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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • As a professional myself, I can say with 100% experience (currently using a 8GB mac pro) that 8GB is NOT enough and I get memory warnings about once every week that causes me to have to shut down a bunch of programs and slow open them back up as needed. But at the same time, I also think given that the 8gb mac pros are only using standard M(x) silicon I think the better answer would be to just not sell standard silicon as “pro” machines.

    And if you look at the pricing between an air and a pro (15" vs 14", both 512 mem, both M3 8/10/8 silicon) the price difference is only $100. The machines are very close in capability; so really the 14" mac pro is little more than a rebranded air. This difference was harder to tell pre Apple silicon as it was easier to have different CPU/GPU/etc between the air and pro to give more of an actual difference. Of course if they did do that then the “base” level price for a “pro” would be $1,999 and not look near as nice as the current $1,599.

    Ultimately with the advent of apple silicon apple really should just have a single macbook line and let the silicon be the actual air/pro/etc dividing factor. But I’m sure people would have plenty to complain about if they did that and apple themselves put themselves in this position by starting the whole “pro” vs “pleb” marketing in the first place.

    The real crime that apple should be held for is the base level of storage their devices have across all of their devices (Phones, computers, iPads).


  • There’s a certain (understandable) mindset that if the service you are using has some form of “gate” to it that prevents the information from being easily scrapped on the web that there are certain privacy expectations. Discord for instance requires you to make an account, find a server, and then either join or be invited to the server. So there is an expectation that what you post (even within private messages) to only be for the people that have “access”.

    But the reality is (and has been proven many times now) that so long as a company has access to your data and can read/understand the data, they will sell that data to whoever wants to pay them for it (most often advertisers). This is true across websites, apps, and even operating systems.

    Privacy is hard, and there aren’t a lot of apps/sites/OSes that truly support it. Thankfully though, as people have started to take it more seriously more companies have started providing options to support the demand (my personal favorites are Signal and Proton).


  • I honestly can’t tell if that’s a passive-aggressive swipe at me or not; but just in case it was: stats mean very little w/o context. I believe the quote was “Lies, damned lies, and statistics”. I simply pointed out a few errors with the foundation of these “statistics”. I didn’t need to quote my own statistics because, as I was pointing out, this is a completely apples to oranges comparison. The AV companies want at the same time to preach about how many miles they go w/o accident while comparing themselves to an average they know doesn’t match their own circumstances. Basically they are taking their best case scenario and comparing it against average/worst case scenario stats.

    I’d give more weight to the stats if they where completely transparent, worked with a neutral 3rd party, and gave them access to all their video/data/etc to generate (at the very least) proper stats relative to their environment. Sure, I’ll way easier believe waymo/cruises’ numbers over those by tesla; but I still take it with a grain of salt. Because again, they have a HUGE incentive to tweak their numbers to put themselves in the very best light.


  • This is just such a bad take, and it’s so disappointing to see it parroted all over the web. So many things are just completely inaccurate about these “statistics”, and it’s probably why it “seems” so many are against autonomous vehicles.

    1. These are self-reported statistics coming from the very company(s) that have extremely vested interests in making themselves look good.
    2. These statistics are for vehicles that are currently being used in an extremely small (and geo-fenced) location(s) picked for their ability to be the easiest to navigate while being able to say “hey we totally work in a big city with lots of people”.
    • These cars don’t even go onto highways or areas where accidents are more likely.
    • These cars drive so defensively they literally shut down so as to avoid causing any accidents (hey, who cares if we block traffic and cause jams because we get to juice our numbers).
    1. They always use total human driven miles which are a complete oranges to apples comparison: Their miles aren’t being driven
    • In bad weather
    • On dangerous, windy, old, unpaved, or otherwise poor road conditions
    • In rural areas where there are deer/etc that wander into the road and cause accidents
    1. They also don’t adjust or take any median numbers as I’m not interested in them driving better than the “average” driver when that includes DUIs, crashes caused by neglect or improper maintenance, reckless drivers, elderly drivers, or the fast and furious types crashing their vehicle on some hill climb driving course.
    2. And that’s all just off the top of my head.

    So no, I would absolutely not say they are “less prone to accidents than human drivers”. And that’s just the statistics, to so nothing about the legality that will come up. Especially given just how adverse companies seem to be to admit fault for anything.



  • Thanks, that’s interesting to read about. While I’m not a web developer, there would seem to be two very large differences between them.

    1. The Apple tokens were designed for a single purpose, reducing (or eliminating) CAPCHAs, with mobile devices especially in mind. It also is not a replacement, but rather an enhancement of an existing web standard.

    2. It’s Apple, a company that makes their money by selling you things you actually want. Rather than Google, a company that gives you (or other companies) things (for free or discounted) so they can make money off of you.

    It is especially obvious when Google has the literal first bullet-point in their “why we are developing this” as…

    This trust is the backbone of the open internet, critical for the safety of user data and for the sustainability of the website’s business.

    Followed by

    These websites fund themselves with ads, but the advertisers can only afford to pay for humans to see the ads, rather than robots.

    So yeah, Google can kindly go pound sand as far as I’m concerned.



  • Not a backend dev, but it would seem like this could possibly be partially solved by purging data past a certain age that falls into specific scenarios:

    • Data from unfederated instances
    • Data from users/posts/comments that have been deleted/removed

    Also, deleting/removing content doesn’t really seem to do much currently as you still get all the info back from the server and it’s up to the frontend to not display it. I’m normally of the opinion of it you want to delete your comment it should be properly deleted (moderation removal being a separate issue).