This reply is quite literally AI as well, and so was your initial comment. It's so so obvious after spending enough time on Twitter and seeing the pattern used by all the AI reply bots. Absolutely insane that the HN crowd isn't able to see this.
No idea why anybody still thinks of this company as making premium devices or catering to the premium market. Tim Cook's Apple makes cheap shit for the mass market, and has for years. It's not surprising when something like this comes out for cheap, because in general Apple has been price competitive for the past decade.
And in that vein of making cheap shit for the mass market, their software quality has suffered incredibly. They no longer serve the consumer tier they used to, but their branding halo from those days is so effective that it helps them sell to this new, lower tier consumer.
Yesterday they came out with a five thousand dollar laptop with 128GB of ram. You can spend 20 grand on a mac studio. Companies can address different market segments.
The software has taken a nose dive, but I don't think it's related. If anything, you'd think that selling lower spec machines would drive software improvements.
I have no idea why anyone ever thought that Apple only made premium devices for a premium market. Apple has always been (or wanted to be) a mass market computer and device company and I have an iPod Shuffle to prove it.
Does it make it less funny? Do you find yourself laughing, but then you get soured because although the chuckle that was made was genuine, it came about from something that was created by a computer, so we have to hate ourselves for chuckling. Is that how it works?
It's because they're misusing the term. Jevons' paradox doesn't apply to the simple idea that "cheaper code leads to more demand for code", that's just the concept of price curves.
Instead, Jevons' paradox refers to a counterintuitive rebound effect: AI tools make engineers more productive, which you'd expect to reduce the marginal demand for additional engineers (since the same output requires fewer people). In reality, this efficiency lowers the effective cost of software development, sparking even greater overall demand for new features and projects, which ultimately increases total spending on engineering talent.
This bill is a strictly better version of the age gating initiatives that have been passed in other states and countries like the UK and Australia. If age gating is inevitable, and it seems as though it is, this is the least bad way to do it — enforcing the onus on device manufacturers, who can do verification one time and then throw away the information.
It would easily mean that you're required to have an unmodified device, running a locked down system, to be able to access any service that uses age verification.
Although, a much more sensible alternative, would be to have parents (that do want the control) give their sons devices that send the "minor alert" signal, and have the services detect that.
Claude has an order of magnitude fewer users on its web product while training models that are just as large and advanced as OpenAI, so this makes sense.
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