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Comment Well... (Score 1) 18

they once had to buy a certain company called NeXT along with its CEO Steven Jobs to get a new OS after failing two times to develop one on their own.

But the real problem is that AI just NEEDS to run on cloud infrastructure since running it on the device is just inefficient, you'd need to stuff enough computing power and RAM into each of them to work any time even when it will be used only rarely. This means totally wasting money.

But privacy and data protection has become one of the main selling points for Apple in the last decade or so. They tried to bridge the gap with their "Privat Cloud Compute" approach, but this is so complex and hard to understand (and to implement) that nobody will really care, they will just see "all my data will be processed in the Cloud just as Google does it" and that's it.

I think this is the first time since a long while that Apple just has the wind of the future blowing right into their face. They find themselves painted into a corner just by circumstances.

Of course they could have led all of this anyway if they wouldn't just have bought Siri back then and then slept on it. So they're pretty much responsible for whatever happens to them now. Tim Cook isn't Steve Jobs. Never was.

Comment Billions of dollars and little to show for it (Score 2) 240

The point I got really suspicious of Firefox was when I realized that they (and the for-profit and non-profit Mozilla companies) made an awful lot of money and somehow managed to get very little done with that.

I mean, yes. Web browsers (and email clients like Thunderbird) are complex, but soaking up literally billions of dollars a year should yield more if you'd pay developers with that. The last time I tried to follow the money I just ended up with being totally disgusted. Not that others are better, but Firefox isn't better either.

Comment The problem is... (Score 2) 63

... that the industry supplying the military isn't at all interested in making simple, cheap drones that can be mass-produced for even cheaper. They're interested in making the most complex, expensive drones in small numbers they can still sell.

I mean, hobbyists and small companies have been throwing together lots of impressive and (necessarily) cheap designs for a long time. Lifting flight to extend range while still having hover and vertical take-off capabilities really is easy to do with electric multi-rotors.

Here's a design of an even piloted multi-rotor craft that turns from a (kinda) quadcopter into a (kinda) biplane without any tilting rotors or wings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There's enormous potential coming just from having multiple electric motors you can finely control instead of either lifting flight with one or several forward thrust rotors or helicopters with one highly complex rotor.

This is SO obvious from all the fun toys you can buy now for very little money, but there's absolutely no incentive to turn this into a military advantage. Maybe just for the better...

Comment Re:Walking is stupid (Score 1) 19

The sole reason for human-like robots is to being able to replace humans in work situations where humans work, and humans work increasingly only where more specialized machines don't.

They're not for replacing more specialized robots or other machines optimized for very narrow tasks. Nobody needs a human-like robot to draw the Mona Lisa when you can just print it.

I agree that there's lots of room for improvement here, but walking is highly important because it makes robots mobile, in environments that are optimized for humans. There's little point in doing anything of what you describe when the robot can't walk there and sit down at a table to begin with. There's also very little point in robots being universal when they can't walk from this job to another. In a fixed location there are much easier ways to sort screws by size or to remove a rice grain from a table.

Comment Well... (Score 2) 60

I have often thought that ONE AI-generated comment to every article everywhere might be a good thing to do. Because often enough the actually human commenters are incredibly stupid, one-sided, factually challenged, emotional and outright crazy. Just defining a baseline of somewhat balanced, reasonable, elaborate, even "political correct" commentary may be just what the doctor prescribes, fully with pros and cons and bullet points.

Of course this is not what Meta envisages. Meta would use this to beat everything into a lather even faster and more efficiently to generate "engagement" and make everyone even more crazy.

Note: Only when your foam goes over the brim on command you're a good Social Media citizen. And foam is cheap and easy to make. It's easy to drown in foam though, it has very little carrying power but suffocates you perfectly fine.

Comment Re:Before you start bickering about Europe ... (Score 0) 98

I love the compatibility, but I hate the plugs and sockets. Half of my cables don't work reliably anymore and one of the two USB-C ports in my Macbook Air M1 isn't usable anymore.

With Lightning the only problem ever was lint in the sockets but the plugs and the sockets themselves were pretty much bulletproof.

And honestly I utterly hate the fact that we're now stuck with this by the type of socket and plug being mandated by a fucking government. But it could have been worse, if this would have happened just a bit earlier, it would have been Micro-USB we would be stuck with forever.

No, I think this is just cheap populism, especially since NONE of the companies that are suffering from this are from the EU. It like the old "Who can, does; who can't, teaches". The EU is like "We can't make smartphones and operating systems and whatever, but we can tell others how to do it".

And yes, I have a huge box with now obsolete cables and adapters, but while the market may not be perfect with such things I think it's much, much better with tech than a fucking government, of all things.

So, no. I'm not really a friend of all these regulations. I can perfectly deal with whom I give my money, thank you very much.

Comment It won't "rival" Starlink (Score 1) 109

It's just about European governments not depend on Starlink. Which is Ok I guess. But these 290 satellites won't be in competition to the 7000 Starlink satellites at all. It will be so expensive that you will only use this if you're mandated by law to use it. I guess it will be about 2000 Euros a month at least for end users.

And if it should be subsidized so much to be as cheap as Starlink is (and it won't) it will be totally oversubscribed. You can't compete with Starlink this way. It's just about government and military uses.

Comment Re:Bottom line Elon musk (Score 1) 109

Well, he didn't interfer with a war... He wanted the US government to contract Starlink for supporting attacks on Russian ports and ships in the Black Sea because he didn't want to do this just nilly-willy. Then the government did contract with Starlink.

Do you really want him to just support such things and basically act as if he's the government? You would hate him even more for that then I guess...

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