It’s really not free. Piracy is still a bit of a chore. It’s just less of a chore than juggling a dozen streaming services, shitty and inconsistent apps and playing the whole “what major corporation’s subscription service has the rights for this show?” game.

They ought to try sucking less.

The big media corporations have been pushing legislation and legal crackdowns since the 90s and it hasn’t made a dent in piracy. They’ll keep trying of course, but it still won’t work.

I really don’t know what to think of this thing. It’s a bit like a combadge from Star Trek with a camera and small monochrome projector. I like the idea behind it, handling most of the utilitarian features smartphones bring without the games and social media distractions. The AI stuff is neat, but I don’t know how well baked any of it is and that’s really going to be what makes or breaks something like this.

Price is a bit high, and I don’t know how I feel about the subscription–I guess it’s not bad if you think of this as a full cellphone replacement, but that’s a tall order with something this new and dorky. There’s probably a 90%+ chance this becomes short-lived vaporware/abandonware, but who knows. I’d love to see something succeed that gets people’s faces out of their cellphones and back to interacting in person more.

I’m hoping the slow creep of right to repair laws will help with this. Forcing manufacturers to provide spare parts, documentation and diagnostic tools to independent shops I think will inevitably lead to more open devices in general.

There would already be a vibrant community of smartphone Linux distros right now if bootloaders were unlocked and manufacturers were more forthcoming with documentation.

If they design the process efficiently it shouldn’t burn too much battery to update the system image. The phone just needs to power up, connect to store wifi, apply the image and shut down. Doesn’t even need to power up the screen.

He didn’t fail. He did what the board asked of him which proved to be more unpopular than they all had expected. So they gave him an obscenely generous severance package and sent him on his merry way.

He’s been rewarded and they’re just trying to position it so it looks like the company leadership gives a shit and won’t try the exact same thing at a later date.

Apple deliberately makes it appear that way so the competition looks bad.

They don’t really advertise the fact that they’re quietly intercepting all of their customers messages to other customers and routing them through a proprietary network.

And if you dare leave, messages from your old iPhone friends mysteriously won’t arrive unless you proactively deregister your number from iMessage or it eventually expires out.

At the time, they gave better results and the clean and simple design got right to it without all of the BANNER! BANNER! HONK!HONK! of the competitors.

They had ads, but they were just text links that said they were ads and weren’t playing games with rankings based on who bribed them.

I think it still has potential but it needs more time to grow

There were lots of interesting online communities with great information and conversations before Reddit but they mostly died out as people moved on to other platforms. It’s a tale as old as time.

Lemmy’s just a platform and communities take a while to grow and there’s no guarantee they even will

I don’t think NVIDIA minds the money they get from the DIY builders market, but they get a lot more money from OEMs. They shouldn’t neglect the DIY market, though. If the enthusiasts stop recommending their GPUs then big OEMS will eventually drop them too.

AI is just in a gold rush right now. Companies are throwing around piles of money to develop it.

I think it’s reasonable to assume that AI API pricing is artificially low right now. Very low.

There are big open questions around whether training an AI on copyrighted materials is infringement and who exactly should be paid for that.

It’s the core of the writer/actor strikes, Reddit API drama, etc.

Simply throwing computing power at the existing models won’t get us general AI. It will let us develop bigger and more complex models, but there’s no guarantee that’ll get us closer to the real thing.

AI isn’t free. Right now, an LLM takes a not-insignificant hardware investment to run and a lot of manual human labor to train. And there’s a whole lot of unknown and untested legal liability.

Smaller more purpose-driven generative AIs are cheaper, but the total cost picture is still a bit hazy. It’s not always going to be cheaper than hiring humans. Not at the moment, anyway.