I'd argue that chess similarly has "useless skills". But learning "useless skills" is one of the most important things you can do for yourself to learn "useful skills".
Not everything has to be an absolute competition-or-not. For the same reason you can enjoy a casual game of chess with a friend, you can enjoy a casual game of some RTS. Helps that there are a lot of open source RTS communities that each have their own skills-emphasis.
The website from this article. It's not free. Ben Thompson releases 1 free article a week but the other 3 articles published each week requires a $15/month subscription. Ben Thompson is also very influential in Silicon Valley and the overall tech/media industry.
I know him, I subscribed for a while. Even his paid content is lacking. I'm looking more Valens Research kind of analysis. SemiAnalysis is also good in the higher tier.
ps. Being influential in Silicon Valley just means you are influential, it does not mean substantial. Leopold is still influential and gets money thrown at him at $100s of million despite having no substance.
I get your overall point, but that’s already a tactic used by attackers, especially in network infiltration. It shouldn’t be a surprise that an LLM would figure out to do the same thing
From my understanding of the architecture, Apple and Google have basically developed a fork of Gemini that is built to run on Apple's PCC. There is no data being sent to any Google servers.
From this MacRumors article:
"The new architecture centers on Apple Foundation Models co-developed with Google, which Apple says are adapted to run both on-device and on servers through its existing Private Cloud Compute infrastructure."
And
"The company reiterated that Apple Intelligence relies on on-device processing and Private Cloud Compute, with a promise that user data is only used to execute the immediate request and is not accessible to Apple or third parties. Apple added that outside experts can verify those privacy guarantees "at any time.""
That seems to conflict with the recent security blog that says they are using Google Cloud infra and NVIDIA GPUs with PCC now [0].
They are allowing it to run on Intel and NVIDIA and Google chips meeting certain requirements now too instead of just Apple silicon because they think they’re secure enough now, but I suspect this decision might have been pushed by the need for Siri to be useful.
I still definitely think it’s better than what every other company is trying to do (like running a variant of OpenClaw 24/7 forwarding data to Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and every other provider they can support).
It's not the compute hardware itself. PCC used to be data centers owned and operated by Apple, running on chips designed by Apple.
With this announcement, Apple is expanding the definition of PCC to Google Cloud data centers. Theoretically, this is Google Cloud, not Google servers, so there should be a separation of access there.
From the Apple security blog:
> Originally built exclusively on Apple silicon with our world-class software security technologies, PCC set a new bar for AI privacy in the cloud, and continues to power the most demanding Apple Intelligence features. Since then, the wider industry has been working to provide a set of confidential inference primitives that could theoretically be combined to reach the security level of PCC. However, until today, those primitives have never been integrated into a comprehensive, end-to-end confidential inference pipeline capable of operating at global scale. That’s what we’ve done with PCC on Google Cloud, which incorporates PCC’s exceptional security and privacy properties at every stage, including the industry’s most comprehensive transparency guarantees that allow external security researchers to verify our privacy commitments.
there is no cloud, it's always someone else's computer, so technically someone who is physically in google/apple datacenter at the exact moment your data is being operated on, hypothetically would have a chance to steal your data.
saying that because google owns the hardware, they would quietly not delete or copy your data is quite a wild accusation.n
There has been anecdotal statements/blogs from Apple employees about the data privacy. They have said building some internal capabilities or user facing features are extremely difficult or impossible because they aren't able to access user data at the level required.
From the information presented, the privacy case is not that your data is only accessible to you (which arguably can have a backdoor) but that the data is NOT stored at all, so it's not possible to build a backdoor. I know there are probably other ways around it, but it's my understanding is that no data is kept on any server when the response is sent back to your device
There is a comment in this thread from an alleged Apple employee that said that, but it doesn't seem like it's possible to send a link for a specific comment. Over the years I've seen comments and blogs posted here in Hacker News reaffirming the same thing.
But to answer your question directly, I don't have any links for those blogs or comments
They don't have the cash laying around. Their "actual" profit, meaning money added to their bank account after stock buy backs, dividends, employee stock allocations, and capex was $7B.
In this statement, their 2025 capex was $91.45B. They expect their 2026 capex to be $180B-190B. And they expect their "2027 capital expenditures to significantly
increase compared to 2026."
So they simply don't have the money. Up until now, I thought the bubble talks about AI were silly because all these companies were using cash flow to fund their capex. These numbers are so astronomical now that a company that had $132B in net income has to take debt or issue stock to pay for it.
You cherry-picked examples. Counter examples would be:
Crowdstrike up 1067%
Cloudflare up 1408%
Robinhood up 148%
For an index fund, I would take a break even or even a slight loss on AirBnb to get those Crowdstrike and Cloudflare returns. I do agree with the overall sentiment that the foundation AI companies are overvalued but the whole point of an index fund is not have to analyze each individual company.
You examples are great… at supporting my points. CRWD ipo’ed at 7bn and NET at 5bn. Unlike the mega IPOs like abnb and uber and now 10x worse spacex. There is very limited upside left after high valuation milking.
I'm not sure how they are related. USB-C was not really a technical challenge or had trade-offs. I'm not a hardware engineer but from what I've read, having an easily replaceable battery would degrade the water resistance of the phone.
I despise the Cook hate from some Apple fans. No he’s not the visionary that Jobs was. But I think he was the best person to scale Apple up to what it is today while still keeping the soul of the company alive.
To me it seems like an LLM-based implementation of automation software like Zapier. The problem with Zapier is you need services to provide APIs and Zapier needs to support those APIs to implement it in the automation workflow.
But because OpenClaw can just use a web browser like a normal user, you don't need all these APIs and there's no theoretical limitations on the services that can be integrated and automated.
Right now there's a lot of issues/bugs. People have more trust in a deterministic solution like Zapier. But maybe the LLMs and OpenClaw will get there eventually, and if it does, I can see how that's a better solution than a deterministic system.
Chess is a great game for removing all those external factors. It's just thinking