mpantone

For anyone who thinks that AI is a passing fad, you are completely out of touch with reality.

AI is here to stay. It's doing some amazing things in the enterprise markets and if it can eke out 100 basis points in net profit for some Fortune 500 company, guess what? They're gonna use it.

I bet 99.9% of people on these tech news site discussion forums who say they don't use AI are over 30 years old. That's right. There's a generational gap in AI usage.

Just yesterday, the AP reported on this:

https://apnews.com/article/ai-companion-generative-teens-mental-health-9ce59a2b250f3bd0187a717ffa2ad21f

That's right pre-teens are using this stuff and some older teenagers even see the danger in young children using AI.

And the consumer AI industry is largely a lawless frontier right now, it needs heavy government regulation from world governments, not just your state's governor or 1600 Pennsylvania.

And many of today's consumer AI companies are really no better than tobacco companies. They are creating AI chatbots that look and behave like anime characters (Grok's assistants, SpicyChat AI, Character.AI, et cetera) to attract youngsters into interacting with them. It's the digital equivalent of adding candy flavors to vaping products.

Look at the way Grok started rolling out their AI anime-skinned assistants like Ani. They debuted on iPhones first, still not available on many Android devices. Why? Probably because iPhone is the platform of choice for young people (the under 25 market), especially teens. If you are over 35, guess what? You are not the target audience of consumer AI companies. I'm way beyond that but at least I know that I am not who AI companies crave as a user.

If you care about the future of today's youngsters -- the ones who will be tasked with fixing many of the world's problems -- you need to pay attention to what AI is today, where it is going, who is using it, for what reasons, etc.

There's one oldtimer here who continually gripes about AI, fearing it will displace him from his job as a writer. AI's potential effects are far, Far, FAR greater than that.

Just sticking your head in the sand or plugging your ears and saying "I'm not using AI so nyah!" like a little brat throwing a tantrum isn't going to stop AI from proliferating. That much is clear in the 3+ years I've been closely following AI.

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.

JinTech said:

So, how many offices does Apple currently have in Cupertino? Legit question.

Short answer: no one here knows.

Longer answer: Apple has many properties in Cupertino. The leases are staggered and don't come up for renewal at the same moment. Apple periodically moves out of old locations and moves into new ones based on their needs. So the correct answer six months ago may well be incorrect today.

I would expect Apple to have some unmarked, clandestine properties in Cupertino with their long history of corporate secrecy. So driving around Cupertino and counting the obviously marked buildings (with logos) likely won't be a complete tally. We know that Project Titan was allegedly occupying unlabeled property(ies) in neighboring Sunnyvale. It is likely that Apple will have some locations that they don't want to advertise as theirs. This might include some small warehouses (not for shipping retail products to customers) but rather storage of their own property and supplies for internal use.

The people who really know the answer are all in the administration division at Apple, certainly not the engineering division, retail or marketing people. Some of the legal and finance staff (like the Accounts Payable people who get the utility bills, the controller), security personnel, facilities & maintenance planners, corporate IT staff, etc.

This is pretty typical for any larger organization (beyond the Fortune 500) not just Apple. The typical line employee and even mid-level managers probably don't know the answer, especially in engineering driven organizations like tech corporations.

Even amongst senior management I bet most of them don't know exactly. It doesn't really matter to guys like Srouji, Federighi, Alan Dye, etc. It matters to the CEO, COO, maybe the CFO, SVP of HR, general counsel, etc.

Strictly speaking, Apple did NOT move out of 1 Infinite Loop. It continues to use that campus. What they did do was move the HQ to Apple Park (the spaceship) in 2017 when that property came online. Apple has divisions that don't need to be at Apple Park and thus needs property elsewhere including (but not limited to) 1 Infinite Loop. It's believed that some senior management have desks at both locations because some meetings take place at 1 Infinite Loop. A lot of the admin teams are based at the old campus plus some non-core engineering teams.

Yes, best to avoid using this feature until Apple gets some brains and figures out how to exclude items from the recommendation algorithm. In the long run, they need to figure this out without user intervention. Joe Consumer isn't going to spend the time flagging content. And Apple is making their data collection less valuable by weighting this stuff normally. In fact, it should be the opposite. For certain kinds of content (like white noise), it should be opt-in. By default it should be excluded from the recommendation algorithm. Same with things that you rarely listen to. If I listen to one or two country songs in a row whereas I've listened to none in the past six months, those should be kept out.

Until Apple can figure this out thoughtfully I'll stick with a third party app for white noise. White noise apps were amongst some of the earliest apps on the iOS App Store (2008). Surprisingly a couple of those early apps have been maintained by their developers and run on both older hardware and recent devices. I still have TMSOFT's White Noise and White Noise Lite apps that I originally downloaded in 2008 (App Store). Another benefit: no Internet connection necessary to run these old-school standalone legacy white noise apps, they're just looped sound files.