Hypothetically speaking, how useful would something like that be in a nuclear weapon fallout scenario? Can such a contraption detect the important isotopes and give the user an accurate idea of the level of danger they're in, does that change over time as isotope composition changes through decay?
I'm sure there are dozens of people in Germany who actively prefer iMessage but I haven't met one yet. Whatsapp achieved pretty much total market capture here back when SMS still were costly and the network effects that arose from that are among the strongest I've ever seen. I'm pretty sure if someone was to do a survey, almost everyone would say Messages is for SMS only and I think most of them wouldn't know it can do more than that.
That sucks, I was about to do the same (Jellyfin on the Synology, Apple TV for streaming). Seems there is no alternative to Plex that works with an Apple TV...
I'd love to use a Garmin or a Suunto, but they aren't integrated very well on iOS and I like the convenience of my iPhone and Macbook too much to switch to an Android. I think there are a lot of people who're not very satisfied with Apple Watches for sports tracking or who'd just like something that lasts a week at least. There are quality options outside of Apple Watches if you don't need it to feel like a tiny iPhone. Most of the UX I need was available on a Chinese smartwatch almost ten years ago (though super buggy back then), the basics aren't that hard and seeing how a fair lot of iOS apps have dropped their WatchOS apps for lack of usage I don't seem to be so singular in that.
But I don't think it'll hurt the Apple Watch sales all that much either, they still work very well as a fashionable accessory.
Lets see how that'll go when the competition starts offering really polished LLM assistants on their devices and people see their friends use them on their 400 Euro Androids and all they get on their 1700 Euro iPhone is Siri from 2011.
If they do then they'll just lose market share to Android, because the Asian manufacturers will offer all these features and they're getting more polished each year. For me personally, all Apple really has going for their products these days is being very stable and dependable, I can always just get the newest Pro phone and have something that'll work well for me. They used to be attractive because they weren't Chinese but US tech is becoming an even bigger liability, and the Asian competition has a lot more on offer in terms of features though it's a lot more of a gamble if it'll be executed well and get maintained and I don't like to gamble on things like that. Most casual users already don't care, nor should they.
But if Apple cripple their devices further I think a lot more of their core user base will be willing to try an Android, depending on what features they axe. If they make iPhones inconvenient in addition to somewhat lagging behind the market, all they'd have left is their brand and marketing and that's about to take a beating in the looming tariff wars.
No, I think they may do a little of that for symbolics and they certainly will throw a lot of fits but ultimately they'll just comply and that will be that.
Today it's Ukraine and F35s, who and what will it be in a year? I suppose European governments are taking a long hard look at strategic dependencies on the US right now, like the whole
economy running on top of Microsoft and Google and other US-made SaaS. If all of that went dark at once, I honestly don't know how some of the larger companies I know could keep operating. They all have fallbacks for critical infrastructure obviously but those are US-made, too...
I don't really use it as a (lightweight) IDE or the like anymore, but as a place to keep unstructured notes and snippets and the like because SublimeText never ever loses anything unsaved. It's pretty much indispensable at this point, whenever I compose something a bit longer or have some text to do a search-replace on or just some text I need three steps later in what I'm doing, it goes in another tab in Sublime. I have at least one tab I re-use since before Covid-19, it's absolutely fantastic how stable it is. Love it for that.
Anything with Musk's name attached to it is also in danger of getting hit with bans and sanctions if Musk and the current US government keep operating as they've done since the inauguration, so I'd also see that as a risk with regard to availability of those services outside the US. Apple is pretty good at keeping their products out of political crossfire but Musk seems to pretty much be seeking trouble these days.
Social media could have been utopian, too, yet those apps are algorithmic manipulation hellscapes that threaten to bring down even the most robust democracies. The same people who make it so are poised to be the ones in control of these AIs. I don't think they want the kind of utopia you imagine.
That researcher probably wouldn't have an army of SWEs at his or her disposal but be out of a job like the SWEs. If they get AI to a point where it can be a safe and competent senior SWE, it'll be able to fill a huge breadth of other roles as well. Human creativity isn't looking like quite the moat it was supposed to be.
Our societies are not in any way equipped to deal with putting what may well be a sizable majority of working-age people out of work, possibly for good, nor are we in any way ready for the kind of power certain tech billionaires would have if their workforce were to scale with just the amount of hardware they own.
At this point I kind of hope the current breed of AIs will plateau quickly and stay there for a while so that maybe society can catch up instead of getting surprise bulldozed by a gaggle of tech giants.
We have almost two dozen Ikea Tradfri bulbs and they've been great. We had a few older Hue ones too, those never seemed to keep their state across power loss and their light quality was pretty bad given the price, really not impressed.
Or just get a mini PC. I have an Intel N100 based one that wasn't much more expensive than a higher-end Pi, housing, wallwart, SSD and adapter, is substantially more powerful, energy consumption is pretty close, and it's potentially more useful if it needs to be repurposed later.
So let's say the US could shoot down everything Russia throws at them, could tell apart all of the decoys, intercept every single MIRV warhead and take out every other secret weapon Russia may have deployed. It doesn't take many hits to take out a big chunk of the US population and wipe out its economy, so that would have to be done at 100% success rate over large parts of the country.
Europe cannot do anything remotely like that, so close to everything west of the Ural would burn and pretty much everyone there would die, hundreds of millions of dead and God knows how many more further to the east. The soot from burning cities and forests would darken the whole northern hemisphere for several growing seasons, large parts of the US population would probably just freeze or starve, more so if the US has been hit as well. And that leaves out fallout dispersal, especially from the inventories of nuclear power plants hit with nukes and so on.
There simply is no winning an all-out nuclear war.
There are lots of amateur photographers out there that use Apple hardware yet so far Apple only monetizes storage. I wouldn't be surprised to see a subscription offering that includes pro tier features for Photos.app good enough to replace Lightroom for enthusiasts but not for actual professionals.
> Get rid of green text when messaging Android phones
I don't think iMessage is big anywhere outside the US (which appears to account for about 9% of iPhone users). I don't think a majority of global users even knows there are different colors.
In the event of another Trump presidency (or a successor in spirit) getting cut off for military purposes is probably more like expected, and in a post-NATO world Russia might get a lot more aggressive towards western Europe. That's probably what is behind most such time horizons right now, but even in the mid to long term, rocket tech will remain highly strategic (e.g. for nuclear weapon delivery), and capabilities like that need to be built up well before any conflict escalates.
There are a lot of highly repetitive tasks in a hunter and gatherer lifestyle (e.g. gathering, making tools and clothes, tracking, plus all of the memorizing that comes with a non-written cultural tradition). I'm sure someone with a deep special interest in horse behavior would have been extremely useful for groups that subsist on the wild horses of the European tundra. Same for people with ADHD, someone who is highly motivated by novelty and prone to risk-taking should be pretty useful for finding new hunting and gathering opportunities and adapting to changing environments. You won't find out there are plump tasty BBQ birds on that island in the distance if you don't brave the journey.
If you want to be sceptical about SpaceX, why focus on the one thing they've proven they are good at? If Starship fails I have a hunch it will be for reasons not directly related to engineering, like unstable billionaire tantrums or demand not materializing in time, or simply politics.
You've just mentioned the topic yourself, giving it a little bit of attention and making others do so too, and you might well not have done that without these stunts, or even had this opportunity. One thing such stunts do very well is ensure that people don't have that topic driven out of their minds entirely, anchor it there, even if it doesn't take center stage. That makes it much easier to activate through other campaigns, channels or even uncoordinated word of mouth, and while that may not seem like much, big corp marketing departments spend fortunes to do the same for their brands. Is there a risk that soup stunts will foster resentment to a degree that harms their goal? Absolutely, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet. Most people appear to forget the stunts fairly quickly, whereas climate change as a topic is gaining traction, and while it's hard to attribute any of this directly to the various steps taken to foster awareness, it's well established that anchoring an idea in people's minds is a crucial basis for bottom-up action – just look at how the MAGA slogan has galvanized the US far right, to a large degree by firmly anchoring certain core tenets in people's minds, even those on the other side of the aisle. I'm wary of the downstream effects the current protests may wind up having, but I can't think of an alternative that's actually doable and that would have the same amount of impact.
Almost all of them have already been read and are waiting for me to build something to pull the links out of Brave and download/archive/index them somehow. I've been wanting to do this for a long time, but haven't yet.