mpantone

Zuck is a nimrod.

This hiring strategy isn't sustainable. He's going to shell out a billion for five similar hires? That's crazy.

And ultimately it's bad for employee morale at Meta. Think of all of the people there. They will look at their own compensation packages and say, "Hey, what am I? Chopped liver?" Even if they wouldn't be offered $200M, many will probably think about sending out discreet feelers to see what others would offer for their services. And who wants to be this new hire's admin/executive assistant? "Gee, he's pulling in $200M and I'm getting $80K and drive a Honda Accord."

Now Zuck has one really rich albeit skilled employee and created quiet resentment amongst many.

The hiring escalation cannot continue forever. At some point, someone is going to say, "your position is eliminated" to one of these high-earning AI scientists. That person will be replaced by someone making $500K and a bunch of Nvidia AI clusters (the latter who will work 24x7 and don't get sick or take vacations).

Good on Pang for seizing the opportunity. Take Zuck's stupid money and invest it elsewhere.

MacSince1987 said:

What crap. F1 has the world's biggest TV audience of any sport, and is truly global - even though most of the cars are built in England. Of course there's overtaking, and what's that about a 'paywall'? You've heard of streaming? It's not free.  In The UK, Sky owns the broadcast rights but so what? You expect to watch a global sport for nothing? Naive and ridiculous. You continue to watch tiddlywinks. F1 is for adults.

First of all, football (a.k.a. soccer for Yanks) has the biggest TV audience and dwarfs the F1 by a lightyear.

And yes, here in the USA, it's easy to catch the FIFA Club World Cup, it streams for free on DAZN. The regular World Cup competition has quite a few matches broadcast OTA ("rabbit ear antennae"). Having to pay to watch a sport does not make it "for adults" [sic].

As for Formula 1, it was a far more interesting sport in the Seventies. Today's cars are stretch limousines in comparison and make passing very, very difficult. It's really just a computer model competition today, whoever has the most powerful computers and skilled programmers running the best CFD simulations basically wins. 98% of the competition happens before the car is even assembled which is why mid-season improvements are extremely modest. That's one of the reasons why Verstappen is thinking about bolting from Red Bull.

Worse, today's F1 doesn't offer good race visuals. The drivers are doing A LOT of interaction with the car's various systems and almost none of these actions translate into something appealingly watchable on television. The drivers are some of the most skilled motorsports competitors on the planet but it's not translating into an entertaining television product. If you watch 2-3 F1 races, it's easy to see 6-8 major issues that hinders this sport in 2025.

With the individual races becoming so boring it's no surprise that the attention drifts to the off-track activities which have veered toward high-end lifestyle marketing, much like America's Cup yacht racing (also the domain of supercomputers and high-end CFD model simulations).

There's no way that Apple could afford to become the exclusive streaming rightsholder for Formula 1. And with the way today's competition is being held I don't think it would be worth it anyhow as it has become so untelegenic.

chasm said:

ranson said:

I think the better option is to just never ever connect your TV to your home WiFi (or via ethernet). If you want or need to do a firmware update, both LG and Samsung allow you to do this via a USB drive. If you're using an AppleTV (or less ideally, a competitor streaming device), there is never a need to have the TV networked.

I didn't know that was an option. Thanks very much for this info!

Firmware updates via USB for things like TVs, A/V receivers, etc. has been around since before the pandemic. And before that there were service ports for authorized technicians, before all these devices went online. Once a device goes online, it generally requires software updates for A.) bug fixes, B.) security updates, and C.) new functionality.

Nothing new about this, Read The Fine Manual. The USB updating is mentioned within.

I'm not surprised at all about the amount of data collection these devices do. Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy famously said "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it." That was in 1999. Which means online data collection had been going on way before then.

That said, this article is very helpful in minimizing the amount of data that these two companies can harvest from your television sets. But they sell other devices too. And they have apps that communicate with these devices.

It's important to be utterly realistic and understand that your smartphone collects WAY more data than your television. Unless it spends 99.99% of its uptime in airplane mode, it's sending plenty of data to many people.

Pandora was really the first mainstream streaming service, it beat out Spotify by a few months. My memory is hazy but Spotify had very large holes in its music catalog for the first few years compared to Pandora. So I ended up using Pandora and waited a couple of years for Spotify to catch up filling out their catalog.

It's also worth pointing out that MySpace let you stream a few songs from musicians' profile pages. This was great for new artist discovery before the streaming music services like Pandora and Spotify existed. It was one of the first social networks and eventually went out of fashion because they didn't monetize it enough to drive growth.

Apple was able to push spatial audio as a category because they made their own audio devices. Once again, Alan Kay's "people who are serious about software make their own hardware" mantra comes into place. By controlling the whole stack iPhone-iTunes/Apple Music-AirPods Apple was able to take spatial audio beyond the gimmicky beginnings to something else.

Once again this shows that Apple really does consider itself a software company at heart. A company whose software and services run best on their proprietary hardware.

It's probable that Apple has been testing Macs (more than one model) using A-series SoCs for 10+ years in their labs, that is, before the M-series silicon became a reality.

For sure Apple is intimately familiar with A-series SoC capabilities and limitations. The benefits of releasing a Mac with an A-series SoC are probably A.) lower cost and B.) lower power consumption.

The A-series SoCs have plenty of performance for the average user: iPhones have been editing 4K video for a decade now and that's probably the heaviest normal workload for Joe Consumer. It's not like office suites, e-mail, content consumption or web browsing require more horsepower.

Presumably a lower price MacBook would open up more opportunities for enterprise/education sales where 3D gaming performance is not performance metric. A lower power SoC would result in better battery performance which might lead to a thinner form factor.