I would be curious how that will work with anti-trust legislation. At least currently, there's an argument that Sony does not prevent people from buying games from other sources, or other publishers from publishing physical games for their consoles.

That's no longer the case if they switch to a purely digital model, since they become the sole source of all the games on PlayStation, and have unilateral authority over them. The only place you can get a game on a digital model is Sony.

A female werewolf would be a wifwolf.

You could probably do something similar with Termux and Ffmpeg, but that requires terminal knowledge, and would be quite a steep learning curve for someone not familiar with it already. FFMPEG and shell terminals are not the most intuitive pieces of software.

But Apple's real secret sauce is that - and judging by the attitude you're swinging around in your post, OP, you're not going to like this - they make REALLY good hardware.

I'd argue that their hardware is middling, but they make up for the shortcomings with decent software. Sort of the opposite of Windows, where you might have some nice hardware that gets held back by bad software (especially with the disastrous windows updates lately). Hence there being a really nice period of time where you could squeeze Mac OSX onto better hardware and ideally get the best of both worlds.

Apple has historically not been the value pick in pure hardware specs alone, and I don't doubt that you could absolutely shop around and get a computer that, on paper, would be more powerful. Before the RAM price hike, they were the subject of mockery because they charge exorbitant prices for increasing the amount of memory in a machine you wanted to be (it was in the region of +$300 for another 16GB to get it to 32GB).

They work quite hard to make it all work together well, and push to make their devices status symbols. Apple is the premium product everyone wants, and all that.

So the hardware may be lacking, but Apple tries to make up for it in making the OS work nicely, and tie in relatively nicely with any other Apple devices you have.

By comparison, the other options aren't nearly as seamless. I'd need a lot more fiddling to send my keyboard and mouse inputs to an android tablet, or share the clipboard, for example, compared to a Mac being able to just push the mouse and keyboard to an iPad with no extra work.

The file management remains atrocious over USB (it's basically the iTunes file transfer interface), on both Mac and Windows, but they've basically tried to paper over it with airdrop and an iDevice file manager.

Whenever I hear somebody moving to a Macbook and make any sort of complaint onkine, lots of people unhelpfully tell you to buy a $1000+ iPhone and that will solve all your problems, or when an Android user is "switching to iPhone", a similar thing happens with "just use a Mac". Why the hell do you need to purchase all the expensive devices to just use one?

At least from my personal perspective, I've never heard nor seen people recommending someone buy a different device to supplement something they're currently using.

With the exception of things like debugging (for some bewildering reason, if your Mac's software breaks, you need another Mac to repair the software), it tends to be fairly self-contained.

The closest thing seems to be more that if you're on a device that Apple hasn't released the full set of features on, some stuff just doesn't work properly, because it expects the full feature set, and seemingly ends up trying to annoy you into replacing it that way.

On my old iPad Mini 2, for example, you couldn't actually close the slide-out panel, or expand an app there, since Apple didn't let them use the split view, and you needed that to expand the window. The closest you could get is making the app crash when in the slide-out, and then it would open normally, or a lot of finagling by swapping it out with a different app, and then running the original app you wanted to.

My current one has a different issue where some apps have Apple Intelligence specific features that I cannot turn off, because the setting I need to change is put away under Apple Intelligence's settings, and that's not available on my device, so the settings are also inaccessible.

Such a unit exists and it is also called tokens, that can measure the capability of a model and the size of a running operation in a model.

I think you might have it mixed up with parameters, rather than tokens. Parameters are how big the model is, and are an indirect measure of how capable it is. Bigger models tend to be more capable.

But what they use for calculating your bill is something different today.

The tokenizer varies a little, but I don't think it's changed measurably from tokens. You pay an amount for a million tokens worth of processing. The tokeniser difference just alters how text is converted to tokens, but the tokens themselves don't change all that much.

If anything, I'd honestly put the issue more with reasoning chains in models, where they basically babble to themselves inside of a tag, that most interfaces hide/collapse. It makes them work better, but vastly increases the amount of tokens per operation.

They have been getting longer and more sophisticated with newer models. So you might have a model now that basically repeats the output multiple times whilst refining and drafting the non-reasoning output.

If you're making it generate a lot, that'll balloon the usage, and thus price.

We had hardware piracy back in the day, when there were CPUs you may have been able to unlock extra cores on.

Then the companies started lasering them off so that was no longer possible.

Ah yes, the thing everyone needs to buy a screwdriver: A Chatbot.

They do, but there may be better local alternatives, since the shipping can be quite high.

The case recently resolved in the plaintiff's favour. though Google intends to appeal, so it's up in the air how things go.

And if it's this easy to poison the AIs, imagine how easy it is for someone with an actual agenda to mislead people in ways that aren't as fantastical and quickly spotted.

Equally concerning is that these systems are now seeing use in a range of things. There are lawyers who use it to file suits when they shouldn't be, and a US lawmaker was recently found to be using AI to draft laws. What happens when things like that make it into the models training data, rather than just being pulled in by RAG/web tools? They'd become part of the base knowledge of all the models of that line going forward.

It's funny when it's outlandish. The question becomes what happens when it isn't? Even without an agenda, what happens when it cites an outdated/incorrect source, or assumes that someone making a joke was correct, and ends up drawing from that when filling a lawsuit/drafting a law?

I don't understand the point of sending the original e-mail. Okay, you want to thank the person who helped invent UTF-8, I get that much, but why would anyone feel appreciated in getting an e-mail written solely/mostly by a computer?

It's like sending a touching birthday card to your friends, but instead of writing something, you just bought a stamp with a feel-good sentence on it, and plonked that on.

The parallels between Musk and Stark seemed perfect on paper. Both are billionaire tech innovators with a flair for the dramatic and dreams of changing the world.

They're not, though. Stark is a rare engineering powerhouse who personally pushed past a lot of engineering boundaries, and Musk is an investor/programmer who mostly puts his name on existing things.

I might change my mind if Musk personally invents AGI, nanobots, and a previously-unknown clean energy source capable of powering a 1/3rd of NYC with a room no larger than a foyer, like Stark did, but I'm not holding out much by way of hopes.