qwopmaster

The prevailing opinion here seems to be that we’d really like for there to not be an omnipresent panopticon because protect the children or terrorists or, apparently, malware. If your imagination is particularly lacking on how this might be weaponized just remember that antifa is now designated as an terrorist organization in US, so you better not be a suspected member of it — as in, you best not have sent a buddy a message on signal about how those tiki torch carrying nazi larpers aren’t exactly great guys, or off to a black site you go for supporting terrorism.

If you want to prosecute people send physical goons, which are of limited quantity, rather than limitless, cheaper and better by the day pervasive surveillance of everybody and everything.

Malware, easily

But this isn't a conversation about people being excluded from the latest JS framework, this is a conversation about people not using a smartphone being increasingly excluded from pretty fundamental things. App only tickets for public transportation? Grandma can't do that. E-voting? Grandma can't do that. Online banking? Grandma can't do that, because grandma struggles to send a text message much less to navigate a modern app with five different dickbars that is outright designed to get people to sign up for marketing trash.

Having an option for digital ID is great, and there are many potential benefits to it. Requiring a modern smartphone for it is wildly out of touch.

The vast majority of people after 65 or so are incapable of using modern smartphones beyond extremely simple things like calling.

The bet seems obvious - Intel has been failing for a while, but they're still much better positioned to produce what the US government wants than some random companies like HP or TI. Their fabs aren't quite on the bleeding edge and the yields aren't quite what they'd like to have but it's still much more advanced than TI's 45-250nm fabs.

If HP, or Nvidia, or Sun, or Motorola wanted the bag maybe they should've tried building their own modern fabs.

If you can't manufacture your chips while your only geopolitical rival is pumping infinite money to homegrow their own fab business, it probably should cause some concern.

If the only source of high quantity and high quality chips is located in your competitor's backyard, and they spent several decades repeating how it's their wayward province that they fully intend to reclaim one way or another, it's pure stupidity to sit around and do nothing.

Let's not pretend that the money would be spent on basic research instead, by the way. US pumping some money into chip production is a rare spark of intelligence amidst an avalanche of stupidity and grift.

On one hand it’s an old, obsolete model.

On the other none of the big-name US labs released their old models, even when obsolete, like gpt 3.5 or claude pre-3.5. All we got are some unusable safetyslop like openai OSS that was worse than existing comparable chinese models on the day they released. Google’s gemma was slightly better, but also hardly exciting.

So… go Elon? It’s not much but it’s something, and who knows, maybe it’ll somehow percolate into other companies to release something that is actually good.

The license is pretty hostile, though.

Same experience on 14 pro - it got noticeably hot after 2nd photo, and after 3rd the app crashed and OS was choppy for a few minutes. And that was indoors, in 22C and screen fairly dim. Never seen anything like it; as-is I’d avoid the app lest it actually damages something. The photos themselves do look better than apple’s default cam, but not by a huge amount. Most noticeable is better range, like a photo of a blue sky with a few clouds seen through your window that takes up a third of the photo, which by default is either very dim inside or mostly indistinct blue-gray or blown out if focusing inside. Super-resolution however, especially at 6x (double 14 pro’s 3x optical zoom) is actual wizardry.

On the other hand night photos seem like garbage - there’s a bit more stuff visible than on default 3sec night mode but the colors are nonsensical and details nonexistent, certainly nothing even remotely close to what adobe promises on their webpage.

All in all I’m not sure what use it is with the terrible performance, outside of long-range photos that you really want to shoot at 6x zoom and keep as much detail as possible.