In theory „There's no (state) school giving out tablets that aren't pretty much single-use locked down devices.“
In practice, most schools lack anyone with enough technical literacy to lock down the device. So they just hand out unlocked cheap android tablets with all the stock spyware and advertisement pre-installed.
They don't "hand out" anything really - probably the closest thing is government programmes to fund laptops/tablets for low income families, but not a single school locally "gives out" tablets to kids. But they're all just "normal retail" devices.
They have some things used in lessons, but they're all given out at the beginning of the lesson, then gathered at the end.
You could argue that it's a problem they they assume home access to such things anyway - especially in later years - as things like online 'homework' is the norm.
Again, this is not true. Some public schools do buy ipads and licenses and do hand them out and some times they're unlocked. You COULD do a basic google search and learn about the topic on the news, you're you don't actually care to learn, you're just spreading noise.
Again my experience with local schools doesn't match that, though I'd acknowledge that local authority can cause a lot of differences. And I'm talking about state schools - not public schools. Remember that means a very different thing in the UK, and might suggest your own distance from the claims you seem to be making.
And googling only seems to find examples of the low income programmes. I struggle to find a single instance when devices are handed out to kids and not keep at school and only used in specific tasks - like the old trolley of laptops was a few years ago.
Or breathless reactionary commentary without any actual examples of course.
Imagine being brain-dead after a serious accident, lying in a hospital bed on life support. And your family gives the go-ahead for the doctors to zap your butthole to collect your semen so they can reproduce you.
The legacy PC makers are lucky that Ubuntu doesn’t work on this, or else they’d face even more competition. By now, everyone hates Windows. And I’d wager some people hate it enough to be willing to switch to whatever works and is halfway ad-free.
>The legacy PC makers are lucky that Ubuntu doesn’t work on this
If Linux would be able to be installed and fully working on this out of the box, then the laptop wouldn't cost 600 dollars. Apple profits from monetizing people tied to its iOS+MacOS ecosystem. If you're not gonna be a MacOS/iOS user, you're worthless to them and selling you a laptop for only 600 dollars is not good for business anymore.
Fully agree. When I have to use Windows from time to time, I’m always surprised by how laggy the cursor feels even on hardware that can do 8K VR just fine.
It really is a pity that there’s no working business model around open source maintenance for software like wine. I’m the guy who fixed the wine bug that blocked new iTunes versions, because I like to keep my music in iTunes for easy iPhone sync. I also have Fusion 360 working flawlessly in wine, but the setup process required multiple sessions stepping manually with a debugger to avoid crashes and packaging that as scripts and/or just documenting all the little issues and their fixes and keeping that up to date with fusion updates would be serious work. So nobody is doing it.
CrossOver sells WINE and WINE consulting; I've been a happy customer on and off for about 20 years. If you're bothered by open source WINE i'd say give them a shot. In my experience it's worth the $70 or whatever to get a well-paved GUI path and support.
I’m a happy CrossOver customer myself. But they don’t have enough resources to keep all major Windows apps working well. Which, to me, indicates that the business model of selling support only to those who are willing to pay, while letting everyone use the results for free, isn’t such a great business model.
„Fitting“ is still too nice of a word choice, because it implies that it’s easy to identify the best solution.
I suggest „randomly adjusting parameters while trying to make things better“ as that accurately reflects the „precision“ that goes into stuffing LLMs with more data.
Related to your answer, I would say the reason is that it works good enough for now and it can always be patched later. Back in the good old days that we remember, software was frozen on a gold master disc, which was then tested for weeks or months before its public release. The fact that bugs could not easily be fixed in the field meant they would incur support costs or lost revenue with people returning their purchased software box.
In my opinion that is the true reason why the old native software was developed to such a high standard. But then once online stores and shrink wrap agreements made it impossible to return buggy software, then the financial incentives shifted towards shipping a partially broken product.
Who cares about pleasing with good performance when you can instead keep customers hostage?
1993 was before the west entered the last stage of capitalism. It was a time when companies still competed on products rather than using monopolistic force to squeeze ever more revenue out of the same people by turning every life necessity into a subscription. Similarly, it was a time when you could mail-order a house and build it yourself. Rental prices were low because there was no regulatory capture on housing construction yet.
Where I disagree with you is video streaming. In my opinion, YouTube and the commercialisation of holiday memories (which later became Instagram influencers) were the beginning of widespread depression. Seemingly regular people sharing their exceptional life somehow forces everyone else to compare themselves to the dreams presented on YouTube and most people will come up short and then most people will feel insufficient. I believe that’s why early YouTube ads were so powerful. Your ad for exotic goods would play immediately after the viewer became painfully aware of how boring they are, when measured against the top 0.1% on a global scale.
I never understand why people want to label such eras of capitalism as “late” or the last era of capitalism. The late stage was late only to its own death. This isn’t the last stage either. Plenty more to grow. Capitalism is more akin to an indestructible and rapidly mutating organism than an ideology.
If all the AI revenue projections were correct, then 1% of worldwide GDP would end up at AI companies. Or said differently: you buy a sandwich for $5 and somehow AI gets $0.05 out of that transaction.
This is basically what happens with the advertising/social media giants (Facebook, Google, etc) because everyone needs msrketing, and mobile companies (Apple, Google) because they handle payments.
I think TSMC laughed them out of the room when they announced the original numbers. So maybe there’s no reaction now because everyone already knew not to trust OpenAI’s promises.
In practice, most schools lack anyone with enough technical literacy to lock down the device. So they just hand out unlocked cheap android tablets with all the stock spyware and advertisement pre-installed.
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