I don’t see this as enshittification. It’s a real thing that’s happening, but raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly. Unlike artificially limiting features that are “free” to them, this genuinely isn’t, it’s not even really super discounted for them on the backend. They’re likely just paying for a series of S3 buckets.

Indexing and lookups on datasets as big as companies like Google and Amazon are running also take trillions of operations to complete, especially when you take into account the constant reindexing that needs to be done. In some cases, encoding data into a neural network is actually cheaper than storing the data itself. You can see this in practice with gaussian splatting point cloud capture, where they are training networks to guide points in the cloud at runtime, rather than storing the position of trillions of points over time.

I firmly believe it will slow down significantly. My prediction for the future is that there will be a much bigger focus on a few “base” models that will be tweaked slightly for different roles, rather than “from the ground up” retraining like we see now. The industry is already starting to move in that direction.

While I agree in principle, one thing I’d like to clarify is that TRAINING is super energy intensive, once the network is trained, it’s more or less static. Actually using the network isn’t dramatically more energy than any other indexed database lookup.

Actually, Windows does allow you to use an alternate “compositor”— a feature which is used quite frequently in the industrial/embedded space. Windows calls them “custom shells”. The default is Explorer, but it can be set to any executable.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot/iot-enterprise/customize/shell-launcher

When I read the headline I just assumed this must be an onion article. That is not good.

It’s really not though. It’s actually pretty simple under the hood.

How is it scammy or gimmicky to put ads on a product you don’t pay for? I guess I’m just missing the disconnect here. This service costs Nvidia money to run.

You don’t need to exercise your stock options to access their value. It’s common practice to take loans out against their value, which allows you to access your money effectively tax free by instead paying interest against the loan. This is (again) a fairly commonplace practice used to make collecting tax difficult, and allow them to make the argument to regulators that they aren’t actually being paid that much, it’s totally just options they would never sell off. That’s why C suite has such a “burn everything to the ground, as long as our stock price goes up” mentality, because if it doesn’t, they have to start worrying about interest on their loans— because they have fairly low liquidity (percentage wise).

Base pay is a meaningless figure in tech. Total comp is all that matters. The true high rollers intentionally keep their base pay low to dodge taxes. This doesn’t mean they aren’t still getting and using this money, it’s just an intentional straw man to allow them to make this exact argument.

You can attach a fake one in software via XVFB (X Virtual Frame Buffer). It’s a little involved if you aren’t familiar with X, but it only took me an hour or so to get setup. Then you don’t need any hardware at all, and can set whatever resolution you’d like.

If that were solely true, there would be a lot more competition in the field right now. Amazon, (and to a much lesser extent the other 2 big names, GCP and Azure) are so massive not because they have a lot of power (plenty of other companies like digital ocean or OVM have plenty of scaling power too)— but because the integrations between their products are so seamless. Most of that functionality has a foundation in FOSS software that they’ve built on top of.

That would be a dream come true for Youtube. Think about how that would affect them financially, they would be serving significantly less load, but they would still rake in all those Youtube premium subscriptions. It would effectively be campaigning to remove the users who aren’t monetized from the platform.

Not sure if this is sarcasm or not, but genuinely I would be ok with this.

It discourages innovation more when the vast majority of modern cultural works, or mechanical inventions are completely off limits to all but a small ownership class. It means no one is generally free to iterate on modern ideas without risking legal liability. Ultimately, pretty much nothing in this world is original, everything is an iteration on existing works. When anything approaching a modern work is restricted, there’s far less to iterate on.

They claim it in the article, and in a few other publications, but I haven’t seen anything that explicitly confirms, from sunbird, that this is the case, including on their website. They also make claims on their website that conflict with that architecture, as I don’t believe it would be possible to E2E encrypt messages like they claim they do. I kinda wonder if the Mac Mini claim is an assumption that everyone just ran with, without confirming that it’s true. I could be wrong though, I’ll gladly eat my words if anyone has a primary source to cite, but that architecture and business model just doesn’t appear to be compatible with their claims.

In the article it mentions that the service is run by sunbird. Just by reading their FAQ it doesn’t actually sound like they are MITM’ing messages via some mac server somewhere. It actually sounds more plausible to me that they are doing all the magic “on device”. They specifically mention that this won’t work on multiple phones at the same time, that’s what’s tipping me off.

What I suspect is happening is that the phone itself is spoofing an actual iPhone, and connecting to Apple servers as if it is one. Normally you wouldn’t be able to do this, Apple sells the phones, so they know all the serial numbers that should be able to access iMessage, and would be able to block anything that doesn’t report to be a real iPhone. What I think may be happening is that sunbird could be buying up pallets of dead, old, or otherwise unusable iPhones for pennies on the dollar, and using those serial numbers to pretend they were an iPhone from another device (like the nothing phone) directly.

This would make sense with their business model, according to their FAQ they have “no reason to charge money” for their product yet. Buying access to iMessage for a few bucks upfront with no ongoing cost would match up with what they are claiming, and it would be extremely hard for Apple to detect on their end, as they would appear to be all sorts of models, bought at different times, in different places, and signed in by real people.

I want to reiterate that this is pure speculation on my part, it’s just a theory. Which this would mean that (in theory) chats could (and would) be E2E encrypted from sender to receiver, ultimately it’s still Nothing/Sunbird’s app, so they could be doing anything with it on device.

If you don’t get a physical piece of media that can be viewed offline indefinitely, you don’t own anything, you’re just renting. Services revoking even bought and paid for content is not unheard of, digital purchasing gives every streaming company the ability to do that.

Yup, those clauses should be illegal. Especially nowdays. In the past, you could cross out sections you don’t agree too before signing, or negotiate the contract somehow. But now, contracts are very clearly designed as a “take it or leave it” offer, and when literally everyone in a given marketplace for an essential product or service has the same clauses, it effectively removes your rights.

Firstly, let me be clear. This is my opinion as someone who isn’t, and has never been involved with their instance in any capacity. My account is with pawb.social.

Posting legal letters may open them up to additional legal liability, and it is completely reasonable to let the community know what happened without sharing the actual letter.

Secondly, you’re putting words in my mouth. I am not saying they are censoring in good faith. I am saying the complete opposite, that they are reversing their stance in good faith. In other words, they are uncensoring content in good faith.