Those speakers by the way are an ADA requirement, and the only information that should be coming out of them are the stop announcements & any comms from the driver that may be necessary. Anything else in four different languages is not required, including the track telling you not to stand too close to the doors on the bus.

> Plenty of younger people are already reverting to more primitive phones or physical media, and I wonder if it's just older addicted richer millenials that'll keep buying at even more than the already idiotic prices.

You don’t sell as many iPhones as Apple does if your market is only as narrow as “older addicted richer millennials” and your most expensive products in your flagship lines don’t fly off the shelves if they’re not already at some level of affordability. Under today’s prices, and this is due to change per Tim Cook’s comments of course, but under today’s prices the iPhone Pro line starts at $1099 and $1199 for the Pro & Pro Max line specifically, which you can get down by trading in an older phone, looking for a deal (prices in the channel are often discounted by $100 or so below Apple’s list price) and can be financed through either the carrier or Apple.

Now you can get that price up to $1999 if you specifically go for the Pro Max 2TB option, but the existence of a 2TB option doesn’t mean that’s the default option for most people. You can also get that price as low as $599 if you forego the flagship models entirely, and again, that’s Apple’s list prices, not necessarily prices in the channel.

I think your frugality is great, and if there’s some young people behaving more frugally, that’s also great. I haven’t upgraded my phone in about 5 years and don’t anticipate doing so this year either, but your remarks don’t read like they were sourced from real observations of either the American or the International markets, and in fact read like an eye-rolling generalization about millennials. Such as this:

> the likelihood seems low that significantly increased prices for effectively the same (boring) product would be absorbed by anyone other than the richest or older established crowd

1) we don’t know what Apple’s prices are going up to yet. They haven’t announced any actual price increases, so we also don’t know how significant the price increase will be. Naturally we should expect sales to be hurt by any price increase, but it’s a bit premature to overstate their significance.

2) their most recent iPhones were not so boring that they didn’t fly off the shelves at a pace Apple couldn’t anticipate because they sold well above expectations, and that is specifically the flagship models. Now it often follows that the following year’s model is more “boring” by comparison, but the view you take their new products is not borne by market evidence.

I’d love to know how much “plenty” in the parent’s perspective stacks up against just this one individual model line and whether it is at all distinguishable from noise.

If I’m dealing with adware either way, may as well use the best.

Businesses might (well, will) suffer because people are misusing AI, but it is a misuse to do anything with it without an additional verification step.

To be clear here, I have no issue with Google taking it on the chin in cases like this, but what the comment I was originally responding to had this:

> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.

And my point is this: if it matters, verification is not optional. If it doesn’t matter, then fine, skip the verification step, but if you’re taking whatever text is generated by a GPT at face value without understanding what that is or being able to determine the source inputs for the “claims” it outputs, then you’re part of the problem because sometimes the source is just a GPT-generated web page, and that’s obviously not trustworthy. Sometimes it’s a MediaWiki site page that doesn’t actually exist, but because it’s MediaWiki it’s not going to return a 404. Using a tool requires understanding it including its failure modes, and in the case of LLMs that means: trust nothing, verify everything.

> errors can be so subtle that it is not possible to recognize them unless you spend an hour researching every fact presented. at that point, what's the benefit of AI? nobody is going to do that.

Because if someone goes through the citations and it doesn’t substantiate what was generated, then what was generated was obviously bollocks. Being able to recognize those contradictions is an essential skill to using LLMs with web search at all. It’s not rocket science.

Or you don’t care about those things at all, and you will buy the T-Shirt that’s in front of you right now rather than wait later and buy one that better reflects your supposed values when you’ve done an appropriate amount of research. Using AI may even reduce the amount of time you spend on that part.

Your T-Shirt buying patterns & values are not my concern though.

> Obviously the marketing point of the AI tools is it just gives you an answer straight up so you don't have to bother reading normal sources.

To lazy people yes. That would be a marketing point. It’s not that though, so you use it to save time, but you don’t get to skip the verification step.

If it’s important, check it. If it’s not important, then it is pretty much just entertainment.

LLMs can be very useful in a general web search and save some time, but if you don’t put those literacy & critical thinking skills to the test and actually confirm anything, then you might as well not even have bothered with the search at all unless you’re hoping it can just replace all of your original thinking too.

Some of it is free on-device. Some of it is free & rate limited per day. They mentioned in the WWDC infomercial that users with iCloud+ (the storage tier subscriptions, Apple likes to throw random things in with that) will be able to get more uses per day. And some of it developers will pay for.

Saying that you’re going to cap your population necessarily implies you’re going to take policy measures to grow no further than the capped amount, which are by their nature, repressive.

That said I did see in some other comments earlier after I posted this that this is a back door way to axe the Swiss-EU bilateral agreements all at once. I don’t know how true that is, but if that’s the goal, Switzerland doesn’t need to take such a back door approach. Just put it on the ballot like everything else.

This may sound pre-judgmental, but a headline is an advertisement & marketing for the article. A headline can get someone in that might otherwise have skipped the article, but it can just as easily dissuade people who might otherwise be interested in the subject matter.

If their audience is into it though, good for them.

I think you’ve perfectly phrased exactly what it is that annoys me when I see a 404 Media headline. When it was a new shop, I stomached it more, but this is every single headline I ever see from them.

Just as an aside jumping off this sentence from the article, I am far less tolerant of the practice of naming countries of origin or general locales rather than specific organizations in headlines and stories.

Name the organization, and if you want to in the body, name where they’re from/located/operating as it pertains to the organization. For that matter, if you can offer information on the specific locale (Sweden is a big place after all), you should also do that unless it really is something more national/international.

The only reason this is getting applauded by anyone is because the enforcement target is Facebook and years of the news media using their voice to complain loudly and religiously about their business competition (social media) has primed the pump for bad laws like this.

This shit isn’t lost technology, and while I understand why The Japan Times might be reluctant to name names, given that they’re not naming which manufacturer or manufacturers it is that is crying about how this is “too hard”, I just don’t believe them.