Apple has the target disk mode, but doesn’t the laptop need to be shut down for it to work?

Modern Macs can’t do Target Disk Mode. If you had the right cables (thunderbolt or firewire) it was really fast, just as quick as a high end internal PCIe SSD.

And yes, you did need to reboot - because the other computer had full arbitrary read/write access to the raw sectors on the drive with no safety checks or security. If you did that while the computer was running normally, you’d corrupt the data on the disk as soon as they both tried to do a write operation at the same time — and also TDM needed to be used with caution - the other computer could easily install a rootkit or steal all your saved passwords.

It’s been replaced with “Mac Sharing Mode” which operates while the Mac is running normally, does have all the necessary algorithms in place to avoid corrupting the disk, full security to authenticate each read/write operation and block attempts to mess with system files, and therefore is orders of magnitude slower than TDM.

Solar, wind, hydro can do it, but the amount of CO2 produced by manufacturing the generators is still massive

That’s FUD.

Sure - the concrete in a large hydro dam requires a staggering amount of electricity to produce (because the chemical reaction to produce cement needs insane amounts of heat), but there’s no reason any CO2 needs to be emitted. You can absolutely use zero emission power to high temperatures needed to produce cement.

And not all hydro needs a massive concrete wall. There’s a hydro station near my city that doesn’t have a dam at all - it’s just a series of pipes that run from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a mountain. There’s a permanent medium sized river that never stops flowing that comes down off the mountain - with an elevation change of several hundred metres. It provides more power than the entire city’s consumption and does so while only diverting a tiny percentage of the river’s water. As the city grows, the power plant can easily be upgraded to divert more of the water though pipes instead of flowing uselessly down towards the sea.

Covid and Russia’s war created massive fluctuations recently but if you look through that noise global CO2 emissions are pretty much flat and have been for a few years now. They are almost certainly going to trend downwards going forward (a lot of countries already are seeing downward movement).

The simple reality is fossil fuels are now too expensive to be competitive. Why would anyone power an AI (or mine crypto) with coal power that costs $4,074/kW when you could use Solar at $1,300/kW (during the day. At night it’s more like $1,700 to $2,000 with the best storage options, such as batteries or pumped storage). Or wind at around $1,700.

Nuclear is $8,000/kW unless you live in Russia, where safety is largely ignored.

Hydro can be cheap if you happen to be near an ideal river - but for most locations it’s not competitive with Solar/Wind. So hydro is safe as a long term power generation method into the future, but it’s never going to be the dominant form of power unless (like my city) you happen to have ideal geology.

Unless you pay for expensive tags (like $20 per tag) or use really short range scanners (e.g. a hotel key), RFID tags don’t work reliably enough.

Antitheft RFID tags for example won’t catch every single thief who walks out the door with a product. But if a thief comes back again and again stealing something… eventually one of them will work.

But even unreliable tags are a bit expensive, which is why they are only used on high margin and frequently stolen products (like clothing).

All the self serve stores in my country just use barcodes. They are dirt cheap and work reliably at longer range than a cheap RFID tag. Those stores use AI to flag potential thieves but never for purchases (for example recently I wasn’t allowed to pay for my groceries until a staff member checked my backpack, which the AI had flagged as suspicious).

I’m betting the owners of the NYT would LOVE to have an AI that would simply re-phrase “news” (ahem) “borrowed” from other sources

No way. NYT depends on their ability to produce high quality exclusive content that you can’t access anywhere else.

In your hypothetical future, NYT’s content would be mediocre and no better than a million other news services. There’s no profit in that future.

If the EU finds apple guilty of “systematic” non-compliance, which will happen if they “continue their shenanigans for every judgement”, then the DMA doesn’t call for a fine. It calls for a TikTok style forced sale. Apple could be ordered to sell the iPhone to another company or face an outright ban in the EU.

Of course that’s assuming the EU has the balls to actually enforce their own laws knowing full well the transatlantic political consequences.

we can be sure a megacorp like apple is pulling every lever at their disposal

Sure. But as far as I can tell the only lever at their disposal is to drag their feet and try to delay compliance as long as possible.

It’s an effective strategy, but it’s stupid. They’re making a lot of people angry and that is never a good long term strategy.

Where will they get their info from with no one to scrape?

It’s not like there’s a shortage of human generated content. And the content that has already been generated isn’t going anywhere. It will be available effectively forever.

just “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

So? If you ask an LLM a question, you often get a very useful response. That’s ultimately all that matters.

I disagree. The real news is the free model will now search the internet for up to date answers, and for calculations it will write and execute a python script, then show you the result.

Paid users of ChatGPT have had those features for months, and they were a massive step forward in terms of how often the AI provides accurate answers.

you can run locally some small models

Emphasis on “small” models. The large ones need over a terabyte of RAM and it has to be high bandwidth (DDR is not fast enough).

And for most tasks, smaller models hallucinate way too often. Even the largest models are only just barely good enough.

It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users

Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn’t the problem.

The problem with twitter is Musk fired all the people who spent their day figuring out how to hide (or just delete) shitty content.

The big difference is exclusive content. Music has a few exceptions but in general sign up for one service and you can listen to anything.

That forces music services to compete on the overall experience (and price), while video services pretty much exclusively compete based on what content is available and literally none of them offer all of the things a person wants to watch. So nobody will ever be happy with any streaming service.

It runs at 120 GB/s…

As a Mac user that sounds pretty shit. RAM in a MacBook Pro runs at 400GB/s and that’s a CPU which will be obsolete in the next few months, with a new one coming that’s expected to be more like 500GB/s.

Sure, modular memory is great. But not if it comes with a performance penalty like that.

TLDR - they don’t want a transition from combustion engines to electric cars. They are saying building electric cars is bad for the environment.

It’s not really targeted at Tesla - what they want is for everyone to start using public transport/etc.

Google doesn’t own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.

So even if Google gives a project a “special deal” it’s still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it’s better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to the level of detail OSM has. Compare these two screenshots — the Google map has so much less detail it’s not even recognisable as the same place. Roads and major features are missing or drawn in the wrong place.

That seems like a bug assuming you have your region selected/enabled? I’d report it to DDG.

Hopes were set unreasonably high because the hardware designer has a great reputation. And the hardware seems well made (for the price) and certainly tries out some interesting new ideas. I love how the camera is physically blocked while not in use for example.

The software team has let this product down. Not surprising, but dissapointing.

Norway has a range of subsidies worth up to half the price of the vehicle and home upgrades plus tax exemptions worth another 25% on top of that.

Which can mean a brand new EV is the same price as an old secondhand ICE.

Incentives like that are a lot easier your entire national population is smaller than some cities.

They took the open source WebKit to develop Chrome and Chromium.

How did that turn out?

Perfectly? Web browsers are way better now than they ever have been.

Google wants to own images. Doesn’t matter if they made the licensing whatever. They make webp. They have a personal vested interest in control.

WebP is a little better than PNG/JPEG and way better than GIF. That’s all that really matters.

You trust Google???

Hell no. I reluctantly watch a bit of content that’s exclusively available on YouTube. Don’t use anything else of theirs and I’d drop YouTube in a heartbeat if I could find that content elsewhere.