It would be interesting to know what the numbers look like in terms of schools that are actually doing something at least modestly Apple-specific vs. ones basically reusing chromebook-focused plans on Apple hardware.

Anything you hand out is going to be 'a platform' and normalize it for the students(not necessarily a point in its favor; people tend to resent the deliberate limitations of hardware that IT has been told to at least try to make less useful for porn and cheating); but there is a potential difference in versatility and vendor flexibility between people actually adopting some macOS stuff and people concluding that chromebooks have been getting more expensive at an alarming clip, without feeling any less cheap, so Apple is now genuinely competitive even if you are just going to slap managed chrome on there and reuse your existing, chromebook focused, IT and curriculum stuff.

I suspect that Microsoft, not unreasonably, thinks that the value of their AI slop will be enhanced if they can use an existing property to get people to classify particularly grating AI slop so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future.

Maybe someone in the org actually cares about linkedin's reputation as a hellscape for aura-farming lunatics; but I'd be shocked if the incentive that MS is actually motivated by is anything but the chance to get a dataset of text ranked by how unpleasantly bot-like it is to try to make their bots less visible.

Looks like Microsoft is trying to convince people to classify more and less distasteful bot slop for them so they can tune copilot outputs in the future.

The winning move is not to play.

Once the supply of customers flush enough to buy under more standard arrangements is saturated you are basically left between ignoring the demand for growth forever or deciding between handling...subprime...customers yourself or keeping the arrangement at arm's length.

This 'restricted mode' that Apple is vigorously denying will be used for lease enforcement suggests that the metaphorical arm is not that long and that Apple seems to be doing more than merely being willing to sell devices to whatever resellers; but it's not a huge surprise that they'd want the risk related to the debt and any shaking down handled by someone who isn't them.

It's entirely possible that they didn't actually care that much. It seems at least as plausible that the sort of people who would risk this sort of legal exposure over a non-issue were more motivated by an excuse to throw weight around and talk like a mob boss than actual concern. Nice to be able to put a hobby project on the company card.

I find it difficult to believe that 'influencers' are a good sign at a society level; but I'm a little puzzled by the degree of hostility to what is basically a degree for self-employed PR/marketing people.

As much as I'm not happy about it, PR and marketing are absolutely entire fields; and I'd assume that people doing those things whose client is themselves would also benefit from a dash of entertainment related law; contracts and accounting related to dealing with sponsor agreements; and the same sort of low-to-intermediate business stuff that routinely trips up musicians, artists, athletes, etc. who suddenly have some worthwhile amount of money/valuable copyrights/etc. but are either wholly dependent on 'agents' of variable quality and honesty or just end up getting screwed.

With the amount of whining I heard about how this version of the Odyssey was woke race treason engineered to poison western civilization I would have expected Elon to move faster than the copy cops when it showed up on his precious everything app. Is he developing a tolerance to the stimulants? Renting out datacenter space making grok sluggish?

Today I learned that 50k/year, in New York, is what Bloomberg considers "middle class".

Were they just hard up for anecdotes or is some sort of expectation management in effect?

I don't know if it's plain volume or some more subtle characteristic of the noise; but I'd suspect that there's more to it than noise alone; given how rare(and often slightly disconcerting in practice) genuinely silent environments are and would have been in evolutionary history.

Even in totally undeveloped areas where you and your little teeny band of hunter-gatherer pals are the only thing going the wind is always up to something; some combination of birds and insects will be doing their thing depending on temperature, if there's a body of water of any size or moving water you'll hear some flow or wave action.

Could be pure intensity; a lot of modern noise is quite intense close to its source; could also be something about how it is interpreted and how readily it is or isn't discarded as background vs. forcing some amount of constant active attention.

It's more about the type of leasing. Something like a corporate or educational IT lease happens without these sorts of features because the customer has particular preferences about opex vs. capex or depreciation or whatever; but that do actually have money. Apple already does that(not sure if directly or through distributors like CDW and SHI, or both).

Building some sort of MDM system that allows you to lock people out of certain apps in order to encourage them to pay up something this week is a different flavor of leasing; normally used on customers who are at the "deciding which bills go un or underpaid this time" level. Apple has, historically, not dabbled in this area.

To an extent they probably do; and may even be correct to do so; but what would concern me is the shift to hard technical enforcement when, in practice, Apple already does a fairly massive volume of contract-based leasing and other payment over time mechanisms. Fleet hardware sales, the financial structure of all the "free" with 2 year contract iphones that go out, etc.

If you are building all sorts of locks in, including ones for hassling the user rather than just keeping stuff from falling off a truck and getting parted out, there's a strong reason to suspect that you are looking to tap, um very subprime, credit risks who you'd never lease something with just a contract; or that (since the 'App managed features' seems to be aimed at 3rd party financiers/resellers) that you are dipping your toes into the really nasty, high-touch, "block tiktok until they scrape up a payment for a portion of a debt that would be hard to collect normally' end of the market. Same as the really really, unpleasant used car places that install remote immobilizers because they know that there are times when your need for your car will seem more urgent than your other bills.

It's absolutely not the the case that there's no money there; some outfits are quite successful at soaking the poor; but it's hard not to provoke questions about either what margins you are thinking about accepting in the future or how saturated the market is among the customers you'd really prefer by preparing to dive in to that end.

What are we going to use to handwave all the 'officer involved shootings' now that the claim that you feared for your life in the face of an imminent threat is no longer plausible? We can't really put these to work until we've decided on suitable legal cover!

I'm glad to see that we have moved past the era of 'bugs' or 'defects' and are now anthropomorphizing undesired behavior as 'honest mistakes'. Truly progress is glorious.

Obviously billing errors are bad; but it seems like ones that off by an egregious number of powers of ten should concern us much less than ones that are small enough to be within the realm of plausible; those are the ones that you'll need to fight over and quite possibly not even win if you are an edge case or dealing with one of the services/configurations where you don't necessarily have any independent measure of usage. You can probably tell that you didn't use a VM more than 720 hours in the last 30 days; but are you actually counting GET requests in some way that is both authoritative and cheaper than just paying the $0.0004/thousand rather than hoping that Amazon will charge you correctly? For some very buttoned up buckets that only your other stuff accesses, quite possibly you can infer from those systems; but if it's something public facing and it might be a billing error or maybe you just got crawled hard last month?

Realbotix's classroom robot has drawn scrutiny because the company is connected to RealDoll, the longtime maker of hyperrealistic sex dolls and sex robots. Realbotix acquired RealDoll's parent company in 2024 but says the education-focused operation has separate employees, payroll, facilities, and technology, with plans to formally separate the businesses at the ownership level.

The "companion robots" are different from sex robots and intended to address what it's described as a "loneliness epidemic." Kiguel has previously said the company's goal is to produce robots and AI that are "indistinguishable from humans."

I'm not surprised surprised or anything; but it seems like a serious problem that it's the 'maker of high-end sex toys' part; rather than the 'attempting to replace education and human interaction with chatbots' part that has the company embroiled in controversy. Real Dolls are certainly pretty niche; a lot of additional inconvenience and cost for modest gains vs. vastly cheaper and more accessible local stimulation tools; but using tools as stimulation tools seems considerably less weird than using them as friends or fobbing children off on them.