tshaddox

Fair enough. But people here are expressing disdain at this new feature, which is not that.

Surely it would be very rare to want to listen to music at its highest quality while simultaneously recording your voice. It’s perhaps conceivable for some sort of niche mode of music or audio production, I suppose.

This is certainly the opposite of my experience. The sound quality from someone speaking via their MacBook microphone is noticeably worse than someone speaking via their AirPods microphone.

15 seconds at a time, when the owner activates the feature. The scale of its recall is not meaningfully different than someone scribbling down 15 seconds worth of what they hear someone say (or even just remembering it), and does not pose a greater privacy risk than a scratchpad or human memory.

It’s also much less effective at recording people speaking for long durations than the audio recording feature that every smartphone for the last 20 years has supported.

Apps already work on Apple devices with many different aspect ratios.

In what way does this violate the privacy of anyone around them? It doesn't even store audio recordings, which is something every smartphone has been able to do for 20 years.

iPads have the same issue (to a lesser extent) if you're really looking for a device primarily for fullscreen 16:9 video. To be honest, the iPhone Duo (and iPads) are much more suited for multiple tiled apps and multi-column app layouts than they are for fullscreen 16:9 video.

Only if "pure marketing juice" means "plainly telling people about a straightforward feature they're adding to one of their products." Which like, okay, that is what marketing is, but are you suggesting they don't tell people?

> Providing ready-made UI components and templates has never been a million-dollar business, nor should it be.

Depends what you mean. I think it’s totally reasonable for a small team with a great reputation to offer a well-made component library and make millions of dollars from it. But I would never expect that to be a reliable source of recurring income, and certainly not enough to support a team of well-paid engineers, designers, marketers, etc. indefinitely.

To be honest, I wonder if AI is even the right thing to blame here, or just a timing coincidence. Is it not the case that they simply sold their UI library to roughly everyone who was in the market for a high-cost component library?

I doubt the modem would cost more than $5 at scale. No idea what sort of off peak data deals you could get at scale but I have to imagine it’s close to being feasible.

I’ve heard rumors of that, and also of TVs shipping with cellular modems with which to phone home. I don’t know if either have been confirmed, but it would be ridiculous for such a thing to be legal.

I never suggested it was out of the goodness of their hearts. I suspect it’s because it’s what customers want.

> Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links...

Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.

> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".

That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.

The Forester still has the awful infotainment system with the vertical screen, first introduced on the 2020 Outback. I actually like the vertical aspect ratio, and the screen is pretty bright and high resolution, but the underlying software is disastrous. It was slow and buggy and felt outdated when it was introduced 6 years ago!

For what it’s worth, the new 2026 Outback has an excellent new infotainment system and tons of physical controls for car settings. But apparently everyone hates it for the external redesign (I think it looks fine). Hopefully that interior will roll out to the rest of the models too.

For certain specific cases, sure, but there is a general concern about an AI agent doing something illegal or harmful against the intentions of the human operator. And this analogy of a BitTorrent client being used intentionally by a human to download copyrighted content is just not applicable.

I don't know. Any of these criticisms can be applied on a case be case basis, but I think I would be justifiably upset if any of these happened:

1. my qBittorrent client pirated content without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

2. my chatbot illegally infiltrated servers without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

3. my firearm killed a person without me intending it or taking any irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it

I don't really get what you're suggesting. You give a 1 year grace period for Metallica to pull all its music off the Internet, but then as soon as I host some of their MP3s on my Wordpress blog it's "public property of everyone" from that point forward?

> Also, I disagree - I don't think "fruit salad", or "chicken salad", or "egg salad" etc are "figurative" (not sure what you even mean by that), I would absolutely consider them legitimate salads.

I mean "figurative" in the typical sense: describing a thing using a word for a different thing in order to suggest a similarity between the two things. A fruit salad is fruit arranged similarly to how vegetables are arranged in a salad. A fruit pizza is a dish with a crust that looks similar to a pizza crust, topped with frosting and fruit in a way that evokes how pizza is topped with sauce, cheese, etc.

I’m fine with their first consideration:

> A salad must be a mixture of greens.

The only additional realization you need is that things like “fruit salad” and “chicken salad” are using the word “salad” figuratively. There’s no reason to expect our definition of “salad” to cover figurative usage. After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?

Will TVs stream UHD Blu-Ray rips off the network anyway? I guess modern TVs all have H.265 decoders now, so there’s no reason they couldn’t as long as the network interface is quick enough and they know how to handle common video containers.

Even UHD Blu-Ray isn't likely to need sustained transfer rates over 100 Mbps. The spec allows transfer rates of about 128 Mbps, and some discs reportedly have momentary spikes above that, but I suspect the vast majority of titles would be playable over Fast Ethernet, especially if given a few seconds of buffer.

> I'm strenuously disagreeing with the 75%, especially in terms of usage.

Oh for sure. I wasn't weighting by usage.

I've used it almost exclusively since around 2019, but that has been in the Bay Area and LA area where the data has presumably been very good relative to other areas.

I find that Apple Maps is typically pretty smart with its automatic zoom. For a typical intersection with just one turn to navigate, it will zoom in to give you a good sense of the lanes, stop signs/lights, etc. But when there are consecutive turns to navigate, or a heavily curved section of road (like highway on-ramps) it will zoom out and even rotate the map to show that upcoming context.

> in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.

Isn't that 99.9% referring to the reliability of spelling heuristics for the words that match a heuristic? For example, the -o and -a spelling heuristic reliably indicates gender something like 99+% of the time, but only about two thirds of Spanish nouns end in -o or -a. There are a few other suffixes with string gender indication, but even then I think you can only account for like 75% of Spanish nouns.

In Spanish, native speakers typically learn (implicitly) or memorize (explicitly) the gendered article along with the noun, so instead of thinking "hmm, let me remember the gender of mapa" they'll just have that noun stored internally as "el mapa". It's still a matter of memorization (at least for words whose gender violates the typically spelling heuristics), but it's not really conceived of as memorizing the word and then separately memorizing its gender. And of course, there will always be rare or specialized terms that a native speaker might recognize but confidently know the gender. This is especially true for the small set of nouns whose gender varies by region or context.

It’s a silly question, since (short of a major life change or economic system change) you need the grocery store and the job to have decent quality of life.

You need to trade your labor for money, and you need to trade your money for food. I would argue that there isn’t a huge difference in the fundamental nature of those two trades. Framing them in terms of “trade deficits” is pointing out which direction money is moving in each instance, but fundamentally they’re both just trades.

Don’t you just mean that one set of vibes resonates with your own vibes better than the other set of vibes?

I didn't say that it would increase RAM prices. I said "may in practice cause RAM to remain unaffordable."

That's actually the point. Opposing vibes are just as easy to utter as the initial vibes.