> The tl;dr here is they also don't want to have to pay to outsource their support staff, so they're paying openai or someone else instead.
I don't think that's the right lens to view this in. Germany in particular is a very difficult market to provide customer service in, given that German-language skills outside of the high-wage DACH region is non-existent, when you compare it to the English speaking market that often relies on the acceptably-accented Phillipine region. If you want to provide customer service in Germany, it's not simply that firms aren't willing to pay enough to hire customer support staff, it's that the pool of people who could work in this field just don't exist in large enough numbers.
By introducing agentic AI to solve some number of support questions you offer patients service that you just otherwise simply couldn't.
I get that this is about preventing ticket reselling, but I have a different question: Can someone explain the controversy around face scans for air travel? Governments have clearly laid out that flying affords zero expectation of privacy, and the airlines won't let you buy a plane ticket without knowing your name (as opposed to bus or subway tickets). If the airline knows your name, and their attendants see and verify your face when boarding anyway, then are we losing anything through the use of face scans?
Domestic flights in the US make extensive use of facial scanning, and both US and EU border agencies digitally scan your face to identify you (Global Entry in the US even means you theoretically don't need your passport to enter the country).
So why should we pretend like face scanning isn't happening? I can understand the idea that at some point, I won't need a boarding pass nor identification to get onto a plane, and at this point, it appears to not cost me any privacy that I've already lost over the last 25 years.
If the argument is "they're already doing this, so what's the issue?" then I have to ask: if they're already doing this, then what's the value-add? Face scanning seems like quite a large complex system to deploy compared to the tried-and-true method of paper ticketing and identification. The push for this technology is suspicious to me as a Westerner because the benefits to me are unclear, while the risks (e.g., China-like ubiquitous surveillance and repression, and corporate access controls like those attorneys who were barred from a Madison Square Garden show) are a little more established.
> If the airline knows your name, and their attendants see and verify your face when boarding anyway, then are we losing anything through the use of face scans?
I've recently flown with FinnAir and they never asked for my ID. All times I went with them. I just scan my boarding pass and done. The only day they asked me for my name is when I was the last person to board the plane because I was late for my flight.
> If the airline knows your name, and their attendants see and verify your face when boarding anyway, then are we losing anything through the use of face scans?
Your face scan is now online waiting for the next data breach.
I have seen neobanks requiring such 3D face scans but not Ryanair yet.
> Your face scan is now online waiting for the next data breach
Completely understood, but the point is that it's at CBP or UK Border Force or Bundespolizei, and it's in the security camera system at the airport, too.
If you've been a visitor to Australia recently, you'll be all too familiar with the process of using your phone to scan your face plus passport data.
When you enter the airport, you walk past signs notifying you of extensive surveillance camera use.
As another commenter noted, this is data from the German online shop MindFactory, which could be understood as the German equivalent to NewEgg. MindFactory would probably overrepresent enthusiast and small business customers, and underrepresent your average consumer who would rather buy their laptop from a big box store (MediaMarkt/Saturn) or enterprise customers, who probably buy directly from Dell/Lenovo/HP/Fujitsu.
Also Germans in general are more into alternatives like Firefox, Linux, etcetera as they have a healthy distrust to Big Tech. Even though if AMD is quite big itself it was more liked by a lot of enthousiasts there even when their performance was seriously lagging.
Thanks! Even if this is only the enthusiast crowd, they're typically ahead of the curve, by a year or two, so Intel can't affort to ignore this. At some point the there will be less willingness from Dell/HP/Lenovo/Fujitsu to buy a subpar product.
The hatred towards intels 28x cpus from reviewers seems overblown to me. They are still pretty good chips that beat AMDs single chiplet offerings in cinebench, with decent efficiency. They're kind of just 2nd best at everything, whether thats multicore, single core, efficiency, or gaming... which to me doesn't seem bad, taken as a whole.
I think they meant that compared to specific chips.
AMDs x3D chips are exceptionally good for gaming but are relatively very poor for MT “productivity” stuff (this gen seems to be a lot better at that, though).
13/14th gen also seemingly also had somewhat better price/performance overall than AM5 chips.
I haven't seen much hatred. As you said they are just subpar in every metric, except maybe idle power consumption. Power consumption under load though is far superior on AMDs x3d.
I guess if you look long enough, you'll always find some hate, for example Userbenchmark hates on all AMD CPUs for years and is very biased.
Their latest review says the AMD CPUs are bad, cause nobody needs that much performance.
I've seen a lot of what I would call hatred. "Intel has failed!" "285k is junk!" and so on. Just a bit more harsh and sensational than I think they should be, as opposed to giving a balanced perspective. Like I said they are not the best at any specific thing, but have better efficiency than before, still beat AMD at certain tasks, good memory controllers, and so on. With the right pricing they would be easy to recommend.
With only two relevant brands of PC microprocessors, "second best" means "worst". Intel might be close to AMD, but rational reasons for choosing them appear to be reduced to socket compatibility with the CPU in someone's relatively recent old PC, which should allow an upgrade with the significant cost reduction of keeping the old motherboard and cooling system.
No, what I mean is, 285k beats the 9800x3d at multiprocessing stuff & productivity tasks, but loses to 9950x. It beats the 9950x at gaming but loses to the 9800x3d. It performs slightly worse than 14900k at gaming and some other tasks, and overall price/perf, but does its job much more efficiently. There's no single alternative thats better in every metric.
Yes, the CPUs listed are in the range where customers cannot perform expensive experiments (buying both Intel and AMD to test) and rely on review sites.
Personally, when I first got access to an Epyc, I was underwhelmed by the performance. For numerical performance it was slightly worse than M2 or cheap old Intel processors. I'm now a bit skeptical of reviews.
I listened to a review that said an i7 Thinkpad was cool and quiet with an 8-10 hour battery life. Fans scream at the slightest load, it's 45 degrees constantly and the battery life is 3 hours if you don't touch it and 1 hour if you do. And digging deeper, that's just normal for them. Serves me right for trusting a "real" reviewer.
Should have insisted on a Framework, by the sounds of it, it would actually have at least not worse battery life.
No, creating a throwaway account and making a superfluous claim creates the thread sentiment.
There might be valid comparisons for specific Epyc generations and their Xeon counterparts. But processors are a bit like car engines. Power and torque numbers doesn't tell the whole story.
Datacenter processors are optimized for different scenarios. Use the wrong processor for the wrong job, and you get abysmal performance. We have an AMD system which won't win any speed records, but that thing has enormous number of memory channels and PCIe lanes, so it's basically a semi with an extra long trailer.
Fittingly, that processor lives in a storage cluster and delivers tremendous amount of I/O both in IOPS and throughput. Same processor would look silly in a compute cluster, though.
I'd rather talk in SPEC scores if we're talking about Epyc and Xeon processors, and in TOP500 lists and national supercomputing centers, but you do you.
The KeePass2Android app gains a bit of functionality if you use it with SFTP instead. You get the ability to, for example, merge changes in the event that there's a conflict. I recommend using SFTP to a machine that then runs SyncThing to the rest of your devices.
> Hydrogen is a terrible battery. Best case conversion to H2 is ~80%, while best case fuel cell efficiency is ~50%. That's 40% round trip while most batteries can do 90%.
While there's no arguing with the physics here, don't forget the economics either. The price of electricity in Denmark on a cloudy, windless early evening can easily be 10 or more times the price in Newfoundland. Then start factoring in that a plane carrying hydrogen is significantly lighter than a plane carrying batteries.
While you might be using 10x as much electricity at the point of generation, you're paying a lot less for it, and you're using it more efficiently.
> And there’s certainly no robust H supply that doesn’t include fossil fuel to create the H gas
The government of Chile published a pretty clear national strategy to address this very issue [1]. And with Chile being on the Pacific Ocean, and these seaplanes most likely being used in islands in the Pacific, it's not hard to imagine a relatively simple solution to the infrastructure issue.
Because a user sitting in the United States could be served copyrighted content by GitLab. It would likely even come from one of GitLab's servers in the US. In that hypothetical instance, GitLab is in clear violation under US law.
In theory GitLab could decide to ignore the DMCA, as you suggest, but that would mean removing all US servers, firing all US staff and cancelling all contracts with US customers (including those that GitLab has with the US government itself). Even in that instance, you would just move the copyright lawsuit to Dutch courts.
I'm no expert on Dutch copyright law, but it seems like such a lawsuit would go nowhere. Presumably, there's no copyright violation at all here: the emulator's source code is FOSS and contains no Nintendo source code, as is usually the case with emulators. What it's used for is irrelevant; the only thing that matters is whether someone actually copied something without authorization from Nintendo, which (I assume) they did not.
The use of the code only becomes relevant with the US DMCA, with its stupid "infringing uses" clause. US law only applies inside the US though.
But a company like that, which does a lot of business in the US, can't afford to thumb its nose at the US's stupid copyright law, if they want to continue doing business there. So business and money take priority over copyright ethics.
My understanding of the DMCA is that whether or not there's any infringing actually going on is irrelevant, you have to take the content down first and then have a court battle to decide whether you can put it back up.
Only if the entity who published the content does not oppose. And then it doesn’t have to go to the court. But if they oppose, the content should stay online until the court decision
There's this weird thing where people don't understand that Europe has a long history of very strong copyright law. The life + 70 years term of copyright comes from Germany, not the US, and globally companies harmonised there.
There's also an international treaty, WIPO Copyright Treaty, that requires signatories to enact anti-circumvention provisions. The EU and the US both agreed and signed it before the DMCA.
> Anyone else starting to get the feeling that the idea of "base load" power was a scam
I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece. Each method of more traditional power production has different capabilities for ramping up and down, in descending order: gas, hydro, coal, nuclear. Now we have renewables entering the market, which so far have more or less had to be matched with gas peaker plants for scaling up and down. Batteries are obviously putting downward pressure on peak energy generation.
Furthermore, we've had the classic paradigm of electricity demand, where if I put a load onto the grid, like turning on my oven or flipping a light switch, it must function. Now we have electric cars, heat pumps, hot water heaters, and even in parts of Scandinavia washing machines, which schedule themselves to run during off-peak times.
Where we find ourselves now is market forces working themselves out, with investors buying into battery storage, and homeowners switching to time-of-use billing for their energy bills to take advantage of cheap electricity at night when charging their cars.
In energy politics we obviously still hear the term base load, but it's now nothing more than rhetoric of an outdated era.
I don't think it was in the past, it's just becoming obsolete, piece by piece.
This is what I'm questioning though, 30 years of hand waving about "base load", and all the stories about how renewables aren't sufficient, but then, oh wait, actually, we can probably do it now.
Maybe, just maybe the tech wasn't there, but it is convenient that when push comes to shove, we do have the technology. If the investment was there 30 years ago, it feels like we could've made a lot more progress. But the narrative persisted.
I don't have hard numbers, but I can say that spam on both sides of the ocean exist. In the US, we get a lot of SMS spam targeted at homeowners, pestering them about selling their property, since there's a lot of open data about property ownership. In Germany, there's frequently spam pretending to be one of the major shipping companies (DHL for example) or the local customs office (Zoll) saying you have a package that couldn't be delivered and to click on a link. I've found the source for this data to be customer data leaks.
So yes, spam is a serious concern. WhatsApp spam exists as well, but since there's a central authority, unlike with SMS, it's a lot harder to avoid being shutdown.
Is that at all relevant for the North American market, where no one would be using three phase power to charge their car? And is it even relevant to the CCS part of the standard, when really what CCS adds on top of IEC 62196 is the ability to use DC charging, at which point phases are irrelevant.
The whole point of connectors is, firstly, how much power they can deliver (both NACS and CCS1 appear equally capable), then, how affordable they are to make and how easy they are to use.
Affordability is objective, NACS is simply cheaper to make. Less materials go into it, and that's a win. Furthermore, it doesn't require a massive charging port (see how Tesla had to work around CCS2 for the Model S/Y in Europe because their charging port cover is too small), so there's further benefits here.
Ease of use is less objective, but for anyone who has used both, clearly NACS is much, much better. It's lighter, less chonky, simpler (you don't have to remove a cover over the DC plugs). I think the consensus here is just clear.
So what, then, is an objective argument FOR using CCS1 over NACS? I really don't see one. The only argument I can see is that we lose some mild amount of harmony with CCS2 connectors that the rest of the world is going to use, but with the differences between CCS1 and CCS2 that exist anyway, that might be a moot point.
> Is that at all relevant for the North American market, where no one would be using three phase power to charge their car?
While 240V 3-phase isn't common in the US homes I'd imagine that it would be super handy for places like shopping malls or parking garages where you want to have lots of Level 2 chargers.
> Affordability is objective, NACS is simply cheaper to make. Less materials go into it, and that's a win.
I agree with you there, it looks much better and is slightly easier to handle. I doubt the material difference is much, it's just a little plastic. The amount of adapters likely makes up the difference.
> you don't have to remove a cover over the DC plugs
This isn't really a thing. These hard plastic covers is something people buy thinking it will protect them from being electrocuted. If they had known how the chargers work they'd likely be less worried. Except in France, where they've made CCS Type 3, which is about as French of an idea as you get.
> So what, then, is an objective argument FOR using CCS1 over NACS? I really don't see one.
The main issue here is that US decided to go with CCS Type 1, when it was clear back in 2014 that CCS Type 2 would be a much better and more future proof choice. It's something that should have been solved with regulation a long time ago. And now you're stuck with CCS Type 1 and NACS for the unforeseeable future. It's kinda funny, because in Europe Tesla went from only NACS (V1 superchargers) to NACS and CCS2 (V2 and V3 superchargers) to only CCS2 (V4 superchargers).
240V 3-phase isn't common at shopping malls or garages either. We typically have 208V in such situations. NACS works just fine for that.
> I agree with you there, it looks much better and is slightly easier to handle. I doubt the material difference is much, it's just a little plastic. The amount of adapters likely makes up the difference.
The biggest difference in the US is the latching mechanism. Its a moving part with the US CCS1 connector, and a surprising number also make it an electrically activated latch. Despite the talk about it being rare to be the failure point, it is actually fairly fragile and failure prone. Worse, we've seen a case or two on the forums where the failure mode resulted in a connector stuck to the car!
On top of that, CCS1 still requires an additional active latch on the car.
Both CCS2 and NACS solve this in a much simpler way that puts all of the active latching into the vehicle. It is simpler and more reliable. TBH, I agree with you about the US really messing up with CCS1. CCS2 is marginally more bulky than NACS, but also has some real advantages and the downsides are small.
Regarding the plastic covers, a lot of cars come with them. The concern seems to be that debris could get into the port while AC charging.
"Is that at all relevant for the North American market, where no one would be using three phase power to charge their car?"
Most anyone in an industrial work setting in North America will have 3-phase 240V service installed, minimum. My work has 480V 3-phase for our SMT line. We have permanently-installed charge stations on that 3-phase service. Damn shame they've got nothing for my e-bike, so I just use the benchtop inside and a cable rig.
The benefit with 3-phase is that you now can use a single cable/charger to charge up to three separate cars, which greatly reduces the cost of setting up a lot of chargers in, say, a parking garage. And you can opportunistically deliver up to 11-22kW (240V/400V) to a single car. Greatly reduces the amount of hardware needed.
Plenty of chargers around where I live deliver 208v at 30a, which tells me they're connected to a pair of legs of a 3 phase circuit.
I suppose this means one leg of the circuit is not used, meaning the load between the different legs is always going to be out of balance, but this practice (use 2 legs of a 3 phase feed for "240 er... 208v" for "big" loads such as a drier or EVSE or water heater, so likely any industrial / commercial setting just accepts that you're not going to load up all legs your feeds evenly.
NA built EVs typically don't have the internal circuitry to manage 3 phase charging -- the EV takes care of the AC -> DC conversion on a level 2 circuit, and the extra stuff to do that in NA wouldn't ever be used. The same is true of charging off of 400v AC -- it's super rare and likely not something that's worth engineering to implement.
> where no one would be using three phase power to charge their car
3-phase power is insanely common in commercial buildings for things like HVAC, refrigeration, and massive lighting systems. Sure, it's not at all common in residential areas, but I'd sure love to charge my car when I stop at a grocery store.
I don't think that's the right lens to view this in. Germany in particular is a very difficult market to provide customer service in, given that German-language skills outside of the high-wage DACH region is non-existent, when you compare it to the English speaking market that often relies on the acceptably-accented Phillipine region. If you want to provide customer service in Germany, it's not simply that firms aren't willing to pay enough to hire customer support staff, it's that the pool of people who could work in this field just don't exist in large enough numbers.
By introducing agentic AI to solve some number of support questions you offer patients service that you just otherwise simply couldn't.