more important goal might be to save weight, but that’s not the case at all.)
In any laptop, if you have IO on both sides of the laptop, then the motherboard is at least going to extend to both sides. There is no room for batteries. Especially with high speed data links such as USB3 and USB4 these days, you need a nice impedance controlled PCB to the edge or some expensive cabling or in the case of framework, IO modules that are pcbs with a connector bridging the distance further.
The opportunity is then taken to stuff the speakers in the framework in that same space.
It's literally no different than a MacBook Pro or other mfgs.
The only thing I could see is they need to figure out how to miniaturize their speakers to expand the battery size a bit. Or move the speakers to the main board and project out the top. Their speakers are currently larger than the competition and not really any better while stealing battery space.
I would love to see them offer a larger battery with the trade-off of the user removing the modular speakers. Because personally I think using sound devices in public is just fucking rude and I'll use better quality earbuds/headphones both in public and privately anyway.
Eliminate or shrink the speakers and you can redistribute that space.
IO? There is no space redistribution possible if you want the IO on the left and right like every other laptop in the world. The alternative would be to put the IO on the top edge of the laptop, in which case you can reclaim space. The downside is you limit the display opening angle (it can't go flat), but that's a weird obsession in laptop design that came from Apple and thinbooks. (There used to be IO on the top edge in older laptops). Unfortunately being the ulgy duckingly would be bad for Frame.works business most likely as I guarantee every reviewer would whine about it
In particular Framework uses a 4 series cell battery pack configuration. Not unusual and they went for 4 equal sized cells put in series in a rectangular frame. Trying to fill awkward remaining space such as a "U" or "L" shape cavity requires a far more custom solution and Framework most likely does not have the volume to commission such an order from a custom battery pack manufacturer.
Harsher punishments are not as important as reliable enforcement. Harsh punishments that are reliably enforced are very effective, but we generally can get a "good enough" result with more moderate punishments, reliably enforced.
> Such as call-by-reference only working 2 recursions deep.
Which smells like an anti-pattern to me. Blaming bad code on the language is one way to deal with it.
> Arbitrary decisions and namings on stdlib.
This is absolutely true and even more annoying I find that the ordering of stdlib arguments is inconsistent. Backwards-compatibility is one of the reasons this has not changed, I guess.
What I don't understand is, why people don't apply that same legitimate criticism to python. I recently had to do a project in python and was astounded by the amount of arbitrary namings and design choices.
I also agree that many php codebases, especially if not written in a good framework, are a hot mess.
That being said, the ecosystem if using decent frameworks with php 8+ versions very productive in terms of time vs results and a joy to work with.
> What I don't understand is, why people don't apply that same legitimate criticism to python. I recently had to do a project in python and was astounded by the amount of arbitrary namings and design choices.
I absolutely do. I appreciate the PHP community for having expertise in actually creating sane tools attempting to do a good job. But Python is just batshit crazy with some of the most wild bugs I have seen and no guardrails whatsoever.
Out of all the languages which got a type-system after the fact, PHP is the best one hands down. Runtime-validation of types + non-null by default keeps some of the bad stuff inside Pandora's box.
> Which smells like an anti-pattern to me. Blaming bad code on the language is one way to deal with it.
It was a simple recursive algorithm which we used to make some custom-highlighting on a few select words (much easier to understand than an equivalent iterative approach). But I wasted a good day until I saw that there was a technological limitation which made the algorithm fall apart, and not the logic itself. That's a quite offputting smell.
Of course I understand the economic choice behind PHP... finding PHP programmers is cheaper than going C# or Java. But having a good background in parallelism and having a good grasp on efficient CPU/JVM usage PHP doesn't provide anything unique. Everything it provides, I can achieve equally fast in other established languages, while posing an actual problem when technological limits are reached.
The US rail system carries a lot more cargo than in Europe. On the order of 3 times more freight per mile of track. It is an also much cheaper to send freight by rail in the US compared to Europe. Reconfiguring the US rail system to even slightly more passenger friendly would seriously lower the amount of freight that can be transported by rail, as well as raising the price, and most of that would end up on trucks.
The other aspect is how the rail infrastructure is financed in the US vs Europe. In the US the infrastructure is to a large extent funded by the freight companies themselves, and in return their needs get priority. Take away that incentive and they'll stop funding the rail infrastructure meaning that much of that cost will end up pack on either the local or federal government, with all that that entails.
One of the heaviest rail, if not the heaviest rail in Europe, is a 500km combined freight and passenger rail that goes between Sweden and Norway (The Iron Ore Line). It alone carries more than the combined weight of all rail freight transportation in Norway, and close to 50% of all rail freight transportation in Sweden. It also happens to be one of the worlds oldest railways, built in 1888.
The biggest issue is speed. The maximum speed is just slightly above that of maximum highway speed, with freight speed limited to less than half of that.
That line is fantastic for freight (unless they've derailed an ore train again...), but the passenger service it offers would feel right at home in the US when it comes to both speed and number of departures. The passenger service to Norway leaves 0-2 times a day
The line between Kiruna and Narvik is so beautiful I’m not sure why you’d want it to go faster. The speed is heavily dictated by the number of tunnels and turns due to mountainous terrain. It couldn’t be much faster without very expensive kilometer long tunnels.
Population density in North Sweden and Norway is low enough that a few times a day is probably sufficient for most local travel. I haven’t been during peak tourist seasons when that number of trains might not be enough.
A fun fact is that since the ore trains travel mostly downhill, braking generates enough electricity that the ore empty trains can return to Kiruna effectively energy free.
We have the largest rail system of any country (USA 220k km vs EU 200k km). If you include the connections we use with Mexico and Canada it’s even larger. It’s almost all entirely freight. Trains can be 2000m long compared to 700m in the EU. It’s all built for freight.
2 km long trains are not long in the US anymore; in the west 3-4 km lengths are being seen more and more often. Turns out slower, longer trains filled with bulk commodities are better for business since they don't have tight delivery deadlines. There are towns where the train comes through for 45 minutes+.
Rail operators have also discovered a really nice side effect of ultra long trains: you don't have to pull into a siding to let a passenger train by as required by law if your train is longer than the siding.
Supposedly 10% of trains in the USA are about 10,000 feet or longer. Duckduckgo tells me that's about 3km. Supposedly there's at least one train 14,000 feet or longer.
It's worth noting that talking about the 'European' rail infrastructure is a bit of a misnomer since there is no standardisation of the rail system of regulations between countries and as such moving freight across multiple countries is basically never done.
Even for passenger transport the historical legacy of national rail networks means that travel across the continent hasn't been a priority. Recently EU initiatives seek to remedy this:
"the United States is the world's largest consumer market for a reason: its rivers. Transporting goods by water is 12 times cheaper than by land (which is why civilizations have always flourished around rivers). And the United States, Zeihan calculates, has more navigable waterways — 17,600 miles' worth — than the rest of the world. By comparison, he notes, China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles. And all of the Arab world has 120 miles."
To be fair, Germany is fairly small (by US/China) standards.
The continental US (no Alaska or Hawaii) is > 22.5 times as big as Germany but has only 8.8 times as many miles of "navigable waterways." (However, it's not clear if the US numbers include the Great Lakes or the oceans; LA to Seattle and Miami to NYC goes by ocean, not some river.)
But, that doesn't leave much for the rest of Europe.
You're right that pure formal perfection is not the only component in art; art has to mean something.
But quality has always been a very important aspect of popularity in art as well as in music (see: Renaissance sculptors & painters, Baroque and Classical composers, etc.)
Great art is when a unique, profound emotion or insight is expressed with great execution.
AI helps with the last part; real artists should still provide the emotional seed.
But effort itself is also a quality. The fact that a human took out a substantial fraction of their time on planet earth to create something is already a sign that at least one individual cared about the work: the creator. If art is like vomit then that initial round of validation is absent.
I don't think I agree with that. "A for effort"? Who cares if someone spent time on something, if the result isn't good? They wasted their time, which is their problem; but they shouldn't waste mine as well to compensate for that.
There are even artists who don't actually make anything: they formulate an idea and then commission craftsmen to produce what they imagined. While the resulting oeuvre involves some degree of effort by someone, that someone isn't the artist themselves; this is quite similar to AI.
Now, there's something to be said for scarcity. If producing something becomes so easy that anyone can output anything, then sure it may become a problem.
Yet the history of the arts is in many ways a history of explosion, and the number of things produced did not kill art. Often, it invented new art forms.
Baudelaire had this to say about photography in 1865:
> As the photographic industry was the refuge of every would-be painter, every painter too ill-endowed or too lazy to complete his studies, this universal infatuation bore not only the mark of a blindness, an imbecility, but had also the air of a vengeance. (…) it is nonetheless obvious that this industry, by invading the territories of art, has become art’s most mortal enemy, and that the confusion of their several functions prevents any of them from being properly fulfilled. Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate one another with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet upon the same road, one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude which is its natural ally.
I think he was dead wrong.
Photography may have influenced painting and force it into non-figurative territories (or it may have gone there by itself), but 1/ painting in general, even figurative painting, survived, 2/ photography became a new art form, and 3/ if abundance of photography did in fact, eventually, devalue the work of professional photographers, it didn't block the existence of great photographic art.
Not an 'A for effort' but 'effort for initial validation'. It shouldn't lead to automatic approval but zero effort is less of a signal than some effort and probably a weaker signal than 'a lot of effort' assuming the basic skills are present.
Photography is interesting because it has very subtle parallels with for instance painting. One of the more interesting ones to me is that it ranges the gamut from 'technical documentation' through 'personal memento' all the way up to very high end art. The big thing missing in photography is spirituality, which arguably was the driver (and often the patron in a financial sense) of lots of great art in paint.
A videogame AI[1] (the AI itself; we're not talking about its developers here) in a FPS being invincible with omniscience and perfect accuracy, at most makes me think "nice".
But a flawed meaty human with enough skill to be the best human at that same game, makes me think "wtf is this witchcraft", with full respect and acknowledgment, and I'll have way more interest in them than in the perfect omniscient flawless AI.
[1]: Yes, I know here "AI" is not used in the same sense as in the article. The point still stands.
I as an artist can come up with an idea want to archive and then use AI tools to reach it or an artist is completely cut out of the loop.
I don't believe that the later can be called an art or even a creation. It is just a patterned noise and more of it is produced the more noisy our environment becomes.
One of my very favorite pieces of visual art is just some text painted on a canvas taken from a review of some of the artist's other work. It probably took her maybe ten minutes to put together.
You have to care to put in effort, but effort isn't the core of art.
So what if humans make a lot of not especially interesting art. More art is good! You can choose what you connect with.
Now you need to define what a unique, profound emotion is.
And you need to define great execution.
And you need to explain why intentionally having poor execution couldn't express a unique, profound emotion. On Radiohead's biggest hit Creep "That's the sound of Jonny trying to fuck the song up. He really didn't like it the first time we played it, so he tried spoiling it. And it made the song."
At the end of the day it's always going to seem all subjective and a matter of opinion. Because it's too hard to pinpoint the objective part of what we are doing when we decide what's great and what's garbage. If there even is an objective part.
> But quality has always been a very important aspect
But what is quality? I used to think it was just degree of goodness, then I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and now I have no idea what it is (or what it isn’t).
It doesn't have to be something that you can objectively measure to exist and people to be able to recognize it (even if not perfectly) - which is the whole point of Z.A.M.M. by the way.
Can you give an example of a unique insight or emotion? A lot of the classic books I read, the greatest films of all time, and the most celebrated visual artists are unique mostly in style or execution, but all express the same basic universal human truths.
His projection is valid because it's not a qualitative problem, it's a quantitative one.
Music may already have been turned into a commodity selected by traits other than quality, but tools like this bring the effect up to a whole new level, a whole new order of magnitude.
Every tool that makes it easier to create art is good in my book. In years past you had to actually have the instruments and had to know how to work them. Now you can much easier learn to use simpler tools to get even better results, which just increases the amount of people that can actually realize their creativity.
But part of the whole point of listening to music is enjoying the expression of the people playing the instrument. Music is much more than just the final output of a machine, it's an expression of the soul. You may be able to create music more easily with this tool, but I guarantee it will be soulless, just like Google.
The results certainly will not be better. They will be a hideous amalgam from a computer. Just listen to real music created by real people (preferably live) and you will know how hideous these results really are.
Everything, even EFFICIENCY, has its limits to how much we should have.
The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music. And a world without the Velvet Underground would be more soulless to me.
I've heard soulless music performed by highly trained musicians playing on great instruments. And soulful music played on crappy instruments by untrained musicians. On average, the great music comes from the more trained musicians on the better tools.
AI is just another tool. The vast majority of music is terrible. It will continue to be terrible. And a few geniuses will use AI the way Hendrix used the electric guitar. I'm excited to hear what that will sound like.
> The same arguments were made to dismiss rock music when compared to classical music
Just because people were wrong in the past doesn’t mean they are wrong now.
> AI is just another tool
Not all tools are the same. A tool that changes how sound is amplified (like an electric guitar) is vastly different than a tool that can theoretically replace the human in the loop entirely.
Someone playing a piano and someone playing an electric piano are much, much closer to each other than someone pressing the start button on a player piano is to either of them.
That same argument has been wrong over and over again. So there's no reason to believe it's now suddenly a good argument unless given solid evidence.
Distortion was just another tool, and first rejected as highly undesirable. It's literally "just" putting an electric guitar through a tube amp and turning up the knob. And it revolutionized music. It sounds amazing in the right hands.
The more important point that I already made is the not all musicians are the same. Give a piano or a player piano to the vast majority of musicians and the output will be common and familiar. Give either to a musical genius like Hendrix and they'll manage to get something beautiful and new out of it. I'm looking forward to what the handful of geniuses out there will get out of AI. It's going to be fun.
The sheer amount of pop music and its pop-ularity contradicts you a bit here. Because one can play live AI generated music just as well, hop around on the beat and prompt the viewers to put their hands in the air - a live performance is (arguably much) more than the music. But I may be wrong, maybe the pop assembly line is not the sign of commoditization I seem to see, and won't gain that much from AI support.
You are right. The pop assembly line is EXACTLY what you describe. However, that does not mean we should create new technology to make that assembly line even MORE efficient! Instead, we should work on changing and dismantling society so that it is LESS efficient.
Hm. It was before the 20th century maybe. People knew of artists by name, not by their social life and sex tapes. The pop culture paraphilia is a very recent thing.
You're claiming that gossip and hero worship and celebrity didn't exist before the 20th century which is a wild claim that you'd need to back up with evidence. Humans haven't changed that much over the centuries.
Like most things I read outside programming on this board, it is people talking out their ass about things they don't know much about but they think they do because they are well paid to write javascript.
