I think the problem is that older SDK versions allowed you to do things like scan local WiFi names to get location data, without requiring the location permission.
So bad actors would just target lower SDK versions and ignore the privacy improvements
The newer Android version could simply give empty data (for example, location is 0,0 latitude longitude, there are no visible WiFi networks), when the permission is missing and an app on the old SDK version requests it.
Of course, they don't like this because then apps can't easily refuse to work if not allowed to spy.
Phone companies are required to make sure 911 works on their phones. Random people on the internet aren't required to make sure 911 works on random apps, even if they look like phones.
I feel like the point isn't "there should be a touch screen MacBook" but more "holy shit we simulated a working touch screen by looking at reflections coming off the glass, isn't that cool".
I just looked up Apple Care. Costs $449 AUD (~$300 USD) for 3 years of coverage on a MacBook Pro.
A quick search shows that it's ~$500-$600 to fix the screen if it does break; I didn't bother looking up the keyboard but I'd assume it's much, much less.
So basically, on the off chance that your MacBook does shit the bed in the most expensive way, you save ~$150 or so? But in the almost-certain case that your Macbook is fine, you're down $450?
>A quick search shows that it's ~$500-$600 to fix the screen if it does break; I didn't bother looking up the keyboard but I'd assume it's much, much less.
_The_ point of that the article you're commenting on, is that a keyboard replacement on a MacBook is very expensive. Why would you make that assumption?
The "most expensive way" to shit the bed is also not the peripherals of the computer dying, it's the logic board giving up the ghost.
I'm a repair tech - hence made some assumptions that the author did not make.
Have done riveted keyboards on non-Mac machines before and would be surprised if an independent shop charged more than about $150 USD for it. It's not that hard to do.
You're right about the logic board being an extremely expensive fix, but it's also significantly less common than something like a keyboard, USB port, speaker or screen.
This is also something extremely Australian-specific, but consumer guarantees would probably cover any logic board damage within the first 1-3 years anyway, regardless of AppleCare warranty.
What if your screen breaks or logic board? Top of the line MacBooks cost ~4-5k. I recently had to service a battery and they replaced a top case and a keyboard free of charge. I will continue paying for AppleCare as long as they will allow me
I run into bugs every day. It wakes, and has a black screen not wallpaper. Change spaces and the focus is wrong for half a second. Login screen is a pain because it collapses all users together. Notifications don’t scroll if they stop scrolling when the cursor is over a gap between them. Something on the system constantly eats disk space, and I think it’s the system updates. If I dock two apps in one space, sometimes one is black. If I zoom out to the Spaces overview it shows fine in the preview though. In the Terminal if I close a tab it can focus an entirely different window.
I could go on for hours. It’s a buggy mess these days and I miss Lion and Snow Leopard desperately.
Yes, these got a lot worse after Tahoe. The past few versions have all had issues on multiple machines.
None of this sounds like a hardware error. Something like notification scrolling is simple bad programming and bad QA. You scroll the list of them, but when the mouse cursor ends up on a gap between them, the new scroll event doesn't apply. They're all individual even though shown together.
Or a black screen on wake - that has the mouse cursor and login prompt, it just sometimes doesn't load the wallpaper or does it slowly. Not hardware - just something buggy. It's unbelievable when I compare to Leopard or whichever version it was introduced the rotating 'cube' of login screens, which always had wallpaper and loaded fast. Here we are fifteen years later with incredibly better hardware and the thing lags.
Nothing mentioned in the previous comment is indicative of a hardware problem. If you think I'm wrong, please describe a plausible mechanism to cause any of the problems described above. They all are plausibly software bugs. I mean, Apple hardware is not really any better than any other piece of fallible hardware, and their OS has been a buggy mess since Apple DOS. Most pieces of software as large as an OS are buggy in many ways, and Apple has not been proven to be the exception.
Honestly, HN has a lot of people getting infuriated by storms in teacups and spouting shit. Definitely an order of magnitude better than Reddit or Facebook but still not the same as IRL.
For me, Sora changed the way I viewed Sam Altman as a person.
I really thought he wasn't like the previous generations of tech leaders - as you mentioned OpenAI (with him in charge) seemed to be genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives.
He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too.
Then they drop this and it just doesn't gel. So much of what they've done since has just doubled down on the Zuck-esque scumminess and greed too.
Part of me still sees Dario as genuine in the way that Sama seemed back in 2024, but I'm sure once he has enough investor pressure he'll cave the same way too.
> He'd go on podcasts and quite convincingly talk about how ChatGPT could prevent real world harm like suicide, and possibly even contribute to helping disease too.
He is a con man. Of course he’s charming and convincing, that’s how he ended up where he is. But he’s just as full of it as Musk when he was waxing lyrical about saving the world and going to Mars. They lie very convincingly.
Sam Altman made his stake at the table with a shady and failed location data harvesting app (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loopt). That's who he is, that's what he does, and we're all better off paying less attention to the sounds he emits, and more to the things he does.
Multiple people have attested that Sam Altman is extremely charming (especially in more casual, intimate settings) and talks very nobly about his goals, but his actual work is just…all kinds of awful. And I think that charm only goes so far as it seems clear that people are starting to demand that OpenAI actually match its words with work it cannot produce.
I think his board fight within OpenAI where essentially lied to the board, his obsession with retinal scanning everyone for his biometric cryptocurrency (Worldcoin), how he left Y Combinator are just evidence that he’s not very heroic. Most cringe to me is that he and many others seem aware that what their are doing is corrosive and harmful to society on some level as Altman has admitted to having a bunker somewhere around Big Sur [0]. Which…WTF.
Not too familiar with that history, but he still is listed as a courtesy credit/reviewer at the end of PG's blog entries, so I assume he didn't have too much of a bad exit?
We’ll never know exactly what exactly transpired, but I think the existing evidence is clear that as President of Y Combinator he should not have been also as involved in OpenAI as he was.
This is a conflict of interest and I think one a very obvious one. He tried to have it both ways and was forced to choose in the end. I think putting himself in that situation rather than resigning up front to pursue OpenAI ambitions says a lot about his character.
I haven't followed him much as I really don't care, but the one clip I've seen of him that really stands out to me (I've seen more but this is the one I remember) is one where he's talking to some guy who doubts the LLMs genius, and Sam says something like "what if ChatGPT solved quantum gravity, would you be convinced then?"
To me, this just came off as pathetic. It hasn't solved anything and there's no reason to believe it ever will. The whole question is completely pointless except to put the idea in viewers heads that ChatGPT will soon revolutionize science, with no actual substance behind it. It's not even a question, there's only one possible answer. He's holding the guy verbally hostage just to manipulate dumb viewers.
So anyway that's the only memorable clip I've seen of Sam Altman, and based on that alone, fuck that guy.
The most memorable clip I've seen of him was the Brad Gerstner's podcast one (an investor of OpenAI), Gerstner questioned Altman about the financials of OAI, how could it have committed to spend so much given the revenue, it's a decent question and it's been up in the air for a while across the media.
Altman's reaction was very telling of the kind of person he is, just immediately lashing out at Gerstner in a childish way, asking if Gerstner wanted to sell his shares because he could find a buyer in no time.
It was a pathetically immature reaction, I wouldn't expect that from any kind of professional, even less someone who has held positions as Altman has and now sits at the top of the leadership for a company sucking hundreds of billions of investment.
Apart from that clip there's also the whole saga of sama @ Reddit, full of lies, deceptions, and the same kind of immature attitude peppered across Reddit itself.
My most memorable clip was when he was interviewed about the "suicide" of an ex-employee and Sama lied through his teeth. I can't understand people who say this snake is "charming"... he's a bad liar and has sub-zero charisma.
> It was a pathetically immature reaction, I wouldn't expect that from any kind of professional, even less someone who has held positions as Altman has and now sits at the top of the leadership for a company sucking hundreds of billions of investment.
If you're familiar with nepobaby brats and narcissists, this is not surprising.
That's the point. The other guy can only say yes - if chatgpt solved a hard problem and improved our understanding of the universe there would be no discussion as to its capability to do so.
"No" is not a reasonable answer to the question. It's like asking an atheist "if god and Jesus and all the angels came to earth and showed themselves for all to see, would you believe in god then?" Well yes of course, I believe in all the things we can all see. The lack of evidence is the whole point.
So asking "if there was evidence would you think differently?" Is either a fundamental misunderstanding of the persons position, or just a cheap ploy to manipulate people. In Sam's case I'm thinking it was the latter. He's a clever guy, he knows he's on camera. He asked that question just to plant the idea in people's minds - not the guy he was talking to, that guy didn't even need to answer the question because as already said there's only one answer to it. But to everyone watching, Sam basically just put it out there that ChatGPT solving quantum gravity is within the realm of possibility. Which it probably isn't.
Thinking that Scam Altman of Worldcoin etc. fame was "genuine about making a product that could improve people's lives" seems like a strange kind of delusion.
N=1 here but I love getting out of the blue phone calls from the couple of friends that do it. If I can't pick up, or am too busy to chat, I just swipe up on of the prebaked "sorry, can't chat now" SMS responses.
It's them who initiate 90% of the calls too, and nobody cares.
You're absolutely right! Nobody in the 60s or 70s thought that the police should terrorise minorities or that women were beneath them. These are entirely new problems that have only arisen since 2020 or so.
They knew not to say the quiet part out loud back then. That decorum is gone now.
Or in many cases (not mine since I don't use them), there wasn't the world's largest bathroom wall to go sound off on... Except you sign every message off with your name. The kind of stuff people post in their real name that I would take to my grave is insane.
Similar experience here with Tirzepatide. Overeating is punished swiftly and painfully.
If it works for you, look into getting one of the 15mg pens and counting clicks in order to get more doses per vial. I've been on the one pen for 3 months now and it's still got plenty of juice left.
One of the quirks of buying brand name GLP1s in the US is that we don't get the dial-a-dose pens, every autopen is one-shot. Some people disassemble them to get multiple doses, but at that point you might as well get the cheaper brand name vials or go with compound or gray.
Lilly Direct sells zepbound in “single use” vials you make draws from. Very trivial to add bacteriostatic water to them and do some simple math to divide the dose. I have a few friends who do this.
You can also take apart the pens and do the same thing, but it’s a lot more involved and you’ll need to source some sterile reusable vials for it.
When I was on Ozempic in the US (Bay Area), it was a dial-a-dose Ozempic branded pen. Came with 4-6 single use needles you’d screw onto the end before use, and discard into a sharps bin after.
A decade or so ago, when I was still in uni, I managed to get similar results naturally too - ~100kg down to ~65kg in around 18-24 months just by eating healthy and exercising more.
I put back all of that weight and then some during the COVID pandemic (I'm in Melbourne, Australia - we had the worst lockdowns on planet Earth) and this time struggled for years to lose it until trying GLP-1 drugs a few months back.
For me, what made it harder the second time around wasn't so much of a difference in discipline skills (if anything, they've improved) but the fact that there was so much more going on in my life - young family constantly getting sick, small business that started struggling, relationship/social issues, health issues (sleep apnoea) etc. etc.
I'd get on the weight loss train, lose a couple of kilos, then the whole family would get sick with the flu and I'd put it all back on again while recovering. Or maybe I'd be forced to shift my focus to the business so that we could keep the lights on. Or any number of things.
I guess my point is that it's not difficult to lose weight naturally (or any self-improvement, really) in and on itself, but it's completely different ballgame when you're fighting a war on 6 different fronts. Having one of those problems simply just disappear through GLP-1 drugs genuinely feels like a miracle.
So bad actors would just target lower SDK versions and ignore the privacy improvements
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