It's unclear, but they are using their extreme market power in one market to gain power in another market, which is definitely pushing against the bounds of being an antitrust concern.

I'm not sure it is a clear step in the right direction. Yes, the fact that they're shifting at least some portion of the price increase onto people who actually use the Prime Video service could be considered an improvement, but as long as you can't get shipping without getting the "free but not free" tier (if it were really free, you wouldn't need a Prime membership at all), it's still a huge problem.

And I'm not certain that they actually pushed all of the Prime Video cost increase onto actual Prime Video users, either. From 2022 to 2023, their sales revenue increased by 11.8%, and I *think* the number of packages shipped increased by 13%, while money spent on shipping increased by only 7.2%. So if those numbers are correct and include all Amazon shipments rather than just the ones they did themselves, then it likely means that their average cost of shipping decreased, both in terms of cost per package and in terms of cost per dollar of revenue. However, I'm not confident in those numbers, so take them with a grain of salt.

Higher prices for Prime in the face of reduced shipping costs would imply that part of the basic Prime cost is going into either higher profit margins or into bailing out the Prime Video division's overspending (or both).

Amazon's apparent ability to massively degrade the quality of a paid subscription without subscribers revolting and leaving is prima facie proof that the streaming market — and Amazon in particular — has negligible competition, and is in desperate need of FTC intervention of the trust-busting variety. Just saying.

Yeah, that's pretty cringey, particularly given how many musicians use iPads for reading music while playing musical instruments.

*shrugs* I concur with the GP's feedback. Face ID is way, way slower than Touch ID for me, too.

But the bigger problem with Face ID is that it does demand at least some of your attention, i.e. you have to have it in front of your face before it even starts trying to unlock. This makes it suck for:

• Unlocking while doing literally anything else that needs your attention.
• Wallet at drive-through locations (because you're double-clicking a side button while your phone is at arm's length, and your face isn't out there).
• Wallet at ChargePoint chargers (because the reader isn't pointing up at you).

And so on.

With Touch ID, your finger can be on the button while it is down and out of your way, so by the time you bring it up to your face, it is unlocked. That no doubt contributes to the perception that Face ID is slow, even if Face ID didn't periodically decide to take ten seconds (and sometimes two or three tries) to unlock.

The real shock is that Apple users didn't dump the brand en masse during COVID in favor of Android phones with fingerprint readers, because even with the mask mode, the rate of recognition while wearing one is still remarkably poor.

Apple removed Touch ID because the hardware costs money, because they didn't think under-screen touch sensors were good enough, and because they thought Face ID was good enough. They were wrong, at least about that third point, just like they were wrong when they thought the Touch Bar was good enough, just like they were wrong when they thought Bluetooth audio was good enough, etc. Their bar for "good enough" isn't what it used to be, and the sooner the die-hard Apple fanboys start calling them on their bulls**t, the sooner Apple will get back to the level of polish that they used to have a decade back.

What I really don't understand is *HOW* something as bad as Bluetooth — particularly Apple's Bluetooth — could dominate a pie eating contest, much less any sort of audio usability contest.

To give you an idea of how bad it is:

• It takes me an average of a minute just to switch my AirPods "Pro" (current generation) from one device to another, because devices keep failing to connect.
• Every time I walk into range of a paired Bluetooth output — my home phone, an open AirPods case, my car, etc. — my phone immediately tries to switch to it, which causes the phone to switch out of speakerphone mode. About two seconds later, the Bluetooth device rejects it (or I walk back out of range), and the phone switches back to internal audio, but without speakerphone enabled. This means on average 5 or 6 times per phone call, I have to say, "Hold on, I've lost you. This piece of s**t iPhone dropped the speakerphone again.

How anyone could think this is even *tolerable*, much less a good experience, is beyond my imagination. And we've been complaining about these problems well over a decade now, but the iPhone's Bluetooth support never gets any better.

"Oh, but if you use Apple's devices, it works SOOOOOO much better than other Bluetooth devices," people have told me. The f**k, it does. The Airpods Pro are just as bad at multiple-device support as the Acrux Bluetooth headset they gave us at work. The only difference is that the Apple hardware costs a whole lot more for the privilege of being a pain in your a**.

I'm really trying to like these Bluetooth things Apple sold, but they don't stay in my ears, they don't handle multiple devices reliably, and the automatic audio switching behavior is a train wreck. No, I don't want you to switch to the Airpods Pro just because I opened the f**king case three feet away from the phone. Why in h*** would you think that I wanted to do that? They're not in my ears. They're still in the d**n charging case.

With wired headphones, if it is plugged in, I want to use it. If it isn't, I don't. If I want to use it with another device, I unplug it and plug it into the other device. "It just works." That slogan is what Apple USED to mean back in the day. And yes, I do have adapters for wired USB-C headphones with pass-through charging, and I'm about to the point of being ready to go back to them if iOS doesn't get a whole lot better real soon.

The one nice thing is that at least it is USB-C and not some proprietary disaster that is incompatible with my Mac like the Lightning-based phones used to require. So at least that's some small consolation. R.I.P., usability.

And at least it isn't as bad as the Vision Pro, which I literally have to reboot every time I want to take over the Mac's screen, because it never shows the "Connect" button a second time. I swear, if I had a dollar for every time I thought S.J. was rolling over in his grave, I'd be richer than Tim Cook.

Sincerely,
Disgruntled Apple Fanboy

There are tons of malware apps that can do the same thing, though. Hell, The NSO Group used Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to do that, why aren't those apps banned by the US Govt?

Listen, person who trusts a weapon manufacturer, I proved you wrong. Deal with it, you must be used to it by now.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.c...

I can find dozens of similar reports.

What information have I provided to TikTok - my email, my birthdate, and maybe a couple other items, of non-security value> What information can they gain from my account? They can see that I like to watch crafting/woodworking videos, funny videos, and will sometimes pause enough to watch a few seconds of hot girls in bikinis dancing around. Oh, no, we've already lost WWIII without a shot fired!

Seriously, though, our country (United States) has no real laws for data brokers or website date security - everything we do (and have done) online is available for a price to anyone willing to pay - even the Chinese government. If the US Govt wants me to believe that they give a shit about my personal data falling into the wrong hands, then they need to create new data security regulations closer to home before worrying about what the Chinese might do with TikTok data - when they can just outright buy EVERYTHING there is to know about us online - plus whatever data is sold on the black market from data breaches at major companies every couple of months. Once the US Govt does something about that (and I don't mean sternly worded letters or hand-slaps), then I'll believe they care about keeping my info private and *THEN* they can start banning foreign apps.

But in the meantime, leave my dancing bikini-clad girls alone!

The pattern here is that like all software companies, they create something good, then they destroy it by continuing to work on it. There's no reason to buy software again if it does everything you need, and Microsoft is too good at compatibility, so you aren't forced to buy it every three years because it broke in some Windows upgrade.

The only alternative for milking existing software is renting software, which sucks from a consumer point of view, but provides continuous revenue.

The right thing to do, of course, is to declare the software feature-complete and move on, dedicating only minimum employee time to maintenance, so that you get way less profit from that team every year, but have basically no costs, and shift the headcount to work on some new piece of software that will produce your next source of new profits.

But tech companies are lazy. They'd rather create something once and milk it forever and ever. Why is this a problem? Simple. 95-year copyright durations. If we rolled back to the original 1970 duration, when copyright was 14 years and renewable for 14, this wouldn't be an issue. Companies would have a limited amount of time to make money off of the software, because in 28 years, the software would be free for anyone to use, so with reasonable virtualization, you'd have folks using 1996-era versions of Word for free right now.

Add to that a second change in the law — making the cost of renewal be 5% of the total gross revenue for the product to discourage renewal — and you'd have a copyright policy that actually makes sense. If a company is making enough money for it to be worth that cost, then they should be able to extend it for another 14 years, but it should be expensive enough that they don't just automatically do so out of spite. That would mean that most software from 2010 would no longer be under copyright, and companies would not be able to milk software for every last drop of potential profit like they do now, and instead would be forced to actually innovate regularly with new products, thus promoting the progress of science and the useful arts.

Only if Google secretly perfected time travel. They bought Android in 2005, and the iPhone didn't come out until 2007.

That might be a real risk for things like cryptocurrency mining, where being able to do something faster than others determines whether the money spent on electricity is less than the value you get out of it, but it probably isn't realistic for generative AI. Either the hardware is big enough to run your model or it isn't. If it is, then it won't just suddenly become worthless unless you decide that you absolutely have to have a larger model for some reason.

And if that does happen, then it becomes a resource allocation question, deciding whether to spend developer resources to find ways to tune smaller models more so that you get good enough results or spend money to replace the hardware and sell or rent the old hardware to someone who can still use it. After all, it isn't as though hardware becomes worthless just because it no longer meets your needs.

You'll always be able to get bigger, faster hardware in five years. That's not a good reason not to own the means of production. You either own the means of production and you're in the owner class or you don't and you're in the worker class, and having a bunch of companies in the worker class really isn't sustainable.

An A100 40GB costs $8,399.00. Renting it ranges from $1200 to $2682 per month.

How bad does the failure rate and/or power consumption have to be for it to make sense to spend 1/7 to 2/7 of the purchase price to rent it for a month? Yikes. That makes rental car rates look downright reasonable, and you don't have to worry about people totalling a GPU on the 405.

That's not really an accurate way to describe it. As people get older, they become less able to adapt to change. Becoming more conservative is a natural part of the brain aging process.

Conservatives always say this, but that doesn't make it true. There are plenty of very wealthy people who earn real money and still pay lots of money in taxes. To them it is about responsibility — from those to whom much is given, much is expected. And while being wealthy does make some people more fiscally conservative, the wealthy also tend to be more socially liberal, i.e. their politics are not aligned with the U.S. right wing at all.

People become more socially conservative with age only because they become less able to adapt to change, not because of wealth or because they're "becoming wiser".

SF is no different than any other city other than having a climate that makes it easier for the homeless to not die of exposure. Cities are dirty, cramped places. I don't understand why people willingly choose to live in them, but they do. They vote liberal because they lean young, and young people lean liberal.

Their politics have almost zero to do with cities being s**tholes. Republicans manage to turn beautiful places into s**tholes just as quickly. They just ruin things in different ways — Democrats by not mandating psychological treatment for people who are wandering the streets because of severe mental health problems and by allowing them to ignore the rules of society without consequence, Republicans by cutting funding for the mental health services that they need to keep them off the streets and by throwing people into jails where they don't get adequate mental health treatment and end up coming out even more screwed up than they were when they went in.

Both parties absolutely suck, and people who claim otherwise are kidding themselves.