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 <think> 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.
I’d be surprised if it was. The man was a symptom, not the root cause of the problem, and he certainly didn’t do it all by himself.
He was the stereotypical man in the underworld who could get you anything, as long as you could afford the price.
Others would almost certainly have filled in the gap he left by now.
They do, but there may be better local alternatives, since the shipping can be quite high.
It seems more like a bad editor/insufficient proofreading.
That’s the kind of comment I sometimes make if I rephrase it in the draft, but don’t check to make sure I remove all of the original sentence before posting.
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 think people would have minded very much if they had taken one of their existing chassis and swapped it for an electric drivetrain, but kept the design mostly the same.
This thing looks fine as a standard passenger EV
I’d honestly disagree there. It looks like someone wearing oversized clothes, which isn’t helped by its colour scheme.
It stands out in a bad way, compared to a modern passenger EV, which arguably looks nicer because it’s less awkward.
But ask a mainstream manufacturer to make an EV car and they look stupid half the time.
IMO, it’s probably more that they overdesign them. They want the EV to look futuristic and unique compared to their regular cars, but their cars already look like that to some degree, and so they overcook the design into looking like some science fiction vehicle. Take the Ferrari, for example, they tried to make it have a floating arch where the hood would normally be.
That’s fine for a movie or video game, but in real life, coupled with the practical limits, it just doesn’t look very good.
It’s also their way of contributing. You keep getting them food, and contributing to the colony, so they’re also getting food and contributing to the colony, to make sure you don’t go hungry, and the colony is fed.
Poorly optimised is also extra bad in today’s climate, where the cost of hardware is just through the roof. People simply can’t afford a new, more powerful computer.
Lasers would be quite risky. Anything that powerful would also instantly obliterate peoples’ vision if there’s a reflection and it gets them in the eye.
If it’s using Bluetooth to knacker them, then all the nearby Bluetooth devices would be vulnerable.
Medical equipment these days also can feature Bluetooth for mobile connectivity, and you can’t exactly go without your defibrillator, hearing aids, or insulin pump.
Or they’re in a position where they can affect the outcome, without being directly involved.
Like the recent controversies over people harassing a journalist because they’d made a bet, and then the journalist didn’t report their desired outcome, or potentially interfering with weather equipment to win a bet.
Wasn’t that assumption part of why the i9 MacBooks a few generations back had massive heating issues?
The fans and heatsinks weren’t enough to cool the i9, even though they were fine with the i7, so performance would quickly go into the floor when they started throttling.
I don’t know if it would, necessarily. So many alternatives are chrome-based, and part of the reason google was able to accrue that share to begin with was by putting a “get chrome now” in the corner of every search you did.
Most alternatives don’t have that same kind of advertising reach to displace chrome, especially not for casual users.
Why bother worrying about the downturn if the world bends over backwards to stop you hitting the ground?
It is basically impossible for Visa to go bankrupt, for example. The moment the threat looms, governments are going to leap in and save them. They’re too big to fail.
A female werewolf would be a wifwolf.