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Comment Re:The HP logo on the lid (Score 1) 52

an area of the system which you can't look at or audit?

You can probbably look at and audit the PCFax area with some sort of enterprise tool, you just can’t write it. Or maybe they will even allow you to erase it and leave behind a “the PCFax report was deleted, so anything could be wrong with this computer! Odometer tampered with! Tampered!!!”

Comment Re:No they arenâ(TM)t (Score 1) 52

It is not in HP's interest to instigate more trust into a used computer purchase. This serves to help the used computer market, at the expense of the new computer market.

Maybe.

One reason Apple can charge more money then other companies for new iPhones is people believe they can sell a year or two old iPhone for a reasonable amount of money. HP may believe their products will retain more value over time in the used market then competitors even if the sole reason is because “PCFax says it is good” for HPs and non-HPs don’t get a report because they come to the party late and don’t offer the feature for several more years. Once people get in the habit of buying HP “because you can resell it for like half the price of a new one” the prices of new ones can start to creep up. It would make sense to pay $600 for an HP with an identical spec to a $400 Dell if you believe that in two years the HP will sell for $300 and the Dell will sell for maybe $100, or maybe cost you $10 for an eWaste sticker. Even more sense if HP gives you a 2 year repurchase price because they think the used price will be high enough (i.e. you pay $600 today for the laptop, and it includes a $200 coupon for a 2027 purchase of a new HP if you send the old one back...)

Again the actual HP might not be any better then the Dell (or may be somewhat worse), but it has a PCFax listing that says “great shape! SSD 100% ok! Battery 97% original capacity, great for 2 years of use! Never been dropped! Never had the screen replaced! OEM RAM!” while the Dell’s says “no information, anything could have happened to this pile of junk, buyer beware!”

Comment People buy stuff that doesn’t exist yet all (Score 1) 76

I’m not even talking pre-orders of video games coming out in a few months.

The entire Chicago board of exchange exists to sell products (originally farm products, you know tons of corn, bales of hay, barrels of hog bellies, whole cows) at future points in time. It revolutionized the farm economy. Farmers can sell this fall’s harvest today in order to afford repairs on tractors they need fixed in order to actually get the harvest into the ground, and keep it watered and weeded and fertilized. Oh, plus afford the fertilizer.

CBOE exchanges billions of dollars of futures a day, granted it isn’t all “farm stuff” anymore. Google buying energy that won’t be produced for ~7 years isn’t really any more astounding then someone buying tons of corn from plants that just went into the ground last week and won’t be harvested until October, and that has been happening since 1973.

Comment Re:I like that we are going to burn our entire wor (Score 1) 76

When it gets to this point, the choice of the population is to starve to death or create a new, parallel system that serves em. It's normally what happens in communist dictatorships etc..., so you can bet the elites are trying to not get to this point, or the system will just get away from em.

Sadly the elite tend to believe their own propaganda about exceptionalism and think they got to the top because of talent not luck, and that what happened elsewhere and in the distant past is irrelevant because they are just too awesome to fail, get pulled out of their limos and beheaded by the ignorant lazy masses of unachievers. Which just increases the chance of history repeating, or at least rhyming.

Comment Re:Insanity (Score 1) 76

Sure it is insane to bet that in 7 years fusion will be working...if in fact Google is relying on this as opposed to that purchase being a fancy way to fund some long term work on reducing power costs and take advantage of tax breaks to basically fund that with tax payer money and not their own.

So it is basically Google spending someone else’s money on something that has a chance of directly benefiting Google. Which I’m sort of ok with because if it does manage to produce that energy (even if it takes >7 years) it’ll also produce energy for the rest of us (either directly as in one big ass facility, or indirectly when they publish a million papers “here is how we made it work” and spin up companies “we built that one over there, give us a billion dollars and we will make one for you too!”). Maybe some day we will actually get electricity that is “too cheap to meter” out of it.

Comment Amusing conjunction (Score 1) 41

Kind of funny to see how AI's improve by re-writing themselves, following immediately a story from earlier today about humans being driven into psychosis by AI's.

This claims it uses empirical evidence to judge improvement but why would an AI not be as much a cheerleader for anything it does as it is for any human?

Comment Yoda's wisdom best again (Score 4, Insightful) 174

Just another example of why having watched Star Wars is such an important aspect of lifetime mental health...

When exploring deep philosophy with an AI and ending up down rabbit holes, Yoda's warning was always there to moderate you ahead of time...

Luke: "What's in there?"
Yoda: "Only what you take with you".

Comment Swift is more advanced... (Score 1) 44

Other than the SwiftUI framework, approximately everything that's in Swift was in Objective-C 5â"10 years ago.

Not the concurrency framework (GCD is not the same), SwiftUI doesn't have things like Swift structs, only supports integers enums, Generics, no guard statement. Also finer grained access control.

Mind you they have improved Objective-C over the years by bringing in some Swift features as Swift improved! Like nullability annotations.

I still do like Objective-C as a language but even with Swifts advanced areas and quirks, I still think it's more straightforward than Objective-C for newer users. And I think finally with the new beta version of Swift they have a concurrency model that is strong but also friendly enough for people to work with.

Comment But that is what Swift is... (Score 0) 44

Sometime, if we are lucky, we will get a small programming language that does not collect new features every year just for the sake of progress

Swift does get new features every year but I would argue most have been good quality of life, or quality of code improvements. Especially the latest changes around concurrency are really good.

Avoiding the pyramid of 500 third-party packages for a mid-sized application is a good thing.

Totally agree but that is where Swift has been really great! It is VERY practical now to build a medium to large application with only handful of third party packages. That was very much not the case 5-10 years ago. If you look at any modern Swift app it looks nothing like the swirl of madness that is a modern React application.

Comment Really dumb (Score 1) 78

Just can't see how any person at Apple thought a push notification from Wallet with an ad was a good idea, ever.

They already have strict guidelines around push notifications that you are not supposed to use them as ads, so Apple breaking this rule is especially egregious for all of those that try and follow Apple's development rules.

I wonder who actually got these notifications though, as I never saw one and I use Wallet pretty heavily - I may just have missed it though, since it seems like a lot of people complaining.

Comment Yes (Score 1) 22

Is Apple going to put ANYTHING in this release that is even remotely useful to me?

There is a lot of stuff under the hood in the new SDKs that will make for better apps, like better direct connection between devices even if they are not on WiFi. Also expanded app intents make widgets more and more useful, and App Data more accessible to on-device intelligence.

And speaking of that, apps being able to use the general purpose AI will lead to a lot of useful apps that don't feed your data to ChatGPT.

However there are some direct things that are better. Photos is finally usable again.

Comment Sigh. More lies. (Score 1) 110

Not rigged.

And your proof for that is? Because I clearly explained to you how you can see it was rigged in the video they provided. You need to at least explain that.

This is the most recent iteration of the 'Teslas plowing into kids' demonstration:>

Pretty hilarious assertion, in that first link you can see from the screen on the car in the first photo of the article they are not in self-driving mode as it has the map up. Just because a guy has his hands off the steering wheel does not mean the car is self driving you know... again zero proof.

These days you sadly have to assume anything negative about Tesla is a lie without substantial proof to the contrary, as there are far too many people willing to outright lie to put Tesla in a negative light. So I reject all of your links as lies unless you can show me any that clearly indicate the car is in self driving mode when it hits someone (that was a flaw in Mark Robler's video also).

It's really just so sad that your utter and all-consuming hatred of Tesla has you covering for a bunch of liars, and not even competent ones to boot!

This is my last message, respond as you will but if all you have to offer in response is lies then why waste time talking to you?

Comment Are things getting better? Not everywhere. (Score 0, Troll) 162

New Jersey is making Tesla remove 64 superchargers along a major turnpike - even though anyone can use the chargers there.

So I question if the article is just trying to paint a bright picture atop a more confusing scene.

The political left's hatred of Musk and by extension Tesla may well end up killing electric cars altogether.

Comment Re:Their tech doesn't work (Score -1, Troll) 110

Rigged demo. Big clue is that it was posted on "Bluesky" for one thing...

You can tell it was faked by the supposed screen not showing the man standing on the left side of the road, clearly visible the whole time. They obviously captured the screen from when there was no dummy present and then overlaid that without self driving enabled at all.

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