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Bud

9,295 karma · joined May 28, 2010

Professional classical baritone. Currently appear with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, American Bach Soloists, Carmel Bach Festival, Bach Collegium San Diego, Marin Oratorio, California Bach Society, etc. Carnegie Hall solo debut in 2007. Lincoln Center debut 2014 with Philharmonia Baroque and Mark Morris Dance Group.

I'm also an IT admin. Tech background includes: MS365/Azure, Unix sysadmin, network admin, jack-of-all-trades IT support (Mac/PC/iOS).

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Bud··on Turn off and restrict access to Apple Intelligence features on Mac
You might want to update your information a bit.

https://pogueman.substack.com/p/125-tests-of-the-new-ai-siri

Bud··on Dario, Please
I guarantee you that no such result would ensue, because said law would be completely unenforceable even with the pre-Trump Supreme Court and legal system. And with the current Supreme Court? Laughably unenforceable.

It's just like you said: this only works if the threat of punishment is credible.

Bud··on LG denies TV spying claims, says tracking and snooping concerns 'not true'
Even the screen itself can be used as a microphone, and a pretty good one, too.
Bud··on Apple reveals new AI architecture built around Google Gemini models
Let's actually not hope that, and let's not indulge the EU regulators' fantasies that they get to dictate the product design of products from non-EU countries.

Force Apple to support all kinds of arbitrary models? That's a comically bad idea.

Bud··on TikTok will not introduce end-to-end encryption, saying it makes users less safe
BBC calling encryption "controversial privacy tech" is deeply disappointing and dangerous.
Bud··on Airbus A320 – intense solar radiation may corrupt data critical for flight
From their viewpoint, you have to think about what happens if, after they became aware of this vulnerability, there was then a crash because they weren't prompt and aggressive enough in addressing it. That's the kind of thing that ruins your entire company forever.
Bud··on Stellantis Is Spamming Owners' Screens with Pop-Up Ads for New Car Discounts
Same company that is planning to deprive customers of CarPlay even though virtually all of their customers want it.
Bud··on Moderna has unraveled
He is, but it's certainly not plausible.
Bud··on Moderna has unraveled
It raises questions that James Comer keeps raising to attack Fauci, but which never seem to get anywhere close to being proven. It's now been four years. The various libels against Fauci remain unsupported.
Bud··on China has added forest the size of Texas since 1990
It should be noted that massive tree-planting efforts do not magically create "forest". They create tree plantations. Forest is a complex ecosystem that takes some time.
Bud··on Apple will phase out Rosetta 2 in macOS 28
It's reasonable to say this is wrong. But really, this seems like a tiny subset of users. Who bought a Mac Pro in 2023 after Apple Silicon had been out for 3 years already? Almost nobody, because it wasn't a real performance improvement by that time. For those extremely niche folks for which it was somehow still beneficial, they definitely won't want to still be using such a machine in 2028. They will have moved on to something like an M5 Ultra Mac Studio or whatever form the Mac Pro takes next.
Bud··on The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem
Which shady marketing? Because I found out about the APPro 2 support from Apple.
Bud··on The AirPods Pro 3 flight problem
Not sure what is up with this, but I just flew from Italy to the US with my AirPods Pro 3 and did not experience any issues. So it's apparently not present 100% of the time.

Also: battery life is VASTLY improved on the APP 3. Rated time is 8 hrs and I'm getting closer to 9.

Bud··on Flock's gunshot detection microphones will start listening for human voices
There's no reasonable expectation of pervasive video/audio capture, permanent recording, and complete AI analysis of all actions in public by all citizens forever, either. But that's the direction in which we're rapidly heading.
Bud··on ABC yanks Jimmy Kimmel’s show ‘indefinitely’ after threat from FCC chair
Neither of those things occurred, here. Kimmel's remarks were extraordinarily mild, and they also happen to be entirely true.
Bud··on South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid
I have an Ioniq 5 and I have had nothing but perfect experiences with my Hyundai dealer. Both for sales, and service. Not that service has been much of a thing, since EVs require so little service.

It's also clearly not just me, as the Ioniq 5 has been rated the EV of the year several years running by multiple publications.

Bud··on South Korea will bring home 300 workers detained in Hyundai plant raid
Uh, they were BUILDING the factory. Which was then going to provide hundreds of jobs to Americans.

Seems hard to characterize this in any way other than calling it incredibly stupid.

Bud··on There Goes the American Muscle Car
A lot of this is true, but also, look at the safety records of those modern vehicles. They protect the driver a LOT better. A totaled car is just a car. Getting paralyzed or killed is a lot harder to fix.
Bud··on Altered states of consciousness induced by breathwork accompanied by music
This is literally why I've been a professional choral/solo classical singer for 30 years. It works! It's a great way of life.
Bud··on GPT-5
There's at least as much reason to believe the opposite. Much of today's obesity has been created by desk jobs and food deserts. Both of those things could be reversed.
Bud··on Unsafe and Unpredictable: My Volvo EX90 Experience
Having a very expensive car just randomly roll to a stop on a highway is a "vibe", too. More of a vibe than anything we might reasonably claim to be picking up from this guy, I would opine.
Bud··on For $595, you get what nobody else can give you for twice the price (1982) [pdf]
Atari 400 couldn't really compete. I had one as a kid. Neighbor kid had a C64. That membrane keyboard was a big handicap.

The Atari sure had some nice games, though!

The full IBM PC wasn't really a competitor; it was 3x the price and very few families were willing to shell out that kind of money at that point.

Bud··on NASA's Project Scientist Faces Painful Choices as Voyager Mission Nears Its End
The power loss is due to the fact that the power source is plutonium. Which decays over time. So, your lump of plutonium contains less and less plutonium over time, and thus generates less power. A more modern generator doesn't really change this basic fact; the power source would still likely be plutonium, and would have the same issue. But yes, you could send up a larger lump of plutonium so that your power budget started out larger and would remain adequate for a longer time.
Bud··on MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming
Basically none of this is true. The wild card system has resulted in an NFL where well over half the league has playoff hopes very deep into the season. It's completely false that "by about the 4th week of the season", the league has bifurcated. Simply not even close to being true.

The NFL has also been extremely successful in leveling the playing field via salary cap and draft, such that franchises beset by woe can become title contenders within a single year. The most recent of many, many examples is the Washington Commanders. Detroit came before that.

And no, the playoffs are not "already set" before the last 3 weeks. This is completely inaccurate, as anyone who watches the NFL and reads about the near-infinite playoff scenarios at the close of every season already knows.

And lastly, only a Brit with no understanding of the economics of American football would even propose that relegation could work in this sport. It can't. The sport costs far too much for that and any such "relegated" teams would instantly collapse financially. NFL rosters contain 53 players with a practice squad of 17 and gigantic support staffs which absolutely could not survive without the full levels of NFL TV contract funding, stadium revenues, and other financial flows that full NFL membership provides.

And lastly, anyone who is paying any attention to the NFL draft over time knows that there is no issue with colleges producing pro-ready players.

Bud··on CrowdStrike's impact on aviation
It's unfair to pretend that all journalists have the same level of professionalism (or lack thereof) with regard to sourcing.

They don't.

Bud··on Apollo DN10000: Quad CPU/128Mb RAM workstation from 1988 [pdf]
I ran a stack of Apollos in the 90s at the U of Iowa. Student hobby thing. We bought them from university surplus. Had a DN5500, a DN4500, and a DN3500. Ran email, a telnet BBS, and web services on them.
Bud··on Micron Ships Crucial-Branded LPCAMM2 Memory Modules: 64GB of LPDDR5X for $330
Soldered? It's not soldered. It's part of the actual SoC. Could we please update our research to more recent than 20 years ago?
Bud··on What Happens When a Fifteen Year Old Pumps and Dumps with a Net Profit of $800k? (2002)
2002 was actually quite late in the Palm era. The iconic Palm V, for instance, dates back to 1999. And BlackBerry had a mature smartphone by 2002. Nothing compared to an iPhone of course, but quite capable.
Bud··on Better Call GPT: Comparing large language models against lawyers [pdf]
That's for a court to decide. It's certainly reasonable to guess that that court case is coming. The only question is how soon.
Bud··on Accuracy of Commercial Sleep-Trackers Compared to Research-Grade Tools
This is cool, but it'd be nice if they had evaluated Apple Watch, which is far more common than the devices they measured for. I've been tracking sleep for years with mine. My sense is that it's pretty accurate, but the problem is, I'm asleep during the time in which I could attempt to verify this! ;)
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