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Comment No one's asking about the 27 floppy disks? (Score 1) 80

Most users had Windows 3.1 or 3.11, running an install that started there, replaced the OS, rebooted and continued on the new one made sense to me back then.

But carrying around a stack of 27 floppy disks no one asks about?

If funny how that was probably a factor here as well. If zip drives were mainstream they would've probably taken a different direction.

The pre-internet times were not cool :D

Comment The EU's 4 freedoms is at stake here (Score 2) 69

The European single market is formed around 4 freedoms:
  - Free movement of goods
  - Free movement of capital
  - Freedom to establish and provide services
  - Free movement of labour

Any kind of country level blocking within the European single market will break those freedoms. Most companies comply with those rules: Netflix, Phone operators (there's no roaming within the block), etc etc etc.

The issue here seem to be that once labour moves to another country, they still want to be able to use the bank from the previous country (they have the right to) and Apple's default everywhere is that Credit Card country = App Store country. Also which app is available changes between countries within the single market, which is pretty bad.

Effectively, the App Stores for every European single market country needs to allow credit cards from the other countries as well. And then make it so that every content that is available in one country it is treated like a Eu single market thing.

Comment Re:It really bothers me (Score 1) 34

I understand what you're saying, and you are correct: a lot of jobs that exist today will become a thing of the past in the next 10 - 20 years. I like to look at things positively, maybe further down the road...

In every revolutionary step our society took (making fire, the wheel, agriculture, aqueducts, books, press, industrial revolution, electricity, cars, mainframes, personal computers, internet, ...) the result was that there was a strong demand for what the revolution could provide. There were always enough new jobs available to meet that demand, and our quality of life improved significantly overall.

I still think that the demand is there: we need more access to health care, we need easier ways of applying knowledge and information to our lives, we still would like to move from place a to place b a lot more, we need to improve education, we need better ways of connecting with people we love, etc.

Looking positively, I expect that AI / LLMs / ML / etc will enable the next jump in quality of life for everyone. The benefits will be unevenly distributed, but I still expect everyone to benefit from it.

Comment We could replace certificate authorities (CA) (Score 1) 12

If we create a DNS RECORD TYPE for certificate fingerprints and we use that to authenticate public certificates from websites than we won't be required to use a CA anymore. IIUC this is as safe as what we already do today:

  - It's already possible to emit a certificate based on dns authentication (https://letsencrypt.org/docs/challenge-types/#dns-01-challenge)

  - Browsers already authenticate root certificates based on their fingerprints (https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/net/data/ssl/chrome_root_store/root_store.md). A zero-day SHA256 attack already breaks things today (although it would be easier to remediate this for only a few root certificates)

If banks and other folks still want to use certificate authorities because of their insurances and legal guarantees they can still do that! We still install the DNS record for your certificate fingerprint, and we validate the certificate against both.

Revocations cases would a lot more rare, but it could be done through DNS as well.

Comment Fair, Apple doesn't want you to replace the iOS UI (Score 1, Interesting) 170

An app that can run any code and build an UI on top of it is effectively replacing the operational system interface. This is possible elsewhere primarily in Linux-based "OS"s (Chromebooks vs KDE vs Gnome vs Android vs Tesla car's UIs vs ...) and effectively means, from a user interface and user experience point of view, that you replaced the OS. It's not really virtualization, but it's from the user perspective that would be pretty much the same.

That seems fair to me. I don't know where the legal side of things is for DMA/DSA/etc, but I'm seeing those laws being enforced on places where the app developers want to do what most users want but are blocked by Apple, rather than app developers that want to test the definition of what a "retro gaming console" is [rolling eyes emoji].

Comment Well, time for someone to step up (Score 3, Insightful) 114

AMD can't do it because they signed up all HDMI Forum agreements to be able to use HDMI. They can't break that agreement.

But... The Linux Kernel has a long history of people reverse engineering closed specs and building a module for it. That module usually sucks for the first couple of years, but they generally achieve their goals.

Who wants to step up?

Comment Oh, that's such bullshit (Score 3, Interesting) 25

Everyone will be buying their product based on this bullshit?

AI transforms and compresses images so much, exactly because subtle pixel level differences would wreck everything. And everyone encodes / compresses their images differently. The only way to create something that would confuse all AI models would be to create something that confuses humans as well.

But, sure, let them market and profit on the fear that creative folks have of AI right now.

Such bullshit.

Comment "Attention Is All You Need" created Transformers (Score 3, Interesting) 6

The "T" in "GPT" means "Transformer", which is the thing that that paper created.

Before that paper it wasn't possible to parallelize large model training across a large cluster, which make large models impractical.

Most of the generative AI and large language models making strides out there today came from that parallelization that Transformers enabled. It really changed the world in a significant way.

Funny thing is that they were only trying to improve language translation models. Well, at least according to the paper.

Comment The most profitable businesses in the world need s (Score 2) 14

I am shocked! I am shocked! Well, not that shocked.

Itâ(TM)s super easy to beat the imported horse, and that does not make you great at growing your own horses.

Give it a decade or two and the EU will be so far behind the rest of the world and still wonâ(TM)t admit to what they are doing wrong.

I am an EU citizen btw.

Comment Designed from the ground up for spatial computing? (Score 4, Insightful) 38

a) You don't use your hands to interact with content as if it was in front of you.
b) Everything looked like apps built for 2d screens projected on something that looks like a very large 2d screen.

Give me Minority Report level stuff with me shuffling through email super quick, dragging and dropping data from one application to another, something with multiple layers of depth that we can start talking about something "designed from the ground up for spacial computing".

Give me what Photoshop would like in a spacial interface, and what it would do differently. Not today's photoshop projected in front of me because I already have that. And I already have multiple screens in front of me.

It feels like a huge missed opportunity here.

Comment Apple built a repair program but kept iFixIt out (Score 4, Insightful) 63

iFixIt are not happy because they can't sell the parts, they can't participate in any way whatsoever.

The repair manual is exactly the same that the Apple Genius bar folks use, and the parts are the same ones they use.

Apple opened up their internal repair program for customers. But they are not interested in helping the IFixIt guys out.

Comment Are they trying to compensate for the GDPR weight? (Score 3, Interesting) 33

GDPR means start-ups can't change their business models quickly, as they have to go through a thorough and expensive legal review every time they do that. It pretty much kills innovation in Europe. You'd have to test business models out somewhere else, then, once well tested and established, you'd bring it back, which is something that is much easier to do for non-European companies.

I believe they are trying to compensate for that, that they will fail, and still not admit they do not understand any of that.

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