redwall_hp

Da Vinci Resolve recommends 16GB for video editing and 32GB if you're doing Fusion compositions. Basic video stuff.

Blender definitely benefits from more RAM. The M-series Macs are good for doing renders. If you're a hobbyist or independent creator, you're more likely to be rendering on your laptop than having a fancy render farm. (That's exactly how the movie Flow was done.)

Musicians know software instruments can eat into RAM, and streaming things like sample-based instruments off of disc is non viable for real time audio. Real world use can have very large numbers of tracks with many software instruments and VST chains. Ableton is a minimum of 8GB for the DAW, and things like Kontakt will multiply that fast.

And people usually have Chrome, chat apps and other things open while they work.

But you can also get a "Pro" phone in safety orange for some reason. It's not even consistent.

Companies should also be legally barred from hiring for three years if they engage in layoffs. Mergers should also be off the table for the same period.

It's deleterious to the economy. As the recent Microsoft game studio apocalypse shows, mergers are also extremely deleterious. It would be better to have a dozen game studios employing people and competing rather than one shit company cutting expenses and reducing products going to market.

Its spiritual successor is the crown on the Apple Watch. I never swipe to scroll on the watch. It's way more fluid (and you get neat haptics) to twist the crown.

It's going to be great, between this and the Adobe totally-not-using-any-decompiled-code-wink clones: people are going to get sued into the ground and LLM code is going to become radioactive to corporate lawyers. Especially when they find out that they also routinely spit out GPL code verbatim.

It's going to be hilarious.

"We've always been at war with Eurasia." - Republicans

I'm fairly pessimistic about LLMs, but I do find they're a good research tool. If I can accelerate finding answers amid the slurry of Confluence, Slack, assorted other intranet places and the web, I can get back to thinking about the design and programming.

I have a user CLAUDE.md that tells it not to presume to modify any files, and a bunch of internal MCPs for our logging and monitoring tools, documents, git repositories and such, and I've been dabbling with writing skill files so it can access some other internal things.

So I can basically say "this thing isn't working because x, and it's probably related to y not having z" and it'll go off and find info buried in the corporate abyss.

Then other people yeet wildly awful LLM generated PRs over the fence and I lose my sanity from basically having fight a constant battle against a slow rot of software quality that will bite us later.

Fred Brooks wrote a whole ass book based on that premise, and people still haven't learned the lesson half a century later.

Sure, it did some meaningful things:

* Higher load on senior engineers who are about to burn out hard from fighting an endless battle against unreviewed slop people keep trying to yeet into production

* Less junior hiring and suppressed wages

* Culture of uncertainty and fear

* Computers are really expensive now

* Some people now live with diesel generators and gas turbines making their neighborhood hazardous to their health

And the LLMs exist to further those problems. People can't afford houses? Well, now they won't be able to own computers either. That's a feature, not a side effect. Once the K-shaped economy progresses enough, you won't even be allowed to use the LLMs. They'll exist only to be a tool for the new feudal class who owns you.

Unless you destroy their wealth now.

There's a list of 81 known instances of police stalking romantic interests, sometimes querying Flock hundreds of times: https://ij.org/police-have-reportedly-used-license-plate-rea...

Some of the cases involve sexual assault and kidnapping as well.

And obviously those are just the ones who got caught.

That mitigates one specific problem with Flock, and not entirely. Firstly, as long as any jackass can fill out a form and set a "hit," they can still target and stalk people.

And ALPR is only one method that Flock uses. Their pan-tilt-zoom offerings are specifically meant to target pedestrians. They have facial recognition (and I've heard gait as well) and sniff for Bluetooth and other things to try to fingerprint devices.

It needs to be illegal to collect video for later facial recognition analysis as well.

Something like 15% of PS5 game sales are physical now and only 5-10 games managed to crack 100K disc sales in a recent year, last I heard.

Games are also exceeding triple-layer BluRay size now in many cases, and average internet speeds in the US are faster than BluRay transfer speeds. Since you've already had to install the games to internal storage since the PS3 at least (and the PS5 even has user m.2 SSD expansion), discs have just been an annoying extra step for a long time.

Also, online purchases are cheaper. Frequent sales happen, at steeper discounts than brick and mortar retailers ever have. Plenty of games were 50-75% off during the summer sale.

That being said, I've picked up a few on disc in recent years. It's a convenient way to share games in a household with multiple PlayStations and I've received some as gifts that way, since giving people a specific game as a gift in the physical world is still inconceivable to companies.

The most legendary drift car of all time was a Corolla: the AE86 [1], which people still fix up and have meets at tracks with. It was a sport model, which also saw Group A and WRC racing use. The modern spiritual successor is the GR 86, which attempts to retain the same weight balance and rear wheel drive.

The modern GR Corolla has a turbocharged 300hp 3-cyl engine and AWD. It's a $40K+ hot hatch. There is, similarly, a GR Yaris that was released for homologation purposes, as it's Toyota's WRC rally platform.

People say similar things about Civics, because their only experience is with the base models, but higher trim levels add a lot of power (over 300hp on the Type R), and Honda understands weight and handling well. My Civic Sport Touring is a hybrid with 200hp, instantaneous torque from the electric motor, and only about 3200lb curb weight. (And it gets a solid 45mpg no matter what mix of highway or city driving I do.)

Japanese brands don't tend to make whole new model names for sports or luxury vehicles, just using a different trim level on the same car. (See also: Acura and Integra are a US thing, with the original Honda and Toyota model names being used in Japan.) Even the Subaru WRX, a notable rally platform, used to just be the the Subaru Impreza WRX, a higher trim on the Impreza line.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toyota_AE86

My Civic reminds me that it's on on every startup. The "don't do dumb things with the screen when you should be paying attention while driving" message (which goes away after a little bit) has a note that data sharing is on, which I have enabled because I have a HondaLink subscription.

Anti-theft location reporting is a feature I pay for, as well as the ability to remote start out of range of the key fob. (Setting temperature before leaving the office is preferable to getting into a 130F car.)

I did briefly see what it does with the data sharing off, and it's basically the same message, but iirc there's an additional button to visit the settings.

Yes, absolutely. Every microservice where I work is architecturally scrutinized by multiple groups over things like PCI, GDPR and SOX, with major features requiring review. And then third party auditors get to review stuff occasionally. PII is radioactive and PCI data is hard siloed.

If you work at a company that deals with education or HIPAA stuff, there's going to be even more of that.

Presumably Google aren't morons or criminals.

A civil dispute over patent details (which is basically business as usual in technology) is not the same thing as orchestrating a criminal corporate espionage ring to exfiltrate inside information.

One is arguing over the legal application of publicly filed information, the other is literal espionage, which not only impacts non-public trade secrets and insider (i.e. stock implications) information, but also raises questions about external agents secretly making actions that could undermine operations.

Nobody goes to prison for patent infringement, but you absolutely can for the latter.

It's the same technique of the "3D touch" the iPhone 6S had, though that was discontinued. Capacitive sensors measure microscopic changes in the glass, as it slightly flexes when you press it. Then a haptic motor does a little kick to simulate the feel of it being pressed down.

They've been doing this since 2015 or so. Prior Macs didn't click on the top 1/4 of the trackpad, because there was basically a "hinge" there and the glass would actually press on a physical button.

Apple was "near bankruptcy" in the post-Jobs 90s period of the late 90s. Closer to the time of the 1997 CRT iMac, which was one of the first products Jobs launched after coming back. (And could be credited as the major turning point.) The iPod came out in 2001, along with the shift from the classic OS to OS X and launch of the iBook and an overall major product shift.

The iPhone was long after Apple was a majorly successful company that people wanted to emulate.

Microsoft also never just gave Apple money for no reason. They settled Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corporation by agreeing to continue to develop Office for the Mac and to purchase $150M in non-voting Apple shares, and both companies agreed to cross-licensing of OS patents.

Even if one believes that piracy on an individual level isn't the big deal that has been made of it, a large business doing it on a massive scale with the goal of destroying others' ability to continue to meaningfully subsist and produce new things is a completely different matter.

There's a world of difference between someone downloading a book and a company basically burning down the entire publishing industry and making writing as a profession increasingly non-viable. The latter should be approached in the context of antitrust (leveraging a dominant position to knock over unrelated markets) and racketeering.

As someone who cashiered in college, I vastly preferred monitoring self checkouts over being monetarily forced to interact with an endless line of the kind of people who don't use self checkouts.

As a shopper, I don't want to be one of those people either. Ideally, I want lower friction and to be able to pay on my phone instead of dealing with the kiosk.

The GDPR does. Consent to data processing must be unambiguous, accessible, informed in plain language with no legal or technical jargon, and not have any preselected boxes.

https://gdpr.eu/gdpr-consent-requirements/

The problem is the capacity to litigate is far surpassed by the world's speed and volume of doing bad.

This is a case where companies' actions should be treated like parking tickets: a fine is issued summarily, with option to appeal, not a slow process of litigation having to happen before a fine is issued.

The corporate espionage ring targeting Apple also isn't a good look. A company that does that is a company that will lie to you about harvesting internal materials from your company.

Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.

The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.

They patched CS:GO away, a game I paid retail price for, with "Counter-Strike 2" and overnight dropped support for my platform (MacOS).

Sony has never stolen a game from me, unlike Valve. The closest incident was that movie thing, which was more a failure on their part to negotiate perpetual licensing with the rightsholder.

Valve killed the previously thriving boxed game industry two decades ago and people can't get over how much they love everything about Valve. Sony follows 20 years later (in a world where internet is faster than installing from BluRay and games are outgrowing three layer discs) and people lose their mind.

There's more noise about this than Microsoft's mass layoffs at the game companies they bought up.

This is a consequence of browser monopolies, established by Microsoft in the 90s: everyone should have to pay for a browser and make a deliberate choice in vendor. The fact that they're free and subsidized by large businesses in other markets, rather than being a product you choose to buy, is a concrete example of monopolistic market distortion.

"Good" is subjective. Quite a large number of people think they're "good," in a time where it's hard to get people into theaters in the first place.

Some of the best selling movies in the past couple of years were video game ones: Mario, Minecraft, Mario Galaxy were all huge. All close to or over a billion dollars at the box office. The Sonic films were popular, and Detective Pikachu was decent.

The new Mortal Kombat ones did pretty well, but I prefer the original.

Honestly, video game films have been outperforming super heroes for the past several years, though Spider-Man turned that around.

It should be a criminal act to attempt to build a mass surveillance apparatus, whether it's for law enforcement or private use.