mayfly

zimmie said:

mayfly said:

"Apple said at WWDC that the battery is not casually removable from the headset. There is a USB-C port on the battery for charging and directly powering the Apple Vision Pro."

Just my uninformed opinion, but I think Apple missed an opportunity by attaching the battery this way. Better to put two USB-C ports on the headset, so users could just swap battery packs without it powering down. Weight gain would be marginal, and it would be easy to add a latch to prevent accidental detachment. Unless it's possible to attach a backup battery to the USB port on the battery. At this time, there's been no mention of that from Apple.

USB power delivery is extremely janky. It isn’t suitable for anything without a built-in battery. Devices can abruptly lose their internal state for any number of reasons. The only possible safe response to this failure is to drop to the lowest supported voltage and current, which definitely isn’t enough to keep the Vision Pro running. It also flatly does not support seamless handoff between two power sources.

They could have done it with a sizable internal battery and USB power delivery, but then all this upcoming legislation mandating easily replaceable batteries would bite them. They would probably also need to change away from glass for the outer face to hit their target weight. Apple uses plastics for AirPods, the Magic Mouse, and all of their keycaps, but they haven’t done plastic in front of a display in a long time.

irnchriz said:

mayfly said:

mike_galloway said:

mayfly said:

saarek said:

Appleish said:

From the country that instituted Brexit against popular opinion and had an unelected leader that was only in office for a few weeks, who destroyed hundreds of billions of pounds from their economy.

Either you’re a revisionist or you simple don’t understand how referendums work.

The vote for Brexit was clear, the majority of the population of the United Kingdom voted for it to happen (17.4M to leave vs 16.1M to remain).

Yes, Scotland and, to a lesser degree Northern Ireland, voted to remain. However even nearly 40% of the Scots voted to leave which is a fact that the SNP never recognises as they pretend that all of Scotland voted to remain in the EU.

Was it the right decision? Well, I don’t think we will truly know that for at least another 10 years. None of the  prophetic doom and gloom scenarios ever got close to materialising and the country was always going to be worse off during the initial divorce stage.

Either way the result of the decision is largely irrelevant, what is relevant is that a democratic vote was taken and was then acted upon (albeit poorly).

This is how democracy dies. The "democratic vote" was driven by anti-immigrant and racist factions with big megaphones stoking the fires of fear and loathing in the population to the extent that they vote against their own interests.

Democracy is not about right or wrong - it’s what the majority vote for, no matter how stupid they may be.

The first Common Market referendum and EEC membership referendum was in 1975 , to gauge support for the country's continued membership of the European Communities (EC) 

Yes - 17,378,581 Votes (67.23%) - No - 8,470,073 Votes (32.77%)

So that time (1975) the people voted to stay in then in 2016 another lot of people voted out. I could argue the first lot were manipulated and deceived by fear mongering (the disaster that would occur if the UK left), but that would be unfair.

Unfortunately this is democracy, other systems have been tried with not really any better results.

This is NOT democracy. This is subversion of democracy in favor of extremism, nationalism and racism. And it's the the next stop on the road to authoritarianism. Which is the next stop on the road to tyranny. Which is the final stop before the end of the road: tyranny.

A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; From spiritual faith to great courage; From courage to liberty; From liberty to abundance; From abundance to selfishness; From selfishness to apathy; From apathy to dependence; From dependence back into bondage.”

Alexander Fraser Tytler

Japhey said:

mayfly said:

Japhey said:

mayfly said:

timmillea said:

There was a time when Apple always led with new technologies - mostly a deeply unprofitable time. In latter years, they work in secret, study what the competition is doing, innovates on top, patents to the hill, then embarrasses the competition. 

My first degree at Durham University starting 1992 was 50% in AI and 50% software engineering. Then no one I met outside the University had even heard of artificial intelligence nor believed in it when I explained what it was. Now AI is on the main broadcast news all the time. Even now, Nick Clegg of Meta was on the airwaves this morning explaining that the current generation of AI is simply predicting the next word or 'token' from big data. Back in 1992, Durham had a huge natural language processing system called LOLITA which was based on deep semantic understanding - an internal, language-independant representation based on semantic graphs. LOLITA read the Wall Street Journal everyday and could answer questions on it with intelligence, not parrot fashion. For my final year project, I worked on the dialogue module including 'emotion'. Then the LOLITA funding ended and that was the end of that. Had it been in the US, I can't help feeling that LOLITA would have morphed into one of the top corporates in the World. We don't support genius or foresight in the UK. 

It is truly depressing that 30 years later, the current state of AI is still neural nets trained on mediocre data sets. 

But to bemoan the fact that AI hasn't achieved singularity in 30 years shows a lack of understanding the enormous technical challeges involved. It will take processing power that does not even exist at the scale required at this time. Perhaps quantum computing will be the answer to the advances you're seeking. Decades from now.

Did you study AI and software engineering in college? If you did, well done  But if you didn’t, what makes you think that you know more than someone who did? 

Also, who said anything about the Singularity?

When I was in college, there was no AI. There was no software. The only computer in Chicago was an IBM 360 mainframe at the Illinois Institute of Technology. That's where I went to college, and where I majored in EE, with a computer science minor. The first engineering job I had was at Robert Bosch corp, developing electronic fuel injection hardware and software. Then in the engineering dept. at Siemens, working on the implementation of integrated circuit technology into their medical devices. Followed by 17 years of self employment in graphic arts (you could find my name on the original Adobe Pagemaker/Indesign and Illustrator teams). Followed by working at Apple until I retired in 2014.

Other than that, you're right, I'm probably unqualified to opine about the resources necessary to advance AI to pass the Imitation Game.

Well done  Thanks for the CV. 

Now, what about the Singularity? The only thing I remember Mayfly “bemoaning” is the slow rate of progress in the area in which they specialized. Does this not make them qualified to opine as well? At least, without being told that they don’t understand and without putting words into their mouth? I think maybe it does.