The situation with Apple is what really annoys me about this entire situation, they clearly felt pressure because there was article after article about "Apple falling behind" on AI.
And there is some truth to that given that the features we were supposed to get in iOS 26 did not come out. But it also was just that they were not shoving AI into every single thing.
I still have hope that they will be the company that will (mostly) apply AI in a more meaningful way instead of it just being "AI magic" in everything. There were some genuinely useful things shown at WWDC.
Will have to wait and see though. I was disappointed to see them leaning more into the same branding.
There is a difference though, all of the talk about ML was almost exclusively in the tech circles. Or at most there was a quick reference to "ML" when a feature was announced but it wasn't shoving "ML is doing this THIS" in every UI it could.
Sure we could argue that there were times that ML was likely not really necessary, but it was still largely invisible to the user what the mechanism was.
I think about autocorrect, sentence completion (or just next word recommendation), music recommendations, etc. All of those were clearly ML but the user was not made aware of that at every step of using them and in many cases it being ML was only in technical documents or the original announcement.
Now obviously there are exceptions to this, but it was the exception that shoved ML in your face compared to the current situation around AI.
This is the problem with all of the recent “AI” crap that has been shoved into our devices.
We have had ML features for years and it provided real benefits but most people did not know or care how it worked, it just did its job in the background without the underlying tech being shoved in your face.
Everything AI though is the opposite, it wants to focus on the technology first and the benefits second. It is actively making a worse UI and often providing little to no benefit.
Most consumers don’t actually care how their tech works, just that it does and gives them benefits.
It isn’t intentionally misleading, at best it is an over simplification of what is happening.
It is a fact that there is a government lead effort in various states to ban books from k-12 libraries. That part of this is not up for debate because it is happening. So they are in fact “banned”. As a society we generally accept that words have more complicated or nuanced meanings when connected to other words, as “banned” is in this case.
We also as a society generally accept that those other words may be implied or require looking at something for more than a minute to understand the context. If you are in a country where a book is actually banned, I would wager that you would likely just say “this book is banned” implying it is banned where you are instead of adding in “this book is banned here in X” since it would be unnecessary to say and would be generally understood.
If you don’t like the word than propose another word.
The problem is that there isn’t really a better term, and using “banned” gives the correct impression for most people to see the problem.
In many cases these books are not simply being removed at the school level but are being driven by the government and it is politically motivated.
Ignoring the problem won’t lead to them being banned in the sense that having them would be illegal, but it could make it more difficult to get. It would not be hard to imagine states like Florida going further and attacking public libraries or possibly even making it so you have to show an ID to buy these books.
Some public libraries are already being attacked.
“Banned” may not be technically correct but it also properly communicates the seriousness of this and the goals of the people pushing this.
I am not fully convinced that a foldable is really going to be something that most will want, but I think it could find its niche. Given that from another article it seems that in the simulator it is using the iPad view it could be useful for some people.
Though, I have yet to find myself in a situation that I wanted to use an iPad and I was not already in a position to be carrying one. I use mine for work and I am already carrying a laptop, throwing in an iPad is a very small addition to my bag.
Any time I have just been out, was never a situation I felt like I needed something like an iPad. Throw in that this looks like it will be the size of a Mini vs the 13" pro that I use now, it puts it in an awkward position. And I could justify the rumored $2k cost to replace 2 devices that cost more than that combined.
It will be interesting to see how it does in practice, but also what it does to the separation of iOS and iPadOS.
A dishwasher is the only reason you can think of a humanoid robot? How about a robot to load and unload the dishwasher.
The fact is we live in a world built for humans. I have a robot vacuum and for it to be effective I had to setup my home in a certain way, and even then it is not fully effective.
People pay for cleaners to come into their home all the time, it shouldn't be hard to think why a humanoid robot would (theoretically, if it worked well) be far better than a purpose built machine in the home. But also in many cases working with those machines.
I unfortunately have met a few. I have one friend that legit scares me... we saw how people reacted to o4 being discontinued.
Though I do agree that most people probably don't want as much AI as is being shoved on us right now, there is a subset that do want at least some of it.
More my point, yeah I think there is an issue of the actual demand being extremely over estimated due to shady practices (like of course Gemini gets a lot of use when every single google search calls it whether you want it or not). But we also should not be so quick to disregard there being real demand just to hope for the outcome we want.
I am thankful that both my partner and myself are in a pretty good spot when it comes to our gaming PC's. I had hoped to double my RAM at some point but I am still at a comfortable spot.
I am annoyed that the new handhelds are all crazy so sticking with my Legion Go for now.
The one I am annoyed with is storage. I desperately need to get a couple new drives for my NAS (one to replace one that its bad sectors are growing and one to add more storage) and I am not looking forward to spending $600-$700 each for 20TB drives.
We can be cynics of AI without ignoring reality, if no one wanted this no one would be chatting with Claude or ChatGPT directly, but people obviously are.
The fact is there are people that do in fact want this, and it isn't just CEO's hoping to cut jobs.
Some competition for Apple in this space and competition for Intel and AMD is great.
But I really do question how well Windows on Arm is really going to work out long term.
For Apple it worked because they were able to force the issue. If you wanted a new Mac it was going to be Arm and we all knew eventually (this year or is it next year?) Intel support would drop. Over time we have seen M series exclusive features.
Developers were forced to update or abandon Mac which gave users a great experience (with some early growing pains).
This is something that Windows will never be able too do. They will always be stuck maintaining an emulator and a likely large subset of apps only supporting one over the other. (also does this work the other way around with an Arm only app working on x86?)
This seems like a repeat of when it was not uncommon for games to only support Intel or AMD or NVIDIA or AMD. But worse since they are not both x86. Sure at least we have emulation but just like with Rosetta2 it shouldn't ever be the long term solution.
As someone who is not in the market for a Ferrari, I feel like I am crazy for actually kinda liking the look of it? (The blue is bad, they should have used the red one for all of the marketing)
I mean, I feel like it should be a departure from the Ferrari look since it really isn't one that fits the expectation of what a Ferrari is. It feels like this is more an expansion of the Ferrari brand into a new segment while also borrowing from the rest of the brand?
They even said "entirely new Ferrari".
I feel like if it did try to look like a normal Ferrari but then it didn't feel, sound, etc like one due to being Electric people would also complain.
The number of people with cars that might be willing to do some side work for some extra money?
It isn't like other jobs that have resumes and (possibly) long interview processes.
From what I can find we are talking a few days without talking to anyone and you are driving. Throw in Uber and Lyft doing an advertising campaign with incentives to start driving, I don't see any reason they could not have a potential large amount of drivers fairly quickly.
Maybe it won't be at ideal hours, maybe it will still be hit or miss, but there are a lot of drivers out there. Just due to the very nature of this being gig work.
All they really need to just ignore the union's demands is to be able to sign up enough drivers to out last the members not making money. Getting used to driving the streets and everything is up to the drivers, not uber or lyft. I am just reluctant to think it will actually work and the drivers won't cave. Trying to pass laws would be a more concrete fix.
No doubt good for them, but I am curious how this is realistically going to work.
The barrier of entry to get new non-union drivers for Lyft and Uber is very low. If a strike does happen I can't imagine it would be hard for them to fairly quickly get new drivers, especially with the possibility of higher fairs due to high demand while it is sorted out. I have to imagine they would be able to get drivers far faster than most other situations with strikes.
I wonder if Uber and Lyft would even try to partner with gocurb or another app to funnel riders directly to taxies.
Not saying a union is a bad thing, I just wonder in this particular case how well it is realistically going to work out. Guess we will see.
Except that your example is a simple conversation vs explaining the outcome of a study/program. That immediately requires more information to actually convey what did and did not happen.
For example, I could read the actual details on this and possibly determine that they replace school with some other (cheaper) program that just keeps the girls busy.
Or I could determine that all we really need to do is launch an outreach marketing program encouraging that girls stay in school and ignore all of the other support that was given.
One of those is supported by the headline and one is supported by the lack of information about what actually helped.
If by your example there was a study on how we made a previously unlivable area, suitable for humans in their homes but all it said was "well the temperature is X" than you would have questions on how exactly that was achieved.
Same with living in space, if NASA told us that the way astronauts are living on the space station with "well there is oxygen" we wouldn't accept that because there is obviously more going on.
Wanting to actually know what the full picture is allows us to reproduce it.
I get that its not like they were sent to a boarding school or something.
But it does mention accelerated catch up programs just for them, assisting financially, and vocational training.
Which is clearly more than just "stayed in school". Meaning it is something that can't just be replicated by encouraging being in school but actively needing a program like this. Which is not a bad thing obviously, but it is important that the right lesson is taken out of this.
Reading this, I can't help but feel like there is a weird correlation here going on.
It seems less specifically about the school and more about the support system and the safe place that this program gave to the girls.
It sounds like this was a program specifically built to target the reasons they were not staying in school in the first place. Which obviously is a good thing but just simply stating "stayed in school" feels like an oversimplification of what was done here.
That is an important distinction since the question to me remains if the numbers would continue without the program specifically in place.
To be frank, it sounds like you are also spreading misinformation. In a follow-up you even said that you have not received yours to test and that you are only assuming based on the previous steam controller.
But your comment here is very definitive and is a major problem at how quick we are to defend Valve when we don't actually know.
And there is some truth to that given that the features we were supposed to get in iOS 26 did not come out. But it also was just that they were not shoving AI into every single thing.
I still have hope that they will be the company that will (mostly) apply AI in a more meaningful way instead of it just being "AI magic" in everything. There were some genuinely useful things shown at WWDC.
Will have to wait and see though. I was disappointed to see them leaning more into the same branding.