If you buy any device, you put yourself into the manufacturer's hands, trusting it with technical decisions. The throttling was such a technical decision: Apple wanted to prevent unexpected shutdowns of their devices and therefore implemented throttling. Of course this makes experience for users worse, but the cause for this is bad batteries. As long as the slowdown is being communicated to the user, there is no issue. If Apple did not communicate it, throttling might motivate users to buy new phones entirely because they might not know the issue is fixable by getting a new battery. That would mean a benefit for Apple at the cost of users and is the main point of the scandal: keeping users in secret, not telling them that a phone is slowed down artificially nor that this slowdown can be fixed by replacing the battery. I think this recent response is handling the issue well, with the exception that Apple could have kept the cost of battery upgrades lower for a longer time.

Criminalized: illegal, but I don't want it to be illegal.
Illegal: neutral term.
Very illegal: illegal, and I want punishment to be worse.

This is the most ridiculous part of the whole story. They think that some people at the board of the carrier can fend off attacks. They believe that it can be solved by like a local scale problem, like aircraft attacking the carrier. So they think they can solve it by people on board specialized to protect you, like they probably have someone on board to operate the anti aircraft cannon.

These attacks aren't local scale though. They are global scale. Vulnerabilities in Windows XP get discovered by someone at the other side of the globe and get used against you. Similarly, a patch to fix a vulnerability in Windows XP can be developed once and then applied locally. And in the case of a total and complete hack during the heat of a battle, even the best team on board won't help them to get the systems back up before the battle finishes.

The analogy is great, until you go to the end of the life of the given software. Like XP for example, it has reached end of life, so no patches are available for it any more. Many android devices are instantly end of life, without any patches being released for them.

The security issues are not solved until you remove all deployments of software and hardware that have reached end of life. The only way to get this done is enforcement by law. In order to make actual comparison of products possible, manufacturers should be required to print how long they support some given software and if they stop supporting before that, they should be the first responsible party for any damage that is caused by hackers (as in: as long as the the hackers can't be identified or they can't pay, the manufacturer has to pay instead, similar to how insurances work).

Python has a type system, its in fact quite strong (as opposed to a weak type system like that of javascript or bash), but its not static, its dynamic.

Yeah, as much as I like the idea of a hyperloop, and new ways to transport people, I think the main issue of hyperloop is right now that its an unproven technology. There isn't a single track in operation around the globe. No info about how expensive it all is, etc. Of course, operating one track is considerably more expensive per rail km than operating many tracks, due to economics of scale, but you can't just give a company that has nothing but concepts billions of dollars/euros to deploy a technology that hasn't even a working prototype. I mean I'm not saying that hyperloop is a bad idea and that it will never work, but I'm neither sure of hyperloop working so well that it should be deployed.

Only the non pro version. They still publish a proprietary driver. And their vulkan driver is being promised to be open sourced but no sign of it, while volunteers are working on radv.

Intel does care about Linux. Unlike AMD or Nvidia, they directly contribute to MESA and make a free software graphics driver that actually works without major issues. And about Thunderbolt, they actually submitted a large patchset to lkml a few days ago.

Yes, the government's biggest job is to ensure a free environment. E.g. there are laws that forbid people to rob or kill others. This allows you to freely roam the country without fear of being robbed or killed. Of course, you could say such rules are just government intervention, and require private armies to be set up, or gated communities, etc. But generally, gated communities are not a good solution to the problem, as a) it is only a solution for people who can afford it and b) it impairs freedom.

The net neutrality rules are similar here: they ensure that the companies don't fuck with their customers, and ensure that you can enjoy any service you want. Yes, its limiting the ISP's but it creates a big free environment in turn for competition, companies and business to thrive.

Other companies will adopt this as well. They will charge you what you are willing to pay them. You won't even be safe outside of the online world, in retail shops the price tags will adopt depending on the time of day and maybe even, combined with face tracking, who is around.

Phasing out cash is a great tool for every totalitarian system. Because then, you can only pay for something if you actually are allowed to by the government. Also, it allows for total big brother like surveillance.

The new tools that technology gives us allow for real strict totalitarian regimes, and it seems that China is seizing the opportunity.

In order to really take off, AI needs hardware improvements. Right now, most of it runs on GPUs, and requires lots of them. GPUs weren't really made for that task and there is potential for efficiency gains. Things like the Google TPU are delivering much better performance per watt, but sadly right now Google keeps the TPU to themselves, not giving them away. Sort of reminds me of that bitcoin ASIC manufacturing company which ran the ASICS they have ordered for their customers themselves for a while before shipping them to the customer...

In the long term though I'm certain that some hardware manufacturer other than Google will step up and create such a chip. Its a bit sad though that most AI tasks are done in the cloud, making costs for the hardware astronomic. Its not certain whether there will be a "Personal AI" version of that hardware, like there is a "Personal Computer" variant of computers. Until that happens, we are locked in to cloud providers, and that's pretty bad for privacy, freedom, and independence of the individual.

Maybe due to globalisation this is not practiced any more, but in places where trees grew, people built houses of wood. In places where no trees grew, people built houses of other materials. So we are adaptable.

There is some kind of slider here how AI will look like when it transforms the industry, based on how available AI is to many people. One one side of the slider, AI will be some secretive technology, controlled by very few people, who get very rich in the process of applying it to the economy, sucking up large parts of it. On the other side, AI will be available to everyone, allowing everyone to use it.

I don't think there is much of a difference between these models, only in how much money the AI companies will make, and how rich their owners will get until the human involvement as actively contributing part in the economy is irrelevant and only AIs run the economy.

Also, if fewer companies have access to AI, they might be required to ask other companies for help to integrate AI, and the owners of those other companies might get off richer than if AI were available to the masses and the masses simply made open source versions of everything.

But in the end it doesn't matter, as with AI human labor only gets out of the equation, but it doesn't mean everything becomes free. One thing still remains: access to resources. Unless you leave earth, its still limited (if you leave earth, its virtually unlimited). Right now there is plenty of resources available, but once everything becomes cheap as hell, resources will become scare and prices will rise.

So the only people who will not completely lose what they have will be resource owners. With resources I mean things that are solid, like real estate, or mining companies, etc. Maybe even data, who knows, but data might be very cheap once there is plenty of it (and more and more is being mined).

Maybe you have some field where you agree the AI to set up a solar farm, or a group of owners has ownership of a valley, and allow the AI economy to build a dam for power storage. Or maybe your field gets used for human food production after all, but don't think there are any jobs in it, only the owners will get any money from it. Of course, some resources may lose value because demand for it shrinks due to some effect.

First, the rich could just kill all poor humans. That is a very radical way to get rid of the problem, but possible. It could be out of some ecological argument, that if you created full economic equality for all humans, the earth would be so abused within a few decades, it wouldn't be a nice place to live.

They could drive a very gentle approach: legalize some cool new drug that maybe makes infertile when being used too much. Then the poor would become less every generation.

I doubt that will happen though, simply because its too inhuman. What is more likely is that larger and larger parts of the society will rebel and maybe try to destroy the control of the rich. I'm pretty sure though the rich will find ways to cope with it, simply because they will have the resources, and the possibilities are endless. This is essentially an asymmetric threat. To cope with those, you increase surveillance and make directed killings of the people you believe to conspire against your dominance. Done very nicely in some asian countries the US flies their drones over, even though it could be improved, e.g. by making everyone wear a collar that watches that person and can kill them. Or by using the new potential the internet of things opens. Right now you already have smart devices watching you, all you need is smart devices being able to kill you. Well, cars you drive can do that, and cars are getting smarter and smarter.

Maybe though some countries will actually establish an UBI program, but I think the moment they do they will have swaths of refugees banging at their doors (rich countries have that issue already, but it will pale in comparison)...