microtherion

I've been wondering about that as well. It appears he & Vox Day were friends/collaborators and may have shared some political views: https://postcardsfromtheageofreason.com/2026/03/01/bpr1/

stable as in "close the stable doors after the horse has bolted"

It's sort of ironic that at the time, there were many complaints that Apple made its devices thin at the expense of more important features. Now that M series MacBooks are thicker again, there are complaints that they are too thick.

Personally, I love synthesis that can be generated on the client machine, in real time. For some applications, like screen readers, this is a really important feature.

Of course, the big interest these days is in cloud based assistants, where synthesizing on server and piggybacking on the rest of the answer is quite reasonable.

To me, the speech sounds impressively expressive, but there is something off about the audio quality that I can't quite put my finger on.

The "Anger Speech" has an obvious lisp (Maybe a homage to Elmer Fudd?). But I hear a similar, but more subtle, speech impediment in the "Adoration Speech". The "Fearful Speech" might have a slight warble to it. And the "Long Speech" is difficult to evaluate because the speaker has vocal fry to an extent that I find annoying.

This is bound to be a question that will be increasingly harder to answer. For instance, Apple processors have at least two different neural accelerators/matrix coprocessors (ANE and AMX) in addition to the integrated GPU. Do these count as "CPU"?

> Not only is the moon further, you also need to use more fuel to land on it

And take off again, if reusable spacecraft are meant to be used.

The skepticism and hate is based on observing decades of shameless dishonesty, which is itself a form of data provided by the company: https://motherfrunker.ca/fsd/

Supervised FSD — automating 99.9% of driving and expecting drivers to be fully alert for the other .1% — appears to go against everything we know about human attention.

As Henry Ford is (spuriously) claimed to have said: "If I'd asked my customers what they wanted, they'd have said a faster horse."

Apple did build Apple II models, up to and including the Apple IIgs. They had a good run. And the line was not without its flops — the Apple III was a notorious disaster, though allegedly more due to Jobs than Wozniak.

But none of the pure 8-bit PC vendors survived the 1980s. One of the better qualities of Jobs was that he was not afraid of the company disrupting itself — foregoing the short term success of the Apple II line in favor of the Mac, which in the long run was vastly superior. The same situation played out with the iPhone disrupting the iPod.

I'm quite skeptical of Tesla's reliability claims. But for exactly that reason, I welcome a company like Lemonade betting actual money on those claims. Either way, this is bound to generate some visibility into the actual accident rates.

You could also say it about the Mac, which Woz was, at best, peripherally involved in. Not saying that Jobs created these products "alone" — he obviously did not. But he was a key contributor.

Meanwhile, Woz has been involved in all sorts of products, including a cryptocurrency, and I can't think of a single one that got significant traction.

It's all a part of focusing on their core business, like… paying an $28M bribe to Melania Trump.

The other huge, huge difference is that one of the Steves has demonstrated he was able to build a successful product without the other's assistance.

I get to visit my 90-year-old mother in law a few times a week to get her TV setup (Cable box running Android TV, connected to a TV running Android TV — FML) working again.

To make matters worse, the cable box remote works via Bluetooth, the TV remote over IR, so getting any universal remote that works with both AND is simple seems a difficult prospect.

What are people even doing for universal remotes these days? Our household is equipped with Logitech Harmony remotes, which are no longer being made, and I dread the day they stop working.

Never heard that one (it may indeed be used that way, but if it were the only reason Apple would probably keep it in the Apple internal parts of their OS installs).

It would also be of limited use, as the engine is purely CPU based; it is single threaded and does not even use SIMD AFAIK, let alone GPU features or the neural engines.

A time limit is also deterministic in some sense. Level settings used to be mainly time based, because computers at lower settings were no serious competition to decent players, but you don't necessarily want to wait for 30 seconds each move, so there were more casual and more serious levels.

Limiting the search depth is much more deterministic. At lower levels, it has hilarious results, and is pretty good at emulating beginning players (who know the rules, but have a limited skill of calculating moves ahead).

One problem with fixed search depth is that I think most good engines prefer to use dynamic search depth (where they sense that some positions need to be searched a bit deeper to reach a quiescent point), so they will be handicapped with a fix depth.

Heh, I was just discussing this some minutes ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46595777

Oh, this led me down a rabbit hole…

I was maintainer of the Chess app from the early 2000s to about 2015. We first noticed in 2004 that level 1 (which was then "Computer thinks for 1 second per move) was getting stronger with each hardware generation (and in fact stronger than myself).

So we introduced 3 new levels, with the Computer thinking 1, 2, or 3 moves ahead. This solved the problem of the engine getting stronger (though the jump from "3 moves ahead" to "1 second" got worse and worse).

A few years after I had handed off the project, somebody decided to meddle with the level setting code (I was not privy to that decision). The time based levels were entirely replaced with depth based levels (which eliminates the strength inflation problem, but unfortunately was not accompanied by UI changes). But for some reason, parsing of the depth setting was broken as well, so the engine now always plays at depth 40 (stronger than ever).

This should be an easy fix, if Apple gets around to make it (Chess was always a side project for the maintainers). I filed feedback report 21609379.

It seems that somebody else had already discovered this and fixed it in a fork of the open source project: https://github.com/aglee/Chess/commit/dfb16b3f32e5a6633d2119...

Reportedly, Meta is paying top AI talent up to $300M for a 4 year contract. As much as I'm in favor of paying engineers well, I don't think salaries like this (unless they are across the board for the company, which they are of course not) are healthy for the company long term (cf. Anthony Levandowski, who got money thrown after him by Google, only to rip them off).

So I'm glad Apple is not trying to get too much into a bidding war. As for how well orgs are run, Meta has its issues as well (cf the fiasco with its eponymous product), while Google steadily seems to erode its core products.

Especially if said mother was murdered by the individual in question.

Maybe OpenAI should try the classical gambit of declaring that they could not possibly betray the confidence of a poor orphan.

Yes, that was my thought as well. As a youthful experimenter, I once did not clean up properly after myself and stopped smelling the H2S which was permeating the room (Back then, the recipe for H2S was in chapter 1 of the Chemistry sets. Good times!)

No longer noticing the smell is NOT a good thing!

I've had arthrosis in both knees for several years (due to a combination of youthful sports injuries and overweight). A few years ago I saw a knee specialist who predicted I was due for knee replacement sometime soon.

On the advice of a massage therapist I instead started a habit of using a home cycling machine for half an hour each morning. So far, it has worked wonders for me, and I hope I can hold on for a decade more, by which time the injection mentioned in the article might be ready for humans.

If you use the records as a display (and though I don't do that, I empathize; CD covers just don't generate the visceral reaction that LP covers do), wouldn't it make sense for publishers to offer record covers without the actual records?

> From what I can tell, everyone seems to be looking at chatbots

A friend recently explained to me that this trend is awful for newer businesses trying to get into a niche:

* Chatbots give a lot of weight to Wikipedia in their training data.

* Wikipedia demands "notability" for pages being created.

* So non-incumbent businesses have a hard time getting on Wikipedia, and chatbots keep recommending incumbents.

Inside Macintosh was great documentation (I’d argue that the second generation in the 1990s, split up by topics, was the peak of Apple’s documentation writing), but I would not classify it as “Internals” in the sense of how a 1970s computer would be documented. There was a clearly delineated API boundary beyond which it was discouraged to venture.

Yes, Apple was/is mostly about computing as an appliance (realized fully in iOS), but there was occasional dabbling with User computing, especially with HyperCard, and to some extent with AppleScript. It seems that ultimately these did not have enough uptake to warrant investing more into them.

The more time I spend getting elderly people’s entertainment systems back into a state where they can watch their 3 favorite TV channels in peace without getting lured into the paywalls of their Android TVs or cable providers, the more sympathetic I’m getting to the “appliance” view.

Yeah, I was also immediately thinking about the Lake Nyos disaster. But that one released something like 200k tons of CO2 in an instant, whereas this facility has 2k tons, which would more likely be released more gradually.

They are being sued by the SFC, which has been deputized by the actual copyright holders to act on their behalf: https://sfconservancy.org/copyleft-compliance/#linux

a) There are too damn many of them.

b) They have a complete lack of respect for robots.txt

I'm starting to think that aggressive scrapers are part of an ongoing business tactic against the decentralized web. Gmail makes self hosted mail servers jump through arduous and poorly documented hoops, and now self hosted services are being DDOSed by hordes of scrapers…

Yes, accessible in the sense of being readable without extensive prior knowledge. If I recall correctly, I read the initial edition while still in high school.