These are not features of functional websites, these are features that make every website an "app" and deprecate the idea of a traditional website. Google is embrace, extend, extinguishing the web as we know it. If Apple gives in, it's over, every website will just be an app and want access to your contacts, and your family history, and whether or not you are on Santa's naughty list or whatever.
OpenAI didn't get everything that they wanted, but I very much disagree with calling it a "failed attempt". The non-profit went from owning the entirety of OpenAI to having ~25% stake.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's as good as peak google (agree on ~ when that was), which felt like magic. But it is, in my experience, noticeably better than current google.
While I agree that TSA should be done away with, I'm afraid that it wouldn't actually change what airport security looks like in most places. At this point, since people have gotten used to it, my guess is that if Airports took over their own security again (or went back to however it worked pre-TSA), they would maintain about the same standards and procedures in an effort to avoid blame in the case that something happened. Regardless of government involvement, it is extremely hard to work back these ratchets on security theater.
On the contrary, I think airports would desperately like to do better. Airports are hated; improving the experience of airport security is extremely important to them.
I could legit see an airport in a major metro advertise "Fly through PDQ instead of SRX - you'll save an hour of your time and nobody will ask to touch your genitals"
The actual screening would probably be the same. But the customer service side of it might improve when airports can compete on how nice the experience is. I don't imagine these scanners are ever going away, but loudly clueless workers don't have to be part of the experience.
Blame/lawsuit avoidance is a powerful motivation to keep things the same. But there's also a very strong drive to reduce costs, and this would be a very enticing cost center, for better or worse.
I turn LED lights off because of the difference in operational life, and I don't like changing bulbs. M GE bulbs say they have a rated lifetime of 13 years......at 3 hours of usage per day. So if they don't get turned off, then that 3 hours can very easily become 12, and now you are at a rated lifetime of ~4 years instead.
A ‘standard’ (A19 shape, E26 base) 8W 800 lumen LED lamp costs around $5 and will use about $20 of energy over a 15,000 hour lifespan, assuming $0.15/kWh.
That works out to around $0.035 per day for the lifespan of the lamp if you run it constantly for 24 hours a day, I wouldn’t waste time thinking about it. It’s an extra $10 over 12 years, you’re still using the energy.
Investing in occupancy or vacancy sensor wall switches at $25 a piece would be the best option, then you don’t need to remember to turn the lights off!
It's not a cost thing, I just don't like changing bulbs. I find it annoying, and with enough bulbs, when the lifetime is down to 4 years, you are doing one every few months on average.
But yes, I have thought about presence sensors. I'd really only need 3-4 to cover the primary areas where lights get turned on and not off (if I don't do it). I just haven't gotten around to it
I've heard it claimed that the era of being able to do this (buy slightly old used server hardware cheap on ebay) is coming to an end because, in the quest for ever more efficiency, the latest server hardware is no longer compatible with off-the-shelf power supplies etc. (there was more but that's the part that I remember) and therefore won't have any value on the second hand market.
I hope it was wrong, but it seems at least plausible to me. I'm sure that probably fixes could be made for all these issues, but the reason the current paradigm works is that, other than the motherboard and CPU, everything else you need is standard, consumer grade equipment which is therefore cheap. If you need to start buying custom (new) power supplies etc. to go along, then the price may not make as much sense anymore.
When boxes get decommissioned it's generally the entire thing. So you can pick up used power supplies as well. Or just buy new because even if it isn't ATX it's still a widely produced item that's used across multiple product lines.
The troublesome hardware is the stuff with custom backplanes and multiple daughterboards each hosting a node. Also AMD CPUs that lock themselves to a single motherboard.
The power supply incompatibility came to fruition a long time ago. Buying used Supermicro ATX motherboards to build into servers stopped being a thing for me about 1 decade ago. But used servers and desktops, even with their non-standard parts, have continued to deliver high value for me even today.
Do you know of any sources that talk about this? I tried to do a bit of searching and the closest I found was the .gov site [0] that did make a similar-ish claim, but was vague enough (at least to me, a non-lawyer), that it doesn't seem to rule out that every photo taken by an individual is copywriteable
>First, copyright protects original works of authorship, including original photographs. A work is original if it is independently created and is sufficiently creative. Creativity in photography can be found in a variety of ways and reflect the photographer’s artistic choices like the angle and position of subject(s) in the photograph, lighting, and timing.
I find it hard to imagine a photo taken by someone where it couldn't be argued that those elements exist. I guess the photographer would have to explicitly tell the court something like "no, I put no thought into it whatsoever, the camera was hanging off my bag and the shutter button was pressed accidentally". Like, if a human purposefully took a photo, then they have made choices about location, subject, etc. which have some element of "creativity" to them.
It's a simple and quite recent Dutch case (feel free to use AI to translate it :p), where the courts basically said that the plaintiff did not sufficiently motivate why their photo would be copyrighted, especially in light of very similar photos having been made by other people (4.5).
So I've never gotten a satisfactory answer as to why there aren't interesting niche phones that don't sell a ton (anymore: android used to be full of them, that was half the point), but are enough for a small company to make consistent (but small) profits. People who want niche phones are a tiny fraction of the market....but the smartphone market is enormous. A tiny fraction seems like it should be able to sustain a few small companies.
My best guess is that the kind of person who would found a company capable of making such a phone won't do it because they know it doesn't have potential to make them fabulously wealthy (just regular old wealthy) because it's inherently limited in scale. And the big companies don't do it because, while such a line could be profitable, in the absence of competition, it's more profitable to force their consumers to buy the "main" line and not make another product line.
My guess is they are only able to make the phones cheap if it’s sold at huge scale. If you make some niche small phone, the price goes way up and doesn’t look attractive.
Then you have to deal with the fact that the people with obscure requirements have a million other requirements. The person asking for a small phone then complains it doesn’t have a headphone jack, and AV1 decoding, and 16gb memory, and an unlocked bootloader, and whatever else.
While being more expensive even further decreases your niche size, it still isn't obvious to me that this should be enough to prevent the niche from existing. I am one of those customers you talk about who has a lot of obscure preferences (I can't call them requirements because literally not a single existing phone matches all of them and yet I still buy phones). A phone that met most of them would be something I'd be willing to pay a pretty good premium for.
Even this most-charitable-possible (to DoW) explanation does not even come close to justifying the supply chain risk designation. It is absolutely enough (and honestly more than enough) for a contract cancellation and a switch to a competitor. DoW could have done that for any reason at all, or no reason at all. If they had issues with Anthropics terms, they 100% should have done that.
Nothing in the quoted text comes anywhere close to the realm of justifying the retaliatory actions.
The DoW is engaging in simple crybullying. In my time as an online moderator I see it all the time.
“You are impinging on my freedom to force you to participate in activities you have expressly indicated it is against your will to engage in! You bully! I am such a victim!”
I find myself totally agreeing with the quoted text and also this sentiment. It just makes no sense to nuke Anthropic as a negotiation tactic if your interest is in preserving the republic long term.
AFAIK, the U.S. government is fully entitled to serve them under the U.S. Department of War’s terms as per the Defense Production Act. The government has yet to do this, but a company acting in a way that the Department of War perceives as benefiting enemy states could certainly be a justification for declaring a supply chain risk. Anthropic’s decision timing as the U.S. has launched a war in the Middle East to save millions of Iranian lives (tens if not hundreds of thousands of Iranians have already been killed by the Islamic Regime) definitely seems to be unjustifiable and the U.S. Department of War (so weird for me to type that instead of DOD) was smart, in my opinion, not to force Anthropic to work with them but to drop all work with them and move to providers who will meet the military’s needs while at war.
(Just in case anyone was wondering, I live in Israel)
> not to force Anthropic to work with them but to drop all work with them and move to providers who will meet the military’s needs while at war.
Conversely, I’m glad that we’re looking a little further than that, and are worried about what happens after this missile exchange. After living through an endless “global war on terror” that gave us the biggest mass surveillance enabling act, it’s hard to not dismiss “it’s just until the end of this war, and we promise it’ll end well!”
> Anthropic’s decision timing as the U.S. has launched a war in the Middle East [...]
According to Anthropic, their terms have been in their contract from the beginning. The only decision they made recently is not to be strong-armed into renegotiating their contract to allow things they don't want to allow. I don't see how that's a bad thing.
> a company acting in a way that the Department of War perceives as benefiting enemy states could certainly be a justification for declaring a supply chain risk.
What’s the difference between a company not building something that’s fit for purpose for fighting a war (like a nursery refusing to build land mines), and thus not being a qualified supplier to the Government for conducting military operations, vs. being tarred with the “supply chain risk” brush? The former seems uncontroversial; the latter seems petty and retaliatory. “Supply chain risk” designations are for companies that you would do business with but might be compromised by the enemy, like when a supplier agrees to provide the DoW grenades, but the grenades could be intentionally defective such that they detonate prematurely in the soldier’s hand.
Besides, as an Israeli, imagine a world in which the manufacturers of Zyklon B refused to sell Hitler their product for the purposes of gassing human beings. It might not have prevented the Holocaust, but at least maybe impeded it a little.
>Besides, as an Israeli, imagine a world in which the manufacturers of Zyklon B refused to sell Hitler their product for the purposes of gassing human beings. It might not have prevented the Holocaust, but at least maybe impeded it a little.
Honestly, if the Holocaust was today, we would probably get 10% of comments here trying to defend "both sides". Some people have a need to try to defend every side, even if one of the sides it's asking for them to be murdered.
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