As I understand it, MacOS’s desktop relies on GPU instructions that haven’t been implemented in any non-MacOS hosted virtualization environment. So you can have a MacOS VM running on a MacOS host just fine, but you can’t run a MacOS VM in a Linux host, even on official Mac hardware, at least if you want the actual desktop environment. The Asahi Linux people have mentioned it before.

If this passes for the military, then that will mandate the creation of a parts supply chain, as well as documentation and manuals for maintenance and repair, for whatever the military buys. Once that stuff is created, it’ll be a lot easier to mandate that the existing stuff be made available to the public, too.

That might not make much of a difference for a guided bomb, but it’ll make a huge difference for the huge amount of commercial off the shelf stuff that the military buys: laptops, routers, tablets, phones, civilian vehicles, tools, other basic equipment.

Netflix used to be too good to be true as well.

So was Moviepass, but while they were operating it was a great deal for the consumer. I wasn’t going to sit that out just because I could see that they were gonna run out of money eventually.

The proper consumer response to these types of models (get them hooked with a great value proposition and then try to squeeze them once they’re in) is just to leave when things get bad. Subscribing to Netflix in 2013 doesn’t mean that I had to keep subscribing through 2023. I could get the benefit of a 2014 subscription and reevaluate each year whether it was worth continuing.

And while information itself can be a “product” or be provided as a service, in most cases, it’s not.

Sure, but my point is that the same is true of physical machines. People don’t want working machines for the sake of working machines. They want working machines to actually do something else, to output a “product” of that machine’s operation.

And viewed in that way, information services are as much a standalone “product” as maintenance/repair services. Information services account for trillions of dollars of economic activity for a reason.

The mechanic is usually the actual worker - you run a repair shop

But what is being repaired? A machine of some kind? And the machine is operated in pursuit of another actual productive activity, right?

Machines are just about the application of mechanical force in some way, and that in itself isn’t an end goal. Instead, we want that machine to move stuff from one place to another, to separate things that are apart or smush/mix separate things together, to apply heat or cooling to stuff, to transmit radiation or light in particular patterns.

Everything in the economy is just enabling other parts of the economy (including the informal parts of the economy). Physical movement of objects isn’t special, compared to anything else: kicking a ball on TV, singing into a microphone, authorizing a wire transfer, entering a purchase order, answering a phone, etc.

I’m not seeing a real distinction between an IT consulting business and a heavy equipment maintenance/repair business. The business itself is there to provide services to other businesses.

A 56.6 kbps modem just needs an analog audio channel to work, right? A stereo jack has two channels for full duplex communication at that point.

NASA funded SpaceX based on hitting milestones on their COTS program. Those were just as available to Boeing and Blue Origin, but they had less success meeting those milestones and making a profit under fixed price contracts (as opposed to the traditional cost plus contracts). It’s still NASA-defined standards, only with an offloading of the risk and uncertainty onto the private contractors, which was great for SpaceX and terrible for Boeing.

But ultimately it’s still just contracting.

NASA has always been dependent on commercial for profit entities as contractors. The Space Shuttle was developed by Rockwell International (which was later acquired by Boeing). The Apollo Program relied heavily on Boeing, Douglas Aircraft (which later merged into McDonnell Douglas, and then merged with Boeing), and North American Aviation (which later became Rockwell and was acquired by Boeing), and IBM. Lots of cutting edge stuff in that era happened from government contracts throwing money at private corporations.

That’s the whole military industrial complex Eisenhower was talking about.

The only difference with today is that space companies have other customers to choose from, not just NASA (or the Air Force/Space Force).

The only problem with that plan is that it takes a lot of energy to raise an orbit that much, I’m not sure how to make that feasible.

Lowering the orbit takes energy, too, unless you’re relying solely on atmospheric drag.

Your original comment said 2050, which is a long way off. SpaceX’s first launch attempt was in 2006, their first successful launch was in 2008, their first successful recovery of a rocket in reusable condition was in 2015, and first reused a rocket in 2017. If they can make progress on that kind of timeline, why wouldn’t someone else be able to?

Physics don’t change fundamentally between 6 meters and 120 meters

Yes it does. Mass to strength ratio of structural components changes with scale. So does the thrust to mass ratio of a rocket and its fuel. So does heat dissipation (affected by ratio of surface area to mass).

And I don’t know shit about fluid dynamics, but I’m skeptical that things scale cleanly, either.

Scaling upward will encounter challenges not apparent at small sizes. That goes for everything from engineering bridges to buildings to cars to boats to aircraft to spacecraft.

The satellite constellation is the natural consequence of cheaper rockets. It’s a true paradigm shift, but the pioneer in this case has only the moat of being able to spend less money per launch. If someone else can deliver payloads to low earth orbit for less than $2,000/kg, then they’ll easily be able to launch a Starlink competitor.

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The actual key management and encryption protocols are published. Each new device generates a new key and reports their public key to an Apple-maintained directory. When a client wants to send a message, it checks the directory to know which unique devices it should send the message to, and the public key for each device.

Any newly added device doesn’t have the ability to retrieve old messages. But history can be transferred from old devices if they’re still working and online.

Basically, if you’ve configured things for maximum security, you will lose your message history if you lose or break your only logged-in device.

There’s no real way to audit whether Apple’s implementation follows the protocols they’ve published, but we’ve seen no indicators that they aren’t doing what they say.

Google has been quietly doing that for more than 10 years, only we didn’t start really calling this stuff AI until 2022. Google had offline speech to text (and an always on local hotword detection for “hey Google”) since the Moto X 2013, and added hardware support for image processing in the camera app, as images were captured.

The tasks they offloaded onto the Tensor chip starting in 2021 started opening up more image editing features (various algorithms for tuning and editing images), keyboard corrections and spelling/grammar recommendations that got better (and then worse), audio processing (better noise cancellation on calls, an always-on Shazam-like song recognition function that worked entirely offline), etc.

Apple went harder at trying to use those AI features into language processing locally and making it obvious, but personally I think that the tech industry as a whole has grossly overcorrected for trying to do flashy AI, pushed beyond the limits of what the tech can competently do, instead of the quiet background stuff that just worked, while using the specialized hardware functions that efficiently process tensor math.

It’s a chain of trust, you have to trust the whole chain.

Including the entire other side of the conversation. E2EE in a group chat still exposes the group chat if one participant shares their own key (or the chats themselves) with something insecure. Obviously any participant can copy and paste things, archive/log/screenshot things. It can all be automated, too.

Take, for example, iMessage. We have pretty good confidence that Apple can’t read your chats when you have configured it correctly: E2EE, no iCloud archiving of the chats, no backups of the keys. But do you trust that the other side of the conversation has done the exact same thing correctly?

Or take for example the stupid case of senior American military officials accidentally adding a prominent journalist to their war plans signal chat. It’s not a technical failure of signal’s encryption, but a mistake by one of the participants inviting the wrong person, who then published the chat to the world.

Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus

It wasn’t the buffer itself that drew power. It was the need to physically spin the disc faster in order to read the data to build up a buffer. So it would draw more power even if you left it physically stable. And then, if it would actually skip in reading, it would need to seek back to where it was to build up the buffer again.

I’m not sure that would work. Admins need to manage their instance users, yes, but they also need to look out for the posts and comments in the communities hosted on their instance, and be one level of appeal above the mods of those communities. Including the ability to actually delete content hosted in those communities, or cached media on their own servers, in response to legal obligations.

Yes, it’s the exact same practice.

The main difference, though, is that Amazon as a company doesn’t rely on this “just walk out” business in a capacity that is relevant to the overall financial situation of the company. So Amazon churns along, while that one insignificant business unit gets quietly shut down.

For this company in this post, though, they don’t have a trillion dollar business subsidizing the losses from this AI scheme.