lowededwookie

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lowededwookie
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  • Apple faces 500M euro fine following EU music probe

    spheric said:

    The EU is desperate to collect a penalty fee. In the U.S. legal system, Spotify wouldn't have had the standing to complain since they had already moved 99% of their iOS subscribers to web payments WITHOUT needing any kind of in-app communication. Nothing about their financial reality supported the complaint. Not the revenue part of it or the communication part of it. 
    Yes, with a nominal GDP of almost US$20 trillion projected for 2024, I'm sure they're desperate to collect 500 million Euro from a company violating existing antitrust laws. 
    Apple hasn’t broken any laws. The only laws that Apple appears to have broken are recent laws designed to punish Apple for being successful. Those laws didn’t exist at the time the EU went after Apple.

    Incidentally, remember when they created a law forcing a standard power supply being USB-C? They claim Apple was filling their rubbish dumps with their leads. Only, Apple has only ever had 3 leads for their iPhones. 30-pin Dock connector, Lightning, and now USB-C. How many different charger leads existed on the EU’s beloved Nokia? Oh that’s right, there was a different power plug for every single model of Nokia phone until they settled on that crappy USB-Micro connector.

    The EU is the biggest bunch of hypocrites which isn’t difficult to understand when Russia is one of the lead countries.
    watto_cobratmaybadmonkwilliamlondonjbdragon
  • Apple has built a new generative AI tool for animating images

    avon b7 said:
    avon b7 said:
    gatorguy said:
    Does Apple normally release several research papers at such an early stage in developing features? 

    This one hasn't really been tested yet, just 13 people have given it a try, but Apple is already announcing it?  I've always seen them as keeping their internal development quiet and under-the-radar and competitors guessing, before announcing to the world what they're up to with a consumer-ready feature all but complete.  Rather than these PR pieces intended to "delight the customer" it seems more likely this is meant to delight the market. 
    Yes, on the AI front Apple has been publishing research papers since 2017 and sponsors AI conferences around the world. 

    The important thing to remember is that the research isn’t publishing what features will be in an Apple product. The research may ultimately power a feature in a product but we don’t know what those features are or how they will be implemented. 

    It’s funny that with the general public’s interest in AI rising over the last year or so that people jump to the conclusion that Apple is behind and is publishing research in an attempt to get in on the action. 

    The reality is Apple has been including AI features in their products for almost a decade. They have built processors specifically to handle AI. They have published research on AI. And they have bought more AI companies than anyone else.  

    Apple isn’t doing anything new, people are just starting to pay attention. 

    Everyone with an interest has been doing the same. Even before 2017. Research is research. R&D centres, universities, private investment... 

    Obviously that includes Apple. 

    Yes, the arrival of NPUs on phones was important. Things got accelerated. They got accelerated for everyone with an interest.

    When people say Apple is behind, it's because they haven't brought what others have brought to market. 

    What does saying 'Apple has been using ML for years' mean?

    That others haven't? 

    Of course not. Was Apple doing more than others with ML? I very much doubt it. 

    Apple was not even performing well with its initial ML efforts (especially in image recognition which was where most of the onus was at the start). 

    Let me ask you directly:

    Where was the DaVinci equivalent? 
    Where was the Ascend equivalent? 
    Where was the MindSpore equivalent? 
    Where was the CANN equivalent? 
    Where was the inference hardware? 
    Where was the GOD network equivalent? 

    That all dates back to 2018/19 and from just one company. 

    Then add the progress of Nvidia, Google, Microsoft... 

    Or Amazon and Meta. 

    How did Nvidia get where it is today? By releasing solutions. 

    So now 'AI' is the 'buzzword' (for better or worse) and it is on everybody's lips. 

    That's tech for you. 

    We can't ignore that. We can't ignore that solutions (both consumer and industry facing) have come to market and been developed at incredible speed. 

    And when I say 'industry' I'm including health, science, education etc. 

    What has Apple actually delivered when compared to what has been on the market for a while now? 

    And when will an equivalent Apple release actually become reality?

    Reveal at WWDC? Yes!
    Deployment at the end of the year? Probably.
    Beta for months? Possibly. 

    That is not now. That is not today. That is why people are saying Apple is behind - now. 

    Research? Great! But who isn't involved in research? 

    Open source? The same answer. 

    I'm open to everything changing quickly. That is technology for you, but right now, and looking at what's available, trying to argue Apple isn't behind is not corresponding to what is actually on the market. To reality. 

    IMO, it is precisely why, after ignoring the term deliberately during WWDC, Apple now finds it necessary to talk about it, finally using the dreaded term, even before a usable consumer facing product is here.

    That's not very Apple. The VP reveal wasn't either. But there you go. 





    My goodness  you have mastered the straw man fallacy and sound a tad unhinged. Good. Luck with all of that. 
    Strawman? 

    Apple sponsoring conferences, working on ML since 2017, using AI in products etc has nothing to do with the claims of it being behind. That's because no one knows what is happening behind the scenes.

    Not at Apple or anywhere else.

    How could we know that? 

    Couldn't that be the strawman here? 

    What is unhinged is the notion that Apple working on something is justification that it is isn't behind.

    How exactly is that supposed to work?

    How are you supposed to compare things if you can't see them? 

    Would you accept Siri as an example? 

    Did they abandon work on Siri? No. We know that much. We know they continue to work on that. 

    Those AI conferences around the world (around 40 since 2019?) were largely focused on language and image recognition. 

    But how has Siri done as a result of all that investigation? For starters the only way for us to evaluate that is from a product that is actually released. So how is it doing today? All I see is most people saying it isn't up to the task. So much for research being the key! 

    The research - for us - is worthless because everyone researches. Apple wasn't alone at those conferences was it? 

    The research is only relevant when something comes of it. Only then can we - the consumers or industry watchers - evaluate it. 

    So people can actually formulate an opinion on Siri and compare it to other offerings. 

    That is why people say Apple is behind. They look at what's being offered as solutions and compare but they find there is nothing to compare to because Apple hasn't delivered anything yet in the areas that have been getting all the attention for the last couple of years. 

    Saying it's 'working on it' doesn't count. Sponsoring conferences doesn't count. Research without a final product doesn't count. 

    But then you slip in Apple already uses AI but people are only now realising it? 

    And I'm making strawman arguments? 

    Are people only now realising that other companies also use AI? Because, after all, they have been using it for years too. 

    That is why I gave you the 'equivalents' list. 

    How many years do you think Apple needs, because in all those years, competitors have been delivering solutions. 

    I slipped in the GOD network because it is AI in the automobile realm and is 'self' learning. It's shipping and clocking up millions of km of real world data. 

    The Apple equivalent here is a complete mystery. 

    All I've said is that the people making those claims are right. That is because Apple isn't, let's say, where the puck is! 

    I'm looking at what there is to see and not seeing the Apple equivalent. That is it. 

    They might turn that on its head tonight, tomorrow, next year or in ten years. The point was, is and will remain the same until it changes. Apple hasn't been providing that much in where things are now and that is why Tim Cook cannot point to an Apple solution. It's why he basically said 'watch this space'. 

    All I know is that this year's WWDC is likely to an AI lovefest, just like the 5G modem presentation was a few years back. 

    You say Apple hasn’t been doing anything but you are completely wrong.

    When everyone was distracted by the iPhone 6s having a 64 bit processor, they missed the fact that that same phone was taking 100 photos, analysing them pixel by pixel, then stitching the best photos together to make a great photo. All that in the time it took to co “click”. That required a lot of machine learning which is why we needed 64 bit processors on a phone.

    Before that Apple had Facial Recognition which scanned our images and learned to recognise faces and build an album for those people. Yes, back then we had to train it, even today, but it got better the more photos we took.

    That facial recognition led to being able to identify other objects which led to the fix of one of tech’s biggest problems so far… OCR (Optical Character Recognition). Now you can select text from an image and copy and paste it. Hell, I use it to translate the data on my wife’s car which is a Japanese import.

    My point is that this is ALL AI and it’s all been done by Apple for at least 10 years in people’s hands since then.

    You might not see that as advancement in AI because it’s all back end stuff hidden in a great user interface. You don’t have to interact with the AI but you’ve got it right there and have so for a long time.

    This is what people are saying. Apple isn’t behind in AI, it’s more than not ahead of the game, we just don’t recognise it.
    tmaywatto_cobra
  • How to download and use offline maps in iOS 17


    kkqd1337 said:
    My problem with "offline" anything and that includes music streaming and  maps (google/apple) is that the iPhone does not intelligently detect when it is offline.

    In the UK the problem I encounter is; I am driving and my phone says it IS connected to the network, and displays (for example) 1bar of signal and the 3G/4G logo. But it IS NOT actually working. 

    Rather than the apps switching into offline mode - the apps just stall and continually try and download data.

    To get the offline mode to work I need to manually put it into airplane mode. 

    First world problem. But heck it is annoying.
    There’s an option to force using offline maps only.
    ForumPost
  • Hands on with Apple's new Journal app for iPhone

    DownUnder said:
    I’ve been looking for a Journal app that will date stamp my thoughts so that I can leave the Notes app available for different idea categories.
    Journal date stamps your posts. You can even add a custom date to your posts.

    I agree that a desktop and iPad app is sorely missing but I can’t even run the latest macOS on my MBA so that’s not a deal breaker for me.
    williamlondon
  • Steam ending support for Macs running macOS Mojave and earlier

    Oh, great. That means I won’t be able to play Rocksmith 2014.

    Rocksmith+ sucks because there’s no Mac version and I can’t seem to use the Rocksmith cable with iOS.
    williamlondonwatto_cobra