The original Apple Watch lineup is officially obsolete
abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org Posts 0Comments 321Joined 2 yr. ago
abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @beehaw.org
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Yes the batteries are small, but other brands last much longer than Apple watches
No they don't. Apple Watches have very large batteries and very efficient processors.
Other smart watches only get longer battery life if you avoid power hungry features... and you can do that with an Apple Watch. Apple's largest watch will last a full 30 days if you don't use power hungry features like wifi, heart rate monitoring, music playback, Siri, GPS, etc etc. The smaller Apple watches will last almost as long in the same mode.
Most smart watches that advertise long battery life have all (or at least most) of those features, and they don't last long at all if you take advantage of them. The Garmin FR965 (their largest watch) advertises "up to 25 days" battery life but that's with everything disabled (and it's also less than the 30 days you get with an Apple Watch). If you read the spec sheet for the Garmin FR965 it advertises "Up to 8.5 hours" if you make extensive use of all of the available smartwatch features. And that's the biggest/heaviest Garmin. The popular Garmins have smaller batteries - like half the size of the battery in that Garmin.
My Apple Watch needs to be charged ever night.
The watch I had before needed the time adjusted every night if I wanted it to be accurate to the second which I did. And adjusting was a painful process. You can't adjust the seconds - it resets the secondhand to zero and then you need to stare at a reliable timepiece (like maybe an Apple Watch), taking the regular watch out of time set mode at exactly zero seconds. If you miss it by a second... you need to wait an entire minute to try again.
I don't like sleeping with my watch on anyway, so placing it on a charger isn't a problem. And the battery lasts long enough it doesn't matter if I forget ocasinally.
If anyone thought an electronic device would become a family heirloom they are really clueless.
I think the first good wearable computer ever made has great potential as something people might like to collect. I have the first ever (proper/good) laptop for example. It doesn't work anymore, but I still like having it (and I'd love to restore it some day - just because Apple won't fix it doesn't mean it can't be fixed... it just means Apple isn't maintaining a large stockpile of spare parts anymore).
In 20 years time, I bet those watches are worth a lot of money in good condition. An original iPhone recently sold at auction for $200,000.
WASM allows arbitrary code execution in an environment that doesn't include the DOM... however it can communicate with the page where the DOM is available, and it's trivial to setup an abstraction layer that gives you the full suite of DOM manipulation tools in your WASM space. Libraries for WASM development generally provide that for you.
For example here's SwiftWASM:
let document = JSObject.global.document
var divElement = document.createElement("div")
divElement.innerText = "Hello, world"
_ = document.body.appendChild(divElement)
It's pretty much exactly the same as JavaScript, except you nee to use JSObject to access the document class (Swift can do globals, but they are generally avoided) and swift also presents a compiler warning if you execute a function (like appendChild) without doing anything with the result. Assigning it to a dummy "underscore" variable is the operator in Swift to tell the compiler you don't want the output.
Compile time is my biggest issue with TypeScript. I've used JavaScript for decades with compile time measured in, what, a millisecond or two. Having to wait for TypeScript drives me nuts.
I could also claim that it’s unsafe to go that slow on a motorcycle due to instability, but really that’s just as true as saying 10km/h is too slow for stability on a bicycle - there is an element of truth in it but we both know it’s perfectly doable for anyone who’s been riding for a while.
To get a motorcycle license in QLD you are required to demonstrate your ability to ride safely at 5km/h. It's not easy, you often need to apply the brakes and clutch and throttle all at the same time and oh yeah counter-steering? It doesn't work at 5km/h. But, every motorcycle rider with a license can do it. And trust me it's a lot easier on a bicycle.
I'd argue if you can't safely ride slow on a bicycle then maybe you should get off the bike and walk across the bridge. Being able to ride slowly is an essential skill especially when you're sharing the path with pedestrians, which as we all know happens all the time.
while they refuse to enforce laws like the minimum passing distance for cyclists even when they’re literally handed the evidence needed.
It's not enough to show video footage of a car passing a cyclist. The cops need to know who was driving the car.
Police speed/red light/mobile phone/etc infringement notices are only issued if they have an accurate photo of the driver's face (or, if they pull over the vehicle immediately and identify the driver). To achieve that they use powerful flashes when the photo is taken. They send the notice to the registered owner of the vehicle but they also need the photo to sort things out when the driver says "that wasn't me".
A bicycle GoPro is just too small, and has no flash. You'd never be able to identify the driver.
The risk is drastically less, as evidenced by the crash rates and crash severity.
Is it? Vic Roads claims you are up to 10x more likely to be killed if you travel by bicycle vs car. And it would make sense to me that you're more likely to be killed if you ride fast. Certainly all of my own bicycle crashes have involved speed - I've never suffered any injury at all, not even a bruise, when I was riding at a leisurely pace.
Your claim that there's no risk to cyclists is clearly wrong. Injuries when a cyclist hits another cyclist or pedestrian are severe.
It would, obviously, be ideal to separate pedestrians and cyclists so they don't share the same bridge. Or make the bridge wide enough to have separate lanes... But in the real world that's those just won't happen and it still doesn't help with crashes between two cyclists - which are a lot more likely to happen when you have a mix of fast and slow cyclists on a narrow bridge.
But anyway, I generally reject your assertion that the punishment should be matched to the level of risk. For me the punishment should be set at whatever level is necessary to encourage the majority of riders to ride safely. And it's not up to the police to determine what speed is "safe". That determination is up to the town planning contractors who set the speed limit on the bridge.
If it was a slap on the wrist fine, everyone would ignore the speed limit. That doesn't seem right to me at all.
None of the bridges on my commute have speed limits. When I cross them I generally do drop down 1st gear and ride at less than 10km/h (and my bicycle does have a speedometer, so I know I'm going less than 10). If there are pedestrians I slow down to walking speed or even stop while they walk past. Why risk hurting someone? I'm not in a hurry.
In a better world, our entire CBD would be a shared-use zone where cars can drive if they need to, but pedestrians always have right of way
Pedestrians do have right of way, at least in QLD. There's no situation where it's acceptable to run over a pedestrian except if it was literally impossible to avoid doing so (e.g. if a pedestrian sprints across the street unexpectedly and the driver has no time to swerve or hit the brakes).
That doesn't mean it's legal for pedestrians to obstruct traffic. J-walking leads to traffic jams which leads to situations where pedestrians/cyclists/etc are more likely to be run over and killed. When someone j-walks on a busy streat they are placing lives of other pedestrians in danger.
I'm in regional QLD, and this is no where near the biggest problem we have.
For example a major highway (National Route 1, which passes through every major city in Australia) goes through a a mountain range just 20 minutes from the CBD and closes almost once a week for an average of 6.6 hours due to car crashes which are difficult to recover. The detour when the road is closed adds 3 hours to the drive time and worse it's unsafe (and illegal) to perform a U turn anywhere on the entire stretch of road up the mountain so whenever it closes thousands of people get stuck and just have to wait until the road opens (which again, takes hours). Emergency services are forced to drive on the wrong side of the road around hundreds of narrow blind corners to reach the accident, and anyone who does turn around is risks crashing into them.
A multimillion dollar review into wether something should be done about it was delayed repeatedly for years and then finally carried out during a full covid lockdown when we had the highest number of covid cases the city saw in the entire pandemic and businesses were only allowed to open if they were declared an essential service. Nobody could leave their home except to go to those essential services and even then you weren't allowed to travel to other cities or towns except for very rare excuses. Traffic on roads between cities/towns, like the range being assessed, was obviously almost zero and surprise! They determined that traffic was minimal, nothing needed to be done, they didn't observe any crashes during the short review period, and recommended re-assessing the situation in 30 years time. When the population of the city is expected to be more than double what it is right now. Great.
The silly speed limits on my commute are, frankly, way down on the priority list compared to issues like the one I just detailed. I could list more serious problems that are being ignored. And these issues are state or national highways, so the local council doesn't have the juristiction (or budget) to deal with them.
There are lots of real issues with pill testing. For example police have every right to assume anyone who enters a pill testing tent at a festival has drugs on them, and can search for drugs / charge them with possession. And, because cops are assholes, some of them will absolutely do that.
Another issue is if a pill is tested, then someone takes the pill and dies... whoever did the pill test has failed in their duty of care to prevent the person from taking a dangerous pill.
Legislation that prohibits cops from being near a pill testing tent, or removes liability for bad medical advice, would be very difficult to get passed into law.
Truck drivers in Australia are banned from driving more than 5.5 hours at a time. There are already dedicated places to stop and park a large truck every 5 hours or so on every single highway.
A truck that can drive five hours on a charge doesn't need that big of a battery. Tesla's semi goes much much further than that on a charge and it would, as you point out, be more efficient if it had a smaller/lighter battery.
I expect where we'll end up is drivers will, when they stop for their mandatory rest, disconnect the trailer, hook the truck up to charging infrastructure, then connect the trailer to a fresh truck with a fully charged battery.
The charging infrastructure would likely be optimised for price, not speed. For example only charge the truck during the day when the grid is running on solar power.
Diesel trucks are not cheap by the way - maintenance plus the cost of the diesel works out to something like a hundred thousand dollars per year assuming you drive the truck all year.
There are too many questions to be answered to calculate how much money you'd save, since electric trucks don't exist at all yet, but my city has started deploying electric busses and they work out to a savings of a quarter million dollars per bus (over the life of the bus). Obviously with savings like that, they are going to stop buying diesel busses entirely as soon as they possibly can. It will be the same for trucks.
Even a modest change reducing a speed limit on a residential street from 50 to 40 undergoes heavy review and is unlikely to happen if even a small vocal minority opposes it.
That doesn't happen in my city.
For example there are two intersections on my commute that are virtually identical (they're on the same stretch of highway and they are exits for neighbouring beach suburbs with the same intersection design). One of them is 100km/h for through traffic and the other is 40km/h. Why? No idea. But if there was "heavy review" then surely they would have the same speed limit. It's been like that for something like ten years, locals just ignore the speed limit on the slower one and if there's a cop car behind you they'll be annoyed if you slow down. Police setup speed traps near that intersection all the time (almost every day), but I've never heard of them doing it on the intersection. They enforce the 100km/h limit, not the 40km/h limit.
Going back on topic - this is a bridge built specifically for cyclists. The speed limit is absolutely intended to be obeyed by cyclists and has nothing to do with cars. And if you can't ride 10km/h safely then you shouldn't be riding at all.
Even manually composed code (like APIs) can be free of copyright, as Google v Oracle turned out to.
We never got a final verdict on that. They settled out of court.
It went backwards and forward on appeals/etc with some judges ruling in Google's favor and some ruling in Oracle's favor.
I listened to a lot of podcasts by IP lawyers throughout the court case and they were often quite confused by a lot of the rulings that were made, which, I guess, is why both corporations had so much success appealing previous rulings. Ultimately we just don't know.
But yes - in general it is a fact that source code often isn't protected by copyright. Patents should be the "right" tool for protecting source code. Unfortunately patents are even more of a mess than copyright. I'm not a lawyer but I'm 90% sure the answer to "can you patent something created by an AI" is "yes, as long as nobody else has patented it first".
I don’t have access to GPT 4.5
I expect it will basically be the same as GPT-4:pretty much useless for writing code. It can only output a few hundred lines at the most, and you can't give it enough input as context to ask it to incrementally write an entire project a few hundred lines at a time.
It's great at "how do I do X?" but pretty close to worthless at "write real code I'm going to use to do X". Anything more complex than a 50 line shell script and GPT-4 falls over.
CoPilot is what you want for real code in large projects, it does the work to summarise your context (other code you've already written) into just the things that are likely to be relevant. However, it can't write a few hundred lines of code. It will often only output half a line of code, and you need to write the rest. Sometimes it might give you a dozen lines, but only if your code is very predictable and repetitive.
Think of GPT-4.5 as stack overflow which can answer almost any question you ask, in a second or two, and without deleting it as a duplicate of someone else who asked a completely different question.
Think of CoPilot as really good auto-complete.
Neither one is replacing a human programmer. But both are very useful tools for certain tasks.
First of all, this isn't a settled issue. Some people would argue Zarya of the Dawn is owned by everyone who created a copyrighted work that was used to train Midjourney. I hope these people are wrong, but it's a legal grey area right now.
The copyright office is not an authoritative source on legal issues. For that you need to find a criminal copyright infringement court case where someone with good lawyers enters a not guilty plea and the case goes all the way through to a final verdict.
Second - if your code is so simple that you can just ask an LLM to write the entire thing for you... then who cares if it's copyrighted? Anyone else in the world can just ask the LLM to write it separately for them. Why would they risk a lawsuit by copying your work? They'll get a better end product by using the latest version of the LLM anyway.
Are these competent developers
Here's an example - a few minutes ago I wrote this line of code:
// date
... and a split second later copilot auto completed exactly the seven lines of code that I would have typed. I read the code, tested it, and moved on to the next block of code.
Yes, I could have written those seven lines. They were pretty basic - read a value from the database, transform it to a string human form, and send that the user. CoPilot types a lot faster than me (words per second, instead of per minute) and it makes fewer typos.
It's also more familiar than I am with all the major libraries. I find I'm spending a lot less time reading documentation or searching the web these days.
But the real kicker... I work on a small team. My project is full of code that I didn't write and it isn't as well documented as I'd like it to be. It's also not publicly documented, so I can't use Google or Stack Overflow to find answers. CoPilot has indexed the project, and it knows how to read the date from the database. It also knows what human readable date string format has been used elsewhere in the user interface.
True. But if AI makes people more productive it could make it really hard to find work. Especially if you're straight out of college with zero experience.
If someone wants to know what music I listen to... they could just ask. Or point a directional microphone at the window from a distance (technology that has existed for almost a century now, and modern systems can likely work from miles away).
Either would be a lot easier than exploiting a zero day side channel attack which would surely be detected and closed.
Also, it can take years for a music track to go from an idea in the artist's head to being available for download by a consumer. If it takes a week to compress the file... that's no biggie at all. Only the decompression side needs to be power efficient.
13b parameters works out to about 9GB. You need a bit more than that since it needs more than just the model in memory, but at 24GB I'd expect at least half of it to go unused. And memory doesn't use much power at all by the way. LPDDR4 uses something like 0.3 watts while actively reading/writing to it.
The actual computations use more, obviously, but GFX cards are not designed for this task and while they're fast most of them are also horribly inefficient.
I run 13b parameter models on my ultra portable laptop (which has a small battery, no active cooling (fanless) and no discrete GPU). It has 16GB of RAM not GPU memory - RAM, and I'm running a full operating system, web browsers, etc a the same time. Models like llama2, stable diffusion, etc get perfectly usable performance without using much battery at all (at a guess, single digit watts while performing the calculations).
There is efficient hardware now and there will be even more efficient hardware in the future. My laptop definitely isn't designed to run these models and on top of that the models aren't designed to run on a laptop either. There's plenty more optimisation work to be done in the years to come.
I think so, yeah. For example if I crash my motorbike it will ask if I'm OK and call emergency services, providing them with my location, name, next of kin, etc if I don't respond.
So far, I've hit the "I'm OK" button the few times that feature has activated, but one day I might not be so lucky.
Mostly though, I like being able to see the accurate time (without needing to adjust it occasionally), the weather forecast, my next calendar schedule, a "traffic is normal" message while getting ready for work in the morning*, and read notifications without taking my phone out of my pocket.
(* if there's a car accident on my commute, my watch tells me to leave for work early, and which route is best to avoid the worst of the traffic)
The newer watches also have better screens, faster processors, more RAM, etc etc... and also lithium batteries don't last forever. So I seriously doubt anyone is actually using an eight year old watch unless they've had the battery replaced at least a couple times. They're not really designed to be taken apart so the cost to replace the battery isn't much cheaper than just upgrading to the new/better model.