I’ve heard rumors of that, and also of TVs shipping with cellular modems with which to phone home. I don’t know if either have been confirmed, but it would be ridiculous for such a thing to be legal.
It's a longstanding, and obviously false, rumor. It would be trivial to prove that these things connect to open wifi networks to phone home, but no one has ever proved that they do that, because they don't actually do that. It would be a little harder, but still very easy, to prove that they connect to cell networks, but no one has proved that they do that either, because they don't actually do that either.
Keeping them disconnected from wifi is sufficient.
It’s perfectly legal to put a cellular modem in a TV, but not without disclosing that to the FCC and on product labels. This and the mesh network thing for TVs are (currently) a conspiracy theory, which sucks because it muddies the waters in advance of it inevitably happening in reality.
Cellular modems seem unlikely, because both they and the service plan they'd need are too expensive to be justified by any benefit to the manufacturer.
Cell plans are very cheap when you are a company looking for low bandwidth off-peak service for a lot of devices. As individuals you can't get those deals, but companies can.
I don't know if TVs have a cell modem, but it isn't unreasonable to say they could.
As a different poster mentioned, the FCC needs to know about this though and so it will be documented.
I doubt the modem would cost more than $5 at scale. No idea what sort of off peak data deals you could get at scale but I have to imagine it’s close to being feasible.
Not so far fetched when your advertising revenue is in the tens of millions of dollars.
They just need this revenue by tv to be higher than the price of the mobile plan per tv. For a few Gb per month it may be relevant in the not so distant future.
Yes. Considering 90%+ of users will just connect their TV to their WiFi, shipping a cell modem with every TV to catch that last 10% seems like bad ROI.
I could however see this happening in the future in response to regulation. For example some "think of the children" rule that makes TV makers responsible for blocking mature content.
The Forester still has the awful infotainment system with the vertical screen, first introduced on the 2020 Outback. I actually like the vertical aspect ratio, and the screen is pretty bright and high resolution, but the underlying software is disastrous. It was slow and buggy and felt outdated when it was introduced 6 years ago!
For what it’s worth, the new 2026 Outback has an excellent new infotainment system and tons of physical controls for car settings. But apparently everyone hates it for the external redesign (I think it looks fine). Hopefully that interior will roll out to the rest of the models too.
They are not going back to physical controls out of the goodness of their hearts. Physical controls are a requirement to get a European 5-star safety rating, and possibly in China as well.
For certain specific cases, sure, but there is a general concern about an AI agent doing something illegal or harmful against the intentions of the human operator. And this analogy of a BitTorrent client being used intentionally by a human to download copyrighted content is just not applicable.
I disagree. Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links, and occasionally picked one and downloaded it. You could even build in an attempt to screen filenames to only download legal content. Your program very well could have downloaded illegal content regardless.
The bittorrent client being used intentionally illegally by a human is something you've invented, it's not something in the original post nor in the comment I replied to.
There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it". The fact that doing otherwise makes powerful LLMs much less useful is beside the point here.
> Fifteen years ago, you absolutely could have written a web crawler that aggregated torrent links...
Sure, and you'd probably be culpable if you wrote the software. But if you purchased Quicken99 to do your taxes, and that software downloaded some copyrighted content with bittorrent, you would not be culpable.
> There's a solid argument to be made that using a powerful LLM in an internet-connected environment constitutes "taking irresponsible actions that could reasonably be expected to cause it".
That is a wild claim and could not possibly be true without some major legal precedent (and almost certainly significant legal/regulatory changes). These are among the most widely used and general purpose internet products in the United States.
I don't really get what you're suggesting. You give a 1 year grace period for Metallica to pull all its music off the Internet, but then as soon as I host some of their MP3s on my Wordpress blog it's "public property of everyone" from that point forward?
The only additional realization you need is that things like “fruit salad” and “chicken salad” are using the word “salad” figuratively. There’s no reason to expect our definition of “salad” to cover figurative usage. After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?
>After all, do you really expect to cover, for instance, “word salad”?
This is covered further down in the article where it's pointed out that one of the Merriam-Webster definitions is
>"A usually incongruous mixture : HODGEPODGE"
The author points out that Merriam-Webster actually has a looser definition of salad than they do, because the article is only considering edible things to count.
Also, I disagree - I don't think "fruit salad", or "chicken salad", or "egg salad" etc are "figurative" (not sure what you even mean by that), I would absolutely consider them legitimate salads.
Not saying I agree with the rest of the claims, but it is funny to think of a bowl of skittles as being a salad, and it's always a mindfuck to think about just how impossible it is to categorize every little thing into a neat little box.
> Also, I disagree - I don't think "fruit salad", or "chicken salad", or "egg salad" etc are "figurative" (not sure what you even mean by that), I would absolutely consider them legitimate salads.
I mean "figurative" in the typical sense: describing a thing using a word for a different thing in order to suggest a similarity between the two things. A fruit salad is fruit arranged similarly to how vegetables are arranged in a salad. A fruit pizza is a dish with a crust that looks similar to a pizza crust, topped with frosting and fruit in a way that evokes how pizza is topped with sauce, cheese, etc.
Even UHD Blu-Ray isn't likely to need sustained transfer rates over 100 Mbps. The spec allows transfer rates of about 128 Mbps, and some discs reportedly have momentary spikes above that, but I suspect the vast majority of titles would be playable over Fast Ethernet, especially if given a few seconds of buffer.
This is the biggest problem with those cheap network interfaces in tvs. They dont have any form of usable buffer, so a spike instantly creates problems.
using an usb network dongle (or if your setup is good enough wifi, but this is very unstable)
Also, most tv's are not able to push the full 100Mbps over their network interface.
Will TVs stream UHD Blu-Ray rips off the network anyway? I guess modern TVs all have H.265 decoders now, so there’s no reason they couldn’t as long as the network interface is quick enough and they know how to handle common video containers.
TVs will stream some. Exactly because the network cards are horrible without buffers etc.
But yeah, remuxes (uncompressed copies of UHD) are pretty common and people that want the best quality use them.
Also, kaleidescape highest quality options are as big or bigger than UHD rips.
I find that Apple Maps is typically pretty smart with its automatic zoom. For a typical intersection with just one turn to navigate, it will zoom in to give you a good sense of the lanes, stop signs/lights, etc. But when there are consecutive turns to navigate, or a heavily curved section of road (like highway on-ramps) it will zoom out and even rotate the map to show that upcoming context.
It might be fine for pure navigation to addresses but business addresses and other metadata are often missing or out of date because people only bother to update Google Maps. Also that’s where all the reviews are.
I don’t want to use two different apps for navigation vs finding businesses.
I've used it almost exclusively since around 2019, but that has been in the Bay Area and LA area where the data has presumably been very good relative to other areas.
In Spanish, native speakers typically learn (implicitly) or memorize (explicitly) the gendered article along with the noun, so instead of thinking "hmm, let me remember the gender of mapa" they'll just have that noun stored internally as "el mapa". It's still a matter of memorization (at least for words whose gender violates the typically spelling heuristics), but it's not really conceived of as memorizing the word and then separately memorizing its gender. And of course, there will always be rare or specialized terms that a native speaker might recognize but confidently know the gender. This is especially true for the small set of nouns whose gender varies by region or context.
Except in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.
In French, it's common for people not to remember the gender of uncommon words. IIRC, there is or was a radio program in France that would call up random people and offer them a prize if they could guess the genders of a list of 10 words correctly.
> in Spanish, gender is pretty easily determined from the word ending 99.9% of the time unless it's a Greek neuter, and there are only a few of those.
Isn't that 99.9% referring to the reliability of spelling heuristics for the words that match a heuristic? For example, the -o and -a spelling heuristic reliably indicates gender something like 99+% of the time, but only about two thirds of Spanish nouns end in -o or -a. There are a few other suffixes with string gender indication, but even then I think you can only account for like 75% of Spanish nouns.
I'm strenuously disagreeing with the 75%, especially in terms of usage. Almost all nouns that end in -a (unless they're Greek neuters), -ión, -umbre, or -dad are feminine. Otherwise, they're masculine.
There are plenty of exceptions, but 1/1000 words sounds about right to me.
edit: my point was that French is far more chaotic than that, and it does cause mistakes. Goes with the general observation that French is easy enough to read, but hard to write.
You remind me that France had (maybe still does?) national dictation competitions (championnat national de dictées). Much of French orthography is silent, so can be a real challenge!
It’s a silly question, since (short of a major life change or economic system change) you need the grocery store and the job to have decent quality of life.
You need to trade your labor for money, and you need to trade your money for food. I would argue that there isn’t a huge difference in the fundamental nature of those two trades. Framing them in terms of “trade deficits” is pointing out which direction money is moving in each instance, but fundamentally they’re both just trades.
Indeed that is true, which is the point of both OP(or at least my takeaway). Attaching a moral value to trade deficits or surpluses, as the current administration seems to be in favor of doing, is fairly nonsensical.
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