To be fair, it’s the most interesting story the verge has covered in about, well, as long as the verge has existed.

This is a big deal - it’s going to shape the entire tech industry for the foreseeable future. And it’s going to drag on in court and probably also congress for years and years.

Apple is the target of the lawsuit but the DoJ is also telling every other tech company what rules they need to operate under. The last decade of “just do whatever you want” is over.

So ban harvesting and exploiting. Don’t ban superapps.

By your logic we should ban kitchen knives because they can be used to murder someone.

I don’t think it’s an oversight at all. The rule is Google can’t do anything on the platform that the competition is blocked from doing.

If there is no store, then google has no advantage.

As for removing features from a product - that’s a different issue entirely and I expect compensation will be in order. Refunds for anyone who bought a Fitbit for example.

Tradies may make more by opening their own company

That’s where glassdoor is misleading. The best tradies are not employees - they do contract work and you might, for example, charge a thousand bucks to fix a shop’s broken window. And it might only be one hour of work.

I want solid data to back up your bull

Anecdotal, but my brother does tree maintenance. His minimum callout fee for a day’s work is $2,000. And he often earns more than double that for one day’s work. He does have relatively high costs, but his income is way better than what I earn writing code.

We’re both at the stage in our career where it’s time to stop being an employee and start running our own company and believe me, his company is more successful than mine. Early days still but my money’s on him earning seven figures per year very soon.

He’s so much more successful than that if my business fails, there’s a good chance I will end up working for him. I’d be on minimum wage for several years while I learn the trade but I think it might be worth it long term and I can eventually pull my connections (the boss being my brother) and get promoted to being a manager with a cushy job driving a company car between job sites.

Um, you know you can use any bluetooth earbuds right?

They literally have done that. For example iPhone 15 Pro Max is 12.5mm thick. The iPhone 6 (thinnest iPhone ever made) was 7mm.

There are several iPhones with different batteries but the largest one is 17Wh. The iPhone 6 had a 7Wh battery.

AFAIK under elevated temperatures, it degrades nicely. At typical soil temperatures it slowly degrades into methane which is a greenhouse gas - not great for the environment… but it’s still a hell of a lot better than plastic.

As bad as methane is, at least it has a relatively short life before it becomes Co2 and ultimately is absorbed by trees/etc and re-enters the cycle of life. Plastic on the other hand is really nasty toxin that often ends up in the ocean and causes long term damage.

The TLDR is methane needs to be managed, we have to make sure we don’t produce too much. While plastic should just be illegal. We should never produce any plastic, at all, for any reason. It’s going to take a long time but that’s where we have to go.

You’re making perfect the enemy of good.

Yes, re-usable cups are better than a commercially compostable cup. Use re-usable cups if at all possible. But like it or not some people just aren’t going to do that, and commercially compostable cups are a hell of a lot better than plastic. Even if they don’t get composted, and you send them to regular landfill, they are still a million times better than plastic.

If I ask an LLM something like “is there a git project that does <something I’d describe in natural language but not keywords>” or is there a Windows program that does X, it may make up the answers

Obviously it depends on the LLM, but ChatGPT Plus doesn’t hallucinate with your example. What it does is provide a list of git projects / windows programs, each with a short summary and a link to the official website.

And the summary doesn’t come from the website — the summary is a short description of how it matches your requirements list.

I’ve also noticed Bing has started showing LLM summaries for search results. For example I’ve typed a question into Duck Duck Go (which uses Bing internally) and seen links to reddit where the answer is “a user answered your question stating X, and another user disagreed saying Y”.

I’m encountering hallucinations far less often now than I used to - at least with OpenAI based products.

I’m sorry but the fediverse is full of instances that block other instances. Blocking an instance is not bad behaviour on the fediverse.

If you don’t like Threads, don’t use it (I’m not using it), and if you want to use an instance that blocks Threads… you’re welcome to do that.

But what I don’t get is the idea that threads is somehow trying to kill the fediverse. All of the evidence is to the contrary. Meta wants to exist in a federated world. That doesn’t mean they will allow access to all content on their corner of the fediverse, nobody wants that. All instances block some other instances and threads has every right to make their own choice about who to block.

No no no, you got all wrong. Think of the children! They are ruining the future of our children!

While I agree - the part you’re missing is the vast majority of TikTok users are outside the United States.

TikTok doesn’t want to sell. They want some sort of “independent” subsidiary where ByteDance still profits from (and controls) TikTok and the subsidiary worries about compliance with US law. But the thing is, that’s already the current structure.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they refuse to sell and wind up being banned. ByteDance doesn’t want to lose all their US customers, but they’d likely prefer that to selling.

I wonder if a tablet or laptop might be more appropriate for your wife? When I think “web” I want a keyboard or touch screen and a TV typically has neither. But in any case, I think you’re making a mistake trying to have one device that can fit every use case. Your TV will have multiple inputs (and it will also probably be a smart TV).

Plug some sort of Mini PC into the TV for your wife, and let your kids use the TV’s built in smart features to watch TV or buy a set top box such as an Apple TV/Nvidia Shield/etc.

PS: I would 100% use a projector, not a TV. Just project onto the wall (assuming you don’t have wallpaper/etc).

Sure but in an emergency? They can handle being discharged as long as you don’t go too far.

An inverter will not let you run your fridge until the battery is “dead”. It’s going to have a low voltage cut off, likely somewhere around 11 Volts, specifically to avoid damaging batteries by fully discharging them.

How many hours you’ll get from the battery mostly depends on your ambient air temperature and how often you open the fridge. They don’t use that much power when they’re idle - my fridge averages at about 90 watts (I’m not running off grid, but I do have rooftop solar and our system produces pretty charts showing consumption). A large car battery can sustain 90 watts for a quite long time - well over 2 hours. Probably closer to 10.

Running a fridge off a car battery long term is a bad idea. But in an emergency? Sure I’d totally do that - especially if your “emergency” is genuine such as needing to keep your medication cold. Just don’t open the fridge unless you’re taking your medication.

LifePo4 FTW!

Sure. Way better than lead acid. But that doesn’t mean lead acid is useless. When I lived off grid, LifePo4 didn’t exist and we got close ten years (of daily use) out of our lead acid batteries. They were bigger than car batteries and also deep cycle ones, but in an emergency a car battery would be a fine choice if it’s the best one you have.

Apple said EVERYBODY MAKE ARM APPS NOW

Uh, no. What they did is make sure x86 software still works perfectly. And not just Mac software - you can run x86 Linux server software on a Mac with Docker, and you can run DirectX x86 PC games on a Mac with WINE. Those third party projects didn’t do it on their own, Apple made extensive contributions to those projects.

I’d like to go into more detail but as a third party developer (not for any of the projects I mentioned above) I signed an NDA with Apple relating to the transition process before you could even buy an ARM powered Mac. Suffice to say the fruit company helped developers far and wide with the transition.

And yes, they wanted developers to port software over to run natively, but that was step 2 of the transition. Step 1 was (and still is) making sure software doesn’t actually need to be ported at all. Apple has done major architecture switches like this several times and are very good at them. This was by far the most difficult transition Apple has ever done but it was also the smoothest one.

It’s 2024, and I still have software running on my Mac that hasn’t been ported. If that software is slow, I can’t tell. It’s certainly not buggy.

Apple is working on models, but they seem to be focusing on ones that use tens of gigabytes of RAM, compared to tens of terabytes.

I wouldn’t be surprised Apple ships an “iPhone Pro” with 32GB of RAM dedicated to AI models. You can do a lot of really useful stuff with a model like that… but it can’t compete with GPT4 or Gemini today - and those are moving targets. OpenAI/Google will have even better models (likely using even more RAM) by the time Apple enters this space.

A split system, where some processing happens on device and some in the cloud, could work really well. For example analyse every email/message/call a user has ever sent/received with the local model, but if the user asks how many teeth a crocodile has… you send that one to the cloud.

The article says they’re talking to OpenAI as well. “Exploring” a partnership mean you’re actually going to partner with them - it could just be “what’s your roadmap?”

Apple also “explored” buying Bing and DuckDuckGo.

I don’t see how it’s any different to using Google as the default search engine in Safari.

Also - phones don’t have terabytes of RAM. The idea that a (good) LLM can run on a phone is ridiculous. Yes, you can run small AI models on there - but they’re about as intelligent as an ant… ants can do a lot of useful work, but they’re not on the same level as Gemini or ChatGPT.