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Comment Re:Durable goods from commodity companies (Score 1) 57

Even worse, this is an initial hardware release from Apple. Apple does eventually keep their hardware updated for a fairly long time... on the third or fourth iteration. But the early versions tend to see only a couple of years of updates before Apple drops them.

You can see that with the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV: their original versions only received a couple of years of updates before Apple demanded people update to the newer ones. The original hardware in all of them was also severely underpowered compared to the versions released a few years later. And if you look back to the original iPod, this is hardly a new thing with Apple. When the iPod was first released, it was pretty lame. It only became popular once USB support was added several hardware iterations later.

Which means that the traditional device holds: don't buy revision 1 Apple hardware. Wait a few revisions until it appears to stabilize. Or don't buy it at all if they just drop it, like the original HomePod (note the new one is part of the "HomePod Mini" line) or Apple Vision. (Where's the non-Pro version, Apple? I'm assuming that was planned at one point.)

Comment Re: Fucking AI... (Score 1) 70

The PC as a gaming platform died when GPUs broke $1000 for an entry-level GPU. And that's just the baseline. If you want a gaming-capable PC you're looking at spending $4000 right now. That's just not happening. This article covers the death of consoles.

You ever talked with children? Even teenagers? There are three big games right now: Fortnite, Roblox, and Minecraft. And that's it. All those run on phones. That's where the kids play. They don't understand how to use a controller and don't really understand how to use a laptop, let alone a desktop computer. They're at home on phones and as an extension tablets. It's what they grew up with.

It's where the future of video games is going to be, because that's what the next generation is comfortable playing on.

Comment Re: Fucking AI... (Score 1, Insightful) 70

Gaming Computers are a dead end.

They are. The future of gaming are cell phones and tablets. That's what kids learn to game on these days, and when they grow up, that's where they're going to game.

There's a reason the Nintendo Switch is essentially a weird tablet. PC gaming has been dead for a while and console gaming pretty much died thanks to shortages at the start of the pandemic. There's a good chance GTA6 will be the last major console game.

But everyone has a phone. Kids see their parents using them, and they tend to be the first devices kids learn to use. That's where gaming will be in the future - small things people play on their phones.

Comment Re:Day after midterms (Score 1) 189

I don't think anyone's worried about a "blue wave" showing up. We all remember the "blue trickle" of 2018, when the polls showed a massive blue wave that failed to materialize. "The polls" have been massively off for at least the past decade and there's no reason to think anyone has figured out a way to fix that.

Assuming there isn't ballot fraud on a massive scale, the worst we're likely to see is the gap in the House become slightly narrower. The idea that either will flip control is ludicrous. People forget how utterly despised Democrats are.

Comment Such a shame: Apple did it roght (Score 1) 74

I would love for my devices to have their AI models local like Apple did. It is really annoying to say "Play song ABC" and even though ABC is a local file, my device goes to the cloud. But Apple gave customers privacy, security, and resiliency - and everyone complained that it took up space. So next time you want to complain that companies are requiring Internet connections for stuff that could be done locally, remember that someone tried and it was rejected.

Comment Re: Not quite ... (Score 3, Interesting) 68

I am sorry, but your comment is completely wrong.

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is a disproven theory. Human embryos do not have tails, chickens do not go through an embryonic stage where they have teeth. Your concept that this two-brain thing is a step in embryonic development is not what the article is saying.

Some years ago there was a very well-done and very popular drawing of human embryonic development showing a human going through evolutionary phases, and I too believed it for a while, but it was fantasy.

Comment Re: Oh Noes! (Score 1) 78

What use is the constitution then if the government just has to hire a private entity to do the things the constitution blocks?

Good point. It's something that really should be addressed. But the Constitution was designed as a limit solely on the government's powers, and it's up to the government as described in the Constitution to write laws that restrict what private entities can do, within the bounds of their enforcement powers as provided by the Constitution.

This isn't a new problem. After Snowden, the US realized they could pretty much just outsource the NSA's spying. And they have.

And the other thing is: none of this is really relevant. There's nothing unconstitutional about sitting in a public space and recording the license plate of every car that passes. There's nothing unconstitutional about building a network of people doing that and storing it in a giant database. It was just infeasible to have a bunch of people doing that. Now it can be automated.

There's nothing unconstitutional about compiling data about people that people agree to hand over as part of the license agreement for using a thing. Once that information is owned by a private entity, there's nothing unconstitutional about the government buying it from that private entity. It's just the government receiving data that was either generated in a public setting or that was willing given in a private setting. (At least, legally. I doubt most people realize how much data on their lives companies collect, and I doubt most people realize they agreed to hand it over.)

Maybe handing over data collected in this fashion should be against the law. Maybe there should be privacy laws preventing it from being gathered in the first place. But there aren't, and neither party is interested in changing that. Which leaves us with the reality that nothing Flock was doing is illegal, and that the replacement systems localities are using aren't illegal either.

Comment Re:Oh Noes! (Score 1, Insightful) 78

Which part of the Constitution are they allegedly violating?

I really wish more people understood this. The Constitution only protects you from the government. It does nothing to protect you from private companies collecting your information, and do they ever. As electronics get more advanced, the amount of information private companies are collecting is ever increasing. TVs listen in on every conversation. VR headsets map out your house. And cameras installed on street lights record every vehicle they see.

Which brings me to the second very important point about Flock cameras people forget: pretty much every town that is canceling contracts with Flock isn't getting rid of license plate scanning cameras. They're just replacing them with cameras from other companies that do the same thing. Companies that people haven't heard of and that therefore haven't raised the same complaints.

Comment Re:iConsent: Not Included (Score 5, Insightful) 64

I can't wait to see how many places ban this Apple Watch entirely. First, there's no way this is legal in two-party consent states, and I don't care how Apple tries to re-define "record."

Secondly, I don't think anyone really cares how secure Apple says "Private Cloud Compute" is, no one is going to trust that a device that's designed to "listen" (but not "record") every conversation in the vicinity isn't "recording" especially when it can produce an AI summary of a conversation.

There's no way this Apple Watch will be allowed in government buildings or anywhere else that people may not want to be recorded, no matter Apple's privacy claims. I expect to see "No Apple Watch Allowed" signs start appearing all over the place once this releases.

Comment Re:"Broadly available" is a stretch (Score 3, Interesting) 90

I suspect a company paying $50k/month for tokens is going to need a whole lotta RTX 3090s. I also suspect that this 24GB model is not as powerful or efficient as something they can get in the cloud. But with that said, this is basically what I do at home - run one locally for common tasks. I keep waiting for the local ones to achieve parity with the cloud versions, but RAM is so expensive because of the data centers, that I'm not sure it will happen before SkyNet launches the nukes.

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