The operational costs are neglible, and run at most in hundreds of millions. Google made ~$10B on Play Store in 2025 (20% of estimated $50B revenue). 99% of what you pay for is monopoly pricing, fundamental cost is two magnitudes less than that. Moreover, the developer "support" is abysmal, as Google has near zero motivation to deal with small time developers in monopoly market.

> Cell phones are not required to offer apps at all. Don't like smart phone terms? Don't use a smart phone.

That's a relevant argument for as long Google doesn't exploit network effects to lock you in. Once it does, it's more akin to cable company charging you 100x more above board for the privilege of using their wires. You're free to not use the service duopoly of Comcast or terrible ISP #2, aren't you?

Same thing with low-resource languages. The more problem is the more obscure domain/language, the less actual training corpus, the more nonsense output from the robot. Eg ask it to write reasonably complex win32 and posix command tool for same problem, with the only differences there being the semantic differences between the systems. It will overall hallucinate more nonsense for win32.

The robot is very good at what it knows - especially at the center of distribution (not too much extrapolation). And it knows what's common. The more you touch edge of the domain, the accuracy nosedives.

> More importantly, I wonder if the positioning and orientation of a person between the Wi-Fi antenna and the sensor matter.

One way to conceptualize it is consider the wifi to be ordinary light, and person's profile their silhouette they cast as a shadow. You can tell someone is fat or not just by diffused reflections in the next room. Resolution of this can be substantially improved by number of observers (all in different rooms), but from various angle (= light bulbs, and measuring SNR they "see") with least squares matching (think something akin to triangulation, but pixel-voxel volumetric solving). The model most likely learns it internally, but one doesn't necessarily need to use brute force by stacking moar layers on this.

These commands are executed from HCI pipe, not radio end. There are no exploit scenarios, as the HCI host has full control in any case. It's about as much of a "backdoor" like a wifi radio with hacked (or similarly permissive) firmware to inject raw frames. If anything it makes the chip moderately more useful now.

Reminder Qualcomm was aggressively pushing for RISC-V extension since 2022 that would allow for a trivial frontend swap on Nuvia. If this went through last year, we'd be quite possibly seeing "RISC-V Elite", not Oryon right now.

For better or worse SiFive isn't going along with it. First its a bad look to let QC dominate the consortium on the market, plus they're probably right on that ARM (uarch-wise) compatibility approach would just add bloat just to save Qualcomm a boatload of money so that they don't have to do expensive redesign of Nuvia's wide issue schedulers.

Some earlier context:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/r...
https://old.chipsandcheese.com...

It's his panicked reaction to Zuck firing the shots about Meta's commitment to dominance through open-source with Facebook entrenched as BDFL.

ICANN are central-control-by-committee bureaucrats of his ilk who'd be quite keen to hop on this (and turn it into a corrupt shitshow, just like domain registries) if given a chance. He has an eye to recognize and groom potential allies well.

The whole business model of clickbait is the audience sharing it all like "look how bad this is" and feeling all smug. A lot of stock photo uses the same form of bait. AI seems perfectly suited for this sort of thing.

To block malware domains (Google SafeBrowsing, Firefox Phishing Protection). The reasoning of bureaucrats is along the lines "well, the feature is already there, might as well use it for whatever we consider malicious".

The fundamental market in the foreseeable future is dark markets and trade with sanctioned countries. This is already starting to show - certain untraceable coin popular in this sector outperforming by 20% everything else during the 2022 crash.

Market cap of shadow economies could only ever account for a very tiny fraction of world trade though.

Why blame the machine, and not the executive? Same old, guns don't kill people, people kill people.

I didn't RTFA either, but I think it is about romance scammers, not really the usual flaky Tinder matches.

The irony is that it's most commonly cheap Chinese brands that get infected - they all come with unlocked bootloader by default. This is great for firmware tinkering, but for average joe, not so much. Such OEMs are perhaps tacitly complicit in the trojan ecosystem - nudge nudge wink wink we're selling phones that are easier to backdoor by resellers.

It's the likes of Tecno, Cubot and Doogee these days. Naming is tricky, coz most of the time, those phones are not infected by the manufacturer, but resellers - both on aliexpress and especially brick and mortar shops in south east Asia.

A telltale sign is when the device is cheaper than from the manufacturer, or doesn't jump into Android setup, but comes up already preconfigured. Unlocked bootloader rootkits exist too, but are far less common. Trend Micro itself is invested in spreading FUD around this to sell their wares for years now, so don't expect anything but sales copy from them. Others did look into it in more detail though.