I don't mean to nitpick but really the only thing they have in common is a)rackets b)being played in pairs and c) being very popular at the moment. Padel is orders of magnitude richer and more complex than pickleball. Pickle is a lot of fun though.
Having played both there's a lot of overlap in the social side. You can find games with randoms or join social match plays with little friction. From what I've heard, it's not that easy with other racket sports like tennis.
I agree the skill gap is wider in padel, which can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you want to play with.
Am I getting old or did it use to be much better 10 or 20 years ago? Half the LRB feels so politicised to me now, and the other half barely feels erudite. Was I just too young to pick it up back then?
I peeked at the front covers from the archives - 2007 has everything from global warming to the French riots, for example, although there's certainly more current affairs content. I'm not sure what you mean by the other decline in standards, though.
I found it unsatisfying. Such a strong opening let down by a meandering movie with no payoff. Made all the sadder by great moments and performances spread thinly through the 2-something hours. I remember coming out of the movie theatre thinking there was a really enjoyable film buried underneath the crud if they could have had more restraint in the editing room. To each their own I suppose.
Having no payoff is the payoff. After everything that's happened to him, he is killed offscreen and his son, now an adult, doesn't even quite remember him.
The journey is the point, basically :) The scenes with the fellow "refugees" are great, insightful glimpses into Brasil, into that 1970s Brasil in particular. They don't need to lead anywhere in particular for me to enjoy it.
That being said, I did like Bacurau and Aquarius more than The Secret Agent. But that speaks more to how incredible those films are.
Fair enough if you enjoyed it. I'm no stranger to the period or the director's movies and still found this one overly contrived. The tense bits are so engaging that the fantastic/anachronistic felt like it detracted from a great story.
I did too. It felt like there were a bunch of subplots that never ended up tying together. The leg was the most disappointing to me.
My take home at the end was that it was supposed to show the audience that the story was recreated from the parts of the story that could be pieced together by the future journalists. Basically it felt meandering because it was meandering to the journalists trying to figure out what happened. The ending with the son was the journalist trying to tie everything together for herself but he just didn’t have the information. Still dissatisfying.
The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.
And it is meant to feel meandering cause that is how this period feels for people trying to study it. There are many cases that we don't know what happened. We just know that the people were killed/disappeared. The perpetrators were never brought to Justice. We are not even sure who the specific perpetrators are in a lot of cases.
This is how the Brazilian military dictatorship operated. There are people in Brazil who want to go back to this period. They say that everything was better. The truth is that a lot of stuff that was bad, was so bad that we don't even have the records to properly reconstruct what happened.
>The leg is used both as a urban legend that was told at the region at the time, but also as a metaphor. The surrealist scene where it shows the leg brutally attacking people at night: all the people attacked are prostitutes, gays, etc. People that during the dictatorship the police used to just dissappear, and society turned a blind eye to it.
Yeah, so I had to lookup the leg after watching the movie. My interpretation was that it wasn't actually really surrealism. They juxtapose that scene with the lady reading from the newspaper about the attacking leg as if it was real. The reason I think this supports the "from the future journalist's perspective" interpretation is that those were legitimate articles ran, while there were serious cases not being reported on things like people going missing by the dictatorship. I think they included it to show the absurdity of what information was available and what information wasn't in the papers from that time. Also because of the lore of it all.
Oh I agree. This was a post-movie rationalization. I think the ending was super frustrating but it was one of those things where after ruminating for a bit, it's like, "okay fine I get it." Maybe, I'm being too charitable to the director. The movie itself was dissatisfying, the reflection on the movie was better.
Part of what it was trying to speak on was how truth and stories were lost during the dictatorship. What you felt was what a lot of Brazilians felt. Like part of them (or movie) was missing and they'll never be whole.
Yes, I was a big fan of Bacurau and it works well as a fable but this one is very grounded historically and even with a basic knowledge of Brazilian history of this era I spent too much time wondering what was happening and why (even though I did understand everything, it's not cryptic either, just the rythm feels a bit off)
Excellent aesthetics though but I am less sensitive to that
I found it the 2nd best movie of the year, right behind House of Dynamite.
Brazil has so much to catch up compared to Argentina, which jailed most of the generals. This one tries it differently, not directing the blame directly, but one bystander who took advantage. Much better than I'm Still Here. But the Argentinian fascism era movie are much better still. El bunaerense, Crónica de una fuga,...
A perfectly performant, luxury-feeling laptop with a secure OS for under $500? This thing is going to eat Chromebooks and budget HP shitboxes for lunch. Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
You are comparing it to other Apple laptops but you should be comparing with its competition at a $600 price point. The aluminum enclosure, touchpad, battery life, display, and performance are all best in class (or near enough) at this price point.
People miss that point. An entry level Windows laptop is an upper and complete garbage. You get the ick within seconds of using it. This thing will sell like crazy. No longer is Apple an expensive brand!
> Sure a lot of niceties are missing but compared to the experience most people have with their $500 laptops, this is going to be night and day.
In September I picked up a laptop for $575.
Its specs are 15.6" 1080p IPS display, AMD Ryzen 7 6800H (8 cores, 16 threads) CPU, 32 GB of DDR5 memory, Radeon 680M iGPU that can allocate 8 GB of GPU memory, 1 TB SSD with a backlight keyboard. Weighs about 3.5 pounds and has (5) USB ports plus HDMI port. It comes with a 2 year warranty as well.
Running Arch Linux on it with niri and it's really nice for what it is.
There are decent laptops out there at affordable prices.
It's metal "A-shell", I got mine in black. It also comes in blue or rose gold.
I'm not a huge touchpad fan, but it's very usable. It doesn't misclick.
When picking it, you can choose up to 64 GB of RAM and a 2 TB SSD. It was $50 more for 2 TB instead of 1 TB.
The only problem is it seems to be out of stock. It's a Nimo N155. Amazon resellers are also marking it up like crazy compared to its official listed price.
That wasn’t the point. You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac. There’s always some other computer you can buy, but most people will just buy the Mac
> You’re a person who runs arch, that means most likely your requirements for a computer are VERY different than the target for this Mac
I do software development, video + image editing, writing and gaming. My requirements are it runs well, I can depend on it and I don't mind if it has a fan.
I only replied because the OP's comment made it seem like it's difficult to find a good laptop in the $600 range. If macOS is optional you can get quite decent specs.
Academic pricing also applies to individual purchases by students, staff, and faculty. In-store, they ask for an ID. But they don't use any mechanism for online purchases, aside from attestation.
I think they used to use edu email addresses to confirm, but now that so many people have alumni emails, that would be useless (and not capture k12 students, whose email addresses typically cannot receive outside emails).
* 86 million (27%) are under 21 and most of those are students.
* Those people have parents, assume 2 parents per 2 children = 86 million parents (27%)
That means 55% of the US population is eligible for the cheaper rate before you even account for people getting secondary degrees, educators, and yes - the schools themselves.
Also these days Apple actually allows sales and discounts at retailers. I bet this will be on sale for $499 at Amazon or BestBuy before the end of the year.
The iPhone Halo effect will bring in the first time buyers in droves. Windoze is inherently uncool among the younger Insta demographics.
Also, the Neo is the ultimate iPhone accessory, for this crowd. Who cares if the ram size is 8GB and Tahoe is a certifiable dog, that the vast majority neckbeards here are fretting about here. The Neo is not aimed at you. For Safari, Apple Mail, Photos and iApps, and ocassional Claude/ChatGPT usage, this is plenty good
What software do they need to compete with chromebooks? It has a browser (it could have several browsers, if you want). I personally prefer all their productivity software to Google’s or Microsoft’s, and it’s not a close race, but you can use those on it too. Accessibility, I was shocked to find is kinda awful on Chromebooks when I had to try to configure it, considering their target markets are kids and the elderly, while Apple’s the gold standard at that.
You misunderstand the market. Chromebooks are bought by bureaucrats. They want provisioning, deployment, management. They want a kid to be able to throw a broken Chromebook into a big garbage bin and grab another one off the shelf and be up and running in 5 seconds.
Just think about the overall platform. How does MacOS update? It interrupts the user with demands, requires an administrator's password under some circumstances, and takes 20-30 minutes. Now consider how ChromeOS updates: silently and instantly.
I wonder why no enterprise where I've worked is aware of this fact, including technically sophisticated ones from Dropbox to Goldman Sachs. When I asked my favorite LLM whether Jamf Pro—which I should stress does not come in the box with MacOS—is capable of this level of zero-touch OS updates, it responded affirmatively then spent 95% of the rest of the response telling me about well-known workarounds for when such updates hang.
Because a technically-sophisticated enterprise generally wouldn't pick Jamf unless they were an exclusive Apple house - they'd consider something like VMware's Workspace One (now Omnissa) that works across windows, mac, and linux.
And no need to ask an LLM - we can read the doc and notice there are 6 different deployment methods that work (out of the box) for the built-in MacOS MDM, several of which allow transparent, mandatory updates to user environments without requiring user interaction.
Absolutely. Cheaper Chromebooks are terrible machines. Those screens should be illegal and probably causes a lot of eye strain and headaches. Same with a lot of the sub $800 PC laptops. The colors aren't even... colors. The trackpad? Yuck. Everything else falls apart right outside of the warranty period of just 90 days or 1 year. Oh and good luck spending the first day just uninstalling/formatting everything from scratch and getting the vendor specific features to work again.
For people who have always wanted an Apple laptop, this is it. The niceties are not necessary, and perfect little things to cut out to bring the price down for the masses.
The mind salivates at the idea of sub-$100 and soon after sub-$10 Lidar. We could build spatial awareness into damn near everything. It'll be a cambrian explosion of autonomous robots.
There are already very good sub-$100 lidars, especially for 2D since they were made en masse for vacuum cleaners. E.g. the LD19 or STL-19P as they're calling it now for some reason. You need to pair them with serious compute to run AMCL with them, plus actuation (though ST3215s are cheap and easy to integrate now too) and control for that actuation which also wants its own compute, plus a battery, etc. the costs quickly add up. Robotics is expensive regardless of how cheap components get.
True, you have to go up to $120 for the 25m version, or $450 for Unitree's L2 which gets 30m in 3D. That's about as much you could possibly ever need unless you're making high speed vehicles that need more reaction time. In which case you probably shouldn't be relying on the cheapest thing on the market :)
There is complains that some Volvo cars damaged iPhone cameras. It’s not even clear if Apple takes those under warranty. We’ve seen car review YouTubers that got their iPhone camera sensors damaged captured (by a second camera) while reviewing
One highlight from the video, he says most cameras are fine, it's just iphones that don't have a very good IR filter. Which sounds correct, in my experience most cameras have pretty substantial IR filters that have to be removed if you want to photograph IR.
I also wonder if the smaller sensor size on phones contributes, since the energy is being focused onto a smaller spot.
Either way, for that to happen he was filming the LIDAR while active, for a decent amount of time, from right next to the car. I assume under normal conditions it wouldn't be running constantly while the vehicle is stationary?
Is it possible that the iPhone filters are weaker due to FaceID requirements? I seem to recall that FaceID (and similar systems, like Windows Hello) depend on IR to get a more 3D map of the face, so it'd make sense that they want to be more sensitive in that range.
Laptops aren't generally being used in the same areas as cars though, so you wouldn't expect to see as many cases involving Windows Hello compatible laptops/cameras.
Are the eyes really "no better" in this scenario? From the above article it seems we tuned the behavior to the eye specifically (but not necessarily image sensors):
> Moving to a longer wavelength that does not penetrate the human eye allows new lidars to fire more powerful pulses and stretch their range beyond 200 meters, far enough for stopping faster cars. Now a claim of lidar damage to the charge-coupled-device (CCD) sensor on a photographer's electronic camera has raised concern that new eye-safe long-wavelength lidars might endanger electronic eyes.
> Producers of laser light shows are well aware that laser beams can damage electronic eyes. “Camera sensors are, in general, more susceptible to damage than the human eye,” warns the International Laser Display Association
"doesn't penetrate the human eye" seems a bit hand wavy, but I take it to mean "these length pulses in this wavelength are tuned to have the power not be enough to damage the eye". Camera lenses may not have the same level of IR filtering/gathering area or, if they do, there is nothing implying the image sensor has the exact same tolerances as the inside of the eye. From the same:
> Sensor vulnerability to infrared damage would depend on the design of the infrared filters
A heater usually damages the eyes through drying out/heating up the outside layer with constant high intensity, not by causing damage to the retina (post filtering). https://hps.org/publicinformation/ate/q12691/
> Furthermore, since the eye blocks the IRR, the eye begins to overheat leading to eye damage and possible blindness. Because of this, you should not look at the heater for an extended period of time.
Enough intensity of any wavelength is enough to damage any camera or eye of course, but the scenario here seems to be built around that question for the eye. Similarly, I've heard of Waymo's causing 6 mph accidents but no reports of eye damage from any car LiDAR. Despite that, in the above YouTube clip Marques Brownlee actively shows his camera being clearly damaged as its moved around.
The next headline will be that it also damages human retinas.
It's not safe just because it's infrared. And the claims that it's safe because of the exposure time is highly questionable, would you be okay with that for any other laser?
> The biggest concern is not photographic cameras but rather the video cameras mounted on autonomous cars to gather crucial information the cars need to drive themselves.
So they don't care if that breaks my phone camera? Wtf?
Is there any deeper study on long term effects regarding retinal damage?
I would imagine, even with safe dosages, there would be some form of cumulative effect in terms of retinal phototoxicity.
More so if we consider the scenario that this becomes a standard COTS feature in cars and we are walking around a city centre with a fleet of hundreds of thousands of these laser sources.
Some lidar units simply use the wavelength that the human eye is opaque to.
The grandparent comment is about camera lenses with little to no near infrared cutoff filter. Some older iPhones were like that and that was the original breaking story.
Absolutely, and is a major cause of cataracts. Somewhat near 100% of people with lenses in their eyes will get cataracts eventually if they are ever exposed to unfiltered sunlight.
I remember those old cellphones with weak IR filters. It was a scandal because light clothing turns out to be more transparent to IR than to visible light so they were acting as a sort of clothing "X-Ray" in bright light. Creepers on the Internet tried to start a whole new genre of porn but were shut down in a hurry by cellphone manufacturers adding robust IR filters on the next generation of smartphones.
Shame that perverts had to ruin that for us, it was kinda neat to point a TV remote as the camera and see the bulb light up.
The short-range stuff is already $150-300 per unit. If you're thinking indoor robots that's already technically feasible. Over 25% of all Chinese cars being produced today have LiDAR.
Even mid-range sensors used in ADAS systems only cost $600-750. The long-range stuff that's needed for trucking or robotaxis is $1,500–6,000
Even back when Snowden was current news, we'd reached the point where laser microphones could cover every window in London for a bill of materials* less than the annual budget of London's police force.
* I have no way to estimate installation costs, but smartphones show that manufacturing at this scale doesn't need to increase total cost 10x more than the B.o.M.
The minute internet became widespread it was game over.
Pros and cons. :/
It'll never happen, but we need a bill of rights for privacy. The laypeople aren't well-versed or pained enough to ask for this, and big interest donors oppose it.
Maybe the EU and states like California will pioneer something here, though?
Edit: in general, I'm far more excited by cheap lidar tech than I am afraid of the downsides. We just need to be vigilant.
Lidar doesn’t really give you much to “see”, just shape and distance…so I’m a bit confused how it can be used for invasive surveillance, do you mean when fused with vision input it somehow allows it to infer more privacy stuff?
Medical, banking and insurance are three industries that the European data privacy watchdogs are much more strict about because of the potential for damage.
I'd say the numbers listed here prove the GPs point of poor enforcement. The largest fine is roughly 0.97% of Meta's 2023 revenue, the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year. It's a tiny-tiny cost of doing business at best, definitely not a deterrent, given Meta's blatant disregard for GDPR since then.
> the equivalent of a $600 fine for somebody making 60k / year
I don't know about you, but on that income I would certainly not brush off such a fine as a "cost of doing business". Would it cause me financial trouble, or would it force me to sacrifice other expenses? Absolutely not. But would I feel frustrated at having to pay it, feel stupid for my mistake, and do my best to avoid it in the future? Absolutely yes.
My bad, a better analogy would be a dealer making 60k / year selling drugs, gets caught by police and is fined $600. I wouldn’t expect them to change much.
1% of Meta's global revenue is a tiny-tiny cost of doing business? At that point, I think I can stop even trying to argue here. It's a massive fine any way you put it. Especially when you consider the ceiling hasn't been reached and non compliance is more and more costly by design.
Their net profit was $60billion in 2024. This is peanuts. It can fluctuate by multiples of this fine in a month, depending on whether or not they've had a bad or good month, nevermind year. This pretty much is just a cost of doing business.
The interesting part is that it keeps going up. You seem to believe we have somehow reached a cap where Meta can just expense it as a cost of doing business. That's not how European law works. The fine maximum is far higher and repeated non compliance keeps making the fines higher and higher. It's a ladder not a sizing precedent.
Unfortunately it doesn't in practice. Meta's total revenue since 2018 when GDPR came into force is just shy of $1T. Even with all the smaller fines combined, the total amount of GDPR related fines is in the range of $3B. It's a rounding error.
There isn't a trend of increasing fines, nor has any fine even reached the cap, let alone applied multiple times for the recurring violations. Even more with the current US administration's foreign policy towards the EU.
While GDPR as a law is fine, with the exception of enforcement limitations, enforcement so far has been a complete joke.
Maximum GDPR fine is 4% of global revenue in the previous year. If a company has 30% profit margin then they can, in theory, treat is as a cost of doing business, indefinitely.
It's 4% per fine. Each violation is a fine and Meta owns multiple companies that can be fined. But 4% of global revenue already can't be treated as just a cost of doing business. Their shareholders would murder them.
I’d definitely feel much better if most cameras in the world were replaced by LIDAR. I feel like it would be much tougher to have a flawless facial recognition program with LIDAR alone
Gait recognition is almost entirely hype. Sure it works to tell the difference between n = 10 people but so what, you can tell the difference between a group of 10 people by what kind of shoes they are wearing.
Then you combine it with some other technique, eg tracking daily routes of individuals, to lower the error rate. You only need a handful of bits to distinguish all inhabitants of the average city. But imho that error rate would likely be low enough for some judge to authorize more invasive surveillance of suspects thus identified.
People saying LIDARs can't recognize colors or LIDARs can't take pictures don't know what they are talking about.
They're just fancy cameras with synced flashes. Not Star Trek material-informational converting transporters. Sometimes they rotate, sometimes not. Often monochrome, but that's where Bayer color filters come in. There's nothing fundamentally privacy preserving or anything about LIDARs.
I don't know what I'm talking about, but isn't the wavelength of the laser pretty limiting to the idea of just slapping a Bayer color filter on? Like, if the laser is IR (partly so they're not visually disrupting all the humans around them), the signal you get back doesn't the visual spectrum sections that you'd need to get RGB right?
Humanity has never known a world without surveillance. Responsibility cannot exist without being watched. Primitive tribes lived under the constant eye of the group, and agricultural eras relied on the strict oversight of the clan. Modern states simply adopted new tools for an ancient necessity. A society without monitoring is a society without accountability, which only leads to the Hobbesian trap of endless conflict.
Mass surveillance is a relatively recent development. Dense urban civilizations are not. And yet their denizens have not historically devolved into a “nasty, brutish, and short” existence. In fact, cities have been centers of culture and learning throughout history. How does this square with your theory?
The 19th century was the true cradle of mass surveillance. Civil registration, property tracking, and institutionalized police forces provided the systemic oversight required to manage dense urban life. These administrative tools served as the analogue version of digital monitoring to ensure every citizen remained known and categorized. Cities thrived as centers of culture only because these new forms of visibility prevented the Hobbesian collapse that anonymity would have otherwise triggered.
And what about all of the previous ~40-50 centuries where cities were centers of learning and art and not Hobbesian hell holes? Ur is slightly older than the 19th century, I believe.
And note that there is evidence for cities of tens of thousands of inhabitants from 3000 BCE, while Rome reached 1 000 000 residents by 1CE. Again, without becoming some Hobbesian nightmare.
Augustus established the Vigiles Urbani and the Urban Cohorts, creating a state-funded police and firefighting force to replace the chaotic and often violent system of private client-patron justice. These were the bold, persistent experiments in social order that allowed a million people to coexist without descending into a Hobbesian hell.
None of those things are remotely comparable to the surveillance we're talking about. There's a world of difference between, "My city knows who owns what properties and also we have a police force", and "Western intelligence agencies scoop up every bit of data they can grab about anyone on the planet and store it forever"
In my country it wasn't until the late 19th century that someone had the balls to stop going to church on Sunday. It was a huge scandal at the time but it all worked out in the end.
Humans have always done mass surveillance on eachother. You don't need technology for that.
At no point in time before this era was it possible for a random bureaucrat to have a reasonably comprehensive list of everyone in a country who attended church yesterday.
This is a reduction to absurdity. Those old societies you cite didn't actively surveil with the goal of micromanaging people's daily lives the way that modern ones do.
Rural surveillance was far more suffocating because every single action was subject to the community gaze. This is exactly why classic literature frames the journey to the city as a liberation from the crushing weight of the village eye. The idea of the peaceful countryside is a modern utopian fantasy that ignores how ancient clans dictated every aspect of life including marriage and death. Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management. Ancient society did not just monitor people; it owned their entire existence through inescapable social visibility.
"It was always shit everywhere" is revisionist history born out of the fantasy of statists looking to justify the modern (administrative) enforcement state.
While the lack of anonymity in small towns certainly puts a damper on one's ability to deviate too far from social norms, the list of things and subject that could get you subjected to government violence without creating a victimized party was infinity shorter. Things that get state or state deputized enforcers on your case today were matters of "yeah that's distasteful, he'll have to settle that with god" or it would come back to bite you when something happened 150+yr ago because society did not have the surplus to justify paying nearly as manny people to go around looking for deviance that could be leveraged to extract money. These people had way more practical day to day freedom to run and better their lives than we do now, if constrained by the fact that they had substantially less wealth to leverage to that effect.
> Modern Homeowners Associations prove that localized oversight is often the most intrusive form of management
And they almost exclusively deal in things that historical societies didn't even bother to regulate.
You're beyond delusional if you think running afoul of HOA is worse than running afoul of the local, state or federal government. Yeah they can screech and send you scary letter with scary numbers but they don't get the buddy treatment from courts that "real" governments do (to the great injustice of their victims) and their procedural avenues for screwing their victims on multiple axis are way more limited.
Seriously, go get in a pissing match with a municipality over just where the line for "requires permit" is and get back to me. Unless you want to do something that is more than petty cosmetic stuff and unambiguously in violation of the rules a HOA is a paper tiger for the most part (not to say that they don't suck).
Modern bureaucracy provides the institutional architecture and political recourse needed to check such arbitrary local tyranny. Without a central legal authority, an HOA or a town council becomes a lawless fiefdom. In those "freer" times, falling out with the local elite meant you didn't fight a permit; you simply had to pack your life and leave.
Your reaction actually proves the point. Aggression thrives in anonymous spaces because the lack of oversight removes the weight of accountability. When people feel unobserved, they quickly abandon the social friction that once held tribes and clans together. You are essentially providing a live demonstration of why a society without any form of monitoring inevitably slides into the Hobbesian trap.
I don't think a random internet comment proves anything about society at large.
People don't hesitate to be aggressive even when they're not anonymous and there's a threat of accountability - see, all crime, or people just acting shitty toward others.
Mass surveillance does not cause everyone to magically get along.
History shows that whenever surveillance gaps appear, chaos follows. The explosion of crime during early urbanization was the specific catalyst for the creation of modern police forces because traditional social bonds had failed to provide oversight in growing cities. Japan maintains its safety through a deep-rooted culture of mutual neighborhood monitoring that leaves little room for anonymity. Even China successfully quelled the violent crime waves of its early economic boom by implementing a sophisticated surveillance network.
Police forces nor "neighborhood monitoring" are equivalent to mass surveillance though.
Anyway I'm curious why - despite having less anonymity than at any point in history, at least from the perspective of law enforcement - we still see high crime rates, from fraud to murders?
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