hperrin

Lol, who is the target audience then? It’s certainly not regular people. They will never take apart their computers. The Framework is 100% marketed at tinkerers and DIYers. (It’s literally called the DIY edition when you buy it.)

I’m not a computer repair person. I have repaired my own computers, but that’s not my job. So I’m not sure if that’s what you meant, but no, I’m not a professional repair tech.

I don’t own that ASUS. I own a Framework. I regret buying it. It’s absolutely not worth the extra price. I’ve already had to buy a new battery for it after two years, because they use cheap, shitty parts, despite charging out the nose for them. So yeah, I wish I had just bought an ASUS.

I’ve fixed tons of screens on laptops. Generally it’s harder than Framework, true, but it’s not impossible. Even if you have to pay a shop $800 to fix the screen, you’re still coming out cheaper than the Framework.

There’s zero financial reason to buy a Framework, ever. It will not save you any money. That being said, some people want to buy them to support the company, or because they like the repairability/upgradability, and sure, those are valid reasons to buy them. But don’t spread lies saying it will save you money. They are expensive products with mediocre build quality.

The price is 38% higher than a comparable ASUS laptop. That also doesn’t include Windows. (Which is how I would buy it, but most people would want Windows on it.)

Now let’s say you upgrade it. That’s another $600 for a new motherboard down the road, plus maybe new ram and ssd, but we’ll say it stays on DDR5. That’s $2570 for the laptop and one upgrade, compared to $2460 if you buy two ASUSes. And what do you get for that money?

Framework:

1. A laptop.
2. A motherboard with no RAM and no SSD. Maybe you could use it one day if you invest a bunch of money into getting more parts and one of those cases. Then you’ll maybe have a mini PC after you spend a lot more money.

ASUS (or, just normal laptops I guess):

1. A laptop.
2. Another whole god damned laptop that you can use for something else or give to a family member or sell or something, because it’s an entire laptop.

To be clear, I’m not saying their laptops are bad. I’m saying they’re mediocre and overpriced. They’ve got some really neat features, like how easy they are to repair and upgrade, but if the price of buying one laptop from them, then upgrading it once is the same as buying three comparable traditional laptops, then I really don’t see the point.

That’s because they’re really expensive and actually quite mediocre. I really wanted to love my framework, but the build quality is way worse than the price tag would suggest.

Yeah, I think that’s definitely only a correlation. They’re both probably caused by lack of critical thinking and poor ability to assess risk.

I could download SO MANY LINUX ISOS!!

Why? It’s not even that compelling at the normal price. If it were 3x the price, who would possibly want to buy it?

Lol. The slopsmith is upset that you know about his slopsmithing.

Were you 100% certain this problem was going to last as long as it has? Yeah, neither was anyone else.

The entire cooling system is designed around those processors. Changing them would delay the Steam Machine by multiple years. Also, those processors may be old (or more accurately, based on an older architecture), but they’re certainly not shitty.

You said “that’s not how they work”. But that is how they work. Same prompt = same output. Throw some random data in there to jumble things around and you get a little variance. That’s the seed, and we only need to do that because LLMs are inherently deterministic.

Same reason Minecraft has a random seed for world generation, and block cipher algorithms use an initialization vector and/or feedback loop. We don’t want the same thing every time.

I did say that you’re right, because the tooling we use around the LLM itself does exactly what you’re talking about. So, in practice, you’re right.