GamingChairModel

The ideas described in Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody and Chris Anderson's The Long Tail made the mid-2000s super optimistic about having fewer gatekeepers between those who would create something and those who would enjoy that thing: you no longer needed to convince an agent and publisher and distributor for the funds or approval to publish a book, or release an album, or even distribute a short film or movie, because you could just do those things and see if you could find an audience.

And it worked, because on the internet it became economically feasible to publish for a small audience, and it became economically feasible to aggregate a lot of small creators and small audiences into big content-agnostic platforms for the thing being distributed. And a few of them would make it big, too.

Yes, app stores still funnel the overwhelming majority of the money on the platform to a small handful of developers. But I'd argue that the recent moves towards consolidation and concentration is because the ecosystems have betrayed the democratic, decentralized, nondiscriminatory/content-neutral ideals that we built the user-created Web 2.0 on, and instead of descended into enshittified monetization of the platforms' algorithmic control, SEO-like strategies so that slop isn't filtered out, and our utterly hacked brains that can't resist clickbait and ragebait and hornybait to where it's mostly sorting through slop instead of organically finding the niches we enjoy.

And now instead of traditional gatekeepers, we have tech gatekeepers. It was a fun run, though, from 2005-2015.

Probably not. The article credits Shutterstock submitter Vladislav Noseek, whose online presence with photographs of this style (soft lighting, bright lighting, shallow depth of field, a focus on breakfast foods) long predates generative AI, much less of this quality. It's stock photographers like this guy whose inoffensive visual style and identity have been most directly incorporated into the AI defaults.

This was published on February 14, 2022, before ChatGPT's public release in November 2022. Inverse was also a real journalist publication that slowly got enshittified, but was still good in 2022.

I remember reading this article when it was first published, in 2022, for whatever that's worth.

Knowing that the state that submits the image for human review is that the system must automatically (1) identify a car (2) whose license plate can't be automatically read, the more productive trickery would be to defeat the "identify a car" part where the software doesn't even know that a car drive within its field of view, and therefore doesn't know to take a still frame and forward it to a human.

Alternatively, have the software automatically read a license plate incorrectly so that it doesn't trigger human review but is instead confidently incorrect in what it did log to the records.

However, each incident will still have a date, time and location in the database along with the captured video of the person, which will make it relatively easy to figure out who among the local population is the most likely candidate.

It sounds like this adversarial clothing is designed to prevent the systems from identifying an image as a person at all, so it wouldn't be logged. They'd need to rerun the patched software on the entirety of whatever archived video stream they happened to have retained, which is far less assured than just the logs and retained records from when the system detects a person.

Microsoft Exchange and the web-based Outlook probably still has a plurality of email volume, because of their dominance in enterprise. Even on the web based consumer space, Apple and Yahoo still have significant market share.

Fairphone is not about the latest tech. They tend to go for well-supported hardware to ensure longterm support.

The USB 3.0 standard was finalized and published in 2008. USB 3.1 specification superseded it in 2013, and then USB 3.2 superseded that in 2017. Each version is fully backward compatible with every standard version from before, so there's nothing stopping people from releasing a 3.0 controller and certifying it works in the 3.2 mode that is a drop in replacement for 3.0.

It hasn't felt t like there's been much significant performance increases or development in RAM in the last.. decade?

In memory? There's been a ton of improvement, even if most of the coolest stuff isn't making it into DIMMs that are installed in user laptops/desktops.

Advanced packaging technology has allowed chip manufacturers to put different silicon dies together with increasingly high performance (high bandwidth, low latency) connections in the same package, including with some three dimensional stacking. That way they can mix and match different silicon dies for greater cost effectiveness, yield, performance, etc.

This also means that in-package memory is now the standard in certain chips. Apple's M-series silicon has its memory packaged right into the CPU/GPU package, as a system-in-a-package, so that the connection between the logic and memory is comparatively much higher performance, several times higher bandwidth than desktops or laptops that don't follow that kind of architecture.

Similarly, in data centers, the AI boom has caused all the memory manufacturers to switch their production lines to high bandwidth memory, where they vertically stack a bunch of DRAM chips on each other, with ultra-fast, high bandwidth connections, so that they can shove terabytes of memory into these data center servers. These recent generations have been improving speed and bandwidth in ways that make consumer level DDR5 RAM look like child's play.

So they're improving things. Just not in ways that really show up in DIMM sticks.

Not strictly, there are usualy hurdles to overcome for home usage of datacentre tech, but it's possible.

The hurdles are basically insurmountable with the hardware released after 2024.

The NVL72 for the Blackwell generation cost about $3 million and takes up a single server rack. The power consumption is about 130 kW, and most configurations require dedicated plumbing for the liquid cooling.

To put things in perspective, a residential electrical hookup is usually 50A or 100A for a house, with recommendations that anyone who is going to be charging electric cars should have 100A service. 100A at 240V is 24 kW.

So one server rack uses as much power as the maximum electrical capacity of 5 homes. You'll never be able to pull that off in an actual residential environment.

Oh, and the newest 2026 generation, the Rubin NVL72s, use something like 230 kW of electrical power, almost twice as much as the previous 2024 generation.

There's always going to be a robust used market for phones that were purchased outright, to be resold on a different cycle than every 2 years (plenty of rich people changing phones every year, and plenty of people replacing on a 3, 4, 5, or 6 year cycle). You can expect the market to basically settle on a curve where it depreciates along a predictable rate.

Leases don't really change that, any more than leases changed the market for used cars, or even certified pre-owned by the same dealers and organized by the same manufacturers who sell new cars.

There will be times that the predefined lease terms will unexpectedly prove to be either beneficial or detrimental to the consumer. Sometimes external factors will affect the entire used market, like currency issues, or component pricing issues (imagine if RAM prices dramatically swing again for new devices in a way that affects the value of the already-sold devices out in the world), where the predefined lease prices turn into a windfall for someone. Like in 2021 or so when expiring car leases allows the lessee to buy out the car at the end of the lease for much cheaper than the car itself was worth.

It's generally going to be a less than ideal financial decision to lease, but it also won't collapse the used device market and it won't be that far off the practice of selling your old phone when you buy a new one.

Law enforcement can legally trick you into giving up your password, too, and that's full access right there. Having an unlocked phone but no password isn't enough to get into certain parts of the core system/security settings, and trying to get into those will prompt a password anyway (and that generally gatekeeps the access to the phone through a physical connector plugged into the port).

Neither pathway is perfect but I think for real world usage and real world adversaries (not just law enforcement, but also criminal thieves/scammers/hackers, and governmental adversaries that aren't bound by legal limits, like foreign intelligence agencies), it's better to have biometrics so that you are physically punching in your PIN/password much less frequently. Especially on modern systems that get spooked easily and require a password anyway when the phone has been idle too long or when the wrong face looks at it too many times.

The other underappreciated threat model is shoulder surfing, especially in an age of ubiquitous high resolution cameras. Punching in a numerical PIN within view of a camera potentially leaks that secret, and some high resolution cameras can even pick up letters and symbols from the on screen keyboards.

Being compelled to give biometrics doesn't do enough for an adversary (including government adversaries) to do everything with a phone, the way having the password or PIN does, and I would argue that governments would be better at tricking people into inadvertently giving up their PINs and passwords than they'd be at compelling biometrics within the time window that they still work (before the phones lockout biometrics as a valid unlocking method), or being able to do stuff to exploit extraction tools past the lock screen.

So the threat model needs to be understood for what it is.