If a Reddit post amounts to a human-summary of a StackOverflow disussion, which itself is a complilation from a forum posts on a discussion board and a Wordpress blogger, who got *their* information from man pages and error outputs...who do you cite? Each of them validates the others in order to minimize the amount of "SEO Blogger Spam" that also ended up in the meat grinder somewhere.

The problem with the meat grinder is that the whole point is essentially to make it impossible to trace sources to the point where the actual answer came from.

More to the main point...the bigger issue is that Perplexity is looking to make money off their training data. Nobody was given the opportunity to opt-in to sharing, and none of the creators even get Spotify-amounts of profit sharing. On the one hand, I hope Perplexity loses because they're the most creepy of an inherently-creepy industry. On the other hand, just because I don't like them doesn't mean it's fair that Perplexity gets slapped with a lawsuit while OpenAI gets off scot-free because they managed to scrape Reddit first.

honestly, that's probably all it needs to be. If If they can make a GPU with 16GB of VRAM and 5060 performance, and give it a $99 MSRP, even if it involves recompiling to whatever-their-answer-to-CUDA-is, they'd give nVidia a run for their money. If they made it readily compatible with vGPU tech with no licensing fees, it would definitely be disruptive.

Temu's existence shows that plenty of people are fine with "good enough". Nvidia's threat isn't going to come from China being able to DIY their own 5090Ti, or even an A2000....it's from China being able to give people more than half the performance at a price that makes it worthwhile to just buy three of them. Nvidia will still have its market, but I don't think it's unreasonable for China to make a good-enough card that takes the bottom 20% of Nvidia's customers.

The unfortunate problem is that this is technically true, but practically...less-true.

If HAL9000 understands what an HR hiring filter is looking for better than a person, then the person using AI has a higher probability of getting the job, because the process of *getting* a job has been so heavily abstracted away from knowing how to *do* the job. "Doing well on an interview" and "Doing well in the trenches once hired" are similarly distinct skills. Those with charisma are, as a rule, more likely to be hired if they are interviewed, than those without charisma who are a savant as the skill the job requires.

The problem with the premise that those doing the work without AI will outperform those who rely on it, is that the premise assumes that job performance is a company's metric of success. It *should* be, but more that a particular company is concerned with appearances and relationships and market capture, rather than the ability for a product or service to meet the needs of the customer, the less the skill of the worker is relevant to the worker's success.

See, there's just no winning. If we move (back) to cardboard, the argument becomes about trees. If we move to that biodegradable quasi-plastic that some drinking straws are made out of, then the argument is that the change disproportionately affects the poor, since that stuff is somewhere around triple the cost of plastic. If we move to glass, then the transport of the containers becomes far more prone to pollution because of the significantly higher weight of everything. If we eliminate one-time packing entirely, then we deal with health concerns and chemicals to combat those health concerns.

As much as the plastic industry loves to lobby, let's not pretend that it's the only barrier.

Yes, because we all love walking half a mile a day in the rain...carrying groceries in paper bags...or in the cold...or in the heat...or transporting 20-kilo items...or making multiple trips...or are we just ordering everything from Buy-N-Large and no longer in-person shopping?

To the topic at hand, PHEVs are fantastic INTERIM solutions. The charging infrastructure isn't as pervasive as gasoline and diesel, so a solution that both encourages the use of charging stations while enabling the use of existing gas stations is a helpful way to handle the transition. As we get to the point where EVs can get 1,000 off a charge and/or 200 miles of range out of a 5-minute charge, and as the number of charging stations continues to increase, and the grid adjusts to compensate, PHEVs will be less desirable as their reduced EV range will start to become a liability as gas stations decrease in number.

Maybe you don't like the fact that intermediate solutions are compromises by definition, but you won't get a whole lot of folks on board with the expectation that the solution to a global problem for everyone to relocate to walkable cities.

As someone who considers Mass Effect their favorite game, all the way to actually-liking Andromeda (I read the novel that replaced the Quarian Ark DLC)...ME4 is something I'm keeping an eye on, but have zero hope about.

We're coming up on four years since the release of the teaser poster, and three years since the trailer...and by all accounts, the game is still in pre-production. *PRE* production, for longer than it took to make ME3, and a year less than the time it took to make ME:A.

This leads me to believe one of a few things: first, that the original push was likely similar to that of Veilguard, namely that EA wanted to make it a casino game, er, "live service"...then, pretty far into the production process, the MBAs were somehow convinced that turning Dragon Age into a live service was going to fail as spectacularly as Anthem, causing a massive pivot back into the single-player narrative game the audience wanted all along. It would shock me more to know that the ME4 story didn't follow a similar chain of events.

Second, I would completely believe that there's a whole lot of internal bickering within the team about how to progress on...basically everything. Amongst the stories about why ME:A was such a disaster was because the team was forced to use Frostbite, which was made for FPSes but not RPGs, leaving the team to waste time building systems for Frostbite that already existed in Unreal...well, it was announced years ago that ME5 would use the Unreal engine again, so 'building the infrastructure' doesn't factor in this go-round. Art assets certainly need to be created, but the use of Unreal means that a good number of assets from the remaster can be utilized, so it's not that sort of baseline stuff.

Let's talk about ME:A for a quick minute...what made it such a letdown had nothing to do with the crappy animations or the fact that there was some transgender NPC in the game...the story itself was the problem. First off, the game's runtime was massively padded with fetch quests - lots of driving around and...retrieving these rocks, scanning this structure, getting this plant...if the missions were limited to unlocking the vaults and fighting Architects, the game would be ten hours long. There *were* pieces that were interesting, but they were few and far between. In terms of the actual narrative...there were two alien factions, the oppressor and the oppressed, and we sided with the oppressed fighting the oppressor...no sign of the nuance or complexity that made one stop and think that the Salarian Dalatross might *possibly* have a point, that curing the genophage might not *actually* be a good idea...just an enemy who wants to destroy everything and a Fern Gully/Na'vi, everyone-gets-along-with-everyone underdog race...that's it. Oh, and dialog choices that never *actually* matter. Either ME4 is spending so much time in pre-production to overcorrect for these issues (I concede that it takes a LOT of time to do either branching outcomes or multiroute missions like the garage pass in Noveria), or it's a bunch of people going to work and arguing all day about how to do things, and the game will be built on a stack of compromises that will please no one.

The fact that they're five years into production - longer than any other game in the series' development cycle - and they still aren't into the actual-production phase - leads me to believe that the game is going to absolutely wreak of compromise at every stage. If the game is in development hell at this stage, I fully expect the release to be about as smooth as Cyberpunk 2077's...and I *don't* expect the sort of stability patches that made ME:A playable in the months to follow.

Really, my pipe dream is that EA will sell the franchises to other developers and stick to a publishing exclusivity deal...they could probably make some decent money doing that with some of their older franchises if their plans involve sticking to FIFA and Battlefield...but I have no hope that Saudi leadership is going to do any better with ME or DA or SimCity than the former owners did.

> The law "undermines the basis of the cost savings and will lead to bulk billing being phased out," the group said.

Good; it's monopolistic, predatory, and ultimately unnecessary. The entire practice is aimed at driving consistency and forced adoption rates, not anything else.

16GB of RAM, I'll grant is fine for standard use...but Apple really needs to come up with some sort of solution for storage expansion beyond "bag of USB accessories" or "2TB of iCloud storage"; most Mac owners end up with both.

Sure, 512GB is fine for Apple Chromebooks, but video editors easily end up with either an external storage array or having to do "the project shuffle" of data management that is an absolute chore. There are more than a handful of PC laptops that offer multiple NVMe slots, so 8TB of internal storage is an option on less expensive laptops, that isn't possible on a Macbook, at all, for any price.

Sure, it's not everyone...but soldered-RAM and soldered-storage means that a nontrivial amount of the Mac market (which is disproportionately musicians, photographers, and videographers) is stuck buying the other half of their computer in pieces, including a port replicator to plug them all in simultaneously. This isn't an argument that Apple needs to design some Clevo monstrosity with interchangeable GPUs, only an acknowledgment that there is a sizeable market demographic that is artificially hamstrung.

I swear, the FSF has no concept of onramps, incremental victories, or provisional compromises.

Graphene, iode, and /e/OS exist, in addition to LineageOS. Are they "free enough" for the FSF? No, but to argue that the reason these things don't have mass acceptance is because users can't modify their modem firmware is patently absurd. I can appreciate the desire for purity, and a truly Free/Libre software stack from the low-level firmware to the apps, but this is absolutely the wrong starting point.

For starters, they could throw some funding toward F-Droid. Fund app development contests to improve availabilty of FOSS/FLOSS mobile apps. Users won't move off a proprietary OS if they *also* have to say goodbye to their massive app stack. If apps are available that will allow users to migrate their data to FOSS alternatives that are *also* available on a FOSS/FLOSS mobile OS, the migration path off Google Android becomes much easier to walk.

To double-down on this, the FSF could fund Creative Commons alternatives to Spotify and Netflix and maybe Tiktok or Instagram, and provide music and video streaming platforms for artists to post their music and movies (maybe with a self-hosted/federation option). Sure, it'll be a bit amateur at the beginning, but so was Youtube, and now entire careers exist because of it. If the FSF got behind these kinds of platforms, to the point of releasing iterations of streaming clients in the Google Play and Apple App Stores, it would chip away at the reasons *why* a FOSS/FLOSS operating system has such an uphill climb. Imperfectly, sure...but my wager is that more users would be willing to abandon iOS and Android if they already move over to independent streaming apps, than if the FSF's sales pitch is "you can modify your own firmware".

From there, again, onramps. Make a list of phones that pass certain criteria of freedom - 'copper' for phones with user-unlockable bootloaders and a commitment to release device trees within the first year, 'bronze' for phones that ship with unlockable bootloaders and release device trees on day-one for Lineage-and-friends to modify, 'silver' for phones that ship with unlocked bootloaders and officially supported mostly-Free Android builds with user instructions to load it, 'gold' for phones that ship with a mostly-free Android build out of the box, 'platinum' for phones that are FOSS everywhere except the modem (which has a documented API), and 'diamond' for 'no proprietary code anywhere, at all'. Hell, the FSF could probably make a few extra bucks reselling such phones at all the different levels, and let users decide the level of freedom they're looking for.

Ultimately, starting at the lowest level of the hardware stack might have its place, but it is of no virtue if the LibrePhone has no users (or worse, whose primary users are troublemakers who get IMEI runs blocklisted). Firmware is the least of the problems the FSF is facing, and while a staunch adherence to principles is laudable, it is of no virtue to have an OSS cellular modem that can't make phone calls or text messages because no telco will allow it. It is of no virtue to have a FLOSS laptop who spends its day storing data in Google Drive, acquired from Salesforce, and copied into Quickbooks Online, then going home and listening to Spotify and watching Disney+...and the phone landscape is exactly the same. Without a counterbalance of enabling users to meaningfully interact with their data without being beholden to proprietary systems, the FSF will be the poster child for winning the battle and losing the war.

Skirting sanctions by siting it in India, where they are not enforcing sanctions on Russian oil for energy production.

C'mon, really? The point is to do a flex, to deliberately make it difficult. It's a subtle, or maybe not so subtle, f-you.

I think there were three elements of this mindset that were assumed knowledge on the part of the person who said it:

1. "Move fast and break things...in a development environment where possible".
2. "Move fast and break things...in a way that is easily reversible." (see #1)
3. "Move fast and break things...and assume they will break, so assume you'll be fixing what broke" (see #2 and #1).

I can appreciate that Facebook can have this mindset, and in the case of a social network, there *is* an element of wisdom in not treating it like the IBM-of-old that overengineered EVERYTHING, making it super-reliable, but also making development very slow and very expensive. Facebook's focus on agility makes perfect sense for the nature of the work.

This doesn't work in every field, though. From finance to medicine to engineering, the costs are much, much greater than the loss of cat videos. Just because something makes sense in one field, doesn't mean it makes sense in EVERY field...and unfortunately, there are very, very few MBAs who understand the one thing that is more valuable than money: wisdom. Wisdom can earn money, but money can't buy wisdom.

But the OP says the 32GB was "Not used. Not allocated. Leaked." It's a little hard to parse, but if true, then maybe the actual effect is truly negligible.

A friend of mine is extremely fortunate to have a bit more of an 'old school' environment. They have a TV, but she doesn't let her kids use her phone. She's able to be a stay-at-home-mom, supplementing the household income with baked goods and Etsy projects and eggs from her chickens. She pays attention to her kids, not as a helicopter parent, but as a genuinely involved parent - going on walks, taking them to the library, teaching them how to interact safely with the chickens, having them cook with her, teaching them arithmetic and reading, playing with them, giving them simple chores...really making it a point to focus on early childhood education. This in turn is evident in her kids' longer attention spans, and ability to have discussions at levels in excess of their peers.

Something tells me that they will do far better than their peers on standardized tests...not because they had less screen time and spent their formative years staring at the wall instead, but because she's been an active parent and made it a point to make the most of the pre-kindergarten years.

She's an exception, sure...but the point generally stands - parents who just hand their kid an iPad and leave them alone are going to end up with kids focused on entertainment rather than exploring their world and gaining understanding, which will likely be reflected on standardized test scores to some extent.

I would also submit that one of the contributors to this problem is how basically every video game has devolved into a skinner box and dopamine dispenser. Puzzle games exist, but it's an incredibly exhaustive process to load an iPad exclusively with games that are pay-once, no-IAPs. It would be interesting to see if such a thing *could* be used as part of an experimental group, where kids who only played games that had traditional progression mechanics were compared to kids who had games that were colorful slot machines.

...the only people using Meta's AI, and even *they* don't want to use it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

89 years have passed, management remains the same.

"Increase Production".