And Apple's total lack of third-party GPU support on Apple Silicon (beyond a few kludges that use them for AI workloads, but no display), losing the current Mac Pro is no great loss. :-)

And yeah, the BlackMagic stuff I've bought lately is Thunderbolt. Also, most of the software for things like real-time switching runs on Windows anyway, so I'd imagine the market for that on Mac is not huge. And so much stuff gets brought in over networks these days (NDI, SRT, etc.) that HDMI ingest probably isn't that interesting anyway. You're more likely to use a dedicated encoder box that provides streams over Ethernet. My production work has been doing it that way since the pandemic.

Exactly this. Apple neutered the Mac Pro by making all of its additional functionality useless.

Years ago, they announced that they were killing support for kernel-space drivers. Then they announced a user-space replacement, DriverKit, that is basically half-assed when it comes to PCI, providing no support for any of the sorts of PCIe drivers that anyone would actually want to write. The operating system already comes with built-in support for USB xHCI silicon and most major networking chipsets, nobody builds PCIe audio anymore, FireWire support is dropped in the current OS release, and video drivers can't be written because Apple didn't bother writing the hooks.

That last one is the showstopper for PCI slots on a Mac. The main reason people bought Mac Pro or bought Thunderbolt enclosures was to support high-end video cards. With Apple not supporting any non-Apple GPUs on Apple Silicon, the slots are basically useless. I'm not saying that PCIe is useless by any means, just that the neutered, broken, driverless PCIe-lite hack that Apple actually makes available on macOS is basically useless.

I suppose you could theoretically provide DriverKit support for RAID cards, but really at this point everybody just uses external RAID hardware attached over a network anyway, so the number of people who would buy a Mac Pro for something like that is negligible.

And I guess in theory, you could port Linux video card drivers over if the only thing you're doing is using GPUs for non-video purposes (e.g. for AI model training or offline 3D rendering), but tying it into the operating system as a video output device is likely impossible without additional support from Apple, and nobody is going to bother to do that for the tiny number of people who would want that when you can just run Linux on x86 and not have to do all that porting work. After all, for those sorts of tasks, you probably aren't benefitting much from the OS or the CPU or memory performance anyway.

So basically the Mac Pro was dead on arrival because of Apple dropping support for very nearly every single thing that the Mac Pro could do that couldn't be done just as easily with a Studio (without even attaching a Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure). And once the Studio came out and had a comparable CPU in a much smaller form factor, the writing was on the wall.

More than that, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a sad toy that was never truly worthy of the Mac Pro name by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't even have ECC memory or upgradable RAM. IMO, Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you," and then they should have dropped the Mac Pro as part of the Apple Silicon transition, rather than shipping something so massively downgraded that is so many miles from being a true pro desktop machine.

Anyone who is even slightly surprised by it being discontinued was obviously not paying attention.

What phrase would you use to describe that, other than "spoke incoherently"? I mean, I can think of some medical terms that might apply, but that's how I would describe his debate performance. He wandered off the subject, had trouble forming a complete thought... basically like a Trump speech, only he paused a lot when he lost his train of thought instead of rambling about illegal aliens eating pets or whatever.

Until it hallucinates and adds something that wasn't there or changes the meaning significantly. In my experience, AI is really good at screwing things up in ways that nobody expects. And if the people making the changes aren't subject-matter experts, but are just doing drive-by edits to try to make things more digestible, they might not notice the errors if they are subtle enough. Allowing any random person to do stuff like that could potentially cause a lot of damage really quickly.

Until it steals the chart blatantly from somebody's published book, and Wikipedia gets sued for copyright infringement. Wikipedia isn't just trying to protect itself from erroneous data. It's trying to protect itself from liability. With user-uploaded content, the user can self-certify that they have the right to upload it, and apart from user incompetence, that's usually going to be good enough. With AI-generated images, it is impossible for a user to know for certain whether what they are uploading is infringing, and would be hard to later prove which AI generated the diagram to transfer the liability to the AI company.

But the biggest risk, IMO, would be asking it to make a chart with numbers from some table. It could manipulate the numbers, and if someone isn't checking closely, they might not see the error, but the incorrect chart could easily mislead people. AI-based chart generation seems way more likely to introduce errors than a human copying and pasting the table into a spreadsheet and generating the chart with traditional non-AI-based tools.

And after a few months, people will complain that the content is constantly wrong, the editors over there will give up trying to keep the error rate under control, and anyone with a clue will come running back to Wikipedia.

The conservative right wouldn't have voted for Harris anyway. That's not why he won.

He won because the Democrats care about whether their candidate stumbles across words and speaks incoherently, so Biden was pressured to step down, and Harris was forced to step up at the last second, with nobody really knowing who she was or who she stood for, thus limiting her ability to bring voters out.

He won because the Democrats weren't clueful enough to get Biden to fully step down and make Harris the next President immediately, which would have given the public months of seeing her actually lead the country.

If he really was struggling, then he won because Biden did not step down and let Harris take power before people started questioning whether he was fit to be in office.

He won because Biden did not recognize that he would have a hard time running again and allow an open primary.

He won because the Republicans were able to paint it as a coverup of Biden's feeble-mindedness, and the Democrats weren't able to show people that struggling mentally when you're physically fatigued isn't inherently a sign of dementia.

He won because Democrats had too much class to use the dementia card on Trump, either first or in retaliation.

He won because too many people conveniently forgot what a disaster he was during his first term, and too many people gave him a pass for the economic damage he did, and the folks prosecuting him for crimes were way too slow so it was still going at the next election.

He won because Kamala Harris was a center-right Democrat who tried to put on progressive clothes to get votes, then swung back towards the center again to get votes. Her time as a prosecutor draws into question her progressive bona fides. That meant the left didn't come out to vote.

I really don't understand why the only two women candidates that Democrats have run have at least appeared to be at the authoritarian end of their party. That doesn't win the presidency unless you're running as a Republican. Both of these candidates were mistakes. There are plenty of women in the Democratic party who would have been better choices.

In short, there were so many things wrong with her candidacy that it's hard to count them all. Gender and race were likely not a meaningful part of why she lost, or at least there are so many other confounding factors that it would be impossible to pin it on either of those.

You don't. That's what parents are for. Parents taking care of their own kids scales easily, because the number of parents is linear in the number of kids being monitored. Facebook taking of everyone's kids scales exponentially in the number of users, because anybody could be talking to any kid.

What they should be suing for are better tools for parents to monitor their kids' activity on Facebook. If you give the parents that, and if you force child accounts to have an associated parent account, then the responsibility falls on the parents, as it should be.

Any other approach would be insane beyond reason.

There are two articles on the home page right now about Meta losing a court case. I think you meant to post this in the other one. This one is about social media addiction.

What does age verification have to do with social media addiction? Did you mean to post this in the *other* article on the home page about Meta losing a court case? :-D

What, exactly, do they think the alternatives are?

Facebook has over 3 billion users. If they output an average of twenty artifacts (posts, replies, direct messages, or images/videos) per day, that's 60 billion outputs. If 1% of those are videos that are an average of three minutes long, that's 1.8 billion minutes of video, and if the other 99% take thirty seconds to moderate, that's another 29.7 billion minutes, for a total of 31.5 billion minutes per day to moderate.

That's 65.6 million workdays of content to moderate per day. Adjusting for people working only 5 days per week, that's about 92 million people required to moderate it.

For context, that is approximately the entire adult population of Mexico. The entire country. They would literally have to employ an entire moderately large country to do this without AI.

So what, exactly, do these lawyers think is the alternative? For Facebook, IMO, the right answer is to require anyone under 18 to link a parent account and give the parent account updates on what their kid is doing every day. Shift the responsibility to the parents where it belongs. The idea of Facebook parenting your child is idiotic and is an intractable problem (because the social graph increases exponentially as the user count increases linearly), so if that's what they actually want, then I fully expect this to be overturned on appeal.

Not both sides. Each side.

Each side has (different) things about its positions that suck. Each side has blinders on about various (different) subjects.

Both sides are solidly in the pockets of big corporations in ways that are harmful to society at times, though we like to pretend the Democrats are slightly better. We lack any sort of true labor party.

We also lack any party that is strongly rights-focused. The Libertarians come closest, but they are also in the pocket of corporations for corporate rights, which are entirely a social construct as opposed to any sort of fundamental human right, and the existence of corporate rights erodes fundamental human rights, yet they tend to come down on the side of the free market and deregulation, which is the opposite of what a rights-focused party would do.

We also lack any party that understands education. We have only two parties: bad and worse. The Democrats throw funding at things without fixing the fundamental problems that caused the funding to have to be so high to begin with, and the Republicans cut funding because they say it didn't do any good, again without fixing any of the fundamental problems.

And so on. Not one political party comes close to my opinions on major issues. And I think that's true for the overwhelming majority of Americans. And the politicians are so focused on crap that doesn't affect me, all the while ignoring almost everything that could make my life better on a daily basis. And I realize that you can't do everything, but there's a lot of really big low-hanging fruit that would make the lives of a huge percentage of Americans better, and they're focusing on silly crap like fighting over voter IDS being a poll tax (which could be fixed by making passports free, but holy crap, people might actually travel the world, see that it is more complex than they realize, and run for office as independents, and we can't have that).

The overwhelming majority of things that they fight about could be solved by having even one single person with half a working brain cell pointing out other approaches that satisfy both sides. The only conclusion we can come to is that either A. none of them have half a working brain cell or B. they don't actually want to solve problems. Neither of these is a ringing endorsement.

So yeah, both sides are bad. I think one side is worse, but even I recognize that the grass is greener only because it was recently fertilized.

That's not the way false advertising laws work. Advertising's meaning has to be what a typical person would understand it to mean. Burying details in the fine print that completely upend the premise of the ad are a sure way to get spanked. You're not expected to disclose everything, but "free" can't mean "free, but only if you're a rare edge case".

The software will not let you get any of the return info you have entered out of it unless you pay or have a free-only tax situation.

What makes this a particularly big deal is that you can sit there and enter information for an hour or more and then suddenly hit the "If you do this, you will pay" wall. And now there's a sunk cost associated with dropping them. This is all very deceptive advertising and is a deliberately manipulative dark pattern.

A shift towards Democrats won't solve anything. States with majority Democrat leadership still have big problems caused by a lack of diversity of ideas, as does the federal government when Democrats are in charge. They're different problems, but they're still kind of a mess. They still spend themselves into the ground and take on huge amounts of debt. They still don't reap ineffectual programs when they add new ones. They still throw money at contractors that don't do a good job, just not defense contractors.

What we need are about a dozen major political parties that all have to work together to come up with solutions to problems. The larger the number of parties, the less dysfunctional the government will be, because it won't be an us-versus-them situation, but rather a "what can we agree on" situation.

When almost two-thirds of users have to use one "non-standard form", your definition of standard is not plausible.

Sold stocks? Not free. Have any sort of retirement account that sold stocks? Not free. Have high state taxes and need to itemize? Not free. Received unemployment benefits? Not free. Did any freelancing for any gig economy company? Not free. Have an HSA because of a high-deductible insurance plan? Not free.

I'm actually surprised that a third of people qualify. You basically have to have no health insurance, work a minimum-wage job, not save money for retirement, and not take any gigs on the side to make money.

Final assembly is inadequate for the law as written. You'd have to manufacture the PCBs in the U.S., which is likely to be completely infeasible for at least a decade.

I think you're underestimating the potential for retaliatory tariffs on component exports from China. There's not a cap for how much the prices could increase.

At some point, the right answer is to buy NICs and compute boards and built your own router like we used to do.

When consumer routers are outlawed, only geeks and their friends will have Internet service.

We're a little early for April 1, but to me, I just read "When your router dies, no more Internet for you." When I read more about this, it only applies to future products that haven't been approved yet, but that's only a reprieve of a couple of years before some forced redesign obsoletes the current products.

The current reality is that ~100% of all network routers currently manufactured (consumer-grade or otherwise) are made overseas. Except one. Starlink.

Donald Trump's FCC and Trump's national security goons just gave Elon Musk a monopoly on consumer Internet. This is what corruption looks like.

Worse, because every iPhone and Android phone is a router, Donald Trump's FCC just banned every future smartphone. And Mac. And PC.

There's an exception that companies can apply for, but whether anyone will get an exception or not is entirely at the whims of the FCC, which in the current administration likely means "companies that sucked up to / bribed Donald Trump adequately".

But critically, there aren't manufacturing facilities in the United States that can accommodate even a tiny fraction of the smartphone or network router manufacturing that the United States requires. It would take a decade for those facilities to be built even if they literally started building them today. So what this means is that for companies that don't get exceptions, they will be unable to improve their products for a decade or more.

And when individual components (even something as minor as a ) stop being manufactured, which they inevitably will, those products will require a sufficient design change to require a new import authorization, and it will no longer be possible to import them at all. If they don't have a U.S. factory lined up by then — which is almost impossible, statistically speaking — then their ability to stay in business will be at the whims of the current administration, whoever is in power at the time.

This, right here. is what corruption looks like. Pure, unvarnished corruption.

The excuse given is that building these products overseas poses a risk of supply chain disruption. But if the products are built in the U.S., the parts that go into them will all still be built overseas. It will take at least a decade before that problem can be solved. Building the final products in the U.S. does nothing to reduce supply chain disruption. In fact, it makes it worse, because the countries that make the parts can refuse to ship the components, allowing export of only finished products, and then your U.S. manufacturing dries up. And there's a strong incentive for them to play games like that, hoping that you will relent and start allowing their cheaper finished products into the country.

This is why countries whose leaders are not complete and utter morons don't pass laws like this, instead passing laws that require a certain percentage of COMPONENTS to be made in their country. That number increases over time. Eventually, once a suitable percentage of components are made in their country, they can start insisting on local manufacturing of the finished products, confident that there is a robust supply chain capable of backing local manufacturing. And even that can backfire, causing manufacturers to stop selling in a country rather than comply with their laws, but at least it starts moving them in the right direction, assuming that local manufacturing (as opposed to just "not China") is the right direction (which is highly dubious, but that's a much longer discussion).

What our current administration is doing shows that they do not understand technology, that they do not understand manufacturing, and that they do not understand the realities of import-export laws. In short, they are lunatics operating in an ivory tower with complete blinders on that prevent them from seeing the real world.

How quickly can we get ALL of these clowns out of office?