I’d also have accepted the money if I were him but at least I would have wrote a blog post explaining the situation, that now the apps are dead and controlled by a bad actor and need to get uninstalled as soon as possible.

Not almost denying it while continuing to get money on his Patreon from unaware users

I donated to the Tibor guy and I feel betrayed for how he managed the situation

It’s always a danger when a malicious company purchases a famous open source project.

Like that israeli adware company that bought simple mobile tools

Why the fuck are they using a cloud tts on an Android device??? Can’t they use on device tts?? Seems extremely stupid for no reason

1. It’s expensive. They are paying a fee to the third party tts provider each single time someone needs a response. They boast “no subscriptions” - that means those fees are paid only by new customer purchases. Ponzi 2.0

2. It’s fucking expensive. Elevenlabs tts voices costs thousands of dollars per month plus $0.18 per 1000 characters. Ask the history of a monument and the verbose result that the LLM regurgitated costs them $0.15. Are they banking on the fact that most customers would just shelf the device after a day?

3. It’s slower. Each time the device needs to reply, it needs to stream an audio file instead of a few bytes of compressed text

4. For the more realistic voices it’s only cheaper in the short term. I get it - they don’t like the robotic free voices and licensing a good closed source one costs money. But then you don’t need to pay the “cloud” forever. Did they plan to shut down shortly after the launch? Where the money for running each user in a VM is coming out? (I saw from a YouTube video that it looked like they were using a browser automation tool in a VM)

At this point since everything is run on the cloud (=somebody else’s computer) this could not only be a smartphone app, but a smartwatch app.

I wonder if they will just fold and do a rug pull now blaming the hackers or fix the problem.

Fixing the problem seems difficult for them - need to fully rewrite the app and having everything proxied through their authenticated server, increasing their expenses (and a rushed fix isn’t secure/tested). But their money comes only from new investors and new customers, and at this point I doubt that they can sell more units or scam more investors.

Closed source but if you pay enough you can get the source

they mentioned some issues when reviewing the updated ROG Ally, i was surprised about that - yet of course they continue to love boasting about how great Asus monitors and computers are, because of all the sponsorship money & free product supply

They have some balls - when you do videos that expose companies like this or the MSI claw you won’t get the lucrative sponsorships like LTT

Companies like to sponsor videos like shortcircuit that in the end are ten minutes long ads about a sponsored product

One day before the attacks, it [Starlink] just shut down. It became super, super slow.”

wonder if it’s because they’re calling their ketamine-powered buddy

It’s resurfacing old tech? My Sony Ericsson P800 from 20 years ago had a screen that worked great in direct sunlight. It worked best in direct sunlight, the brightest the sun, the better you could see. Downside is that in the dark it had poor illumination

It’s LCD with a reflective background and lateral illumination rather than backlight

True, it should also refuse to activate in low visibility situation

I was ready to write shit on Tesla then I saw the video. The asshole was driving at that speed in the fog??? And let some alpha proof of concept software that relies only on cameras to let drive in the fog???

If the human eye doesn’t see the train crossing, how a camera can see it?

Although a bit of fault to Tesla, because the system should have known from the maps that over there was a train crossing and should have slowed down anyway

Patriotism + unlimited funding = innovation

I feel that’s not actually replaced by ai rather his previous works have been templated and a script is replacing names and stuff automatically. The solution is called “ai” because in this way the developer can price it higher

This said, for a client point of view, switching from “everything is custom” (=$$$) to “everything is from a cookie cutter” is not good. Long term viability of that marketing company is compromised, IMHO. Why a client should pay $$$ if all it gets is something that could come with $5 from Fiverr or even with a free Canva trial?

A graphic designer is still indispensable, especially if they were “so busy that could barely take a few days off”

Also the decision of Microsoft of discontinuing windows on hardware produced before 2018 is an incentive to transition to Linux in developing countries (although I saw massive use of windows 7 even today…)

The year of desktop Linux?

No, it’s this, they mostly want x86 for government use https://www.tomshardware.com/news/loongson-launches-3a6000-cpu-matches-14600k-ipc

An article that lists the CPU: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/china-bans-intel-and-amd-cpus-for-government-offices-and-servers-plans-to-switch-to-domestic-made-alternatives

That Huawei CPU is mostly marketing as doing 5nm chips with duv machines is possible but yields much less because it needs more steps. It’s also the same design of 4 years ago

And then the American government helps to speed up the process by banning Intel to selling CPUs to Huawei and affiliates

The reason China is forcing themselves to use shitty, slow, and inefficient processors is because they’re indirectly injecting billions in the industry in this way, because no consumer would ever buy a zhaoxin CPU, which is slower than a celeron while more expensive than a core i7.

So, government using shitty processors = after a decade those shitty processors should improve to parity.

Now, if also consumers are forced to use the shitty processors, then the industry has even more incentive to improve

On my 4k 32" usually I run 4 programs at the same time, one at each corner. It’s like having 4 1080p screens (I keep scaling at 100%)

Wait? My Lenovo laptop did exactly this. It first encrypted the SSD without telling me, then it updated the bios via windows update (or via Lenovo assistant, but still it was unattended)

Luckily I was using a Microsoft account (usually I don’t because fuck that) so the keys were automatically backupped

Because I assume that iOS devices become e-waste a few years after discontinuation, unless you write custom software on some outdated xcode+MacOS combo