Interesting copyright question: if I own a copy of a book, can I feed it to a local AI installation for personal use?

Can a library train a local AI installation on everything it has and then allow use of that on their library computers? <— this one could breathe new life into libraries

Honestly I think they suffer a little from early-mover disadvantage.

“Cheap Chinese” and all the associations that come with that is a little reductive in this case. Roborock vacuums are not actually cheap - they are extraordinarily well-made, featureful, and a good value compared to iRobot.

Decades ago, iRobot probably spent millions in R&D just to arrive at navigation algorithms that were worse than what you can get with open-source libraries today. They also spent the marketing dollars to convince people these robots were safe and effective. They weren’t always, so there were some ups and downs in that.

Nowadays the supporting technologies are all much more advanced (and cheaper) and the market for these robots has been created already and is very robust. Companies like Roborock just have to come in and build a good product and they’ll see much faster returns than iRobot did for all those years. They can go straight to lidar, which was probably prohibitive for iRobot for many years, leading iRobot to invest heavily in other technologies which are now a generation behind.

So in addition to their decades of tech legacy. iRobot is burdened with the expectations of longtime investors who want a big cashout, just as they are getting eaten alive by all this new competition. They pinned their hopes on a big exit and are now holding the bag. It’s not surprising that this all left them in trouble.

setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps

iRobot was originally founded all the way back in 1990 and have sold quite a lot of Roomba vacuums, advancing innovation in home automation along the way. I don’t think anyone can ever say that they set up this company for a quick flip corpo pump and dump.

I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.

Thoughts? Frankly, none.

That was genuinely pulled out of my ass. Not a benchmark comparison. It’s just my perception that cards only get incrementally better each year, but “this year’s card” is always proportionally much more expensive for what you get. Few games actually demand the very latest and greatest, so I don’t know why people would ever pay the premium for the latest and greatest.

You’re saying that all backlit LCDs are projectors?

Sometimes a product winds up in late-stage enshittification before its sector is fully developed. Just as the thing it does is beginning to fully explode, it begins to aggressively harvest its brand value. They miss the big wave, and everyone asks what happened. That’s one disadvantage in moving early. You also hit enshittification early.

Fuck him for taking anything from Tolkien’s legacy for his evil fucking purposes.

For years now the prices on this year’s latest cards are so high that I don’t know who buys them. I can afford to spend $1000 but I never would when I can probably get 85% of the performance for $250.

Guy should really move on.

We’re arguing about whether music videos are videos and therefore there will be ads on videos… Here’s what the article says. Pretty straightforward.

With YouTube Lite, customers will be able to watch videos across verticals like gaming, fashion, beauty, cooking, news, and more, ad-free, but will be shown ads on music content and music videos.

My YT usage includes exactly zero anything related to music, so this seems relevant for me.

Sometimes the hype bubble bursts and then the products eventually grows to be even larger than the hype. But you never know how connected hype actually is to any realistic timeline. Hype can pop like a cherry tree flowering on the first sunny day of spring, thinking summer has arrived, but then get drenched by another few weeks of rain. And as stupid as that cherry tree is, summer will eventually arrive.

This is a good point. It’s never sat right with me that LLMs require such overwhelming resources and cannot be optimized. It’s possible that innovation has been too fast to worry about optimization yet, but all this BS about building new power plants and chip foundries for trillions of dollars and whatnot just seems mad.

The vibe there is infuckingsufferable. Corporate bootlicking, performative workaholism, and the butt-ugliest “influencers” of all platforms.

Some parts of life have gotten massively easier. The other day I called my pharmacy to delay my next prescription refill because I still have pills. I was able to do this entirely through voice interaction with an automated system. Huzzah. I get texts when my scrips are about to be filled or ready, and reminders if I don’t pick them up for a while. I can also see this info on demand in an app if I want. What’s not to like?

My entire medical group runs on an app now. I can make appointments with my doctor, see the documentation from prior visits, pay bills, see test results…

Oh but boo hoo this author had to download an app to order a drink. First world problems…

It’s crystal clear to me that Tesla played an important role at a key time, and pivoted the industry. The technology to do so had been there for a while but they lacked the will and they needed an innovator to scare them into action. Tesla did that. However, that role is now complete. I am flabbergasted that anyone still values this stock. Even setting aside this recent downturn in sales due to their brand going necrotic, they were already overmatched by the flood of competition coming their way. If major manufacturers don’t eat Tesla’s lunch, Chinese upstarts will. They can’t survive. They won’t survive. Even their supposed software advantage on self-driving has turned out to be a fraud, and the Simpertruck is a high profile failure. I’m glad that the stock hasn’t died yet though, because the rest of the world is still completing the transition to EVs, and the death of Tesla might put a chill on that. But in a few years, yeah, Tesla will blow away on the wind like so much dust.

You are 100% correct. They knowingly doubled down on him. They can all ride his coattails straight to hell.

A bigger screen is better for text consumption, too. Perhaps especially for that. If you don’t know why, just wait ;D

Seriously as a person getting on in years I always bump up the font size. And if you do this on a mini phone, you run out of usable space immediately.

I wish there were small phone options, too, but I can see why big is the default.

I’d like to see more options out there. But there are reasons it could be difficult. I’ve been a software dev for 25 years and we’ve had take our software from local installs to web services, then mobile web services or responsive interfaces for all screen sizes. Then mobile APPs came along… and we do have to decide which devices and screen sizes we’re going to support. It’s hard to justify spending 20% more time so that you can support 2% more people. And for my app anyway that’s how many tablet users we have. 2%. So we’ve never done tablets, period. If we had to support some phones that were 3x the size of others, that would be kinda hard too, and we’ll always choose to spend the bulk of our time where the bulk of our users are.

Just a real answer. Supporting different screen sizes isn’t free.