II2II

EDIT: Just to be clear, the parent's post was originally made in relation to an article/thread called: "LG smart TVs caught logging audio with screen off and snooping on local devices". My response was written at the same time.

> So the video doesn't seem to support the claim in the article that "LG smart TVs continuously [...] log microphone audio while appearing to be turned off".

While it is a bit unclear as to whether the logging and transmitting of audio is happening[1], without hacking the device, they were also quite clear that they made it extremely difficult (if not impossible) to MITM certain encrypted communications on their consumer devices. Combining that with claims they make about advertising makes LG's actions highly suspect.

While the video is quite clear that they are not saying LG is doing this (for legal reasons), the set out to prove the capabilities are there and the privacy related configuration options are very weak. For example: the microphone switch only controls one of the onboard microphones. Even if it physically cut off all of the microphones, there are other vectors that could only be software controlled (such as voice enabled remote controls).

Either way, whether it is LG or a third party, the capability to log and transmit audio can certainly be exploited.

Perhaps it is time we start considering whether we should do something just because it can be done. That is to say: do we really need to control a television by voice, or have other features that require a microphone, just because adding a microphone is cheap and there is enough compute to process the data?

[1] I got the impression they were claiming that the audio was recorded and stored on device. They simply could not prove it was sent to LG.

> I find that they're often the only thing that will be truthful about a company's intentions.

Really? Many years ago, I had to physically sign a license with Microsoft to obtain some software. The license was not consistent with the license included with the software. Both licenses effectively said they were the real license and that any other agreement you made with Microsoft was not valid.

I don't think there was any nefarious intent. It was likely to avoid a situation where Microsoft employees offered terms that were not approved of by the company. Still, it goes to show that it can be awfully difficult to judge the intent of a company.

Why would anyone put themselves through that if they didn't have to? There is the tale of Allen hand coding the bootloader in machine code, but that was because he was on the plane to give a demo. Otherwise, all of the tales I've heard of the development of BASIC involved a mainframe. Hand coded assembly was certainly conceivable, given that terminals weren't exactly everywhere back in the day, but even a basic assembler does more than the straight translation of instructions into opcodes.

> i hate being jaded because you can see where things are headed every time on repeat, but i also hate the term "power user" carries a lot of pc gamer energy and i simply could never assess that i know more then the next guy for certain.

It could be a generational thing, but I've always associated "power user" with the DOS/Windows crowd and it isn't so much about knowing more as, well, treating a computer like a computer. That is to say that the person who uses scripting in Excel is as much of a power user as the gamer who tweaks power profiles or overclocks their processor. On the flip side, someone who uses the basics of Excel or the gamer who buys the fastest GPU is a consumer of products, rather than a power user.

Funny thing is, I never hear that term being used on the macOS or *ix side of the fence -- even though there are certainly people who who would qualify.

As for the AI thing: AI is something that nobody wants but "everybody" expects. I don't blame them for pursuing it, even if it's a type of integration that I really don't want.

There is a bit of a difference between making a explosives and planting a bomb in another student's locker. The former involves taking risks and may have some utility. The latter only results in others living in fear.

Call that lame if you will. I'd rather think of it as being civil.

When people talk about how much better off kids were in the past, I remember stories from my father (who went to school in the 1960's). They involved drugs, knives, and bombs. I had it pretty good in the 1980's.

> The most dangerous part of this addiction is that it doesn't feel like addiction.

I've started framing addiction as something that we feel compelled to do even when we know it has a detrimental effect on more important aspects of our life. In that respect, yes, it does feel like an addiction.

> Unlike alcohol or drugs, this is knowledge addiction - afterall, we learned about a bunch of things in those 4 hours, didn't we?

Did we learn anything? If we aren't using that knowledge, even in casual conversation, chances are that retention is very low. I'm not even talking about useful learning here, since it is pleasurable to learn something for its own sake. I'm talking about the stickiness.

Another way to think of it is: are we even interested in learning? I have downloaded the entire Wikipedia to my computer, along with Project Gutenberg, as well as various technical documentation. (Kiwix is wonderful.) On top of that I have enough books (digital and physical) to last a lifetime. I have a multitude of resources that I can tap into without touching the Internet, and accessing it is all very low resistance (e.g. I don't have to get off my ass to go to the library). So why do I even have home Internet access? Communicating with people certainly doesn't require a high speed connection.

It's more like, is it better to be the person who:

- sees a waterfall in every river, even when one is not there?

- sees the waterfall, and is resigned about their fate?

- sees the waterfall, then struggles for survival no matter how hopeless the situation seems to be?

- is completely ignorant of the waterfall?

> One thing people go through as they age is an elevation of cynicism and general misanthropy. After decades of being disappointed when naive idealism and speculative optimism fail, one can just get down on it all.

It's even sadder when one realizes the world was always that way. The author more-or-less says as much, though they seem to suggest it is amplified. I'm not entirely sure the part about it being more amplified today true. Most of the ills mentioned existed when I was a youth, it simply took different forms and (of course) was spread by means other than the Internet. There never was a chance to get ahead because the cards were always stacked against us.

Apologies for the cynicism.

Was it a mistake?

It is easy to say that IBM had monopolistic tendencies, because they did. On the other hand, the 5100 sounds like a vertically integrated design and it ended up being extremely expensive. The Datamaster strayed away from IBM components, but was still based upon IBM software. One can blame it's failure on the IBM PC being released a month later, but in a way that would prove the point. The Datamaster had such a big head start that the IBM PC borrowed elements of it's design, while the proprietary software of the Datamaster held back its release date.

Undoubtedly, IBM wanted more control over the PC. Avoiding a completely proprietary design was probably a calculated bet, an intentional course of action rather than a mistake. It just happens to be a bet they lost.

I think their point is that computers used to defy inflation. Across the decades, computers were getting cheaper in an absolute sense (i.e. not factoring in inflation) and astonishingly cheaper in terms of dollars per unit of performance.

Even when the cost of the cheapest computers bottomed out, it likely had more to do with lower prices not making sense. At a certain point, the cost of things that encapsulate the computer and I/O (like the enclosure and screen) end up overwhelming the cost of the actual compute.

True, but many of those bits would be learned in some primary schools. It simply depends upon whether they are relevant where you live. That's especially true for names, which is culturally dependent. It is also true for the culturally dependent aspects of dates/time, though there are obscure bits that are only relevant to certain disciplines.

Just look at the "falsehoods programmers believe about ..." articles that pop up from time to time. There are plenty of complexities in the real world that people either don't know about, aren't front of mind when they are tackling a larger problem, or simply don't want to deal with in the here and now. Lost knowledge and new problems are part of the reason why programmers are discouraged from rewriting software from scratch and why businesses in general are hesitant to replace legacy systems that still work.

> Frankly, I don't think it's practical to expect operating systems to continue to run binaries perfectly in perpetuity.

A lot of that is going to depend upon perspective.

Take something that is coming up: Apple has mentioned that Intel application support is going to end in the next release, or about 8 years after the introduction of the M1. Eight years may sound like a good run, but there are all sorts of edge cases: software that doesn't receive updates because the publisher is no longer in business, or software developers who are providing updates under a disagreeably different business model (ahem, subscriptions). Some software may have been released Intel only after the release of the M1, simply because the developer wasn't going to test a new architecture immediately after its release.

I'm not going to pretend that I know how much software that affects, because there was a 12 or 13 year gap in my use of Macintosh. Something I did notice after my return to macOS was the absence of software due to earlier changes in the platform. An more exotic example is F-Script[1]. Not only is the project gone, but the change in the security model pretty much ensures that nothing like it will ever exist again. A more common example will be games, where only a select few will receive updates a couple of years after its release.

[1] https://www.macintoshrepository.org/25973-f-script

Given Apple's reputation as of late, I was mildly shocked to learn that I could connect a SATA optical drive to my Mac with a USB-SATA bridge, right click on an image in the Finder, and tell it to burn the image to DVD. This is under the latest beta of macOS.

You can call it incidental if you want, but it generally takes some effort to ensure everything works. That's especially true when you consider how much has changed since optical drives were common.

As for other forms of disk images, such as software distribution, those are still a common thing in macOS.

Making it even harder to say: the 8080 was based on the 8008. Even though the 8080 was based on the same instruction set as the 8008, it wasn't binary compatible. I assume that means the instruction encoding was different, which means those engineers probably did as much as the could to clean things up while designing the 8080.

Of course, the 8008's origins (along with the completely unrelated 4004) were outside of Intel. They were hired to design custom ICs. The 8008's architecture was dictated by a CTC terminal. While Intel designed the 4004, it was only intended to be used in calculators. Intel, and its engineers, probably put relatively little thought into microprocessor architecture until the 8080.

I think it is a bit more complex than that, since how Asian those goods were varied a lot across time.

Early on, it may have included semiconductors designed in the US, with manufacturing outsourced to Asia. That outsourcing may have been to a facility owned by an American company or to a foreign owned company. Then the semiconductors may have been shipped to Mexico where another company was manufacturing consumer products. Under such circumstances, can such a product be described as essentially Asian?

Of course, things changed. Asian companies took more control over product development and manufacturing. When they ran into labour and regulation making manufacturing in their own country more expensive, perhaps due to tariffs or perhaps due to their own citizens demanding better, they used the same playbook.

You're right in that it made no sense from an American perspective, but that isn't because it suddenly became cheaper to manufacture in the US. It did not make sense because they lost control of the playbook, because others could do it better.

On the whole, I agree with your point about trade being used to bypass labour laws and environmental regulations. I'll be more blunt with how I phrase it: the practice is exploitative and causes more harm than good. That said, the current American response appears to be driven by the demand for trade on their terms exclusively. Never mind that other countries may want something in exchange for their resources.

That should read, Trump betrays Americans. The reality is that he is destroying American credibility on the international stage, which is going to have long term effects on their ability to make agreements with other countries in the future. Standing alone is not in the interest of any nation.

As for betraying Canadians, Trump is not responsible for representing Canadian interests. I wouldn't want him to either. (Speaking as a Canadian.)

Canada doesn't have domestic auto companies, yet we manufacture auto parts and assemble automobiles destined for the US. From my understanding, this was negotiated as part of the trade deals. There is no good reason for them to desire cheap Canadian labour, weak Canadian unions, or weak Canadian environmental regulations. For one thing, Canada is known for none of those things. On the other hand, Canada had a lot of things the US wanted: access to the Canadian market and access to Canadian resources. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happened when trade deals were manufactured with Mexico. While Mexico isn't on the same economic tier as the US, it isn't a third world nation that people like to paint it as.

As for companies looking for loopholes, it may be fun to blame it on Asian manufacturers. I would suggest that Americans take a good long look in the mirror. US companies were outsourcing assembly to Mexico long before Mexico came under the NAFTA umbrella. Quite often, at least with electronics, those US companies were using parts manufactured in Asia. Should Asian companies hold themselves back, should they avoid using the same practices as their American counterparts, just because it isn't fair to Americans? If anything, they have less reason to because Asian countries are responsible to their own citizens, not to Americans.

> Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.

In that case, I fail to understand the benefits of using a token system over a credit card. The publisher is loosing a cut to another third party. The consumer is dealing with an extra layer of complexity, and paying more to offset the cost to the publisher.

> This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.

Do you blame the consumer? Not only do they have to decide whether the article is worth reading, they have to do so sight unseen. While there are some who simply want all-you-can-eat plans, there are plenty who would be happy to pay by the article if they knew the article was digestable (at least in cases where it would be cheaper to buy one article they are interested in, rather than for a month at the buffet table).

Google was not the first search engine, and it certainly isn't the first search engine to fall from grace.

Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad.

I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).

I have a Libra 2 and a Libra Colour. I generally don't notice a difference in crispness, though the effective resolution of the colour's screen is lower. There is a huge difference in the contrast, and you will probably want to use the frontlight even in a reasonably bright environment.

The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.

Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.

But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.

> On the other hand, the only reason I need AI to search the web is that the web is now a impenetrable forest of near unreadable, SEO-stuffed, spammy articles.

Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.

> The other approach is to expand what land is available to build on. I understand that in the UK, farmers consider it a lottery win if they get planning permission for some of their farmland to become housing.

I've seen that mentality in other parts of the world. The thing is that agricultural land is often protected because it is good agricultural land. It is literally the reason why the cities were built where they were built, since that land provided for the cities. Unfortunately, good agricultural land also tends to be easy to build on and we have a tendency to ignore features that may make it a poor decision to build on. (Such as the flood plains you mentioned.)

I got tired of that sort of argument when I realized that a great many of the people who argued that they have the right to tear down the side streets of walkable downtown neighbourhoods lived in unwalkable suburban neighbourhoods. Those unwalkable neighbourhoods were usually designed with a single access road to ensure there was no through traffic, so they would never have to deal with that problem. Then those same people had the audacity to ask everyone to pay for additional access roads when they realized that a single access road was a disaster when their neighbourhood needed emergency services and had to be evacuated (because it was burning to the ground). Of course, those additional access roads had to be designed to discourage through traffic.

Am I bitter about that? Yes. There is nothing wrong with wanting the best for you. There is something dearly wrong with using what's best for you to make life worse for others.

I understand why you are opposed to the arguments and I like the idea of anti-trust action, but ...

The anti-trust cases I am familiar with spanned decades. Perhaps it's not a representative sample, yet it also makes sense. Anti-trust basically says they're doing something that is normally legal, but they're abusing their power over the market in a way that makes those actions illegal. You're moving from prosecuting actions to intent. That is a whole lot more difficult to prove.

I'm also uncertain how I feel about prosecuting a company just because it is a monopoly. I absolutely hate monopolies, and large monopolies almost certainly got to where they were by illegitimate means. On the other hand, it is difficult to untangle legitimate consumer choice from a monopoly manipulating the market to remove that choice.

Among many teachers it is, "those who can't teach become education consultants/researchers."

The sad thing removing the reference to housewives with respect to makeup would actually strengthen their point, since makeup is used in professional photography to restore more natural tones for both women and men.