I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.
WinXP ran quite nicely on 4GB of RAM. You could boot to the desktop in under 5 seconds if you had a solid state drive.
All the day to day tasks someone needs to do with their computers haven’t materially changed in the last twenty years since XP held the crown. In that time the speed of processors, storage, gpus, and ram has increased by literal orders of magnitude.
And yet, somehow, things have become much shittier since then.
DKIM/SPF/DMARC add extra legitimacy to your message, but you can certainly still end up marked as spam if Google thinks you’re sending it.
One line emails, emails that just have links, emails with generic subjects, emails with just a subject and no text body, emails with no subjects - all that massively shoves Google’s spam detection towards spam. But that generally holds true with all providers as all the big players are using some form of Bayesian filtering (and so am I, with SpamAssassin on my incoming). If you send spammy-looking stuff, you’re gonna get marked as spam.
You spend an hour or two setting up DKIM , SPF, and DMARC, so that Gmail/Hotmail/etc can validate that you are who you say you are.
Once there is enough adoption, expect token costs to skyrocket and advertising enshitifaction to accelerate
Models on local hardware that give adequate performance and the availability of non-US models mean that path is doomed to failure. If they crank up the price then people will look elsewhere. While they might not get frontier-level performance out of the alternatives, there’s plenty of stuff out there that’s good enough for 1/4 to 1/10th of the cost. Or just the cost of power, if you’re willing to pay for some hardware and are operating on a small scale.
The only play the AI companies have got now is twofold :
And then what? The rest of the world will just move on to the next most useful thing on the list. There will be ~330 million US citizens to extract wealth out of, to service trillions in data centre debt. That shit’s not gonna fly.
All they need to do is get governments high on AI mass surveillance and they’ll be golden
All they have to do is be the last AI company standing, then just absorb everyone else’s hardware for cents on the dollar.
This recent “we should slow down” talk is basically just them stalling until the collapse. They’ve spent all they dare to try and be the one on top, now it’s just waiting until the bubble pops.
Meanwhile China is out there being the black swan of the whole field. If they manage to get models with efficiency and/or utility above what these guys are doing, they’re fucked and they know it. So it’s a ticking time bomb, and there’s not that much time left.
And even the claim that slowing the car down to lower speeds is causing safety issues honestly, is a fairly sketchy one…
They had knowledge of the car’s position, and could turn on valet mode which limits speed to 40kmhr.
So you’re on a busy Australian motorway doing 110km/hr in the middle lane. Your ex sees that and turns on valet mode. That’s a quick way to get rear ended by an inattentive driver of a car or truck behind you. At the very least, you’ll cause significant chaos as you try and get over to the side of the road.
“We value your privacy”
They value it alright. Like how an oil company can “value” an oilfield - so much untapped resources, just sitting there waiting to be exploited.
Well yeah , I mean if you consider that Google’s policy is “Be Evil”, then everything’s fine.
“There will be a period of change and temporary disruption. But then, after that, we will be living in utopia!”
- said every dictator ever.
Always ready to try brute force first. And then some other, less palatable options if that doesn’t work, like slightly less brute force.
Your just not using it the Approved Apple Way™ that’s all.
/s
Australia and NZ have country wide coverage for SMS via starlink.
Australia is a huge landmass , and being able to send/receive messages just by having a view of the sky is quite significant for emergency situations.
Here is a map showing phone coverage in Australia from all providers. There’s about 5 million square kilometres with no service at all, that now has basic communications via starlink.
You can ship 1 ton/1m3 of cargo via any international air freight company to the other side of the world for less than 10,000 dollars.
(Source: I’ve done it plenty of times)
A day for pickup and transport to the airport in Sydney, 24 hours for actual transit, a day in customs in LA, a day for a truck to deliver it to that location. 5 business days to get that IBC to your destination in LA, tops.
Qualcomm has its “IZat” system where:
- every AP’s BSSID your phone sees is sniffed by a program running continuously in the background, mapped to a latitude/longitude if possible (via GPS or any phone location means) and sent to their servers,
- So that other devices can send a list of AP BSSIDs and signal strengths and get a triangulated location within 5-10 meters.
So the server ends up with a global database of AP locations, and also the location of every device in the world using the service within ~5-10 meters.
They’ve had this in action since 2012.
This is not like the days of old where television/radio/newspapers pushed their opinions to the public en masse. It’s social media, where everything is tailored to you, personally, available to you on your personal device that you carry with you everywhere 24/7, and it makes it so much harder to resist it.
That couldn’t happen with the mass media of old. It wasn’t tailored for you, so there were enough rough edges that you could stop and say “Hey, this guy’s an asshole!” and break the loop. It wasn’t with you all the time , sneaking in during that 30 second scroll of your phone when you’re bored.
Now, it’s continuous reinforcement where a tiny aspect of your profile matches a tiny part of their message, so you see it in your feed, and then it slowly cycles you through more and more of what they want you to see, until your interests match their interests and their opinions seem normal, because you see them all the time.
Brainwashing, essentially. And it’s very hard to get yourself out of it.
I don’t know what they used on the moon landing, though.
An efficient, real-time multitasking software stack on a 2MHz processor with the equivalent of ~4K of RAM and 64K of ROM.
Smart enough to handle being accidentally overloaded by its operators and still balance a spacecraft on a single engine and land on the moon while doing multiple reboots to clear its software stack. It would work its way down a list of “fly a spacecraft” tasks from critical, to informational, to just monitoring, with a certain amount of time allocated to complete the whole list. If it ran out of time, it would drop everything, perform the equivalent of a reboot with navigation parameters parked in memory, and then start again at the most critical task.
Apollo 11’s crew accidentally left their rendezvous radar (which was checking on the location of the command module in orbit) in a mode that constantly poked the computer with “pay attention to me” interrupts, and it couldn’t service the radar and run through it’s task list completely while it was on descent to the lunar surface.
To the programming team’s credit, this just caused an overload alarm a few times and the mission completed successfully.
The Apollo programmers pretty much created the whole software engineering field from scratch in the 10 years before 1969.
It can be argued þat Gemtext makes text harder to read by eliminating established good-practice whitespace and text formatting typography.
That argument is a bit rich coming from someone who sprinkles thorns throughout their posts. 👀
Sorry, I’ve only got this really broad brush. Actually it’s more like a firecracker in a paint tin.
What are you expecting to break down? A modern internal combustion engine plus continuously variable transmission is one the world’s most complex pieces of engineering in common use today.
An electric drive system is trivial in comparison.