Someone funny in a dark way that this story is posted right above the FEC's attempt to control mass surveillance via hardware. This kind of thing makes it absolute clear that one of the core goals of these self-described "AI" systems it to finalize the capture of all PII on everyone and transmit it to centralized storehouses controlled by... who exactly?
"Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."
Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.
Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has them all. And all the commercial services give bad directions from time to time; my spouse had to flag down a Forest Service ranger and send them after a couple that was blindly following Google Maps down a road they weren't going to make even in their big honkin pickup truck.
I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.
Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.
Wow - that page reads like a step-by-step guide on how to violate the Robinson-Patman Act. Too bad we haven't had any real consumer protection enforcement in the US since the 1970s.
"Why did they make him CEO if they know so clearly that he can't be trusted?"
'I never expected the leopard to eat my face! [just the faces of those marks and chumps]'
"There is no safety or cost reason to prefer this over normal analog protein vaccines. Only advantage MRNA has is reduced up front capex."
Nice attempt at shaping the discussion to flow down the limited paths you prefer. In reality world the gigantic advantages of having straightforward yearly influenza vaccines be mRNA-based is that (1) after enough experience it would become possible to reformulate the vaccine midseason if the dominant flu strain changes (2) if a 1918 Kansas Flu boils up out of a giant pig farm somewhere it will be possible to create an mRNA vaccine for it and get it into distribution rapidly.
The streaming services have already done multiple rug pulls, rights-stripping acquisitions, and bankruptcies to take away "purchased" streaming rights and force people to pay a second time (and a third, and a fourth...). But yeah, the people who have CD players with analog outputs and who buy CDs are the dumb ones.
The AI crash is coming for not only the profits but the capital of everyone who thought there was going to be some trees-growing-to-the-sky "AI" miracle, so there's that.
I, Steve Wozniak, did not participate in the theft of the BASIC. It was funny to me to see others enjoying doing this. I had never used BASIC myself, at that time, only the more-scientific languages like Fortran, Algol, and PL-1, and several assembly languages. I sniffed the air and sensed that you needed BASIC to sell computers into homes, because of the book 101 Games in BASIC. I loved games and saw games as the key. It was the [MS] BASIC that inspired me to write a BASIC interpreter for my 6502 processor, in order to have a more useful computer.
"Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"
To conservatism I would add billionaireism.
[note that this is not Wilhoit the academic political philospher, but a different Wilhoit]
The smartest guys in the room somehow failed to realize that 40% compounded growth forever at 80%-3000% gross margins wasn't possible. It can happen for 5-10 years of an economic turnover (whether driven by new technology, new forms of organization, immigration, or other fundamental changes) but just because it happens to some organizations for 5, 10, even 20 years does not mean it can/will happen to every organization - and trees don't grow to the sky.
It's hard to find people with Tim Berners-Lee's integrity. We should 'own' our own lives. It's a lot deeper than just being watched.
"When the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to treat everything as if it were a nail." -- Abraham Maslow
