I think they mean the licensing is "all digital." Just an entitlement associated with your account on their servers.

I agree, that's what I initially thought as well. A backdoor is supposed to be a built-in feature, possibly covertly added, but a designed-in part of the software nevertheless. This sounds more like a particulary sneaky remote access trojan.

You have to wonder though, if it is behind a NAT and Firewall like most PCs, how does it receive the magic packet if it doesn't phone home? It must be designed to be used against a specially targeted victim.

Was autotune a net positive or net negative? I guess some artists really leaned into it trying to use autotune as a new instrument - I don't get the appeal.

On the other hand, AI already brought us Girly Girl productions https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Whatâ(TM)s odd to me is that the Brits already have a solution to this, theyâ(TM)re just not deploying it. British councils *love* giving people 63 wheely bins for them to sort increasingly difficult to identify waste into. Why not just give out a container for people to put waste batteries/battery containing devices in? Alternatively, do the same as most councils do with glass, and put a big metal box in a fairly central location to contain them until the bin men come and empty it?

You have no clue if you think they dont. The M5 max GPU is roughly as fast as a laptop 5080. If you want either pro apps, or AI ability, the M5 isnâ(TM)t beaten by anything at all.

I think the point is that if a math teacher can use AI to write a paper and thereby elevating their skills without any investment, then why can't a dumb student use AI to do the same? Eventually we'll all be dumb as rocks and require an AI to do basic thinking so we can get back to the important things, like masturbating and watching tv. It's kind of a moot point, really, because convenience always wins out in the end.

What sides? Fair and reasonable discourse is impossible on these platforms. There's only the side of those who control the algorithms, and the suckers who engage with them.

You're right, it's a constant, soul-sucking trap. People joke that they thought quicksand would be larger factor in their lives, but this is figuratively mental quicksand. The more you fight it, the more you get sucked in. The only way to win is not to play. Close the app and come back in 20 minutes... or not at all.

No, cars don't all have to be made to fail. I got lucky and bought a car with a rock-solid powertrain, never had any issues in 16 years, but unfortunately it's the rust that gets to it in the end. I think it's time to retire it this year.

Funny, though, it seems like modern cars need 10x more maintenance than my "old clunker" ever did.

The question is rather how you weigh a life without sugar against a life with cancer?
Or, more precisely, a life with limited sugar against a life with a chance of cancer.

That doesn't really make any difference to the RAMpocalypse though - the thing that's hard to get is the RAM chips that go into those tightly integrated packages. Apple is having just as much trouble as everyone else getting RAM.

I'm not sure what the distinction you're making is.

The memory manufacturers stopped making your desktop memory in order to make RAM for AI data centres.
AI data centres are taking all the RAM.

These are the same statement.

What do you mean, a search task? I just pop the CD in, and it plays. I mean yeah, sometimes I have to flip through my CD organizer at a stop light, but it doesn't take more than a few seconds.

This is a sign that there are way too many middle-management types whose only contribution can be pointless cosmetic changes.

"Can we get it in cornflower blue?"

Kids are so lazy these days. Back in my day, if I was trying to plagiarize a paper I found on the Internet and pass it off as my own, I would at least go through the effort of restructuring it a bit before submitting it. You don't need to bother trying to have an original thought, but show a little bit of effort and rearrange some sentences, maybe throw in some synonyms, switch up some grammar. Maybe add some commas where they shouldn't be to throw them off even more. Glad to see that at least some skill is coming back to the art of plagiarism.