Desktop Linux is seeing higher and higher market share, not just because Linux is growing but also because the desktop mode of computing is shrinking, especially for personal use. There are lots of people who used to own laptops/desktops but don’t anymore.

This is actually a pretty common concern for businesses on dealing with whether and how to protect themselves when installing improvements, business-critical equipment, or other hard-to-move stuff on land or in a building without a long term lease in place.

The tenant deals with it by either building out a portable infrastructure to where they can move their business quickly if need be, or by protecting themselves legally to where the landlord can’t kick them out on a short notice, by negotiating a long term lease.

This one is the same author addressing this specific Mozilla release.

Yes, this has everything to do with AI, because this is an AI vendor locking out a customer from their ordinary workflow.

At the same time, this is a generalizable example not limited to AI, where any form of vendor lock-in on a critical business function becomes a potential point of failure when the vendor drops the customer or stops working. It’s true of a cloud provider, an email provider, an ISP, any software provider that can revoke access/authority, or even non-tech vendors like a landlord or a temp agency or an electric utility.

I think it’s worth being clear about the scope of the rating. iFixit has always been about repairability defined by parts availability, and its ratings consider software restrictions only to the point where it interferes with the user experience when replacing parts to restore things to the original performance.

Customizability (in software or otherwise) isn’t part of the score. Durability/longevity isn’t part of the score, either. Those are things that I want, too, but I can recognize those are outside the scope of what iFixit advocates for.

I do have some concerns about the partnerships creating a conflict of interest, but sometimes that feedback loop is helpful for improving the product, where the maintainer of a standard also has a consulting business in helping others meet that standard. Ideally there’s a wall between the two sides (advisors versus raters), but the mere fact that one company might do both things isn’t that big of a deal in itself.

briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent.

That’s just an awkward sentence construction but it makes sense: they released track via Bittorrent. The tracks were scraped from Spotify.

I sold my car that was purchased from a dealership via private party sale.

I charged my laptop that normally accepts 100W via a 20W phone charger.

I would’ve used a “which” phrase with commas to avoid the confusion, but the sentence as written is valid and makes sense.

You can reason from a few principles:

• At its core, the math functions being optimized by these AI tools and their specialized hardware is that they can perform inference and pattern recognition at huge scales across enormous data sets.
• Inferring a rule set for pattern also allows generation of new data that fits that pattern.
• Some portion of human cognitive work falls within the general framework of finding patterns or finding new data that fits an old pattern.

So when people start making claims about things with clear, objective definitions (a win condition in chess, the fastest route to take through a maze, a highest lossless compression algorithm for real world text), it’s reasonable to believe that the current AI infrastructure can lead to breakthroughs on that front. So image recognition, voice recognition, and things like that were largely solved a decade ago. Text generation with clear and simple definitions of good or bad (simple summaries, basic code that accomplishes a clearly defined goal) is what LLMs have been doing well.

On things that have much more fuzzy or even internally inconsistent definitions, the AI world gets much more controversial.

But I happen to believe that finding and exploiting bugs or security vulnerabilities falls more into the well defined problem with well defined successes and failures. So I take it seriously when people claim that AI tools are helpful for developing certain exploits.

but isn’t the memory on the Neo on the same die as the processor?

Not actually on the same die, but in the same package, stacked on top using TSMC’s Integrated Fan-Out Package on Package (InFO-PoP).

So the memory still needs to be sourced from memory manufacturers, sent to TSMC, and then have TSMC package it all together in a single package. It’s unclear whether they had locked up this supply at pre-AI prices, though. The underlying A18 Pro chip/package was annoinced and launched about 18 months ago, so if they had the manufacturing pipeline set up for that they might have kept the contractual rights to continue buying memory at the old prices.

This reporting says that the subpoena requires that Reddit produce the information and appear for a hearing.

No, it’s not volunteering, at least not anymore.

Subpoena is legal Latin for “under penalty,” because noncompliance with a subpoena carries a penalty.

Originally, it was an information request from the feds, and Reddit refused. Then they escalated to getting a grand jury subpoena (which means they got a bunch of normal citizens to agree that the information was relevant to a criminal investigation), so now noncompliance carries a penalty.

Reddit notified the users, who hired their own lawyers, who are resisting the subpoena and will litigate it to where they need a judge to decide whether Reddit will have to turn the information over.

That’s the process for these things, and we’re a couple steps in already.

The article describes how they immediately went to look for an unsigned 32-bit millisecond counter when they noticed it was happening around 50 days since last reboot, because they already knew that association you describe.

Interesting writeup. Fun little story about the detective work involved.

God I wish democracy meant that we could vote on decisions like this

You can! Only problem is that it’s one vote per dollar instead of one vote per person.

It sucks though, I agree - software should get more efficient over time, just like hardware does.

It generally does, for any given computing task, but the problem is that generally software adds more features over time, not least of which is supporting new hardware that hits the ecosystem.

Unless it can be paper thin this does not look better than magnetic tape.

As the article explains, the whole purpose here is to be able to store data on a medium that can endure harsh conditions, including heat, moisture, radiation, and physical abrasion. The company’s website claims the medium can retain data for 5000 years without power, and is water and fire resistant.

I reckon you could scratch it pretty easily.

The underlying ceramic film is already used for protecting tools like drill bits and saw blades from physical damage, which is why it was chosen for this project. They already found one of the most durable materials in the world, and asked whether they could store data using that already-durable material.

With the current level of tech in a car, you’re already likely pushing 300GB in total.

The actual article (and the call it is reporting on, with statements from the CEO) says that 16GB is the average in new cars today. No need to make stuff up.

Education and enterprise still have a need for a lot of group-managed laptops. Not all of them will be power users, either. Some of them won’t even have sophisticated IT departments (thinking about elementary schools and the like where their IT needs might not run very high).

I agree that we’re probably seeing the waning days of the casual laptop user who administers their own system as an independent device. Everyone will either be further up the enthusiast/power user ladder or will have switched to phones and tablets.

I’m glad the MacBook neo is only 8gb. That means they have to support it as a usable low-end target.

This is huge. Apple has traditionally supported its laptops for at least 5 major OS versions and 2 more years of security updates, so they’re essentially telling us that the MacOS version they release in 2034 will not require more than 8GB of RAM to function is gonna be a good thing for all users, who will mostly presumably have much more memory available.

I switched to Macbooks specifically for the 11" Air. I do wish they’d bring that form factor back.

Macbook build construction (ever since they’ve moved off the plastic entry level Macbook to all aluminum for all their models) is really solid but not necessarily rugged. The hinges and ports seem to hold up better than a lot of other devices from HP and Dell or whoever, but some models are more susceptible to drops, dust/sand, moisture, etc., than the solid construction would lead you to believe.

So it depends on use case. I think they hold up very well to normal indoor use, for many years, but might not be the ideal device for clumsier people or those who might be routinely using it outdoors or in more rugged environments.

I think TouchID isn’t a priority for them, but looking at the supported M1 and M2 devices and features, it seems like it could be a daily driver. It has things I never got to work on my first Linux laptop (webcam, microphone, speakers, suspend, keyboard backlight, wifi, bluetooth), although it’s 2026 so those are basically all expected. No thunderbolt, touchID, or display port alt mode, though, does make it a step behind MacOS, with some doubts it’ll ever fully catch up even on this 5-6 year old hardware.

Still, these were very popular devices, so I think they’ll stay on the used market for a long time. I might pick one up if it’s cheap enough.