Which inflation measure are you referring to? Because of course petrolium products directly (gas, heating) and indirectly (cost of shipping) contribute to the effective price of most consumer baskets.
In other words, this might be true because the “inflation-rate“ was high, but it was high because the cost of oil went up.
I'd like it in a setup that makes usable as a portable without a lot of setup. IMO it is feasibly to disable the keyboard/trackpad and just put my keyboard on top but it isn't ideal.
I have an external Thinkpad USB keyboard with full-travel keys, a built-in trackpoint, 3 physical buttons, and no trackpad. It cost me about £60 new, 3 years ago.
I use it with my MacBook Air when travelling, and a cheapo external USB-C screen with a broken laptop mount.
The MBA is slim, light, and 3 years on, its battery still lasts several days. It's perfectly able to do 8-10 hours of near-continuous use. But the keyboard and trackpad are awful.
So, external keyboard, external screen, pocket USB-C hub to connect them, which also gives me a spare full-size USB port and Ethernet.
If you don't need the battery life, I suggest investigating a ?20 era Thinkpad.
The X220 is quite portable and though the screen is small the keyboard is great and the range of ports good.
The T420 is moderately portable, has a decent screen and the i7 has a discrete GPU. Works surprisingly well with Wayland these days.
The W520 is not really portable at all but has a lovely big screen, tonnes of ports, and quad-core models have 4 SO-DIMM slots so 24 GB is cheap and 32 GB doable.
For all, get an i7 model, fit 2 SSDs and max out the RAM, and the result is perfectly usable in 2026 if you're a gamer or "influencer" who needs to edit video.
Cost, £200 or so.
And there's the 701 DS which has 2 screens, a numeric keypad, and a Wacom tablet built in.
There's no need to lose face to the vast majority of their customers, who don't read tech blogs or know who Siracusa is.
They can just boldy advance forwarded in a rearward direction and claim whatever they want about it. They've done it multiple times - every new iPhone and iOS has looked "the best and newest" and made the last one that looked the best and newest look old-hat.
They owned their mistake of removing all ports and function keys from MacBook Pros, so there is a chance. That being said, the UI degradation of macOS has been a slow but persistent march for about a decade now, and I don't imagine it will change now.
People keep blaming Alan Dye as if he was the only one responsible.
Federighi—who's in charge of implementing this and was busy praising it on stage—is completely blameless. As are all other managers big and small at Apple.
I mean, yeah, if you were picked to present "on stage" (when was the last time a stage was actually involved???) then of course you're going to be a team player and read the script enthusiastically. It's not like Federighi is going to present something "and now, here's the thing that I argued against doing, but was shouted down in all the meetings so here's this thing I don't like and you shouldn't feel obliged to like it either"
> I mean, yeah, if you were picked to present "on stage"
Ah yes. Federighi, the VP of Platform Development, literally responsible for the development of iOS and MacOs "was picked", and had no power to say no to the overwhelming power of the all-powerful head of design Alan Dye.
> but was shouted down in all the meetings
So, VP of Platforms was shouted down by whom exactly?
But sure, let's keep telling everyone that it was only Alan Dye who was responsible for Liquid Glass.
BTW I remind you it was the same Federighi who introduced the awful design changes in the MacOS a few years ago proudly presenting the new settings app and saying that everything will be meticulously designed in the final version (was it Sonoma? Can't remember).
You've taken the wrong interpretation from what I was being somewhat snide about. I don't know the Apple hierarchy and who is actually responsible for what. The point was that anyone presenting for Apple is going to come across as having drunk the kool-aid, otherwise, they would not have been picked.
At the end of the day, I don't care who was/wasn't responsible for any of the decisions. I have no say in the matter, and unless you're part of the management at Apple, neither do you. Lots of people wrote the code to make whatever debacle has happened. They all have skin in the game.
Yeah, I don't quite agree with that, or think of it as any kind of a criticism. The candles are placed in such a way that the faces of the important characters are easily visible, while the spectators fade into the background. This is fine! You're not meant to see their reactions, only hear them. The lighting functions like stage lighting, or (more likely Kubrick's inspiration) chiaroscuro, focusing viewers' attention where it's meant to be.
As an aside: I've always suspected that the next scene (outside the house, at the end of this clip) is not naturally lit, though I've never seen anyone write anything about it. Even there, though, the lighting is used dramatically: as she turns, her face goes into shadow, leaving her reaction to his approach unseen, and therefore ambiguous.
Sorry / not-sorry , you were making a quick point, which I've totally hijacked to geek out about one of my favorite films of all time. Carry on.
For a camera exposing onto Kodak 5254, probably the fastest available in 1975, blazing ISO 100 film stock. Yeah it’s dim for that. To your eyes as I understand it’s pretty well lit.
The photo nerd hacking tweak of note here was the pushing of the stock to 200 and using uniquely crafted NASA lenses built to photograph the dark side of the moon with not seen before aparture.
Arguably a youtube rending of a compressed digital source viewed on a computer screen falls short of a 1970s full cinema via film live viweing.
AFAIK their business model is to send skilled engineers to client sites to be consultants and developers. Their selling point is not some product/code per-se (ie. they have a code base with existing analysis tools, but nothing crazy), but the fact that they jump into whatever situation and grind through problems.
The problem is that they also keep close ties to law-enforcement and (para-)military clients, and while they promise to keep your data safe, they would never inform you if they received a warrant from the government to share the data.
Went to a luncheon and sat with some IT Directors at a Fortune 20.
I asked what they were seeing and excited about.
They kept explaining that Foundry (Palantir's SaaS BI platform) is better than EVERY other alternative (and mind you, they've used every other major vendor as an F20). I kept asking what was special about it (Did it re-invent data models? Is it faster/cheaper than MSFT, GOOG, AWS, SNOW?)
I kept getting circular answers (advantages without addressing design consequences) until I realized (to myself) that what they were describing as "great" had nothing to do with the Palantir tech.
It was great because Palantir's sales people had taken a top down approach (getting CEO's blessing) and had the "green light" to greenfield data solutions and cut through internal bureaucracy/silos about connecting datasources to find revenues or savings. This is CEO (since fired) kept bragging to shareholders about rubbing elbows with Palantir's Alex Karp and gleaming with joy about the potential of their AI collaboration.
That's the impression I get about PLTR.
They're like if McKinsey was re-loaded with software, and sales engineers and they hunt C-Suite and government clients to "speak AI." I haven't looked recently, but one bearish sentiment was that they need growth to sustain their high P/E, and there are only so many more governments/CEOs in their addressable market to add.
One of the most telling experiences while following this company was a town hall type of discussion between Karp and I believe former BP CEO. In it, the CEO gushes about how vital Palantir has been in transforming operations and ironing out inefficiencies. But as he continues to talk it becomes apparent he has absolutely no idea what was done or how it helped.
Then the motives became very clear to me- Palantir wants to sell more software by creating an image of a secretive panacea while the c level wants to create an image that they are forward thinking and using cutting edge tools to transform operations. It’s a two way fortuitous grift but I have no doubt the investors pouring money into it have also gotten ensnared in this grift and it’s grown from questionable sales tactics to a full blown bubble.
When the former CFO becomes CEO and starts talking about the potential of a vendor's black box, it calls into question everything else they've said like thinking a journalist's coverage is accurate until they blunder a topic your familiar with.
It's literally just "better then what people had" + they're willing to work through government and military contracting processes so it can actually be deployed in those environments.
They have a lot of "forward deployed engineer" roles which basically means staff with security clearances who get locked in SCIFs and provide on-site technical support.
Which is really why they keep getting hired: when you write into your contract "it stays on premises and technical support can't take logs off site" they agree to it (at a hefty mark up because all of that sucks to do).
There are many, many, many companies much older than Palantir operating in the beltway that do this. Having TS/SCI cleared resources who can work in SCIFs isn’t in itself a differentiator. Besides, that type of security level would make it very difficult to make use of their products in the first place.
You're missing "better then what they had". It was as I understand it, a big innovation to just bring some post-2010s webdev to the UI experience.
A relevant comparison would be that SpaceX didn't build fancy rockets and their was a lot of similarly old players in the space. They still took it over pretty thoroughly.
No, the model is closer to AWS sending engineers into orgs to build bespoke solutions, with the platform team providing flexible building blocks rather than each solution being ground up.
Context as a Swiss person: One of the strongest political parties in Switzerland today is the SVP (german acronym) which is right-wing. It has won a strong plurality in national elections for easily a decade.
This vote, however, does not stem from the federal (or even state-level) government, but instead is an initiative launched by a group of conservative politicians which happen to be part of the SVP party. The Swiss Federal Council (executive body) has come out against this initiative.
Switzerland has a form of direct democracy, where any group of individuals can propose a change in laws and if they collect 100k signatures (within 18 months) this proposed text will be voted on by the whole country. Here is a list of all referendums, a subset of which are these initiatives: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Swiss_federal_referend...
These initiatives are a frequent feature in Swiss politics, and not necessarily indicative of broadly popular legislation. In fact, whether or not an initiative is accepted is heavily correlated with the support it receives form the federal government. Give that they oppose it, I would bet against this passing.
SVP "which is right-wing" may not convey the degree and nature of that alignment. Just search for "SVP propaganda posters" or read https://www.dw.com/en/far-right-party-violated-anti-racism-l.... When I lived in Switzerland I was pretty shocked by how "out" the hard right was. It was as if having been neutral in WW2 not enough of their homegrown fascists got shot, and they still had plain old Nazis kicking around, holding offices and passing laws.
Supporting a fascist country bombing the Gaza Strip into oblivion ends up fucking your morality. We are seeing a lot of the west be very comfortable with fascism post 2023.
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