Yes all Russian phones are spy devices. All Russian citizens who own phones are required to have the government spy software on it, called appropriately enough, "Max." It acts as a means of identification and authentication for government services, and it also a government-authorized replacement for Telegram, WhatsApp, etc. All wrapped up in one little spying app. Very convenient.

Even at the more accurate prices it's still cheaper than paying a six figure salary. So while we will probably see a lot less AI doing peoples' hobby projects, or even open source projects, companies are not going to reduce their internal use of it.

I bought a Roland S-1 Tweak Synth this week. Absolutely lovely bit of kit, one of the best things Roland have done for a while. It's relevance to this conversation though is that it has a built-in, non-user replaceable battery and is charged by USB C.

I've kept my Roland synth from 1989, and there are people with synths much older than that. While never massively user-serviceable as a genre, this is the first time I can think of that there's a definite life span on these things. Just like a phone, eventually this battery is going to wear out and have severely reduced capacity. I have to imagine that, as with vintage synths or older phones, someone will probably start a service for replacing the battery but wouldn't it be nice if they didn't have to and the design had been thought of in advance?

Hopefully AI thing will start to cool a bit now that the free ride is over and end users start to bear the full cost of these systems. Up until now the big AI companies have been giving it away at a token cost to keep the hype going.

Hopefully seeing the true costs will push demand more towards more efficient, smaller, specialized local models for many applications.

Yep, was more thinking of the "people using wired don't care about the DAC" part than the actual machines we're talking about.

Quite the opposite. A strong use-case for a jack is low-latency audio, and tht's the kind of thing used by people who use their machines for audio and music production. I'm a heavy user of Logic, and would absolutely not let wireless headphones anywhere near it.

For "people who don't care the DAC sucks", there's wireless. For people who do care about the DAC but only for listening to music or conversation etc., then wireless also exists. For those who care about both quality and latency, and that's really only for specific use cases these days, then wired is the way.

What? Where did you get that from? The Neo uses the Apple A18 Pro SoC. It was widely reported (here on Slashdot even) that Apple was using binned iPhone chips for the first batches of Neos, with the defective cores deactivated.

The way a language runtime stores unicode strings in memory is a different thing from the way the language interacts with byte data in the world. Python's approach is to treat unicode strings as essentially arrays of unicode code points. Slicing is all done based on the array position of the unicode code points. The way they are stored in memory is irrelevant to the programmer and abstracted away, except that the programmer still has to be aware of unicode's many warts such as pairs..

Under the hood Python stores them in memory as UCS-32, UCS-16, or ASCII depending on the string's contents. None of that matters. What does matter is that when you want to send unicode to the world, you encode it to bytes using whatever scheme you require. The default if not specified is UTF-8. While reading data in, you must decode the data, telling the .decode() method what scheme to use if it's not UTF-8.

Python strings are also immutable, so they are fundamentally different than the way other languages handle strings.

Nonsense. Modern C++-isms often result in extremely fast, optimized code. For some good examples, see this presentation about using C++17 to generate fast 6502 code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... Of course this presentation is also a good one to show you why you'd rather not use C++17 at all. But for reasons other than efficient and fast binary code.

Better yet, the LLM can just write the secure C code in the first place.

If Mythos is so great, why not close the loop?

All true, but there is a measurable increase in pollution in the upper atmosphere now, some from launches, and most from all the satellite constellations burning up all the time. It's not as if these satellites just burn up to nothing. They leave behind all sorts of metals in the upper atmosphere, especially aluminum and magnesium compounds. It's a bit reckless. From what I read some of these particles might act as cooling agents, so hey it's all good. Nevermind the kerosene soot that lingers for years in the upper atmosphere after every spaceX launch. And other compounds damage ozone. We really have no idea how these effects will play out.

China's labor costs have been rising fast in recent years. I don't think you can say any longer that China produces cheap goods because their labor is cheap. Especially for the kind of technology goods that so many of us buy. Phones, laptops, gadgets, etc. Rather China has invested in advanced manufacturing technologies. And they make all their own tooling. They now have more experience building and operating electric vehicles and charging stations that we do.

I participated for a while in a small company that was trying to mass produce (domestically) a product for a specialized market. I learned all about saving pennies and removing as many parts as possible until it just barely functioned. The Chinese learned to make goods as cheaply as possible from us!

No, this is not targeted at industrial control! This is for consumers programming arduino microcontrollers, or setting up drone autopilots, over USB serial cables. Web Serial definitely provides access to that. In fact there's a web-based Arduino IDE that requires no software download, thanks to Web Serial.

Chrome has had web serial for at least five years. Not really sure what you're talking about with adafruit and css.

I liked the original Star wars a lot and generally loved the book universe. But count me among those who just want it to die now. Let's let it be finished.