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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • That’s why they made it a pin.

    Sure you can sell an app on the App Store, but most people won’t pay more than 5 bucks for an app, and even that’s stretching it. And the subscription market is already over saturated. So how do you make a boatload of cash? Sell overpriced hardware that needs to be “upgraded” every year or 2 to use new features, and include a subscription to use the thing in the first place.

    They wanted to pull an Apple and lock people into their hardware ecosystem. I guarantee there was a plan for them to release an AI phone in the next 5 years if this thing did well.

    What they missed is Apple products are generally pleasant to use on a daily basis. From what everyone said, this thing was hot garbage and slow to respond to queries.




  • At this point we’re not even sure if fully autonomous vehicles are possible.

    Yes that one guy has been saying it’ll be ready next year for the passed 10 years, but no self driving company has been able to get an autonomous car from point A to point B in all road conditions that a competent human can manage.

    Even aircraft autopilot is not as autonomous as what people want out of self driving cars. Pilots are still required to be at their seats the entire flight in case something unexpected happens. And there are a lot more unexpected things on a road than in the middle of the sky. Even discounting human drivers being in the way, a self driving car needs to be able to recognize everything a human can and react to it better than a human would. I’m not sure that’s possible, even with “AI”. The human brain is insanely good at pattern matching, and it took millions of years of trial and error evolution to luck our way into that. How can someone guarantee an AI is going to be better?



  • You’re giving me flashbacks to the online training my work makes me do every year.

    I almost failed the first of 7 courses because I made the mistake of trying to do actual work while listening to the training, and didn’t realize there was a 5 minute timer for inactivity on the video player. And no, there was no additional time provided to complete the training. It was mandatory but essentially had to be done on your own time.





  • If Amazon were a country, and you treated its gross revenue as GDP, it would sit right between Ireland and belgium in the rankings.

    554 billion dollars of revenue every year.

    It’s insane that one company has more money moving than some medium sized countries.

    Personally I think it’s criminal that one company can control that much of a market, and it actually might be criminal considering Amazon offers everything from web hosting, video streaming, selling pretty much anything, manufacturing their own products, to sending you your prescription. AT&T was broken up for doing pretty much the same thing. I think it’s time we actually enforce some of these antitrust laws we have.




  • Zron@lemmy.world
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    toLinux@lemmy.mlI bought a Surface Pro 4 - Update
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    8 months ago

    Microsoft has a terrible track record with hardware.

    About the only hardware they’ve ever sold that didn’t crap the bed was the Xbox, Xbox one, and Xbox series whatever the fuck.

    The 360 would cook itself, instead of fixing it, they added red LEDs to tell you it was fucked. The windows phones were unresponsive and unimpressive garbage, and every tablet they’ve made has been mired in various hardware and screen issues.

    It’s almost like a software company that has a business model that depends on selling people regular updates, can’t get its head around the idea that hardware should just work for the task it’s designed to do. They want you to buy a new tablet every year or two, because it makes them money. They don’t really care if the battery is going to cook itself in 5 years, when the plan is you’ll buy a new device in 2 years, because you really need to edit PowerPoint™ presentations while on the train and with a touchscreen.





  • The secret service was just starting to use AR-15 pattern rifles, chambered in .223.

    You can see an agent with an AR-15 falling over when the motorcade accelerated, around the time JFK’s head exploded.

    The only wound that jfk had that had bullet fragmentation was the headshot, despite the .30 caliber carcano rounds that Oswald was firing being very capable of punching straight through a head, and in fact passed cleanly through jfk’s spine and ribs without deforming or splintering.

    The Autopsy report mentions how the bullet entered from the occipital lobe at the back of the skull, and fragmented, causing an exit wound by the ear.

    .223 rounds commonly splinter when impacting bones, as they are fairly small and don’t maintain much momentum when they hit hard surfaces.