Yeah, I think for most of what OP is describing, an earlier generation Pro with RAM and storage upgrade is a better bargain than spending the same amount of money on the newest processor. Not sure if OP can access the refurbished Apple store, but that’s where I’d be looking.
Yup, the base M chips can only support two displays, including the built-in, so a base MacBook Air can only support one external monitor. This was not a limitation of the Intel versions from before 2020.
Yeah, I’m not sure my reaction to them adding Pandas as a playable race (in the Warcraft III expansion) was that they were “really badass” as OP seemed to think.
Also, the main problem with LIDAR is that it really doesn’t see any more than cameras do. It uses light, or near-visible light, so it basically gets blocked by the same things that a camera gets blocked by. When heavy fog easily fucks up both cameras and LIDAR at the same time, that’s not really redundancy.
The spinning lidar sensors mechanically remove occlusions like raindrops and dust, too. And one important thing with lidar is that it involves active emission of lasers so that it’s a two way operation, like driving with headlights, not just passive sensing, like driving with sunlight.
Waymo’s approach appears to differ in a few key ways:
There’s a school of thought that because many of these would need to be eliminated for true level 5 autonomous driving, Waymo is in danger of walking down a dead end that never gets them to the destination. But another take is that this is akin to scaffolding during construction, that serves an important function while building up the permanent stuff, but can be taken down afterward.
I suspect that the lidar/radar/ultrasonic/extra cameras will be more useful for training the models necessary to reduce reliance on human intervention and maybe reduce the number of sensors. Not just in the quantity of training data, but some filtering/screening function that can improve the quality of data fed into the training.
BYD was just a cell phone battery company, and was like “well we’ve got the lithium supply chain locked down, you know what needs huge batteries: guess we’re doing cars now.”
Waymo chose the more expensive but easier option, but it also limits their scope and scalability.
I don’t buy it. The lidar data is useful for training the vision models, so there’s plenty of reason to believe that Waymo can solve the vision issues faster than Tesla.
I don’t think they’d go back to off-package RAM anymore. The benefits of putting it on one package is too great, and gives them just enough cover to be able to charge like crazy for it.
96GB of DDR5 laptop memory is $350
Maybe it’s better to compare LPCAMM2 form factor prices. For that, 64GB is $329. Still not quite the same as adding 16GB for $400, but it’s a better comparison.
For stationary workstations limited to only driving two displays, permanently committing to one built in display hurts flexibility. A MacBook air can’t have a dual monitor setup where both monitors are the same size.
The mini form factor cools better, and can do more sustained work with the same hardware.
More ports means more straightforward connection to things like hardwired Ethernet, external storage, etc., good for certain stationary uses.
A couple hundred dollars is like double the price. The MacBook Air starts at $1099 for the current generation, almost twice as much as the $599 Mac Mini. For now, the Mac Mini is also ahead by a generation in the M-series chip and base storage/memory, too, so it literally is more than twice the cost for a similarly specced MacBook Air over a Mac Mini. Presumably the next generation Air will also have some improvements to the base model, but I expect it to be the same price.
I personally use my M1 Mac Mini as a pretty good home server. That might not be a super common use case, but I’d think it would make a way better desktop than a MacBook Air.
You can’t just use an audio file by itself. It has to come from somewhere.
The courts already have a system in place that if someone seeks to introduce a screenshot of a text message, or a printout of a webpage, or a VHS tape with video, or just a plain audio file, needs to be able to introduce that as evidence, with someone who testifies that it is real and that it is accurate, with an opportunity for others to question and even investigate where it came from and how it was made/stored/copied.
If I just show up to a car accident case with an audio recording that I claim is the other driver admitting that he forgot to look before turning, that audio is gonna do basically nothing unless and until I show that I had a reason to be making that recording while talking to him, why I didn’t give it to the police who wrote the accident report that day, etc. And even then, the other driver can say “that’s not me and I don’t know what you think that recording is” and we’re still back to a credibility problem.
We didn’t need AI to do impressions of people. This has always been a problem, or a non-problem, in evidence.
A camera that authenticates the timestamp and contents of an image is great. But it’s still limited. If I take that camera, mount it on a tripod, and take a perfect photograph of a poster of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the resulting image will be yet another one of millions of similar copies, only with a digital signature proving that it was a newly created image today, in 2024.
Authenticating what the camera sensor sees is only part of the problem, when the camera can be shown fake stuff, too. Special effects have been around for decades, and practical effects are even older.
this won’t ruin his company or him financially for the rest of his life if it doesn’t work out
It wouldn’t be the only thing but I think there’s a nonzero chance that something like this is one key step in a spiral that forces Intel into bankruptcy. Their inability to get their foundry business off the ground currently threatens their long term prospects, and if they get stuck in a place where the government won’t trust them because they don’t have customers, and the customers won’t trust them because they don’t have the money, then that might truly lead to the end of the company, with his business decisions taught in business schools as a case study.
Gigglebytes?
YouTube serves probably dozens of formats/bitrates, and has spent years tweaking how it ingests, transcodes, and serves videos. Adding in-stream ads might have been a bigger engineering task in that environment. Depending on the percentage of users/viewers avoiding ads, it might not have been worth the return.
But I can’t seem to find any data on actual Spotify viewership to pin these numbers down to be able make some apples to apples comparisons.
There are several third party research firms, most notably Edison, that compile their own data from the client side, akin to how Nielsen produces cross-platform numbers for television and streaming. And others compile data from different sources, including published ordinal rankings and publicly reported view counts, other metrics like mentions/shares on social media.
Podcasting historically predates always-online devices, so a lot of the interfaces count downloads rather than listens, as the tech companies try their best to push things towards data-tracking proprietary client apps. So it’s a non-trivial effort (usually requiring lots and lots of paid survey participants, which also introduces some statistical skew), to get listener data.
So there is data out there, almost all behind business-to-business paywalls/subscriptions. Those closely guarded datasets are what advertisers use to price ad campaigns on these channels, for example, where they have to decide whether and how to spend on one particular type of medium versus another (e.g., product mentions on podcasts versus YouTube versus twitch versus traditional television or film).
Also do people not “watch” podcasts?
The NYT article I linked describes the issue somewhat, that there’s a difference between viewing as a first screen or second screen, or listening as primary, or listening as background, and that advertisers and publishers are aware of how different shows perform at different functions. They describe the example of the political podcast, Pod Save America, having stats showing that about 20% of their audience is through video rather than audio-only.
As I understand it, through my own personal experience, podcasts are popular during commutes, as a primary audio experience for people driving alone in their cars or wearing headphones on the bus/train/sidewalk. Those are functions in which video is not desired, so “watching” would be a strange way to describe how people primarily consume the content, through listening only. And while I know official music videos get a lot of watches on YouTube, I don’t think counting those watches are a good way to rank or analyze how people “listen” to music overall.
It’s also why many of the most popular podcasts simply don’t do video (NYT’s popular The Daily), and stem from radio roots (the NPR podcasts, a bunch of iHeart or Sirius-published podcasts). Video isn’t a good proxy, especially for the podcasts that are tied exclusively to a non-YT platform.
Maybe SiriusXM overpaid for their deal, at $40 million per year. Maybe Spotify overpaid for their previous deal, at $30 million per year. But those numbers alone aren’t anything to scoff at, and in my opinion are the best proxy for cross-platform comparison: Smartless got about $33 million per year from SiriusXM, Dax Shepard got $27 million per year from Spotify, etc.
And maybe you’re right that podcasting itself isn’t ever going to be as big as video or streaming. The South Park guys got $900 million for 6 movies on Paramount+. Apple TV dropped more than 9 figures each on Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon.
But for advertisers, that specific podcast is a valuable property. I can’t comment on the quality or cultural comparisons because I literally have never heard any part of it (or other huge genres like true crime podcasts or celebrity podcasts or video game reviews or whatever other things people consume), but I watch the business side of things because I’m interested in that.
And I’m not trying to give any commentary on the cultural relevance of this particular Harris interview any more than I’d give commentary on her appearance on Howard Stern (who I might not have heard about in like 20 years) or Walz’s appearance in World of Warcraft or something I don’t actually understand the logistics of. Politics isn’t really something I care about, but tech and media businesses are.
Yeah, looks like a series of voluntary tags in the metadata. Which is important, and probably necessary, but won’t actually do much to stop deceptive generation. Just helps highlight and index the use of some of these AI tools for people who don’t particularly want or need to hide that fact.
Are you required to subscribe through Prime or can I add any subscription?
I think it only works with services subscribed through Amazon.
Yeah, Google does the same thing, but it launches the specific app in order to play from that screen (and not every app handles that gracefully).
What’s interesting about Amazon is that they play the actual content in the same app, even when licensed through a subscription with another service.
Or the untested hardware that isn’t guaranteed to be as good as the established player.