Because URL shortening is relatively trivial to implement, and instead of just doing so on their own end, they decided to rely on a third-party service.
Considering link permanence was a "founding principle", that's just unbelievably stupid. If I decide one of my "founding principles" is that I'm never going to show up at work with a dirty windshield, then I shouldn't rely on the corner gas station's squeegee and cleaning fluid.
First of all, how the links are made permanent has nothing to do with the principle that they should be made permanent.
There seemed to be two principles at play here:
1. Links should always work
2. We don't want to store any user data
#2 is a bit complicated, because although it sounds nice, it has two potential justifications:
2a: For privacy reasons, don't store any user data
2b: To avoid having to think through the implications of storing all those things ourselves
I'm not sure how much each played into their thinking; possibly because of a lack of clarity, 2a sounded nice and 2b was the real motivation.
I'd say 2a is a reasonable aspiration; but using a link shortener changed it from "don't store any user data" to "store the user data somewhere we can't easily get at it", which isn't the same thing.
2b, when stated more clearly, is obviously just taking on technical debt and adding dependencies which may come back to bite you -- as it did.
> A sixth, broadly Marxian sort of objection rejects the project of defining art as an unwitting (and confused) expression of a harmful ideology.
But I don't think many serious critiques of "this is not art" claims invoke Marxism. The Marxist perspective generalises the idea that art is incredibly difficult to define, but doesn't originate it.
The first paragraph that talks about the OS itself is depressing:
>macOS Sequoia completes the new Mac Studio experience with a host of exciting features, including iPhone Mirroring, which allows users to wirelessly interact with their iPhone, its apps, and notifications directly from their Mac.
So that's their highlight for a pro workstation user.
Just be glad they didn't focus on movies, music and cute apps. Macs seems to be the only product line that continues to semi-dodge Apple's myopic media/services/social kiosk lens they now view all their other product lines through.
If that sounds too negative, compare their current vision for their products with Steve Jobs old vision of "a bicycle for the mind". iOS-type devices are very useful, but unleashing new potential, enabling generational software innovation, just isn't their thing.
(The Vision Pro is "just" another kiosk product for now, but it is hard to tell. The Mac support suggests they MIGHT get it. They should bifurcate:
1. A "Vision" can be the lower cost iOS type device, cool apps and movies product. Virtual Mac screen.
2. A future "Vision Pro that is a complete Mac replacement, the new high end Apple device, filled out spacial user interface for real work, etc. No development sandbox, Mx Ultra, top end resolution and field of view, raise the price, raise the price again, please. It could even do the reverse kind of support, power external screens that continued working like first class virtual screens, when you needed to share into the real world.
The Vision Pro should become a maximum powered post-Mac device. Not another Mac satellite. Its user interface possibilities go far beyond what Mac/physical screens will ever do. The new nuclear powered bicycle for the mind. But I greatly fear they want to box it in, "iPad" everything, even the Mac someday.)
I agree, except I wonder how they'll do this securely. Imagine if a VS Code plugin could spy on everything in front of me. Opens up a whole new level of security concerns.
They use a similar line on the MacBook Air page. If you're buying an (up to) $13,000 Mac, hopefully you already understand macOS and its features, I guess.
14 years or less. Any version of Postgres before 9.0 was a nightmare to administer as a real production transactional dbms, at least the off the shelf version without a whole lot of tweaking without a (then very rare) pg expert.
I see a disconnection with reality here… Somehow bugs are caused by dumb people who thinks their code is great but it’s not. So we let smart people come up with practices that dumb people will follow and mistakes will be avoided.
How these certified architects folks will prevent defects is not clear to me.
If I ask you to build a shelter (out of wood, metal, whatever), and you go ahead and build "something", how do you know the thing is going to survive the wind, snow, earthquakes? You wouldn't know - unless someone has done the calculations, based on certain specific parts, put together in certain ways, that are tested to resist specific forces applied in specific ways. This is the science part of engineering. It ensures that you can build 20,000 houses the same basic way (in one specific area) and not have them randomly fall apart. Yet the people building those houses have no idea of the maths involved. They are just following an approved formula, with approved parts.
We don't have that for software. But if we did, a lot fewer of our buildings would fall down. And it would actually be easier and faster to build the software, because nobody would have to sit there and wonder how to put it together, or with what parts. Just follow the plan.
There’s also a huge difference in what people, even children, expect when sitting down to watch a movie versus seeing a clip of some funny cat/seal hybrid playing football while I’m looking for the Bluey episode we left off on. My daughter is almost five and cautiously asks “is that real?” about a lot of things now. It definitely makes me work harder when trying to explain the things that don’t look real but actually are; one could definitely feel like it takes some of the magic away from moments. I feel alright in my ability to handle it, it’s my responsibility to try, but it isn’t as simple as the Looney Tunes argument or, I believe, dramatic effects in movies and TV.
Yet, in a movie setting it's clear something is a special effect or alike which is not the case for GenAI. Massive underestimation of the potential impact in this thread, scary.
Maybe. Or maybe some people massively underestimate our ability to cope with fiction and new media types.
I am sure that there were people decrying radio for all these same reasons (“how will the children know that the voices aren’t people in the same room?”)
Not a bad point, those representations have, in some cases, caused widespread misunderstandings among people who learn about those concepts from movies... and this is all while simultaneously knowing "it's just a movie".
Yes but a movie is a movie whereas these AI-generated videos will likely be used to replace stock footage in other (documentary, promotional, etc.) contexts
If the producer wants to publish bad physics, they get bad physics.
If the producer wants to publish good physics, they get good physics.
It doesn't matter if it is AI, CGI, live action, stop motion, pen-and-ink animation, or anything else.
The output is whatever the production team wants it to be, just as has been the case for as long as we've had cinema (or advertising or documentaries or TikToks or whatevers).
You don't have full control over AI-generated images though, or not to the same extent producers have with CGI.
There's a video on sora.com at the very bottom, with tennis players on the roof, notice how one player just walks "through" the net. I don't think you can fix this other than by just cutting the video earlier.
There's already techniques for controlling AI generated images. There's ControlNet for Stable Diffusion and there are already techniques to take existing footage and style-morphing it with AI. For larger budget productions I would anticipate video production tooling to arise where directors and animators have fine grained influence and control over the wireframes within a 3D scene to directly prevent or fix issues like clipping, volumetric changes, visual consistency, text generation, gravity, etc. Or even just them recording and producing their video in a lower budget format and then having it re-rendered with AI to set the style or mood but adhering to scene layout, perspective, timing, cuts, etc. Not just for mitigating AI errors but also just for controlling their vision of the final product.
Or they could simply brute force it by clipping the scene at the problem point and have it try, try again with another re-render iteration from that point until it's no longer problematic. Or just do the bulk of the work with AI and do video inpainting for small areas to fix or reserve the human CGI artists for fixing unmitigatable problems that crop up if they're fixable without full re-rendering (whichever probably ends up less expensive).
Plus with what we've recently seen with world models that have been released in the last week or so, AI will soon get better at having a full and accurate representation of the world it creates and future generations of this technology beyond what Sora is doing simply won't make these mistakes.
People don't watch The Matrix expecting a documentary on how we all got plugged in. If someone generated the referenced ladybug movie for use in a science classroom, that's a problem.
And it's already harmful in some cases. E.g. people drag people out of a crashed car because they think it's going to explode, sometimes seriously injuring them.
Did you see the movie Battleship? Or a good percent of recent and not so recent action movies, at least Matrix could be argued that it was about a virtual reality.
It's misleading to claim that companies own their existence to governments, to imply some innate subservience of companies to governments, when companies can and have created governments whenever the need arises.
I'm talking about companies as commercial enterprises seeking to profit from doing business. No funny business with esoteric definitions.
You say companies creating governments are the exception because usually governments which are compatible with doing business already exist. And this is in no small part because companies modify their environment to create that set of circumstance in the first place. Sometimes they create governments outright where none previously existed. Most often they do it by lobbying or bribing a government to adopt rules better for doing business. Sometimes they hire private armies to destroy and replace governments which cannot be brought into alignment with the companies.
The colonial trading companies are the most famous examples because of how extreme they were, but there are countless examples throughout history and around the world.
Companies forming governments outright, complete with new currencies, was common in the undeveloped American west. Companies hiring mercenary armies to destroy unaligned governments has happened several times in South and Central America.
Companies needing governments are like beavers needing ponds. If none suitable exists, they make one.
The legal concept doesn't feel esoteric to me. In contrast, "companies" creating governments is quite rare in my mind. The historical concept you're referring to was even more of a legal concept. Those companies were individually chartered by their host governments. They might have inflicted something else on their victims, but ... Let's take the East India Company as an example. It might have appeared sovereign at times, but was trivially dissolved by the British Empire.
You're getting the cause and effect wrong. For a company to exist, there needs to be stable structures in place. Foundational things like money, infrastructure, laws, people - "Capital".
There are many examples of companies causing those stable conditions to exist. They even create currencies whenever one doesn't already exist. It doesn't work in only one direction, that's my point.
And yet… that was a very self-destructive decision.