I think Apple has held off 120 Hz for so long precisely because the average person gets a bit of a jolt of "this device is fast, it runs so smooth compared to..." they can't quite immediately place until someone explains it's the refresh rate.
Without this, it'd be very hard for an average user to "feel" a performance difference between an A18 Pro in the Neo and say as far as the M5 Max in a MacBook Pro unless they had a "special" use case which really needed the extra CPU/GPU cores.
Of course, they can't stay forever on that. E.g. with the iPhone 17 they finally flipped the non-Pro over. Probably because it was starting to make the iPhone seem sluggish/stuttery compared to other phones more than it was making the iPhone 18 seem fast. Tablets have never seemed to be as fierce a market in terms of your average Joe comparing them, but I'd expect the same switch to being a liability instead of a tool will happen there as well (if they aren't already late to the game).
What's magical about 60 there? I'd naively think you'd just want VRR and some power saving render rate behavior rather than a fixed target framerate equal to the max framerate for all types of content all the time. The latter gives you neither good power saving nor good experience in most combinations.
You may have missed the bulk of the "free" ride: ChatGPT Pro 200 is both being imminently nerfed (even for those who signed up before) and reaching the end of a month of reset candy as they quell that backlash/end a month of "ailu major features or resets". Yes, it was $200... but hear me out first!
In the last 5 days alone I've had the equivalent of 2+ years of ChatGPT Plus Codex quota given for free via resets. I literally leave my PC running in Codex with 8+ Sol 6.1 Max sessions jamming away most of the day writing a desktop environment from scratch (and other things) just because the reset tokens will evaporate if I don't use them. I've even had days with > 1 billion tokens used where it was reset by the morning.
That said, who knows what free ride will appear with AI capital next month!
The more optimistic hope is that actual prices continue to drop at the rate they have been and then by the time the subsidization runs out (even if that's not far from now) it's because there is nothing for the chickens to come home and roost to anymore.
After all, a year ago and doing these same tasks would just fall on its face. The hard part of the problem is solved, now it's not even "do LLMs continue to get better" but "do LlMs keep getting cheaper".
Half-Life: Alyx was damn good too though, often considered the best of the entire VR category. Still 6+ years ago itself at this point... but I wouldn't count Valve out just because they don't push a new game every year.
I don't think most people do maintenance on their laptops at all, which is probably why they usually end up with that one friend/family member who does.
Laptop manufacturers would like to have you think cleaning them or removing a "warranty void if removed" sticker over a screw actually voids the warranty but it usually doesn't actually.
They take on bushels of potentially generational debt to afford horribly overpriced and locked-in John Deere farming equipment to farm food when food can just be bought at the grocery store!
I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Here, if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both because it's plain impossible for you to block all means of VPN/proxy regardless of how perfect your service tries to detect it. There's no payment, there's no account, there's no anything - you're just serving DNS to an IP that reports to be out of Germany according to German law. At some point it stops being a mistake/malintent of the company and one of the user. Where that transitions probably depends on the person though.
> if any pair of countries have conflicting rules then you simply can't expose your service to both
Yes. This is also how physical products work. The internet makes it easy and the default to offer a service worldwide, hence also making it easy to get in conflict with the law worldwide. You have to pick and choose which laws to break, which laws to comply with by minimizing exposure, and which laws to comply with by making a tailor-made version for a specific market.
You say this confidently, but this is merely one theory about how things should work.
If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time. (Unless your country is powerful enough to violate the sovereignty of my nation.)
In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product. I simply offered it to anyone who came to my “store” (server). I admit that this dynamic changes if you directly pay me for something.
Your framework implies that every social website needs to make a decision on whether or not users are allowed to insult the Thai monarch[0], and then must block access to Thais if they decide it’s allowed. In reality nobody does this, although they may choose not to put a server in Thailand if they are worried about it.
> If I make a product in my country, where it’s legal, and a buyer purchases it from me and then brings it to you overseas where it’s illegal, and someone in your county tries to sue me for it, they are typically going to have a hard time.
Except the analogue to your ISP for your example is UPS and they are far less (if at all?) responsible for the content of packages they deliver.
It’s just a metaphor and it breaks down if you dig into the specifics too deeply, as with all metaphors. But if you insist, I as the seller am not responsible either. If I’m a bookseller and I send a banned book to you via UPS, after you paid me in person in cash, and your customs seizes it, you don’t get your package and nothing happens to me. YOU might get in trouble though.
Now if I keep sending banned materials to your country, it might be a bad idea for me to travel there. But nothing else is going to happen, unless you’re a global power and you drone me or compel my government to extradite me. (Or if my own country was foolish enough to make mutual extradition agreements for such things.)
(Note, I specified in person in cash above because as I mentioned before, electronic payments make things messy. But most websites are “free”.)
UPS is partially liable for incorrect declarations of international packages and for attempting to deliver packages they should have known were illegal...
> In most cases, you accessing my website is more like this scenario. Intermediaries (ISPs) brought you the product.
Offering a website to a certain country is not something ISP decided for you, but you actively did that yourself. I cant create a gambling website and host it in Monaco and then serve it to someone in CA and say that, it isnt on me, but on Comcast.
How do you "actively" offer a website to a country?
Websites aren't broadcasting, they are waiting there and responding to requests. Why should it be on every server in the world to have to figure out whether they're allowed to respond to a given request based on the client's country?
Why is it not the user's responsibility to not send requests? Why isn't it the ISP's responsibility to not route the requests? And every single router in between?
FWIW, this theory was attempted in court with a bittorrent case in Hong Kong. [1]
Defendant's lawyer argued that seeding a copyrighted movie was not (active) distribution but merely "making it available" (which was not associated with a criminal offense in HK law as opposed to "distributing infringing copies").
This is someone in HK judged under HK jurisdiction. That's fine.
My point is it's weird to expect website operators to be aware of every jurisdiction on the planet and take steps to comply with each of them.
If that expectation becomes common, the obvious way to go isn't to block the countries you aren't allowed to serve. It's to only allow the ones you know you are allowed.
Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
> Imagine how the internet would be if you were default blocked from accessing any website hosted in a different country.
It's a difficult issue for sure. It's almost a geopolitical problem -- the larger economic blocs (eg. EU, China, USA) can basically dictate terms and expect general compliance (eg. GDPR) because most companies can't avoid operating in those areas, while smaller countries can't really do much unless they're part of a bigger economic bloc.
False. Making a website accessible from the internet is not “offering” it to anyone. You might have a claim if I were paying to advertise in that country, maybe.
And actually you can just make a gambling website overseas, people have done that since forever. You might have trouble with accepting payments, though.
See also the UK's Online Safety Act and the UK's regulator Ofcom, which stated:
'Ofcom told the BBC: "We are aware of this lawsuit. Under the Online Safety Act, any service that has links with the UK now has duties to protect UK users, no matter where in the world it is based."
A service doesn't have to be based in the UK to be subject to the act, and therefore face action from Ofcom.'
The US-based lawyers for the services in question take a very different view....
> I think, usually, in those cases it's that people believe the company did not really do anywhere near everything it could - it did the bare minimum it thought it could get away with then seemed shocked it wasn't enough to matter.
Yes, and Quad9 could have done better in the German court case. At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency, and then could have ensured that their DNS service is offered only to registered users.
> At a minimum they could have asked users to register and provide proof of residency
This would have been a massive burden to them, and (as we have seen from the ongoing data leaks) a gigantic privacy risk to its users. It would have also been a big overreach, as the German ruling would have mostly impacted non-German users.
Let's take this level of user tracking for DNS would be accepted & fine by Germany as well as what folks were thinking was feasible for the company to do as a given, how does it prove the user+ip who registered is the user+ip who submitted the request instead of the place it got proxied? Or malware enabling the same?
If you can solve this for me it would actually help a lot at work :D
A recursive DNS resolver is identified just by an IP address for your system level DNS resolver to use (eg. in /etc/resolv.conf). Even if you assigned a random, secret IPv6 address for every individual user, they could simply share that with anyone else too. In IPv4, pretty much impossible.
I’m not defending it and hate it too, but it’s worth remembering that from the perspective of many governments and regulators, the internet is a legally broken Wild West that the law needs to catch up with. Viewed through the lens of legal precedent that balanced privacy/safety/liberty before telecommunications networks, that is true: surveillance was permitted within a very broad set of parameters (by default, even: that’s why we talk about e.g. private residences being protected exceptions to no-privacy-by-default).
Again, I don’t endorse that framing. But that’s where a lot of lawmakers are at. They’re not corrupt or fascists or hysterical about porn or whatever (well, plenty are, but not most). They’re trying to correct what they identify as a dangerously uncontrolled area.
This comment was made ~15 minutes after the article posted, the only other comment at the time was in agreement, and all but 1 of the first 11 comments in the 30 minutes it took to get to the front page were in support.
I'd say you thought right HN is generally against climate change but I'm not sure where you got the idea little to no-one cares.
For anyone else who can never remember how much a hectare is and think "420 football fields" sounds more like some weed joke than an area: 300 hectares = 3 sq km
/ ~1.16 sq miles
If it's found they really did skip the required steps then I hope there is actual action about it.
It's also odd to me we seem to find the need to build AI DCs near population centers, in forests, and/or by/with new fossil fuel plants. Does it really matter so desperately if it takes your AI query an extra 10 ms to go to the middle of nowhere and we have to wait to build renewable or nuclear power to scale it for what we gain in return of that choice?
> Does it really matter so desperately if it takes your AI query an extra 10 ms to go to the middle of nowhere and we have to wait to build renewable or nuclear power to scale it?
The middle of nowhere in Finland is likely to be a forest (about 80% coverage).
Interesting the forest area in question doesn't appear to be some sort of amazing old growth forest thats been there for centuries it appears to be old logging sites that was maybe reforested a few decades or so ago.
None of this has anything to do with forests, and a step beyond that, doesn't have anything to do with datacenters either. It's entirely panicked flailing about AI capabilities.
Maybe the answer is not to build them in Finland if there is really no more useless land there (unless Finland is explicitly asking for the DC to be built in the country for other reasons) but there is elsewhere. Even if it was, that's still less than 0.5 ms from a city of 200k+, surely there is some option better for the climate in 20x the radius!
I do like that it is at least a naturally cooler place, which is more consideration than most DCs get. And, being Finland, I'd imagine a decently cleaner power mix than usual for a new DC? Both of these are fair things to give credit and support for IMO - not everything has to be outrage.
Off the top of my head Finland seems to tick a lot of boxes: low population density, good local availability of water without competing uses, low electricity prices, very green electricity (lots of nuclear, hydro, wind), good infrastructure, cold climate
Apart from this being in a forest, this seems like an ideal place. And places that are not used for agriculture or human habitation but do have water available have a habit of being forests (or mountains)
> low population density, good local availability of water without competing uses, low electricity prices, very green electricity (lots of nuclear, hydro, wind), good infrastructure, cold climate
This then makes the headline basically read as, "Popularly disliked company listened, with new project avoiding literally every valid or ignorant criticism people brought up; news found some even more nonsensical criticism to amplify".
Nuclear power plants take a very long time to build, it can be 7-10 years before you even begin construction due to all the permits, politics and planning.
As for scaling massive amounts of solar/wind... that's exactly what China is doing to power their infrastructure buildouts.
7-10 years to scale it right is better than immediately doing it wrong in my mind! Or what China is doing if they really just can't wait to scale (though my understanding is China is still increasing the total amount of power generated via coal even though the percentage of power generated via coal is going down - so not quite the full step needed).
>> "In our view, operations at this construction site should be suspended until it is clarified whether the project is in compliance with the law," Hanna Halmeenpaa, chair of the board of the Finnish Association for Nature Conservation, who filed the request with the agency, told AFP at the edge of the deforested area.
>> "From the satellite images, we've seen that nature sites which should be preserved have also been logged," she added, explaining that the size of the clear-cut area was comparable to 420 football fields.
I just can't bring myself to believe that a Finnish bureaucrat, speaking to a French news agency, explained that the area in question was comparable in size to 420 football fields.
And in fact the numbers don't seem to work. The area is estimated at "more than 300 hectares". 420 football fields is more like 224 hectares.
On the other hand, 420 soccer pitches would total 299.9 hectares. This tells us some interesting things:
1. The area in question may be "more than 300 hectares", but it's also less than 307 hectares (which could fit 430 soccer pitches). Or, alternatively, zero effort was made to express the actual cleared area in terms of soccer pitches, and it was first rounded to 300 hectares and then the rounded figure was converted to soccer pitches. (Which I have to assume was done by AFP and not by the Finnish government.)
2. Either the "global audience" that TechSpot serves doesn't include the United States, or they copied a French agency's English-language press release without bothering to consider whether any of the numbers in it made sense.
Without this, it'd be very hard for an average user to "feel" a performance difference between an A18 Pro in the Neo and say as far as the M5 Max in a MacBook Pro unless they had a "special" use case which really needed the extra CPU/GPU cores.
Of course, they can't stay forever on that. E.g. with the iPhone 17 they finally flipped the non-Pro over. Probably because it was starting to make the iPhone seem sluggish/stuttery compared to other phones more than it was making the iPhone 18 seem fast. Tablets have never seemed to be as fierce a market in terms of your average Joe comparing them, but I'd expect the same switch to being a liability instead of a tool will happen there as well (if they aren't already late to the game).
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