Can you provide evidence for your claim? Most people take this statement at face value and I don’t understand why. I do some volunteer work supporting elderly people that have issues adapting to a digital only world and I am always pleasantly surprised by the performance of their old iPhones all the way down to the 8 (old phones they get from their kids)
Apple admitted to slowing down iPhones to keep the batteries from failing, and agreed to stop doing it and created a new battery replacement plan. I’ve personally experienced the benefit of getting the battery on Apple devices replaced which made them behave like new again. There’s a reason old Apple devices hold their value a lot better than competing manufacturers.
They hold value now. They didn’t if we go back to before those lawsuits. Apple can blow smoke wherever it wants, but that 500 million loss isn’t about battery health.
As an aside, I have this lovely tower from France, barely used, scrap price should be very high. Priced to sell?
It was a pretty terrible controversy at the time but I think the battery health settings pane we got out of it was a good compromise and a net positive. What would be even better would be fully user-replaceable batteries.
To be more precise, the phones weren’t slowed down to keep the batteries from failing, they were slowed down to maintain stability and stop random crashes. As batteries age they lose their peak voltage capability, so you’re basically undervolting your components unless you slow them down.
Every time I upgrade iOS past a few major versions there is significant slow down. I don’t think it’s done on purpose, it’s just that software grows more demanding over time.
Nah. Adding more features to software doesn’t make software run slower. The problem is that software developers only optimise enough to make it run fast on our own computers. Because we keep getting new computers, we get lazier over time and software gets slower.
Electron is the most obvious example of this sort of thing, but examples are everywhere once you start looking.
Yes. Microsoft is scrambling at the moment because the macbook neo only has 8gb of ram and runs great. Windows 11 can't compete on that hardware because it's so bloated.
I find it strange given microsoft made windows 3.11, which ran fine on computers with just 4mb of ram. Windows 11 is of course more complex than windows 3.11. But not so much that it should need literally 2000 times as much ram.
In some ways, the memory apocalypse is a great thing. The windows start menu should never have been made in javascript and react. I'm hoping our industry uses this as a push to make our software small and fast again. If ram is 5x more expensive, we should aim to make 2gb of ram be more than enough for regular computing tasks.
I wonder if the computing requirements of windows scale exponentially? It looks like it.
I suspect if we graphed them, they’d pretty perfectly match the computers that were available. Ie, I think windows is optimised just enough to run on the low end hardware of each generation.
I agree, it’s not a natural phenomenon per-se and it is getting worse. I think this consumer hardware problem will actually help get us back on track, to a degree.
That’s the literal truth, but the subtlety behind it was that CPU spikes combined with low voltage batteries were causing phones to shut off. Apple’s slowing down the phone down was nominally because customers prefer slightly slower phones to phones that shut off unexpectedly. Should they have announced this as a feature and had a toggle switch to allow users that preferred the option to disable it? Of course. But I don’t necessarily think they did the wrong thing.
Thank you for the sanity. This is like being being mad at Ford because a 20 year old truck runs worse than a new one, and they’d want some engine design that would make it rev in to redline (and blow up while driving) to keep the original horsepower.
Just follow the people you care about, only use the "Following" tab, ignore the "For you" tab, block the ads - so you can still choose freely who manipulates you and how. At least X still gives you real control over a chronological timeline.
It’s really surprising. When Apple announced the multi-billion dollar deal with Google to power Apple Intelligence I thought great things were coming. Instead we are getting more and more bad news: delayed Pro models and AI leadership leaving. I wonder if Apple know something the rest of us don’t know or if they are already regretting their decision.
Besides Apple apparently making Siri AI model agnostic, the choice to go with Google was almost certainly for practical reasons. Google is a low-risk established player that already has a long work history with Apple. Google also isn't in an existential battle to establish themselves, Gemini still amounts to just another project at Google. There is tangible non-zero risk that either OAI or Anthropic will be gone in 5 years, or will be forced to leave Apple high and dry to save themselves. There is almost no risk Google will be in either such position. And worst case scenario, Google has incredibly deep pockets should Apple pursue a "refund."
What Apple wants out of Google is Siri that runs at 8gb ram and isn’t a horrible embarrassment that feels like a primitive markov chain. Given how good Gemma 4 is, Google can squeeze some serious performance in small models. Whether they can make bleeding edge models is irrelevant to Apple.
As someone on the Apple beta.. the model is almost completely irrelevant to the experience. Apple has gone and done Apple things by nerfing the experience so completely that almost any model in the past year would be fine. I still reach for ChatGPT/Claude/Grok constantly instead of the AI toy that Apple calls the new Siri.
Apple isn't counting on their model to be a frontier coding and cowork model. Gemini is perfectly fine for the tasks that new Siri is supposed to be doing.
If you have a recent EU passport (like 6-8 years), biometrics like fingerprints are already in the chip, and you won't need to be fingerprinted upon arrival or departure, at least in theory, I wouldn't be surprised if some bureaucrat decided that the passport data can't be trusted and we'll fingerprint everybody anyway.
We're not talking about people who have an EU passport, we're talking about those who want to enter the EU with a non-EU passport. These people get fingerprinted on entry (and some of them on exit too) since 2025.
Is that good or bad? Maybe a naive thought but the first I think is that check every time is to check biometrics matches with what is in the passport without storing them, checking only once mean your picture and fingerprint is stored a central place and is used in combination to later verify that the passport is yours
Before this change, my average time for EU immigration check was 10-20 min. After this change, it's 2-3 hours. Is that good or bad?
I don't care much about "verify that the passport is yours". For centuries, the person presenting the passport was supposed to be the owner of it, with their photo (aka "biometrics") as a proof. Comparing your passport picture with your face is what border controls have been doing since forever.
That is clearly bad. I was commenting based on the privacy point of it, not the user experience. On the privacy part it is also strange that fingerprints, something we leave copy off all over the place, is considered private and safe information, instead of something that is easy to copy and relatively easy to spoof
The linked article argues that our pictures and fingerprints are "our most sensitive data" and it's bad giving it to anyone, like the US Government. I tend to agree on the "sensitive" part but not sure I agree on "US Govt" part.
The fact that we leave fingerprints everywhere is hardly relevant, considering the costs of retrieving and storing them en masse are astronomical.
The licence plates on our cars are out in the open for everyone to see, and yet when a private company collects them and makes a searchable database out of it -- with locations and timestamps -- making it possible for anyone with access to build traceable paths of all of our movements since forever, it results in people getting enraged, and in my opinion justifiably so.
I believe the coding tool revenue is an important factor right now but not the endgame. The AI companies have to become consumer products to justify their gigantic valuations. We always talked about the “super apps” - one app that fulfills most consumer needs, like
WeChat in China.
OpenAI is the company most visibly making a huge bet on becoming a “consumer super device”, even designing their own hardware to stop being dependent on Apple and Android.
The long term battle is not AI companies vs SaaS, but rather AI companies vs big consumer brands - Apple, Google, Meta, Amazon.
Imagine having the ultimate digital assistant that you can throw any task at. Under the hood it creates its own code and interfaces on the fly to help you accomplish your task. By using LLMs as coding assistants we are all training them to become really good at it. If the newcomers succeed to deliver the ultimate digital assistant first, then even a monster like Apple could become obsolete.
I prefer that scenario to the one we had before where too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.
We are still dealing with the consequences…
I don't know, I feel like llms are the even worse replacement for social networks and maximized ad impressions. Now you don't even need a network or users to produce the addictive content and inject narrative that is so impactful on our brains and lives
I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks. And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).
Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks. Looking around, I expect I'm not alone, but this may not be the default experience. And the LLMs certainly aren't perfect. They can hallucinate, they're often sycophantic, they're bad at judgment in a number of ways, probably others I'm missing.
Compared to actual people, they suck. Compared to social media as it exists today, they have orders of magnitude to fall before your comparison makes sense to me. And, at least for now, the LLMs are the ones getting better while the social networks are- AFAICT, universally- getting worse.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.
If by "social networks" you mean platforms like X, Reddit or HN, then sure, but bar is pretty low there.
But let's not forget that both technologies mainly isolate and alienate you from real world and real people. The fact that the more recent one doesn't suck as much yet is not very comforting.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks.
This is kind of making the parent's argument for them about the dangers...
> And the LLMs never try to make me feel angry or stupid, they never ignore my arguments to go on their own soapbox, they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately), and they've yet to tell me to my face that the purpose of their interactions with other people is not to convince or even communicate with those people but to perform for an audience (often one that doesn't feasibly exist).
You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected. The world has conflict. Not all conflict is bad. Yes, social media weaponizes that conflict for ads, but I think the opposite is more dangerous in creating completely distorted realities. What you're describing sounds worse than the worst nightmare I've ever had, a world in which I'd be constantly disconnected from everyone else and would be disillusioned into thinking I'm not.
> Some caveats here: my view of social media is biased by the fact that jerks tend to pull me out of the woodwork- I get ragebaited, although I think I avoid the literal bait- so many of my interactions are with jerks.
>You're basically asking to be coddled, affirmed, validated, and protected.
Incorrect. My interactions with LLMs simply don't look like this. I don't know where you got this idea from what I said. I have a prompt that begs the thing to call me out, and it currently does so too much, which is exactly what I prefer.
What it doesn't do is rub minor disagreements in my face, jump to conclusions about who I am based on pre-existing beliefs, or tell me to go to therapy when I earnestly admit my humanity.
> I have more meaningful intellectual conversations with LLMs in a given day than in a month on social networks
Social media felt this way in the early days, too.
> they almost never feed me misinformation (and never deliberately)
This is dangerously untrue. LLMs will deliberately tell you the things you want to hear. They even "call you out" in exactly the ways that are most palatable to you. There is ample evidence that LLMs can be biased. The ability to broadly influence individual opinions, without even needing bot accounts on social media is exactly one of the reasons so many people who want power/money are flocking to control these LLMs.
> so many of my interactions are with jerks
This is one of the ways that the LLMs are "scarier" and more powerful than social networks. Real people are more likely to be obviously pushing agendas or otherwised easily dismissed.
> LLMs are the ones getting better
Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media. It's the reach and anonymity of social media without needing to control a feed algorithm, deal with content or people that doesn't fit your agenda, or produce fake content that does.
Did you mean to say you feel LLMs will be made into an even worse replacement? Otherwise not clear on your "early days" point.
The second half of your second paragraph is also forward looking- as I said, LLMs would have to get orders of magnitude worse for this to be a concern versus social media. I am surrounded by people- smart, informed people- who were convinced by instagram or TikTok or whatever that Mitch McConnell was brain dead a few weeks back, despite their being wrong about Trump in the same way several times already. We're in a thread mentioning "all the negative externalities from AI development", and I just have to hope they're not talking about water usage and electric prices and silent-but-deadly infrasound because everybody inexplicably believes that those are real, serious concerns. LLMs aren't doing this! This is the status quo!
The chatbot I'm interacting with does not tell me the things I want to hear. This is just not true. I don't know how to convince you otherwise.
>Getting better at what? The things you list are exactly the things that make LLMS subtly powerful and far more dangerous that social media
? At not hallucinating, not being sycophantic, making good quality judgments, making good strategic judgments. The things I listed. I don't know how this connects with the rest of this paragraph.
My "agenda" is believing true things and not believing false things. Sorry, but if someone is opposed to this for me, they are not a person I'd like to speak with.
> I remember lamenting all through the 2010s that all the high paying jobs were basically ad revenue supported.
That's never been true for financial services, many of which offer very high-paying jobs for high-frequency trading, hedge fund management, market operations, etc. There are many other industries with high value IT jobs that are not ad-supported.
Those jobs are much more niche, and require much more specialized knowledge. Google alone probably has more software employees than all of the high paying trading firms combined. It's a possible career path, sure, but its like comparing taxi driver opportunities with stretch limo driver opportunities IMO. Totally different scales.
AI is much more similar to classic cloud/infra with a lot more OSS than finance afaik, and probably already employs more devs than prop firms.
(I'm not counting big bank jobs because those are definitely not high paying)
> too many smart people were building out social networks and similar services trying to maximize ad impressions.
Honest question: where should these very smart people work then in your opinion? Nearly all suitable-looking, "smarter" ideas that come to my mind will bring less revenue/profit in expectation than, for example, letting them maximize ad impressions.
I of course wish we lived in a "more intelligent" world where this is not the case. :-(
Call me crazy, but the smartest people I know have rejected maximizing their employer's revenue and profit as their goal. Or even their own company if they go that route. Find a niche, work it, enjoy it, and enjoy the rest of your life, too.
Probably not on systems that rot democracy, freedom, and human expression. Companies like Google and Meta are net negative for humanity and the people that built these companies and continue to work for them are evil in their apathy towards the human cost of their salary.
The problem with this is people investing their time/expertise/money/energy into the common good and then have a small number of people ruining the benefit for their own ends, knocks the well-meaning out of the most positive people. The common good only works well when everyone wants the common good.
You seem to have independently discovered the market failure commonly know as the Free-rider problem, for which there are many solutions, and which is not a dispositive preemptive argument against the establishment or management of common good(s).
For example, Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work illuminating design principles illustrated by long enduring common pool resource institutions.
> Ah, then my second wish will be for everyone to want the common good.
People have very different, often contradictory opinions what the "common good" is.
I would even claim that this question is a special case of the millennia-old philosophical problem of defining what "good" actually means (i.e. defining ethics), which has resulted in myriads of different opinions:
> where should these very smart people work then in your opinion?
Anywhere else. Ads are a net negative to society and provide no value. ANY activity outside of pushing ads is a better contribution to society as a whole.
> I mean, war, in all its cruelty and tragedy, at the same time it brings the worst from people is also able to bring out the best.
I can see it from here: out of tens of thousands of people, one man takes a stand to save a handful of children from all the pillage, rape and murder.
In an alternate world, this man might have (gasp) tried to run a business instead. Sure, the children and city would still be alive instead of burning to ashes, but who cares?
Look, there's not much positive to say for the ad-driven Internet, but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here.
> but to consider "pixels on screens that you disagree with" to be worse than actual mass killing is maybe a tad hyperbolic here
And who considers this?
I never wrote that world with war but without business would be overall better than world without war but with people profiting from ad business. I merely pointed out that war can bring out the best from people - mercy, valor, honor, sacrifice, selflessness. Business cannot, as it is about commodification and profit.
That will certainly come in time. We're already starting to see/hear the beginnings of it. My hope is that the market maintains competition because the moment one or two corps have monopoly/duopoly they will go full throttle toward that I'm afraid.
It is not enough to invent a new medicine. You also need to make it easily available. People investing in AI are not interested in giving new awesome medicine to people that couln't afford it.
Talk to employees at anthropic and OpenAI. Listen to the talks from the higher-ups. Sam Altman even said something to the effect of “we don’t need a working business model because AGI will figure out how to make money”.
My guess is these AI companies are counting on the money to come from traditional SAAS style services only. This whole AI would be used to gather enough capital to rewrite most of the existing SAAS services under one umbrella, sort of super APP concept. The SAAS businesses doing the layoffs will soon realize that for this whole time they were just pouring their money into their own demise
I'm not even sure that I do prefer the AI train to the social media / ad train. I certainly would if the direction was "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so to gradually free citizens from the need to work", but right now it's "we're throwing ourselves blindly in AI so that we can sacrifice workers for higher corporate profits".
Not to mention how they will be used by terrorists and evil people to create biological weapons and other tools of mass slaughter. Or how it will be/is being used by criminals to target vulnerable people and businesses. Or how coupled with drone warfare the world becomes an unlivable hellhole in the next decade. But Marc Andreesan said only losers are against “tech accelerationiism” on twitter so here we are.
You can, right now, find out how to synthesize VX or sarin, or how to weaponize anthrax. You can and have been able to acquire this knowledge without the use of AI. Knowledge is not the obstacle to proliferation of biological and chemical weapons. It's hard to set up the infrastructure. See Aum Shinrikyo.
If you believe that AI is powerful enough to help the good people (however you define that), why isn't that also coupled with the belief that it is powerful enough to help the bad people (ditto)? Either the capability of this tech is completely overblown or it can help a wide swath of people including those with conflicting ideologies.
I absolutely believe that AI can be used by bad people in harmful ways. I don't think that's going to take the form of mass murder. I don't think knowledge is the missing component there.
Well, you’ve convinced me. Ai changes nothing, so then we should be terrified of the capital being poured into and the opportunity costs lost to the current thing(tm).
Sounds like you're reading into Amodei's propaganda as to why they should control AI. The information to make biological weapons for example is nothing new, it has been on the Internet for decades.
Should we control nuclear weapons? Is nuclear technology of the sort we’re fighting a war over right now a bigger technological advance than AI when it comes to war fighting capabilities? I suppose if you think ai is nothing big, it makes sense to not want to control it. Or, if you are all for widespread nuclear proliferation, then your position would make sense. ELSE: you’re totally illogical.
An LLM can't help you build a nuke. LLMs can't paper over hard engineering challenges like "You need to reinvent the centrifugal separator industry" and "rocket engineering is pretty difficult" and "you need really really good data to simulate things before you can actually build an implosion device" and less engineering challenges like "The CIA keeps murdering anyone who works on this"
There's never been an information access problem with nuclear weapons. The information was so public that most physicist realized everyone was building bombs from the sudden lack of published papers on how you could build bombs.
It's just silly how people seem to believe that if you just have a page worth of text saying something, you can suddenly do that thing.
Even a magical superintelligent AI could not do these things. It's going to tell you the exact same thing that has been known for nearly a century now:
"Hire 100 engineers and a couple physicists and 1000 very skilled machinists and laborers, and spend a billion dollars on plumbing, and then do that a second time if you need to deliver the device using a missile"
Meanwhile a dirty bomb is trivial.
These things don't happen because people who want to cause mass harm are generally poorly resourced.
"The smartest people" were not working on ads because building an advertising behemoth is not a smart thing to do.
When there's nothing good being invested in, "the smartest people" are simply underutilized. They do things that they think are good instead.
"The smartest people" have never sought maximum capital accumulation, and have not historically been driven by "highest wages" jobs.
The computer industry formed out of WW2 because a bunch of smart people ran into each other and did what they thought was really cool and had realized was suddenly possible. Von Neuman literally met one of the other guys and discussed computers as a theory at a train station and that meeting was influential on the future industry. They did not try to make billions of dollars. They had fairly average jobs that paid average. Often working for the government itself.
"The smartest people" did not work on targeting ads at people, and while some of them may have been involved with early transformer work, they certainly would be disillusioned with LLMs by now and would not be working at companies burning trillions on them.
This both destroys discourse, and centralizes the means of production into ~4 companies, with everyone else paying them an economic tax in order to be competitive.
None, but for actual communication by lay people, it cost a ton of money for audio and video calls by having to pay their phone service provider a lot, or calling cards, or whatever.
I mean there are ads in certain chatGPT plans. There have already been multiple studies showing that regular use of genAI makes you less intelligent...
Additionally, it's pretty clear that the owners of this tech (dario, altman, etc..) do not have the best interest of "the people" at heart and only care about accumulating as much power and wealth possible. Not that it's their responsibility to save humanity or something, but I'm not sure this future is much better...
I totally agree with you that our unhinged consumption behavior is the core problem. And with AI we stepped on the accelerator again.
But regarding your second statement. The actual problem is the greenhouse effect of CO2 and Methane in the atmosphere which traps the suns energy in our atmosphere heating up oceans, ice and landmass. The heat we produce is negligible compared to the energy the sun sends every day. The greenhouse gases are the problem. And you are right, pulling away that blanket so that more heat can dissipate into space will take a looong time (growing trees) or cost an insane amount of (clean) energy, reversing the chemical processes of burning oil, gas and coal.
Looks like he got hot milked by “advisors” who insisted in an overly complicated setup. Setting up a UG is fast and easy as long as you stick to the standard and you don’t need advisors or lawyers.
You can do the same in Germany. Costs 29 Euros with an online form. Once the sole proprietorship is setup you apply for your tax id and done. The whole process took 2 weeks in my city. Legally you can even start invoicing as soon as you registered your business.
The problem with OP is that he chose an overly complicated structure. Probably got milked by lawyers and advisors.
I don’t know the specifics but the OP chose a complicated setup. Why not just use a GmbH which is the equivalent to an Inc in the US? The capital requirement is 12500 in the bank not 25000 as stated. There are online services that run the whole process for you similar to Stripe Atlas.
Even setting up a UG (with 1 euro stating capital) is very easy but you have to upgrade to a GmbH once you receive investment (investors usually demand it).
For the whole process there are standard forms. You only need to pay lawyers if you want to personalize your setup.
Maybe OP was just not advised well which is surprising given the amount of information available online (startup guides for Germany)
Maybe not a relevant experience then, as most people in this forum look for startup advice and take on external investment.
You can totally setup a Inc or LLC equivalent pretty fast in Germany as long as you stick to the standard. What he is setting up is basically an LLC owning an Inc.
This. Is founded (and liquidated) my GmbH with only 12.500€ deposited to the business bank account. Note this is not a cost, it just moves to the corporate account and can be used to pay expenses (notary, lawyers, hardware etc.). The remaining 12.500 are a permanent loan that the proprietory needs to cover on in case there is a liquidity shortage or liability suit etc. In my case I never paid the remaining 12.500€, and in liquidation process it balances out to zero.
But if you think founding a german company is difficult, wait until have you do an ordered liquidation (not bankruptcy) - that is madness on its own.
Also the coming iOS 27 release supposedly has some big performance improvements for all supported models that people have verified in the beta releases even with the iPhone 11: https://www.macworld.com/article/3160623/apple-finally-figur...