I say I "fear" it in the sense I could see Apple trying to gate-keep the functionality of the new chips; refusing to document how others can utilize the capabilities directly and writing only closed APIs limiting it to use with Siri for everything "AI" it does.

Maybe it's too early to tell? But the only reason I can see caring much about an "AI enabled" processor is if new applications start coming out, implementing it, to allow doing AI tasks locally that require cloud services to do right now.

EG. I just paid almost $100 for a 1 year membership to Suno AI, a service that lets you create songs with their AI engine, including surprisingly realistic vocals singing the lyrics you type in (or alternately, ChatGPT style AI generated cookie-cutter lyrics). I was blown away by how far this tech has come, vs programs I used to use to help create music on the computer like "Band in a Box". But it would probably make me upgrade to a new Mac if this same capability was offered in software like Garageband or Logic Pro, using just my Mac's own processor instead of a cloud server on the back end doing all the work.

I fear, though? It will wind up used as some sort of co-processor for Siri, to make it process results faster or let you use APIs to run a local version of Siri as part of your own programs or something. That's something I never asked for or needed.

Yep... this!

Snowden needs to be pardoned first, IMO.

I never really understood the fixation on banning TikTok, while SO many other products and services Americans use daily come out of China and even collect info in data centers under their control?

The most popular drones people fly are made by DJI, a Chinese company. The Roborock robot vacuum cleaners are made in China and stay signed in to a cloud server that keeps maps of the rooms of your house stored on it, and can even store images from the vacuum's camera to help it avoid certain types of furniture. Bambu Labs is making the most popular 3D printer on the market right now, and they're owned by some engineers in China who came from DJI. All their printers are cloud connected, too.

I think TikTok is ultimately pretty useless. Just one more place to throw poorly made videos, to pretend you're more important than you are. :)
But it's hard to see how their site poses a security risk to the nation any worse than other social media platforms.

They also aren't cheap even if the knowledge problem is solved. Something like a roomba lives in a special case where being more or less a toy RC car is enough robotics to actually attack a real-world cleaning problem(on reasonably uncluttered flat floors).

If you want "look for missing items, get things out of the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor, clean the toilets, and vacuum" you are suddenly talking about a *lot* more robot. Not necessarily 'call Boston Dynamics for their most humanoid biped', you might be able to get away with some sort of wheeled platform with robot arms since the arms count for more than the legs(as long as you can reach things that are a meter plus away from the floor); but you are definitely talking a much more involved piece of hardware with considerably more fiddly moving parts; especially if you don't want to overhaul your entire house.

âoeDonâ(TM)t just read the slide deckâ is more or less rule #1 of not completely ruining a presentation. Is there any room for optimism about the results of a tool that generates video of you reading the slide deck? Even if itâ(TM)s a goddamn miracle on a technical level it seems like a fundamentally mal-suited tool for the job. If anything, the better it works the worse it will likely be, since it will just be doing the wrong thing more attractively and easily.

I'd agree that a production system that actually relies on actual floppies would be rolling the dice in a deeply uncomfortable way at this point; but I'm a little puzzled by the extent of the fuss given that(admittedly, more for hobbyist and niche stuff, retrocomputers and synths from the floppy era, that sort of thing) the practice of emulating floppy drives is quite well established and, thanks to the age and (low) speed of the busses in question, pretty technically undemanding.

If I had a floppy-dependent system I'd have wanted people evaluating commercially available floppy emulators starting 10 years ago; potentially trying to push specific developments if my system requires things that the retrocomputing guys don't(whether in terms of features or in terms of not being hand-built in small runs by hobbyists); but, barring some especially esoteric complication I'm not thinking of, slapping floppy emulators into a floppy-based system and bringing it right up to the present day in terms of media seems like it would be both a relatively simple project and much, much cheaper, lower risk, and more predictable than a full 'upgrade' that promises to rip out the old system and replace it with a full new glorious IoT something something.

It might not be true people can simply cross our border with NO interference... I mean, obviously we DO still have border checkpoints and some barriers to entry put in place. We do hire border patrol people and we have an immigration enforcement group.

But the point is, we're getting floods of people coming through who are NOT getting vetted, and many people who get caught trying to cross illegally are just sent back across to the other side so they can attempt it again another day.

The "MAGA agenda" of "build a wall" is kind of a simple-minded attempt at a solution. Realistically, we had previous Presidents try to ensure a continuous wall was built along our Southern border and the plan failed. They didn't realize how complicated it was going to be to try to use a lot of that privately owned land to construct a wall along it. (Eminent domain would be required and the courts would be tied up for decades fighting every farmer along the way.) Perhaps America lacked the foresight to reserve a strip of land around all of our borders as government-owned, from the very start? (Our public utilities have easements but our own borders apparently don't.)

Still, our 2 party political system forces everyone to choose between two, often lousy, options, to go with the one more closely resembling one that gets the results they want to see. Right now, that "MAGA agenda" is looking slightly superior to the status-quo to me.

I mean, when Amazon is selling its own products directly from its warehouses, as it used to do almost exclusively in the "old days"? (Remember "Amazon Auctions", anyone? That was where you went to sell on Amazon back then, in most cases. It was separate from what Amazon sold on the rest of the site.) Amazon could decide the benefits of no-questions asked returns outweighed the negatives from fraud losses. They could always just auction off palettes of of the returns and still potentially recoup a decent chunk of their initial costs. Alternately, they might even donate some of it and take the tax write-off? Who knows?

Today's resellers are expected to maintain these same standards of friendly returns for nearly any reason or excuse, and are getting hammered by the scammers. Many of them can't afford to absorb the losses. I know a few of these sellers personally. They're people like college students who made a business out of designing and making their own journals with pretty covers, or people with a small 3D printing business running out of their home, trying to cash in on some useful prints they created. If you fight back as a seller and refuse the refund? Amazon comes down on you hard, in short order, saying you can't do that and you lose your rights to sell on the platform.

I'd say it's the very definition of art! Nothing "idealistic" about stating the truth.

If "art" is being created without those motivations at the core of it, it's really not true art. Will some fools still pay money to see or own it? Absolutely. But this is the essence of what happened in America during the Cold War when the CIA invented the "modern art" concept out of thin air. You know, hype up the idea that throwing paint splatters at a wall has hidden meaning and is desirable/relevant, and nobody came up with this amazing new idea except American artists! Go Western Civilization! You can market anything and convince some people to buy into it.

As an Independent, I even see the obvious problem America has with the flood of illegal immigration across our Southern border. Mexico is a nation ruled by drug cartels. Their official President is nothing more than a figurehead, controlled by the cartels, and this has been the case since around 2007.

Allowing people to freely cross over to the U.S. means we have ZERO control over the type of people coming through. Are they all "bringing drugs, crime or rape" to America? Obviously not! But we sure can't tell who is guilty of any of this and who isn't, when we're not even following reasonable steps to process people through legally with proper background checks.

At some point, you have to ask why you even HAVE a "border" at all, if you don't enforce the concept. What makes you a "nation"? I'd say it's about people sharing a common culture and general system of beliefs about what the rules/laws should be where they live. That really disintegrates when you start letting large numbers of people pour in without vetting them to even find out their purpose for wanting to come to your country.

There's really nobody else on the planet freely letting people in to their nation to the extent America has been doing it lately. In much of the world, you'd instantly get a bullet in the head for attempting it.

All the AI stuff is over-hyped right now.

Artists are reacting to everything they see and hear in the news, including a lot of "predictions" of what AI will do in the future.

In reality? All of the "arts" have always been about humans translating emotion and feelings into a concrete form that others can appreciate and get something out of. As soon as you substitute computers simulating it -- even if it seems convincing on the surface? You strip away the purpose of it.

New art, whether it's music or a painting or a sculpture, has to come from a human who was compelled to create it for personal reasons. A computer has no emotions or "soul". It just analyzes existing works and tries to make authentic-looking mash-ups from the database of that content it has access to work with.

I'm not one to put a LOT of faith in humanity to make sensible choices... but I think people will see through AI music, or any other art, and largely reject it in favor of new creations from other people.

Even if the history of Russian 'import substitution' weren't littered with farces where someone gets a gold star for domestically producing tractors...from imported Polish kits with the serial numbers filed off...or the like; "game console" seems like a strikingly hard target, especially relative to its value.

It's a consumer product, rather than the state or state owned or heavily influenced companies being the customer, so there's a lot less leverage in terms of just making 'domestically produced' patriotic and mandatory; and it's a toy that only some people are even interested in, so it's even more difficult to distinguish between people who don't buy Super Motherland 3 because they just don't play video games and ones who don't buy it because they are playing Genshin Impact on something imported from China or a cracked copy of CoD on the wintel they say they use for work. Obviously possible, if you wanted to divert even more statesec guys from keeping an eye on planned terrorist attacks in order to do traffic analysis to look for game pirates; but not obviously worth the trouble.

It's also a pretty demanding category: customers tend to be pretty cost-sensitive and tend to expect frankly remarkable levels of hardware and software punch that are deliverable only thanks to mass production at all levels(whether you are talking ICs, game engines, asset packs, or very large numbers of sales of the final product). This isn't some military thing where you'd like more; but it's workable, and arguably worth it, to be able to reliably deliver domestic clones of some 20-year-old TI DSP even at twice the market price. Unless you are running a crackdown on the alternatives that would make North Korea blink that's not going to work on the gaming side: expectations are high and prices are low; and 'good enough' is defined in large part relative to what other people have, rather than to specific requirements.

I noticed in just the last week or two? My Echo Dots at home are suddenly MUCH more responsive than they've been for quite some time. As soon as I give a command like, "Alexa, turn off the living room light.", I get a near instant response of "OK" as the light is turned off.

It was getting progressively more sluggish up until now, and I assumed it was a sign of Amazon cutting resources for the Alexa-enabled smart devices. (They laid off a big chunk of staff supporting them, etc.)

I'm wondering if Amazon is throwing more resources at it again, now, with the idea it's needed for AI tie-ins?

I'm pretty sure I always get more than just 4 hours of sleep a night. But I tend to be more of a "night person" who can't even get to bed before midnight, and yet I have work during the week that expects me there in the morning. So I'm definitely shaving an hour or so a night off the "ideal" amount of sleep I should really be getting each week.

I find that on a weekend when I can sleep in later, I wake up with more energy and essentially feeling a bit "younger". And as a work week rolls on, I often get to feeling worn down and "older" by the end of the week.

That said? I think quality of sleep matters as much as anything else. I can really tell it takes a toll on me if I had one of those nights where my sleep was restless and I partially woke up several times, vs a really good, solid night of sleep.