Other than paying them for hardware that has no discernible advertising revenue for Apple...
My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.)
So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices.
The Android spec sheet added a line:
Encryption: Yes
Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever.
They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1].
Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.
As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice.
I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time.
Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.
If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
The most depressing thing for me is the feeling that I simply cannot trust anything that has been written in the past 2 years or so and up until the day that I die. It's not so much that I think people have used AI, but that I know they have with a high degree of certainty, and this certainty is converging to 100%, simply because there is no way it will not. If you write regularly and you're not using AI, you simply cannot keep up with the competition. You're out. And the growing consensus is "why shouldn't you?", there is no escape from that.
Now, I'm not going to criticize anyone that does it, like I said, you have to, that's it. But what I had never noticed until now is that knowing that a human being was behind the written words (however flawed they can be, and hopefully are) is crucial for me. This has completely destroyed my interest in reading any new things. I guess I'm lucky that we have produced so much writing in the past century or so and I'll never run out of stuff to read, but it's still depressing, to be honest.
That sounds low... Really low. E.g. NYC has ~350k employees and I know they got hit hard. Not all of them have windows machines, but let's say 100k do. I know they basically all have falcon installed. That's 100k in just one org, not even counting their windows servers. How many Fortune 500s are mainly Windows?
Edit: I did some back of napkin math. ~30 million work for a fortune 500. Let's say 2/3rds of those have a Windows desktop provided by employer, so ~20M. I think I read crowdstrike has about ~25% market share, so that's 5 mil just in fortune 500. No way it's just 8.5M
I regularly had arguments on homeopathy with some close family members. I stopped, because belief in homeopathy is the same kind of belief as belief in flat-earth, and you can't be cured off it.
People get seduced by a somewhat internal logic. They get a fuzzy feeling of superiority in their discovery that the mainstream ignores. If you point out the absolute lack of evidence of any of what they believe in, it's because pharma is silencing them. They are excited to be enlightened, because only they can see how crooked big pharma is: they need you to be sick so you can buy their "allopathic medicine" (derogatory calling of drugs that actually work), so they're trying to kill homeopathy who would really save you ; which to be fair is not helped by the fact that pharmaceutical companies are indeed crooked and want you to be sick.
I don't think there's any volume that can be said on homeopathy that will convince anyone who already believes in it that it's all a scam.
Where are the best places to keep up with all of this? I'm very interested in this area as I want to use these tools to create things with and my own voice isn't great for this.
Speech to speech seems like it might be better than TTS to get it to be more natural, i've played around with some tools like RVC etc, but I feel like there are maybe a lot of great AI workflows I am missing amoungst all the AI noise, it's the interesting workflows and people doing interesting things with AI that I am more interested in.
Its inevitable because of the power dynamics between democracies and totalitarian regimes. Democracies thought that with the internet they would topple totalitarianism because of free flow of information. They forgot that totalitarian regimes can just imprison and shoot all who have access to and propagate the information. Now the wheel has turned and the same regimes are weaponizing AI and shill farms to create enough propaganda to destabilize a democracy for the price of a few dollars. We're all headed towards a global race to the bottom because of it, the dream of the early internet has been crushed because of human evil.
Human societies are in a constant game of evolution against each other, since time immemorial. The ones that are incapable of defending themselves militarily are invaded and subdued by those who can. This unpleasant fact of life doesn't care about our ideology.
It’s almost like our entire society was not designed to support human flourishing, but rather is an elaborate mechanism for extracting the maximum amount of labour in exchange for the least amount of all source support.
I have been playing with it for the last couple of weeks.
I do a lot of traditional music production for fun and was wondering how I could use Suno together with Leonardo for video and then bring it all together in my existing tools.
Here are some examples. I wrote the lyrics by hand and the music has been reinforced with my existing studio equipment.
For me, that is where the gold is. Not replacing myself, but extending what I can do.
Very cool! Here's some I made on v3, not perfect but any means but still impressive. No custom lyrics or retries, just prompts and whatever came out first.
What's wild to me is that almost all the individual devices a smartphone represents, not even counting the phone itself, would have been confiscated if used in class, for my generation (and I'm a millennial!)
Flashlight? LOL, they might not even wait for you to use it, just assume there's no way you're not going to do something dumb with it, and take it.
A handheld gaming device? Insta-yoink.
Note-passing? Notes confiscated.
Basically an ordered-from-a-back-of-magazine-ad spy kit of a miniature camera and voice recorder? GONE. And you might be on the way to the office for a chat, and parents called, if you'd actually been using any of it.
A glossy fashion magazine, seen out at any point that's not explicitly totally-free time? In the teacher's desk. (and that's on the tame side of the kind of thing one might be looking at on one's phone...)
A portable mini-TV or small radio? Jesus, of course you can't have that in class.
But smartphones? Nope, they can have those. Which is the exact same as having all those things above, and way more.
It's such a crazily-different direction for policy.
The reason you don't see long term support on Android is because of Qualcomm. Qualcomm wants manufacturers to build on new chips, so they deprecate older chips and stop support. Most manufacturers don't want to hire kernel and hardware devs.
Samsung can pull off longer support because of Exynos and they have a lot of inhouse expertise to extend support on old Qualcomm chips.
It's all money. They don't want you keeping a phone for 5 years.
Apple can do it because they lock you into their walled garden where they can double and triple dip on getting your money.
> You have no concept of how cattle are actually raised. They are grazed on grassland. No farmer is cultivating food plots of soy beans and bringing them to the cattle. You are thinking of feedlots which cattle go to before slaughter where they are fed corn or soy for a short period of time in order to fatten them up.
While it's true that cattle are often raised on grasslands, the global demand for beef has led to many operations utilizing grain-based feedlots, which do have environmental implications. It's estimated that about a third of the Earth's arable land is used to grow crops for animal feed.
Furthermore, the conversion of forests and other natural habitats to grassland for cattle grazing is a significant driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss, particularly in places like the Amazon.
> The existence of a feedlot does not change the fact that for the vast majority of the animal's life it is on a grassland eating grass that would otherwise just grow and die in the winter. The vast majority of the energy that goes into growing cattle would otherwise go completely unused without them. That is why ruminants are special. They turn grass into protein, which is necessary for life, especially brain function.
Indeed, ruminants play a unique role in converting grass into protein. However, the issue isn't as straightforward as just utilizing grasslands. The environmental footprint of raising cattle, even on grasslands, includes water use, greenhouse gas emissions, and land degradation. This, combined with the growing global demand for meat, creates a sustainability challenge that cannot be overlooked.
> You just want to eat your disgusting soyburger and treat it as some kind of penance so you can then parade around as if you are morally better than people who eat meat. Sorry, we will never stop eating meat and you will never acknowledge the reality that ruminant grazing is good for the environment.
It's not about moral superiority but about finding sustainable and ethical ways to meet our nutritional needs. While ruminant grazing can have some environmental benefits, it's not universally "good" for the environment given the issues like:
- Greenhouse gas emissions
- Deforestation
- Land degradation
- Water pollution
- Water overconsumption
- Loss of biodiversity
- Antibiotic resistance
- Ocean dead zones
- Inefficient land and resource use
- Ethical concerns regarding animal welfare
- Contribution to zoonotic diseases
- Air pollution
- Eutrophication
- Soil erosion
- High energy consumption
- Chemical runoff from pesticides and fertilizers
- Destruction of habitats and ecosystems
- Inequality in global food distribution
- Public health risks from foodborne illnesses
- Nutrient pollution
- Strain on waste management systems
> You will never consider why there were tens of millions of ruminant bison covering North America for thousands of years. They were a tool of the balance of nature that helped the ecosystem.
The comparison between modern cattle farming and historic bison populations is not entirely valid. Bison roamed freely, contributed to nutrient cycling, and didn't contribute to the same environmental problems associated with large-scale livestock farming.
Similarly, whenever I'm working at my kitchen table I always "lose" my mouse as if there's another monitor connected.
I realized a couple weeks later MacOS display continuity (or "sidecar"?) was connecting to my Mac Mini located directly upstairs using it as a 2nd monitor while I'm downstairs.
My apple watch also regularly unlocks my Mac Mini when I'm downstairs (Mac Mini in a bedroom upstairs).
All of these features pose serious security issues if your physical location isn't secure/trusted.
There really should be a "Travel Mode" for MacOS that disables features like these. No one wants airport security to open a laptop and have the apple watch immediately unlock it for them while standing 20 feet away (or in another room).
Well, the security coprocessor on every iPhone and Mac runs a formally verified operating system that manages the at-rest encrypted messages. Also, all software running on the phone is vetted before being allowed to hit consumer devices, which adds an extra level of security between malicious developers and kernel APIs.
There's no way Android will support that stuff across its entire ecosystem, so I guess it means the law is toothless? Maybe it means it will be up to each hardware manufacturer to ensure interoperability?
I have come to two conclusions about the GPT technologies after some weeks to chew on this:
1. We are so amazed by its ability to babble in a confident manner that we are asking it to do things that it should not be asked to do. GPT is basically the language portion of your brain. The language portion of your brain does not do logic. It does not do analyses. But if you built something very like it and asked it to try, it might give it a good go.
In its current state, you really shouldn't rely on it for anything. But people will, and as the complement of the Wile E. Coyote effect, I think we're going to see a lot of people not realize they've run off the cliff, crashed into several rocks on the way down, and have burst into flames, until after they do it several dozen times. Only then will they look back to realize what a cockup they've made depending on these GPT-line AIs.
To put it in code assistant terms, I expect people to be increasingly amazed at how well they seem to be coding, until you put the results together at scale and realize that while it kinda, sorta works, it is a new type of never-before-seen crap code that nobody can or will be able to debug short of throwing it away and starting over.
This is not because GPT is broken. It is because what it is is not correctly related to what we are asking it to do.
2. My second conclusion is that this hype train is going to crash and sour people quite badly on "AI", because of the pervasive belief I have seen even here on HN that this GPT line of AIs is AI. Many people believe that this is the beginning and the end of AI, that anything true of interacting with GPT is true of AIs in general, etc.
So people are going to be even more blindsided when someone develops an AI that uses GPT as its language comprehension component, but does this higher level stuff that we actually want sitting on top of it. Because in my opinion, it's pretty clear that GPT is producing an amazing level of comprehension of what a series of words means. The problem is, that's all it is really doing. This accomplishment should not be understated. It just happen to be the fact that we're basically abusing it in its current form.
What it's going to do as a part of an AI, rather than the whole thing, is going to be amazing. This is certainly one of the hard problems of building a "real AI" that is, at least to a first approximation, solved. Holy crap, what times we live in.
But we do not have this AI yet, even though we think we do.
Here's a concrete scenario:
StackOverflow makes money because people go to it for answers to their questions. The answers are provided by people who write them because they get points for providing good answers, that they use for reputation points to get good jobs.
It's an ecosystem. Everybody profits.
Now Google scrapes the contents, and provides a service where you just ask your question and it gives the best, most accurate answer. Nobody goes to StackOverflow any more. People stop posting answers, because nobody asks the questions, and nobody reads their answers any more. StackOverlow goes under, and the ecosystem dies.
Where does Google gets its information now? The feeder pipeline has died.
>I'm glad to see that they not only support, but require the use of multiple keys.
Yes, and also that they support up to 6 of them. That's a very solid number enabling a lot of decent (if basic) backup practices. A number of keys for regular use, a few put in a safe deposit box or safe or the like. Or if (as I'd assume) keys can be reused between accounts, then a family could each have a key, with all keys registered to all accounts, and then 1 or 2 in a safe spot as backup. Everyone still is protected by their password, but if they lose keys/devices then any other family member could be their live backup (and having the majority of keys constantly under control and in active use is good in terms of immediately noticing if one is lost or breaks and so on).
While I know it's definitely not Apple to add extra complexity, if anything it'd be cool if they leveraged this a bit farther even. Would be neat for example to support m of n restore, where if key/password are lost (somebody dies in an accident for example) then any 4 of 6 (or 3 of 6 or whatever) remaining keys can be used to get access. That would be a useful hedge, while not needing to offer unlimited trust to any single person (there could also be a few other safety measures like it taking a week and sending the account owner alerts in the mean time).
>During set up, you're signed out of inactive devices, which are devices associated with your Apple ID that you haven't used or unlocked in more than 90 days. To sign back into these devices, update to compatible software and use a security key. If your device can't be updated to compatible software, you won't be able to sign back in.
My only real disappointment with this is that Apple didn't implement some sort of "Purchases Only"/"iCloud Lite" functionality for old devices. I've still got an iPhone 6 and a few others because a lot of cool apps (both productivity and games) I love were dropped by iOS quite a long time ago. The devices are dedicated app runners, no communications, no syncing needed, but not having them attached to the same Apple ID means the old purchases would all be gone which kinda negates the point. And you can't transfer purchases between IDs, nor purchase now gone apps, so there isn't anyway to just setup a new one not even for money. Maybe it's possible to remove them from the iCloud side while they have WiFi disabled and then keep them offline forever? Still, kinda shitty :(. Though perhaps that's more a symptom of continued from-the-start weaknesses in the Apple ID system. Not being able to move and consolidate purchases has been a huge damn stupid thorn in people's sides almost since it became possible to start purchasing stuff with them.
Just one minor tweak of what plays next can totally rip off independent artists on the platform. We have reached an era where algorithms aren't transparent, so artists like me are bewildered that for all the promoting we do on our own music, we rarely get any views and listens unless we literally spend thousands of dollars on advertising to break the visibility barrier...
For example, if I tweet a link to my own song (hosted on spotify) not only will Twitter potentially block people from seeing the link, their URL shortener may break the link to Spotify (Because the CEO doesn't want traffic leaving Twitter) and then even if the link goes to Spotify, they do a ton of things to siphon listeners that came for my music away from listening to my music, including NOT playing more of my music after the intended song plays. The net result is that hours of promotion as an artist only generates a few leads that often get ushered away from your content... It happens in many other ways for creators, artists, and even businesses without anyone being able to know that it's happening.
The future of being an independent entrepreneur is totally disrupted by social media as it slowly creates a stranglehold on the Internet. If we all don't start acknowledging this and calling out anti competitive practices and platform scams, we'll all be weeded out from being able to make our own living and we'll be forced to work for employers for minimum wages... The Future of the Internet looks grim from where I see it.
My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.)
So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices.
The Android spec sheet added a line:
Apple had a tech day talk where the guy in charge of device encryption dev team talked for an hour about the four layers of encryption on an iPhone. How it decrypts the bare minimum when booting, and keeps itself in a partially-decrypted mode while locked. How there's a bunch of fine-grained keys so that app-specific data can't leak out. So on, and so forth. The aim was to prevent state-sponsored groups pulling apart locked-but-powered-on phones and extracting plain text secrets directly from the flash, cache memory, or whatever.They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1].
Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.
As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice.
I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time.
Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.
If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.