information about a person

Not only one person, but also their relatives, who didn’t consent to begin with. You of course don’t get all of it, but if you e.g. have the DNA of a parent, then you also get information about their children.

Say for example they have some genetic predisposition for an illness, then their child is probably also more likely to get it. Better hope that in the future there are still laws against using this kind of data for determining health insurance.

Agreed. Future carbon capture capabilities are used to justify current emissions.

Thanks for the link. That is certainly a frustrating development, since they had to sell it for a much steeper discount before as the article mentions.

There might be public displeasure about it, but I think behind the scenes India buying Russia oil is expected and at least to some degree accepted (or possibly even wanted).

The bigger thing is Russia not generating profits from those sales, which I am speculating is not the case at the prices India is buying at. The upside of Russian oil still being available to the world market is keeping the prices lower, something Europe is very much interested in.

I am also from Germany and get payed for donating thrombocytes at my university hospital. The compensation is actually quite substantial imo at (up to) 75€ per session, which can be done every two weeks. The money is however mean to offset the time required, not the thrombocytes donated. So it is correlated to how long it takes.

You get 15€ (?) for up to 15min (if they have to abort very early for some reason or at your first visit where they just draw blood to test), 50€ for up to 1h (which equals to 1 instead of 2 pack of thrombocytes, usually done at your first real donation or if you maybe dont have enough for 2 on this particular day), and 75€ for anything over 1h (which is the norm).

Timewise the hospital is on the outskirts of the city, so most will have to travel a bit, then you have to fill out forms, have a quick talk with the doctor, and finally depending on your parameters it takes anywhere from ~55-70min to extract, during which you are tethered to a machine (which takes out some blood, then seperates out the thrombocytes with a centrifuge, pumps back the rest, and repeat).

One could get philosophical about the topic, but from a practical perspective the money makes a lot of sense imo:

• It costs them a lot of money to investigate new prospects, so you want reliable repeat donors

• Each donation already has other costs associated with it. Like for example the kit used during extraction, the staff handling everything and so on. So even those 75€ are just one more expense among many, and from donation to usage probably vanish in the overall costs.

• For the donor it is quite a substantial time commitment, especially when done regularly every two weeks. Unlike for example full blood donations you’d maybe do twice a year. And you should be reliable and not randomly cancel at the last second, so ideally it also has priority over some other things in your life.

• the small amount of blood that remains inside the machine is sometimes used for other research (if you agree to it, which i do)

From my own experience i can say that i might still do it without, but certainly not at the same frequency. And considering the time and effort required i don’t think anyone could be blamed for doing it less frequently without the incentive. So at least in this case it imo is a fair trade and net positive. Although it does also help that this is a university hospital that directly uses it themselves, rather than a for profit company.

I never used it myself, but rather than a dedicated alarm clock app, maybe look at tasker?

Looking at their website they actually list your use case as an example of what is possible

wake up with a random song from your music collection

(Third point under “usage examples”)

The issue is that would at best “reset” their reputation to zero. But the state that they’d like to go back to would be similar to “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM”, which ofc only works with the existing name. And this line of thinking is what got damaged by the degrading processors (and maybe how they handle it).

But Intel has never been in worse shape. So I think it’s less about Intel considering it and more about if it gets forced on them either by activist investors (I remember seeing an article that Intel prepares to defend against that) or necessity.

I don’t think so. The degrading processors are certainly bad, but in the grand scheme of things won’t move the needle. The reputation loss is probably worse than whatever fine they end up paying (and they will drag it out).

The split would be between design and manufacturing. And it would mean a massive shift, not business as usual.

The design side is probably in better shape and would increase their use of TSMC instead of using the now spun off Intel fabs.

The manufacturing side would have it rough. But we are talking about only one of 3 manufacturers of leading edge chips here (together with tsmc and samsung), not something you “conveniently let go bankrupt”. They’d try to raise more money to finish their new fabs and secure customers (while trying to make up for the lost volume from the design side). But realistically I’d say that similar to Global foundries they would drop out of the expensive leading edge race.

This is their best chance to escape their coming economic trap. They control so few actual resources beyond labor.

Is that actually the case? I am not sure how many resources china has in their own country (I assume there are a few with it being this vast), but I think they are tackling the resource problem more so with their investments in Africa and other poor countries. And because of the war Russia also has fewer countries to sell to besides China.

I think the true longterm problem is actually with the cheap labour force you mention. As the standard of living rises, so do wages. And more importantly they’ll experience the same demographic shift other developed countries are currently experiencing with an aging population. With the difference that it’ll be worse for them due to the one child polic.

Photo manipulation has been around as long as the medium itself. And throughout the decades, people have worried about the veracity of images. When PhotoShop became popular, some decried it as the end of truthful photography. And now here’s AI, making things up entirely.

I actually think it isn’t the AI photo or video manipulation part that makes it a bigger issue nowadays (at least not primarily), but the way in which they are consumed. AI making things easier is just another puzzle piece in this trend.

Information volume and speed has increased dramatically, resulting in an overflow that significantly shortens the timespan that is dedicated to each piece of content. If i slowly read my sunday newspaper during breakfast, then i’ll give it much more attention, compared to scrolling through my social media feed. That lack of engagement makes it much easier for missinformation to have the desired effect.

There’s also the increased complexity of the world. Things can on the surface seem reasonable and true, but have knock on consequences that aren’t immediately apparent or only hold true within a narrow picture, but fall appart once viewed from a wider perspective. This just gets worse combined with the point above.

Then there’s the downfall of high profile leading newsoutlets in relevance and the increased fragmentation of the information landscape. Instead of carefully curated and verified content, immediacy and clickbait take priority. And this imo also has a negative effect on those more classical outlets, which have to compete with it.

You also have increased populism especially in politics and many more trends, all compounding on the same issue of missinformation.

And even if caught and corrected, usually the damage is done and the correction reaches far fewer people.

If once you do not succeed, just try again next year. They tried and backtracked putting heated seats behind a paywall not even a year ago see here.

Unless laws are made to make this fundamentally illegal, they’ll just keep pushing until it sticks. And once one manufacturer succeeds, they’ll all follow.

The issue is that I bet modifying the firmware will have consequences on insurance and liability in case of an accident. Regardless of whether or not one is at fault or not, and that it didn’t have any effect

Since he mentions enshittification, I assume he means Plex.

However I am pretty sure both will have some bugs. I use jellyfin, so I can only speak about that. But one annoyance is that the androidTV app sometimes doesn’t have the best subtitle support. However it allows you to open movies in external players, which is a workaround.

Agreed. I remember when lightbulbs got banned here in the EU starting from 2009 to 2012 in steps. Here in Germany plenty of people were mad and hoarding them.

Nowadays with the larger focus on energy prices, especially in light of the russia-ukraine war, it seems insane that not even that long ago to light a room one or multiple lightbulbs using 65-100 watts were used. That’s like the equivalent of an office PC running just for some light.

I think you’ll need to give some more information to receive good advice:

• What’s your budget

• What’s your use case? Just web browsing, light office work or something more demanding like gaming or editing?

• What form factor? Want a larger screen or something lighter and more compact? Touch screen/convertible yes or no?

I’m nowhere near tech-savvy so it has to be easy to use,

Easy to use or easy to repair? As far as use goes pretty much every windows laptop will be feel the same to use, same as with apple. I mean it is the same operating system, just depends on what you are used to, but neither are complicated. It’s only Linux where you have a larger variety of variants, some easier to use, others geared more towards advanced users. Bur you haven’t indicated that you specifically want to run Linux.

I want something that is built to last, as opposed to certain (looking at you, Apple) devices that are desinged to become unusable within a next couple of years.

Generally laptops aimed at businesses are more durable than consumer lines. Don’t go too cheap unless you are buying used business laptops. And if something is heavilu leaning towards thin and light, then usually it is at the expense of some durability.

Apple is actually decently durable and I’ve seen quite a few MacBooks running for over a decade while still being ok. Where they fall short is repairability, when something does break and their lowest specs paired with no real way to upgrade later (especially with the newer models that don’t even have SSDs that can be swapped) is bad for future proofing, if demands change. And they make you pay through your nose for reasonable configurations.

Personally I don’t understand these kind of people either, who endorse something that directly goes against themselves (e.g. in case of gays in conservative parties) or their children. But I think there also is another way to view this behavior:

Because besides being a father of biracial children, he is one other important thing: rich. And he only gains to get richer from playing towards the maga crowd.

So how much do we actually expect his children to suffer the consequences? They’ll probably grow up privileged in good neighborhoods, get great education, own their homes and advance in their careers through connections.

I always like this answer by Steve Jobs on the topic (here it’s xerox, but this also fits Intel pretty well).

Man is stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Imo this is also one of the issues that shows how he has boxed himself into a corner with his VP candidate choice. If he had chosen someone that appeals to a different voter base, rather than Vance, who caters to the same crowd, then they’d have an easier time arguing both sides at the same time.

Well i aswell hope that this isn’t just my bias speaking :)

Unlike France or GB, which recently had elections substantially changing majorities, here in Germany it’s still the exact same people in charge since the start of this war. With the only major change being the defense minister, and that was for the better. So the people deciding here are the same that (based on this article) doubled this years support budget. And as far as i am aware there really hasn’t been any major event that would have shifted the sentiment in foreign politics from what we’ve experienced until now.

On the side of internal politics as mentioned it is basically a self-inflicted struggle to balance the budget and limit new debt. Because for some reason we chose to write that into our constitution, restraining our options. So everyone is fighting for their share and by the looks the winners are the usual: more money to secure pensions for old people and the automotive industry. While not only the budget for Ukraine is on the chopping block, but also other stuff like a reform of welfare for children or infrastructure projects for railroads.

Might sound bad, but it’s nothing really new and so far lack of funds hasn’t been an issue delaying German support. So i don’t expect it to be going forward either. We’ll just keep moving in lockstep with what others provide, slowly build out capacity and react to new developments. Which would be no change to how we’ve seem to have handled it so far, and not like “the slashing the budget by half” would imply.

And as mentioned above i am sure there are plenty of additional ways to support Ukraine that don’t hinge on the budget. Like telling Ukraine to direcly purchase through the manufacturers and giving security assurances for loans. Might be a worse deal on paper for Ukraine, but in the short/medium term wouldn’t make a practical difference. And things can get sorted later.

But regardless of how this plays out we won’t have any type of deadlock like the one delaying US aid until recently. And the largest party in the opposition is also in favor of supporting Ukraine, despite taking any opportunity to take shots at whatever the governing parties decide.