Real question, will the clanker actually be autonomous, or will it talk to one of Crapple's servers and stream audio/video of the inside of your home at all times. No thanks if that's the case - I'd rather have a dirty home, rats, and roaches.
I would hope that any AI would be on-device. I think anything else would be a show-stopper.
Nah, the first time it just fires a warning shot.
Don't you mean the first eight times?
I mean, if it is lasers, the cat might chase it, and use up all nine immediately.
Apple has misunderstood the robotics vs. laundry problem. Laundry folding is a trivial task for humans, there's no need to productize that and if they push ahead it will probably be a failed venture for them.
It's a trivial task that wastes one to two hours per person per month. For a four-person household, that's the better part of an entire person-day wasted every month. So it might be trivial, but that doesn't mean people want to do it.
No, this is *exactly* the kind of thing I want AI to do. Clean my house. Straighten my house. Put things away. Fold clothes. Free up those hours so I can do something more fun, more interesting, or more productive.
That said, there's one very critical design consideration that Apple may not be thinking about, but that will make or break this as a product: upgradability. No one will tolerate throwing away a hundred pounds of e-waste to get the latest version every three years. People are going to want to buy this and keep using it for literal decades, because they'll see it as an appliance, not an electronic toy. This means a modular design, both at a hardware and software level:
And so on. The software should be designed under the assumption that new software versions should be compatible with older brain units to the maximum extent possible, for as long as possible (minimum 10 years), and that nothing more than a brain transplant should be required for backwards compatibility forever, so long as you are not using new features that require new versions of components (e.g. you might need an upgraded camera module for the eyes for some future feature, but that should block only that feature, and only until you swap the module).
In other words, for this to actually sell, it has to be built more like a Windows PC than a Mac. And this is why as much as I'd love to see the level of polish Apple would bring to something like this, I have my doubts about whether they can distance themselves from the hard-to-repair form-over-function design concepts that they are used to, and create something that behaves more like an appliance that people will pass down to their grandchildren when they die.
Who can forget the Mid-2012 13-inch unibody MacBook Pros (and similar 2011–2012 models) where a design flaw caused the internal hard drive SATA flex cable to rub against the rough, aluminum chassis. Over time, normal laptop vibration wore through the cable's insulation, severing data traces and mimicking a dead or "loose" hard drive by causing random freezing, data corruption, or the infamous flashing question mark folder. While the physical drive remained securely bracketed, the inexpensive ribbon cable itself required replacement, often requiring a strip of electrical tape underneath to prevent recurring failure.
PowerBook Pismo: Display cable sliced by Airport antenna connector. PowerBook Wallstreet: Hard drive connector board attached by a single screw that didn't hold it in place, causing constant disconnects. The iBook G3 graphics chip disaster. So many mechanical design mistakes, so few column inches to write about them.
The only theoretical advantage I can think of for a satellite
Come on, I can't believe you are that stupid. You can't think of any technical advantage of operating a power-hungry machine outside of Earth's shadow? Try harder.
You mean 24x7 solar power? Now calculate how many centuries an on-earth data center could go, even with having to use batteries at night, even with replacing the backup batteries every couple of years, before the cost would equal the cost of a single launch. In other words, that's not an actual advantage, at least in practice.
Besides, you can't repair or upgrade the hardware when it is in space, which is such a colossal disadvantage that the advantages would have to be almost unimaginably great to balance that out.
In space you have to deal with cooling in vacuum without thermal convection but being exposed to sunlight for energy harvesting, triple redundancy to counter radiation (charged particles) induced malfunction, and slow data links compared to ground based communications, just to name a few of the challenges. And that is supposed to be advantageous somehow, while low earth orbits get fuller and fuller, and malicious countries demonstrate satellite hunting satellites?
The only theoretical advantage I can think of for a satellite would be that if someone launched one from international waters, if some random government wanted it to stop existing or stop doing something, they'd have to launch something to destroy the satellite, because from a legal perspective, it wouldn't be within their jurisdiction.
But in practice, as far as I know, nobody is launching anything into orbit from international waters, so this is entirely theoretical, at least right now.
Closer to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy tradition. All they need are the words "Don't Panic" on the front cover.
If it doesn't, it has no real value.
Almost nothing on Wikipedia is true, but all of it is "verifiable" in that there's at least one published source making the claim. Even if 99.9% of all other sources say the opposite.
(The Haka is not, for example, a war chant. Which is attested to, but because it's claimed to be online, it is "verifiable".)
The number of errors is huge, the number of "official editors" who know anything about the subject is extremely small, and this has always been the case. This is why nobody reputable cites Wikipedia. Wikipedia is where you go to find out what is potentially interesting, but you ALWAYS obtain the facts from elsewhere, if you've any sense.
The screen itself seems fine, however the hinge is failing and puncturing the screen. But worse, this teardown shows that the hinge lets in particles like sand with no actual sealing causing immediate failure. I’m not sure how any engineers could let this happen, this looks like idiot management and AI slop replacing actual skill.
Everything is recycled periodically in tech. Broken hinges (and broken wires in hinges) on Mac laptops were a big problem 20 to 25 years ago, so that's just about right on schedule.
I remember the Internet before Eternal September. You need to go back at least that far.
No. The fundamentals haven't changed. Same with the Nvidia and SpaceX mentions. The stocks recovered in both cases. Usually the action here is to buy the dip and sell when it gets back to about where it was, but I'm not a finance guy and this is not financial advice.
The legitimate concern here is that this could (and IMO will) result in a long-term write down on assets long before they normally depreciate. And it probably will because these guys have been putting 5 year depreciation schedules on GPUs where it's normally 3 years.
Not a financial person either, but wouldn't writing it down mean that a company no longer considers it to have value? Is there something unique to the hardware they use for search-specific AI that prevents it from being leased out as part of Google Cloud or being used to run other teams' models?
Free speech has never been free as in beer, or at least not at any meaningful volume level. Talking to a single person was free, but that's not going to spread your ideas very far or very quickly. In the early days, you paid scribes, but that would cost you money. Later, the printing press brought the costs down, but you still needed money. Radio and TV made it possible to reach even more people more quickly, but at a significantly nonzero cost.
The Internet is no different in that regard. In theory, you can always spin up your own server and post anything you want to. But that won't guarantee that anybody is going to actually visit your site. To get eyes, you'll still have to buy ads, etc.
Your best engineers will be AuDHD, and AuDHD folk don't do well in these sorts of synthetic tests.
I can code in 20+ languages for over 12 different OS', write code that's good enough for CERN to run for particle accelerator data collection for a decade, have accelerated systems by an order of magnitude by understanding the poem space better than their previous engineers, but I am abysmal at exam style settings.
The software industry is riddled with SEs who write abysmal code but can pass a coding test easily. They're the folk that you have always needed to reject but didn't because they ticked a box.
Nothing motivates a man more than to see his boss put in an honest day's work.
