> In Europe a CNC, or at least good and repeatable saw is available at large hardware stores. You can get any product cut to any shape precisely as long as it's a rectangle. I've not noticed one that offers more than this such as drilling holes.
That's not the case in the US.
The big box hardware stores have a large track saw vertically mounted that can cut full sheets of wood, but there usually isn't someone working who is trained to operate it. They also have a rickety cart with a hand saw and tape measure attached with too short cables that you can try to use to make your cuts of dimensional lumber.
Idk, I never cat problems with getting a random Home Depot employee to cut it, the problem is that they are usually very rough cuts, far from square and precision
It isn't about improving things or fixing the problem, it is about mitigating cost.
Public sex, shooting up drugs, and vandalism still occur; but the owner/operator of the bathroom no longer has to maintain the bathroom or deal with individuals complaining about the poor state of the bathroom as a result of the behavior.
I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
When the iPod came out you largely had two options for carrying your music collection on the go. You either carried a binder of CDs, or you had some niche player like Mini-Disc or an MP3 player. Both alternatives were expensive and had limitations similar to a CD in terms of number of tracks you could carry.
I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.
Creative's Muvo was a weird form factor that was larger than an iPod. It had a horrid interface both on device and for loading music. It's only grace was that it was slightly cheaper than an iPod and didn't need a Mac with FireWire. Although iircc this was pre USB 2.0 so not having FireWire would mean loading music took forever and a day.
The iPod allowed you to carry most, if not all, of your music collection in a package slightly larger than a deck of playing cards. And it had a fantastic interface for navigating music on the device.
This was at a time before most people had laptops and if you had a PC it was at home and used sparingly. The iPod was such a compelling mobile computing device that it drove adoption of the iMac. Apple would eventually release iTunes for Windows and USB support but that was many years later.
> I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.
I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.
"1000 songs in your pocket" was the entire driving force behind the thing. It was constantly bellowed in the marketing and it's what Steve Jobs demanded of the engineering team from day one. The size and the storage were paramount and they knew no one else could match it.
> I feel like this completely misses the mark. Audio quality was never the compelling feature of the iPod and people weren't clamoring for it because it sounded good.
> And the competition still couldn't do it for almost a decade
There were a couple things Apple had in their favor but it certainly didn't take 10 years for folks to catch up. They mostly one because they captured people's hearts and minds.
The key things Apple did right was a high speed connection and owning their software. The Creative Nomad Jukebox used the same HDD as the iPod and beat Apple to market by a year, but Creative didn't own the software. The iRiver H series of players showed up around 2004 and were comparable to iPods in terms of quality and capability, though their aesthetic wasn't polished minimalism. Their UI wasn't as good but it was still very good. Their crux was Windows and Mac support wasn't great. I had an iRiver in 2007 and was running an opensource (rockbox?) firmware to get around some of those issues.
Apple has always been good at innovating around the problem which is usually the UI or software at large. This comes in part because of their vertical integration and being able to make minor tweaks to other parts of the ecosystem (e.g. desktop OS) to dramatically improve the experience of their product. The iPods are another great example where they made minor tweaks to iOS Bluetooth that magically made the experience of using wireless headphones dramatically better.
Yeah I had an iriver. That thing was great because it essentially acted as a giant (for the time) USB drive. And it could play any mp3s and you put on it.
You synced music by manually managing folders on the device. All my non technical friends were horrified by it. They didn’t have neatly organised mp3 libraries. For all of iTunes’ problems, being able to plug in a cable and hit the big “Sync” button was really simple and convenient.
> Creative Nomad Jukebox used the same HDD as the iPod
The Creative Nomad Jukebox used a normal laptop 2.5" drive. The iPod used a new 1.8" drive from Toshiba that Apple bought up the whole initial run of. That's why the iPod was smaller and more pocketable, the Jukebox was more the size of a CD player.
I had a Rio Volt which somewhat bridged the gap. 700MB mp3 CD/RWs (about 10 hours of music per disc) and a CD player when traveling and picking up new music. Not as small as an iPod, but no book of CDs was necessary, either.
The iPod’s user interface was good once you figured it out. I bought a 2nd gen one, I think, because it was the only large capacity device that supported audible audiobooks, and the UI frustrated the heck out of me. I consistently had trouble navigating it.
Then it clicked, the control, no matter what it looked like, it wasn’t a d-pad. It was a weird touchpad emulating a physical dial. Which exactly nothing in the documentation that it came with mentioned.
I worked for Microsoft at the time, and took a lot of grief for not using a Zune. Except I owned one, bought cheaply at the company store. It just never supported Audible.
Looking at photos of the OG iPod, the control looks a lot like a modern Apple TV remote which is a D-pad. But if you've ever held one you know instantly that it isn't a D-pad. And there was so much hype and advertising about it at the time, I'm not sure anyone would expect D-pad behavior from it.
I want to say that Apple invented that particular design language, and prior to the original iPod nothing resembled that UI but I'm not sure.
It seems to me that the OP was either too young or not alive when the OG iPod came out, and so they're looking at it like a modern man trying to figure out caveman tools.
How would you know? It's impossible to have done a thorough analysis of all the Windows UI frameworks, five have been released since I started typing...
I have this same affliction and have used ad-blockers for as long as I can remember. People seem to associate importance or quality with clutter. The more there is going on, the better it must be. My brain has just learned that certain page elements are never going to bring value and therefore don't exist.
Very rarely I'll come across a page where valuable information is hidden in those areas and it takes someone else showing me to actually see it.
The router mode and matrix routing in llama.cpp is still early days and it can't easily juggle multiple models as easily as llama-swap so there's still benefits if you're using 24-32GB cards that can run multiple models simultaneously.
The gulf is quickly shrinking though and it seems like the need for llama-swap will disappear soon.
There are tools like llama-swap that make this pretty bullet proof and offer an OAI style API and compatibility for local Agents. I've been running flavors of OpenClaw and Hermes exclusively on local models hosted this way.
If you can get away with it, you really should stick to llama-server alone. When they added support the ability to load multiple models + an idle timeout to unload them, it finally did it for me.
Adding llama-swap adds a fair amount of complexity that is unpleasant to debug and its documentation isn't very good (the only real doc is the sample config file).
The native router matrix for llama.cpp is still pretty immature (though evolving quickly) and I plan to switch once it reaches feature parity.
Personally, I don't see the value in idle timeouts or time based eviction. It doesn't improve model load performance but does mean you're more likely to incur a load penalty for any request.
I generally use the same two models for my agentic workloads and they sit comfortably next to one another in the 32GB of VRAM on my GPU. If I need to load a larger model, llama-swap can easily eject both models if necessary.
It seems like they're removing POP/IMAP support from the web client?
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