They did still overpromise and that should not be the way Apples does things (although it was hardly the first time; the AirPower mat was announced in 2017).
To be fair, all tech companies do this. Sell first, implement later, hype hype hype. Of course we’d like to think Apple was better, but well.. it isn’t.
Google certainly shipped Magic Cue as their tentpole new AI feature on the Pixel 10 despite it not working.
> “The right info, right when you need it.” That’s how Google describes Magic Cue, one of the most prominent new AI features on the Pixel 10 series. Using the power of artificial intelligence, Magic Cue is supposed to automatically suggest helpful info in phone calls, text messages, and other apps without you having to lift a finger.
However, the keyword there is “supposed” to... even when going out of my way to prompt Magic Cue, it either doesn’t work or does so little that I’m amazed Google made as big a deal about the feature as it did.
Many gamers are married to Windows exclusive games like Fortnite etc., but gamers are also more rebellious than corporate IT staff and many have actually built their computers from parts, so they are not scared of flashing a USB drive. I'm optimistic that this group is the next one to break away from Windows.
Gaming is the biggest thing that keeps me on Windows, followed by the fact that I use an Nvidia GPU, followed by a very localized case of inertia where I have so much data, settings and programs concentrated in my OS install that migrating it all over is going to be a monumental pain in the ass. But luckily, Linux gaming has gotten way better and I don't play the kind of games that categorically refuses to run there (anything with highly involved anti-cheat systems), so once my version of Windows becomes unsupported, I'll bite the bullet and make the Linux install into my primary one.
I think people like me are the real first line that's most likely to switch - techy people who play games (which had so far kept them on Windows) and that suffer firsthand at Microsoft's attempts to get them directly in addition to already being treated horribly by default. This group is less afraid of changing things up and has more incentives to switch. But if we talk of gamers in general, it may take a while until a meaningful number of them switch over, even though they are far more motivated than the average PC user. Even though they're the prime candidates, it's going to be a very, very steep uphill battle.
> ... localized case of inertia where I have so much data, settings and programs concentrated in my OS install that migrating it all ...
Your first step is start swapping out Windows-specific programs for cross-platform alternatives. Eventually you'll have to just cut the rest loose and make the jump though. Don't bother dual-booting either or you'll just delay it further.
I made the transition a few years ago and it was far less dramatic than I imagined.
Luckily, there's not that much Windows-only software I must use. Unluckily, it's pretty essential:
- Fusion 360 (the only alternative seems to be learning a different, likely far more involved CAD)
- Paint.NET (a simple, quick, no-nonsense image editor - while there are image editor alternatives, as far as I can tell there's nothing quite like it)
The bigger issue that might keep me dual-booting are graphical features. Things like VR and HDR are already known to be janky on their "native" Windows implementations, so I'm scared to imagine what any of that is going to be like on Linux. Neither are common use cases, but I still want to hold onto those where possible.
I feel that pain. I was using Lightroom since 2009 or so and I it took me many hours over many Saturdays to extricate myself from its grasp. That being said, my efforts to abandon it was the only thing that exposed a lot of problems (metadata, duplicates, etc.) so... it worked out in the end.
I don't have a replacement at all but this coincided with a reduced desire to tinker with and touch up my photos in general. I'm currently working on a modular Unix-y/CLI-focused way to safely ingest photos (archive originals with PAR2; then move from source and rename), reject/rate as needed, ensure timestamps are correct (UTC for DSLRs), geotag with whatever GPX I have, and then eventually some sort of LLM-based tagging. Exif will do a lot of heavy lifting here.
All I really need now is a way to rate my photos and I'll probably use Digikam for that. Raw processing doesn't have a CLI solution that I like so I'll probably have to use RawTherapee or something as well.
Right. I said that when Windows loses the gamers, its monopoly will eventually collapse. Office-use is another area where Windows has a stronghold, but the gamers are typically quite clever people, whereas elderly people often have physical problems and grew up in a time where computers weren't so dominating.
This is just a personal anecdote, but I was speaking from past experience. Perhaps things have improved now, but back when I seriously used Linux on my own PC, the 2-3 times when the system randomly stopped booting properly and had to be tinkered with for me to be able to do anything with my computer, all of these issues were caused by something (Nvidia) GPU-related.
The situation is much better now. I've never had any issues with using the proprietary drivers on Arch on wayland in the past few years. If anything, AMD's drivers are noticeably more buggy.
Not just battery life, but also webcams and mics. Sure, you can use additional gadgets...but being able to open your MacBook and just talk to your coworkers is reason enough to keep an M1 Air around for the next years.
(That's just one genre of brainrot I came across recently. I also had my front page flooded with monkey-themed AI slop because someone in my household watched animal documentaries. Thanks algorithm!)
Have you dived into the destructive brainrot that YouTube serves to millions of kids who (sadly) use it unattended each day? Even much of Google's non-ad software is a cancer on humanity.
Only if you believe in water memory or homeopathy.
To stretch the analogy, all the "babies" in the "bathwater" of youtube that I follow are busy throwing themselves out by creating or joining alternative platforms, having to publicly decry the actions Google takes that make their lives worse and their jobs harder, and ensuring they have very diversified income streams and productions to ensure that WHEN, not IF youtube fucks them, they won't be homeless.
They mostly use Youtube as an advertising platform for driving people to patreon, nebula, whatever the new guntube is called, twitch, literal conventions now, tours, etc.
They've been expecting youtube to go away for decades. Many of them have already survived multiple service deaths, like former Vine creator Drew Gooden, or have had their business radically changed by google product decisions already.
Will you be responding similarly to Pike? I think the parent comment is illustrating the same sort of logic that we're all downwind of, if you think it's flawed, I think you've perhaps discovered the point they were making.
Yes I agree although I still believe that there is some tangential truth in parent comment when you think about it.
I am not accurate about google but facebook definitely has some of the most dystopian tracking I have heard. I might read the facebook files some day but the dystopian fact that facebook tracks young girls and sees if that they delete their photos, they must feel insecure and serves them beauty ads is beyond predatory.
Honestly, my opinion is that something should be done about both of these issues.
But also its not a gotcha moment for Rob pike that he himself was plotting up the ads or something.
Regarding the "iphone kids", I feel as if the best thing is probably an parental level intervention rather than waiting for an regulatory crackdown since lets be honest, some kids would just download another app which might not have that regulation.
Australia is implementing social media ban basically for kids but I don't think its gonna work out but everyone's looking at it to see what's gonna happen basically.
Personally I don't think social media ban can work if VPN's just exist but maybe they can create such an immense friction but then again I assume that this friction might just become norm. I assume many of you guys must have been using internet from the terminal days where the friction was definitely there but the allure still beat the friction.
How does the compute required for that compare to the compute required to serve LLM requests? There's a lot of goal-post moving going on here, to justify the whataboutism.
Being able to replace the keyboard is especially wonderful because laptops are usually "region-locked". I know people who use relatively unpopular layouts relative to where they live, and it makes it harder to buy and much harder to sell their Macs.
This curse extends to mechanical keyboards as well. There exists all sorts of fancy, beautiful and odd keycap sets... for Americans. Some times for German and French. If I get really lucky, I'll find some with a "Nordic" layout, which is an abomination that combines dk/se/no.
And I thank god every day we don't. The ISO keyboard is awful. Left shift is too important of a key to be 1u. I don't need a massive enter key that lives on two rows. Just insane choices.
I use a Dvorak-based layout on Qwerty keyboards, so in normal usage they could as well have blank keycaps.
Despite that, the Qwerty keycaps remain useful for me, because my keyboards are not programmable, so the key mapping is done by the operating system. When I have to unlock the computer with a password, after booting, the keyboard still works as Qwerty and the keycaps help me in entering the password, because nowadays I touch-type only on Dvorak, while on Qwerty I must return to hunt-and-peck, as there are many years since I stopped using Qwerty.
So only because of this password entering, I prefer to not have blank keycaps, even if I ignore them in normal usage.
They're really not -- Mac scissor switches are pretty delicate, and it's easy to do damage to the tiny plastic nubs on the keycaps or the switches... and if you damage the metal retaining frame in any way, you're toast (Mac laptop keyboards are virtually unreplaceable, being buried in the "bottom" of the unibody chassis).
I've swapped ~579 keys (6 MacBook keyboards, and one magic keyboard) with exactly one broken plastic bit from the very first key tried, before looking up the youtube video on how to do it. Damaging the metal retaining frame is impossible when removing or installing them appropriately, so the technique you used was very very wrong. They're easily and trivially popped off and on, if done right. Great care is not needed, with the whole processes taking me around ~10 minutes.
I think they mean different regions have physically different layouts. I supported users in different countries and know that French layouts are different than Hebrew layouts which are different from English layouts and so on. Trying to buy different key caps doesn’t give the user a native layout because the shapes of the layouts are somewhat different.
It seems that no modern comment section is complete without the complaint "too much politics", then followed by "but everything is political". Some talks do not even try to draw a line from politics to computers, and I think that is what people feel unhappy about.
The first two talks are in the "Ethics, Society & Politics" category, and the third in the "Art & Beauty" category. Why would they need to be about computing?
It's a big organisation, and politics is wrapped up in what they do, along with the post-WWII Antifaschism culture in Germany.
Even if it weren't the case, I don't get why attack them for helping stand up for democracy, something in dire need of advocacy these days
Unrelated to this conference I've often heard the "everything is political" argument, and mostly with a passive-aggressive "or else.." (you're up for a political fight) undertone. I once enquired on very mundane things in life, and yes "those too are political act". Well, if everything is bleakly political in that sense, we may make it universal, just call it Newspeak.
Definition of politics: whenever two agents have conflicting goals and a resolution is reached (peacefully or otherwise). Or more succinctly, multi-agent dynamics. Yes, almost everything is politics, and this is not diluting the word, any more than saying that almost everything is made of atoms is diluting the meaning of the word "atoms".
(Parent comment was edited to remove the part about diluting meaning)
We might be the same age; I remember that defacing conservative websites was already a C3 thing about 20 years ago. Back then, it felt good to punch up against authoritarianism. Hackers hated Bush and his Patriot Act just as much as many hate Trump now. In Germany, the CDU is of course the perennial enemy.
But what happens when authoritarianism does not come from the right, but from the left or center? (Not a contradiction: East Germany was an "anti-fascist" totalitarian state as recently as 40 years ago.) Sadly, I think we have been slowly moving in this direction since Covid, where I was genuinely shocked that many of my "leftie" friends had turned into government drones (from my perspective), while they were deeply disappointed that I was now a "right-winger" (from their perspective).
The more aware they become of how unpopular some of their politics are, the less they believe in democracy as a concept, while I'm still jealous of countries that have proper referendums and freedom of speech. Hate Speech laws are accelerating this divide.
Anyway, I think that these are the dynamics that are driving many people apart who all simultaneously claim to not have changed in decades. The CCC is still doing a lot of great work, but I do feel it drifting away from me because it is not so much about punching up than about punching right.
The authoritarianism quick clearly and explicitly comes from the far right, Putin and Trump. Claiming anything else is ridiclous, its not even hidden anymore. Its a clear outright endorsment.
Back in the Bush days it was about defending freedom but being to invasive about doing it. Nobody was talking about Bush they do about Trump. And the CDU of old is certaintly not the modern AfD.
Claiming the lefts action in covid even approches the lines of thought out of Trump, AfD or Putin isnt a serious argument.
That is not what I said at all. My claim is that, regardless of what the authoritarian right is doing, the left has become more tolerant of authoritarianism itself, especially to 'save democracy' (which is again reminescent of the GDR, starting from its very name).
As to why this split is happening, I'd argue it was easier to be anti-authoritarian when we were in the opposition, just as today's AfD reliably votes against Chat Control or other power grabs because it makes them look good at no cost. But the left has become a dominant force due to its long march through the institutions, and some want to use this power to crush the enemy (debanking, police raids for milquetoast internet comments). Others look at the internet compass from your sibling post and decide they'd rather hang out with people in the libertarian right than with _any_ kind of authoritarian.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying the CCC is an authoritarian organization. But I doubt they'll ever be too critical of our intransparent "Trusted Flagger" system, for example, because they know it would anger many in their crowd. 20 years ago we'd have agreed that this kind of crap only happens in China.
They also support Group Policy and JSON based configurations, depending on the OS. So you could install a config that disables a lot of that before you even install the Brave Browser.
Heck, they could probably sell that as a premium/business feature for extra funding (hint hint if anyone from Brave reads this).
Neither do I, but what about YouTube? Not letting your TV manufacturer sell your watching habits is already a big win, and on macOS you can further block telemetry. A big chunk of my YouTube consumption happens through yt-dlp using a VPN provider that presumably does not cooperate with Google.
