skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Enterprise management tools from apple allow you to bulk remote wipe and reset the devices thus preparing them for resale.

Alternatively load them all with the same account with local credentials: reseller:password
I feel like Apple has been quietly & slowly releasing its death grip on PWA use cases.

We've been shipping a B2B, PWA-enabled web app to iOS Safari users for almost 2 years and it all mostly "just works" now. We even have a customer using hand-written provisioning profiles via Azure InTune to roll out PWA web apps to their iPad home screens automatically.

To be fair, figuring out how to do this is not documented in any meaningful way whatsoever. I had to reverse engineer another PWA that already worked on iOS/Safari in order to figure out the right path.

If anything, Apple should be punished for intentionally obfuscating the capabilities of their products. I feel like this is where they are going to weasel their way out of trouble in court - "Oh look if you do this <performs elaborate ceremony no rational person could conceive> then you can actually achieve an open application ecosystem on apple devices".
'too many scam items, like shopping at some flea market. reviews unreliable.'

Might even be intentional. You are essentially pushed into buying amazon basics where you can to save the research time.
I like the incentive you propose, but in the case of a company offloading 3000 laptops that are perceived to already be EOL, they likely will not find the financial incentive to be worth their time. I suspect nothing less than regulatory hurdles would resolve this, and I don't think the recyclers have enough pull for that.
Have they considered ad-supported seat heating? Along with crypto mining?
Paid composting collection sounds like a ridiculous idea but if for example they manage to become a standard and get monopolistic contracts like waste management companies, on a national level… there’s your moonshot. Here, have a hundred mill.
in some form, this was present on DJI drones even 2 generations ago
Crypto is a permanent distributed transaction list. I’ve never understood how that was marketed as private
Copyright Office Officially Cancels Registration for AI Graphic Novel
Most likely this wont work with ARM Macs since hardware lock is part of SOC.
> They might not be resold at full price, but even selling to a fence for parts is profitable if your acquisition cost is zero.

Apple has started blacklisting parts associated with locked iPhones. At this point the only reusable bit is the case and possibly battery. The display, Face ID, Touch sensor, and such are all bricked. Overall the reduction is massive in any form. There isn't a 100% effective solution but you can easily cut down on 90%.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was by design…

imagine for a moment how valuable new cars would be if you could restrict the supply of the used car market by mandatory recycling when the first owner buys a new vehicle.

Apple benefits significantly at least two ways;

1. Increasing overall demand for both new and used (unlocked) Mac Books by restricting supply.

2. Used unlocked Mac books will have a better resale value on the aftermarket thus continuing the folklore that Apple products retain their value for longer.

This begs the question… how much would a used Mac book cost if Activation Lock didn’t exist?

What is the true market price of a used Mac book? Or Apple Stock?
Thanks! That to me is the most useful response to my ramblings today!
recently two sites and Google translate gave 'censorship' appearing results while browsing openly from California.. one was about some statue to a past hero, and the other was about some polish WWII era resistance group. One was with the translate.google.com site, the other was using the inline 'translate to English' feature in Chromium browser.
On the other hand I ditch a handful of film/TV ideas each week.

Many because they'd be crap of course, but the rest because there's no way in this lifetime I'll have the resources to bother thinking about them, never mind have the time to actually write them out.

Gotta do regular people work till I die. So glad I was dragged out of the universal energy just to pay rent for 60 years haha. Fuck I wish I could afford to do something arty farty instead. Such is life.

I passed my GCSE English literature (end of high school exam in UK) writing a time travel story, haha.
Hope you're right and it's just an experiment :) $10 seems reasonable
In my opinion, LaTeX is useful for typesetting (1) unwieldy documents (2) using as a template for documents you write often and scripting it.

(1) By unwieldy I mean a book or academic writing. Typesetting a thesis or a book is "easy" to do with LaTeX, especially if that document contains a lot of acronyms, glossaries, figures, cross-references, bibliography, etc... there are lots of great templates out there for theses and books; creating one from scratch is more often than not, overkill.

(2) One use case of what I mean here is document generation, say you have a table of employee names, phone numbers, email addresses. You can easily generate new business cards for all of your employees for the printers by creating a script to do so. Though, the initial investment may only be worth it for a larger amount of data.

A resume is mostly about design and is not altered with the frequency that would make typesetting in LaTeX interesting for anything other than curiosity.

Also, moderncv produces enormous files. I agree that LaTeX is not suited to every task.
Was it stolen or did your friend just not remember the password?
I don't think what you're saying really applies to SEO articles, though. If you don't get wedding insurance because you read some SEO article that recommends against it, even if the advice is clearly bad, can you really hold them accountable? It's tough for me to imagine you'd win that lawsuit.

> With a person, you can slowly get to the bottom of it and develop a relationship.

With this kind of content (with most content on the internet, I'd argue), you really can't.
I do not think it was ever allowed. EDIT: I did not realize you were talking specifically about Germany.

In France you had a lot of "minimum 10€ to pay with CC", now this is mostly gone after COVID.
> and large corporations that dump 3000 machines assume they have been destroyed

e.g. We lied to the corporations who paid us to destroy their systems and we want to be able to unlock devices, bypass data protection, and fence them, when they are effectively stolen because they were acquired through fraud.

These people are laptop thieves and mad that Apple made their illegal activity difficult. Good for Apple, and fuck this guy.
Microsoft subpoenaed Sony. Imagine what sort of questions they plan on asking.
What I find rather satisfying about this argument is that it rather neatly solves the problem of evil in a way which I don't believe the Catholic apologists managed. Clearly a complete genius, I should reread his books with an older head on.
Can you provide an example of ChatGPT laughing at a joke? It’s fascinating that you go to such lengths to insist that it has human characteristics that it clearly does not possess.
Just to confirm, you mean they lost weight after switching to metformin?
Yes, toddlers can be annoying. But that doesn’t make them masterminds of the operation.
Doing excellent work doesn't automatically mean you earn the company any money. It's one of the harsh realities of capitalism that you can do an absolutely shitty job and still earn your company a ton of money (and have job security) and vice versa: Working your ass off without adding anything in terms of revenue - not even by proxy.
Back in my day, when we returned school supplies our teachers made us erase the markings we made so they could be reused, or else we had to pay the replacement cost. That was a lot more work than wiping a hard drive.
Nothing unusual.

Since 1947, every Prime Minister has found some way to censor and ban whatever they don't like.

The first PM - Jawahar Lal Nehru - banned a certain musical instrument from state radio as he personally disliked it. He also introduced the 1st amendment to our constitution which ironically is the exact opposite of the US 1st amendment.
Ours allows the government to ban any speech!

This was because someone wrote an article critical of him personally.

His daughter, Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi better known as "Mahatma Gandhi"), took this to another level, introducing drastic censorship during an "Emergency" which was triggered by her election being nullified by a court.

So, all this is pretty much par for the course.
What parts? The screen / front camera assembly also stays locked if the phone it was on was stolen. The FaceID / TouchID data is stored on the camera module.
There are definitely pros and cons to part serialization.

However, I think we can all agree that when Apple is selling genuine replacement parts, those parts should be ready to pair with the first phone they're put into, instantly, without needing to call Apple Support to finish the repair process. You should also be able to order the parts without needing to give Apple your device's serial number ahead of time. Otherwise, repair shops can't keep genuine parts in stock, and your ability to complete a repair is entirely dependent on whether Apple is staffing their call center sufficiently, which is currently a requirement.

Optionally, maybe there would be a way where the phone could prompt the user to choose whether they want to serialize those replacement parts to this specific device, and then they would be registered with Apple, unable to be moved to a new device if this one were stolen and parted out. An automatic check for whether these parts have previously been registered would not be as onerous as a phone call.
Tables? Where we're going, we don't need tables.
You ever been to an hotel before?
VMware and QXL X.org Video Drivers See New Updates After Several Years
Great vocabulary word, and perfect description of the activity. "Half-lies [...], told [...] as a fantasy, suppressing unpleasant parts of the truth.

I respect OP (TeMPOraL), he(?) has a long track record of great comments and insights on HN. I always look forward to his comments. But what he is describing is kind of a fantasy that we tell ourselves to get through the unpleasantness. Or more accurately, it's how the working world works in theory, but not in practice. "Team productivity" "Individual as force multiplier" these are phrases straight out of the employee handbook. It's how the company pretends career development works. And a lot of people believe it!

How it actually works is like High School. There are cliques. There are in-groups and out-groups. If you're part of the in-group, you're going places. Your individual performance sometimes matters, sometimes doesn't. Your actual teamwork and team accomplishments sometimes matter, sometimes don't. If you're in the out-group, nothing you do matters. You could be Ken Thompson but if you're not in the right clique, your career is going nowhere.

I've seen it almost everywhere I've worked. A low or medium performer manages to charm his way into the right clique, get liked by the right exec, and his career skyrockets, despite spotty actual work output. Despite their projects failing, despite their direct reports quitting. All the way up to Director level at FAANG--the sky is the limit. All because they got into the in-group and befriended the right people. I've seen top performers stagnate and quit out of frustration, because despite both great individual output and team success, the VP just didn't like the guy, and that was that. There's no way around it. I had a boss who picked favorites and villains. If you were the Golden Boy, you could do no wrong, and you were on track for promotion purely for being in her favor. If you were the unlucky villain, you could do no right and ended up just being a punching bag.

The actual corporate world in practice is nothing like the optimistic and egalitarian employee handbook. It's 80's High School again with jocks and cheerleaders and dweebs and losers.
I left my job at a publicly traded company you've heard of in the summer, seeing layoffs on the horizon (i was right!). The company has never responded to my request for a shipping label to return the macbook they bought for me. But it was remotely disabled, and now is impossible to get into. I'd happily factory reset it and give it to my nephew or something but I can't get it. So, I've asked a few times, emailing the IT contacts I have there, because I want to get rid of the damn thing. No response. But I can't legally sell it since it's not mine, and Apple will likely not bypass the firmware password for me. What am I supposed to do with this thing (besides pay my own freight to ship it back to the company I guess, something I refuse to do out of spite). Anyway, I can see how a lot of laptops might end up in the dust bin because of things like this.
NASA Pauses Attempts to Fix Lucy's Pesky Solar Array
I don't see what the issue is here.
At the same time, I do want old laptops to not become e-waste if the approval process is too difficult for previous owners.

The approval process needs to ensure that some enterprise IT drone can easily go through a pallet of laptops, wipe them all, and put them on eBay, without depending on Janet from sales properly following the decommissioning process, without requiring them to navigate a phone tree at Apple to read off serial numbers.

If the laptop is more valuable as scrap than as used minus costs of recycling, it will be scrapped. If scrap minus costs of disassembly and hazmat disposal is less than zero, it will end up in the landfill. In spite of all the work going into lead-free components, halide-free solder, and so on, we still don't want that.
Consumers may not be used to unlocking a laptop before selling it. But, the process is still far easier than transferring the title on vehicle when selling it.
Around when Google IPOd (2004) it was seen as a special place.

Now it seems like any other Big Tech Co. Similar politics, similar capitalistic ruthlessness.
It's harder for me to make that connection but thank you for your write up. It's really great.
I'm locked in my own personality trap. I don't understand why people buy shit and my toxic also think they are dumb sheep of some made up social values. And I can't change myself to get out of my trap. I always think what I'm going to sell to people has to be really good .. but I just realize it's about a lot of bullshit going on on marketing and sales and network effect vs pure functionality.
> ... melted his brain.

wouldnt that require a 'back to the future' tie-in?
I really wish iOS devices had FIDO (etc) built in. I wish I could use my other iDevices as a FIDO device.
Having gone that route word -> latex -> html; i've converged to using an Open source desktop publishing app called Scribus [0]. You get WYSIWYG, but on an open format. There wasn't anything fancy to learn on the tool. The app is actually used to all kinds of magazines and books, so a resume is pretty simple compared to those.

If you need a template to get started, you can use mine here [1]. The output pdf is also in the repo(although haven't updated it in 5 years now!). Reminds me to go and fix/refactor it a bit.

[0] https://www.scribus.net/

[1] https://github.com/sidmitra/sidmitra.com/blob/master/static/...
The website author appears to own a browser extension that competes with Bitwarden.

Looks like conflict of interest given the article contents.
ChatGPT seems very good at summarizing text. I wonder why Google AI would not summarize the top articles (when asked about facts) instead of guessing the next word like what ChatGPT does.
I'm confused - the comment you are replying to basically says the Navy can freely ban smoking onboard submarines and end up with no real consequences other than some mildly grumpy sailors. It made no moral judgement about smoking or addiction.

Did you mean to reply to another comment?
I'm trying to understand how big of a deal ChatGPT and the like is or isn't. Even people in AI don't seem to agree on whether it's going to change everything or it's overhyped and not a major advancement. Which is it? Or somewhere in the middle?

"if you think AI chatter has reached an annoying level right now you're in for something else. it's going to be the only thing on anybody's mind starting shortly... i'm finding it a bit hard to communicate the urgency and heaviness of what's going on" https://twitter.com/tszzl/status/1617317478987878400

"Personally I can give you a formal definition of intelligence and even a number of speculative sketches of how I think it could be implemented, but I will also tell you that strong AI is not within sight and that recent advances are not moving us in the direction of strong AI" https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/1617579095885500416
What is the moat here?
If the laptops are worth ~$1000 unlocked and ~$100 locked we're talking about a pretty big loss. Propagating this back up the recycling chain is going to take a while, but eventually all of these companies will have "unlock the laptop" as a step in their checklists.
If you take a sibling commentator's suggestion to stand up something at home, there's always older, beyond-upstream-support rackmount servers to be had on Craigslist for a song. You'll end up upping your electrical bill in the process, but it's a fun option if you want to homelab it as a hobby.
That sucks. In the US we typically get fixed rate loans for the length of the loan which could be as long as 30 years.
Twitter's Infrastructure Continues to Crumble, Silently
Yes, but if you’re the original owner that shouldn’t be an issue.

The other thing to note is that if the computer hasn’t been signed into iCloud or had Find My Mac turned on, none of this necessary. So someone who’s paranoid about phoning home can probably resell after a simple reformat.
Alternative: https://prompts.chat/
This take strikes me as a little off. Programming languages are language. Unlike natural languages they are also based on context-free grammar. So an understanding of programming languages should actually be easier for even a general language model to incorporate than natural languages.

We can expect a bot like this to not really get context clues in natural language, although they seem to be getting better at that, but context is not necessary to have a true and functional understanding of a programming language. That was the point of creating such languages.

Using an API that doesn't exist but logically should once the use cases are demonstrated is not an example of lacking understanding, it is an example of advanced insight. A human might have invented the necessary functions inline with the rest of the project but if they are expressing functionality that is commonly applicable, then a common API for those functions is what the humans would eventually converge upon to clean up the code from the initial inline implementation, making it more consistent and readable.
Honestly, now I want this for cars and basically everything.

Anything stolen should be worthless. Discourage the theft of anything with a CPU.

Love it!

You can still unlock it and sell it, this would only impact re-sale of stolen items.
The Lean Data Scientist: Recent Advances Toward Overcoming the Data Bottleneck
Sure, I don't know the details about Germany but I'm pretty sure it's the same in the UK. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/card-surcharge-ban-means-...
Can you give concrete examples?
It's an issue, for sure. My thinking is I would include some sort of in-house encryption for stored objects; encryption is never perfect and rolling your own is usually a recipe for failure, but it would get in the way of intrusions of the "bored employee poking around the servers" variety. Such a lazy nose would move on to easier pickings, and nothing I'm doing matters enough to steal - even my creative work is CC so if you want my 3D asset files, they're all yours buddy.
I've been talking to it in spanish to practice. Literally, just say something in spanish and it will respond in spanish. Regarding quality, I'm pretty sure it's about the same as english; technically correct just aggressively formal.

I asked it to play a game where it gave me a sentence in english, I translated it to spanish, and it graded my translation. I had to explain it about 5 times because it kept giving the spanish translation itself first. But eventually it got it. Nice tool for language learning, imho.
This is my exact problem with ChatGTP, it looks great when you don't know what it's talking about, but as soon as you do, it looks foolishly over-confident in it's answers which are very clearly wrong.
> compostable plastic bags ... normal metal/paper/plastic recycling stream

That's really clever since it avoids needing to have separate trucks.

Will they also accept leaves and yard trimmings? These are much larger in volume, so I'm not sure if they could be handled, but maybe with large bags it's fine.

> sell to local farms/etc

My city sells to farms and also sells it in bags at retail stores. It's meets standards that are supposed to make it safe to use in your backyard garden.

Also, since it costs money to put stuff in a landfill, and since this diverts from the landfill, it saves a bit of money that way too.

(Further info: https://www.austintexas.gov/department/dillo-dirt)
Not everything is a conspiracy. If you buy a used laptop and the previous owner didn't remove it from their icloud first, you can still try to get them to unlock it for you. As a buyer, make sure it was removed from their icloud before you buy it. It's a very useful anti-theft measure, and Apple warns you about this on their site to take those steps before selling it.
> There is no justification for this enormous disparity.

I dunno that the Google vs Microsoft comparison _is_ compelling. Isn't the question not "how much do the employees cost" but "are they worth what they cost"? This is not my area, but it seems like measuring _profit_ per employee gets a crude measurement of whether in aggregate those employees are generating more value than their comp.

Grabbing stale numbers from yahoo finance,

MSFT: 221,000 employees, Net Income to common $69.79B => $3,157,918.55 / person

GOOG: 186,779 employees, Net Income to common $66.99B => $3,586,591.64 / person

I.e. even with their higher comp, google employees as a group are generating similar but higher profit per person. And if the median compensation is ~$300k, then on most of them it seems like Alphabet is still doing extremely well? Is this not the right way to look at this?
I had a free tier machine. It got terminated for no reason (only was running postgres). The last time I tried, was not able to provision a new one due to capacity.
Isn't the idea you steal an unlocked phone, then use that for further crimes?
> A phone should not function with any parts from a phone that had the lock.

That would be extremely expensive to design. Probably impossible.

Especially when component level repair ala Louis Rossmann is possible.

https://www.youtube.com/@rossmanngroup
Not even close, sorry. The HN homepage isn't even using divs. It's a giant table
>I can accept a system such as ChatGPT synthesizing from data it sucked in, making educated guesses and so on

On that note I find it interesting that this has sometimes been an argument to dismiss chatGPT as "non intelligent". What are we if not statistical machines, synthesizing from the data we've sucked in over our lifetime?
FTA, this seems like a reasonable approach to still mitigate theft while reducing the stuff that gets tossed in the garbage:

> "Bumstead offered some solutions to the problem. “When we come upon a locked machine that was legally acquired, we should be able to log into our Apple account, enter the serial and any given information, then click a button and submit the machine to Apple for unlocking,” he said. “Then Apple could explore its records, query the original owner if it wants, but then at the end of the day if there are no red flags and the original owner does not protest within 30 days, the device should be auto-unlocked.""