I do agree that they are very close; maybe I’m an Apple apologist, but I put ICEBlocker in the same class as Tea. They both claimed to be to protect their target audience; Tea was exposed as having been Vibe Coded by someone who knew SFA about user data security and ICEBlocker had a huge honeypot of user data that the government would love to subpoena.
That is exactly right. But the demographic of Pixel owners likely to install GrapheneOS (or Sailfish or Ubuntu Touch or whatever) and the demographic of GrapheneOS users likely to buy a Pixel probably has a fair overlap.
Long-term support is never something that Normies (that don’t want iPhones) contemplate. They would rather buy the cheapest phone; they don’t see the value in a software vendor supported phone. That is why Samsung is more of a household name than Pixel.
Google have also shown that their long-term support is pointless when they pivot and implement their own version of Apples “walled garden” on the Play Store and the Android ecosystem.
Their implied guarantee of openness is just as facetious as Apples implied guarantee of privacy.
I’m surprised it isn’t more.
Pixels are the reference platform for a lot of open-source phone operating systems. A disproportionate number of people who purchased Pixels are the type of person who did believe Googles motto of “Don’t be Evil”, even after Google abandoned the motto.
Now that Google is inarguably Evil (not Musk Evil, but definitely more Evil than Apple), these people are searching for solutions. They are gun-shy and are not likely to get an Evil iPhone, have a large investment in the Android ecosystem so are unlikely to pivot to Linux Phone, and the niche Android variants are more likely to be assassinated by Google.
GrapheneOS is the obvious choice. I’m surprised it isn’t a higher percentage.
One thing (only good thing) about Vista was that it rationalised Printer (and Scanner) Drivers.
The UI was consistent between printer manufacturers and everything could be accessed through one interface.
Then the Printer manufacturers complained to MS because they couldn’t have infinite branding all over the interface and the feature was dumbed down in 7.
Meanwhile Apple used the same UI for all Printers (based on CUPS) and didn’t even let a company logo appear in the interface.
Not all the Apple CUPS drivers were available for Linux CUPS so unfortunately Linux (at the time) still had their device compatibility issues.
In some fields, General Purpose LLMs are useful;
That is why they are being adopted wholesale by certain companies; marketeers and analysts for lobbying groups and political movements.
So yes, they are useless for any legitimate case, but are useful for justification of lies to certain gullible individuals (consumers and politicians).
That said, the fact that Deloitte was forced to (partially) pay the Australian Government back for a report that was all AI Dross is enheartening. The fact that it was only a partial refund and the company is not being prosecuted for Fraud is disenheartening.
That is the thing about general purpose LLMs. They really are impressive to people with below average experience and knowledge in a specific field.
People who actually do know something; academics, professionals and hobbyists realise that they are completely useless for their specific use case.
Unfortunately then they use it for something they are ignorant about and then they forget how useless they are.
The best thing about Compulsory Voting was that a Right-Wing politician was scared he would loose the election if The Workers voted and his advisors told him that the majority of his supporters didn’t vote.
He reasoned that if it was compulsory, The Silent Majority would come out and vote for him in a landslide.
It was a landslide; it turns out that his advisors overestimated how many supporters he had and he was voted out.
Also see last election, the Right-Wing media echo chamber and the coalition.
Managers aren’t being held accountable for their management decisions either.
“Oh, I sacked our entire workforce and sold all the company assets, so the figures will look amazing this month.”
<one month later>
“Oh, the figures are down this month, a golden handshake!? Thank you very much.”
Yay!
Now do “profits from human rights violations”!
If only we had our own Automobile Industry.
It would also benefit if our own automobile industry was specifically for the benefit of our own manufacturing industry and not just global outsourcing.
Towards the end; GMH and Ford Australia were outsourcing component manufacturing to China and revenue collection to Detroit.
I am not glad that GMH and Ford Australia are dead, I am glad that the Corporate welfare has stopped.
I would love to see the return of Australian manufacture of Consumer, Industrial and National goods.
The thing is that these reports (and training material and industry analysis) is Deloitte’s bread-and-butter.
If they have begun outsourcing their product to an LLM, and believe that the new is comparable to the product they previously provided, they are admitting that everything they have ever produced is garage and no one should be paying them anything.
Amazingly, Ford Rangers underrepresented in these videos; maybe because they wouldn’t show fatalities in a promotional video.
These consultant companies are all just a bunch of wafflers who spit out garbage.
You are much better off going down to the local pub, shouting a round of drinks and asking the punters for political direction.
They can’t run a stable network. They can’t run secure Cell Towers. They can’t provide Emergency phone coverage. They can’t run a Cable TV Service. They can’t pay their tax. They can’t compete with Aussie Broadband, Telstra and/or NBN.
It is time to abandon the whole Privatised Telecommunications infrastructure and for the Government to exercise Eminent Domain.
Advanced Data Protection does require all iCloud Ecosystem devices to be current.
Not every person can afford the latest and greatest.
I’m gonna play devils advocate here (and probably be monstrously downvoted);
ICEBlock stored the location data of all its users on Apples iCloud Servers. This the perfect target for ICE; a complete database of locations of every person who doesn’t want ICE to know where they are.
One assumption is that that Apple realised how tempting this data is to the current demonstrative administration and purged it before ICE could get their civil-liberty-abusing mitts on it.
Please listen to Tim Minchin’s song “Confessions”.
So that explains why MenuLog closed down. “If we are expected to actually pay people to work, our business model is not sustainable”.