Replacing the battery in a throttled phone resulted in increased performance, conclusively shining light on Apple’s throttling shenanigans. The phones weren’t the problem—old batteries were. Public outcry and lawsuits ensued. Finally, Apple publicly admitted to CPU throttling for aging batteries.

Despite the shadiness of the ordeal, this change was actually made to lengthen the lifespan of these devices. The sentiment (and conspiracy) I continue to see is that there are software updates made to intentionally cripple devices and frustrate their users.

Especially since Apple will 100% bog it down with MacOS updates to force schools to upgrade their devices earlier than necessary.

Where do these conspiracies come from?

It’s likely (and one of the reasons I don’t use Chrome) but its not the discussion we’re having.

To me this seems arbitrary—Chrome contains countless other binary blobs which you have no insight to and cannot consent to. They are part of the application. Chrome contains other machine learning algorithms and features and has for years, but these have been baked-in. You have likely been using “local AI” or machine learning on your laptop battery for quite some time without being explicitly aware of it.

If people don’t like these features that’s fine, there are lots of alternatives to choose from (personally, I use Helium). But to be upset about this specific instance seems arbitrary to me. And to claim that it’s somehow nefarious (i.e. the consent part) seems disingenuous. Consent is granted when the user downloads and begins using Chrome—why would Chrome need additional consent to download/update one of many external components?

Again, I don’t use Chrome and I’m not interested in this feature, I just don’t see how it’s necessarily bad or evil all things considered.

Beyond the disk size, what’s wrong with this? Isn’t local machine learning better than shipping your data off to some cloud provider? Or is the problem machine learning?

@[email protected] why do you put the current date as the title when the comic is from 1983?

What kind of hobby is “injecting ads into soweone else’s community platform that you’ve rebranded as your own”?

GearLever will also perform automatic updates for your AppImages

Didn’t March already happen?