Yes, but its incredibly dangerous when the operator of the token predictor can give you, personally, different behavior and can influence your decisions even more directly than before.
Some people are incapable of internal thought. They have to verbalise/write down their thoughts, so they can hear/read it back, and that's how they make progress. In a way, these people's brain do work like LLMs.
I constantly use AI like this. For life decisions, for complicated logistics situations, for technical decisions and architectures, etc. I'm not having it make any decisions for me, I'm just talking through things with another entity who has a vast breadth of knowledge, and will almost always suggest a different angle or approach that I hadn't considered.
Here's an example of the kinds of things I've talked with ChatGPT about in the last few weeks:
- I'm moving to a new area and I share custody of my daughter, so this adds a lot of complications around logistics. Talked through all that.
- Had it research niche podcasts and youtube channels for advertising / sponsorship opportunities for my SaaS
- Talked through a really complex architecture decision that's a mix of technical info and big tradeoffs for cost and customer experience.
- Did some research and talked through options for buying two new vehicles for the upcoming move, and what kinds work best for use cases (which are complex)
- Lots and lots of discussions around complex tax planning for 2026 and beyond
Again, these models have vast knowledge, as well as access to search and other tools to gather up-to-date info and sift through it far faster than I can. Why wouldn't I talk through these things with them? In my experience, with a little guardrails ("double check this" or "search and verify that X..."), I'm finding it more trustworthy than most experts in those fields. For example, I've gotten all kinds of incorrect tax advice from CPAs. Sometimes ChatGPT is out of date, but it's generally pretty accurate around taxes ime, especially if I have it search to verify things.
A certain type of person loves nothing more than to spill their guts to anyone who will listen. They don’t see their conversational partners as other equally aware entities—they are just a sounding board for whatever is in this person's head. So LLMs are incredibly appealing to these folks. LLMs never get tired or zone out or make snarky responses. Add in chatbots’ obsequious enabling, and these folks are instantly hooked.
It does strike me as pretty crazy, but I'm at the other end of the spectrum, I almost never think about using an AI for anything. I've tried Claude I think, twice (it wasn't very helpful). The only other AI I've ever used are the "AI summaries" that Duck Duck Go sometimes shows at the top of its search results.
They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips. Add in a decent x86 to ARM translation layer, and you have the basis of the next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
At the high-end they announced two new flagship processor platforms at its 2025 Snapdragon Summit. The Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 they claim to be the world’s fastest mobile SoC.
Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
- iPhone 17 Pro Max relies on Qualcomm's Snapdragon X80 Modem for 5G
- 5G Edge solutions for RAN, presumably harnessing AI
- Non-Terrestrial 5G Provisioning in their partnerships with Thales/Ericsson.
- IoT and Wearables - presumably low power/footprint modems
> They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm, securing rights to use Oryon cores in Snapdragon chips.
As an aside, wonder how this will impact Qualcomm's RISC-V plans? They were apparently working on some RISC-V cores, but I wonder whether that was just a play to put pressure on Arm, or are they still planning on bringing those out to market?
(The "Arduino UNO Q" that they're launching now is based on a Cortex A53. One would think if they're serious about RISC-V they would start with this kind of things, as in low-end stuff for tinkerers.)
So they are using RISC-V already for some embedded cores. For application cores, they are participating in the RISC-V consortium to keep the pressure on ARM and also to be ready for the long game.
I do not expect to see Qualcomm made RISC-V application cores until Android or Windows is completely ported to it, which I think rules out the next several years.
I don't see nothing will affect the RISCV stuff. The risc-v will be likely used in some fixed-function chip(like TPM or security core inside CPU, pretty sure they've done that)
>They just won a significant case in its licensing battle with Arm
did you notice how ARMs stock jumped 5% after that ruling? that tells you everything you need to know.
not to be reddity but reminds me of that scene from The Social Network, where Zuck's buddy couldn't udnerstand how the the record companies winning was actually a massive L.
all the court proved was its total irrelevance to market forces, thats all. ARM is in NVidia accelerators, in Apple phones, in things of actual relevance.
Where is qcom "in"? theyre competing in... laptops!? i could not think of a worse commodity to be in. low volume, no margins, no added value. NPUs? holy snakeoil. again, this edge inferencing that nobody cares about. theres not even a roadmap for anyone to care about it.
>next generation of handheld gaming. If Valve or someone paired with them for the next Steamdeck style project, they'd dominate.
yeah, a market of what, $50M? jeez louise.
>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
Quoting Arm stock prices is hilarious considering that there is only 10% float available to be traded and 95% of that 10% is owned by institutions already. That stock is so heavily manipulated so the big boys can make insane profits on options.
On the other topic
>>Outside of Snapdragon its basically 5G Telecoms atm
>seems to be the only thing going for it.
Did you guys forget the $4B a year in auto rev that they generate, they essentially captured the entire auto market from Nvidia and NXP.
So why on earth did ARM sue to stop their release and force a clean-sheet redesign? Other than SoftBank being Softbank.
//ARM’s CEO wrote in a contemporaneous internal message that the Nuvia ALA “had left a route to blow a hole in [ARM’s] revenue plan” because “Qualcomm already ha[d] a v9 architecture license” under its own ALA. That observation led him to vent that “I’m struggling not to be pissed that we set up a route for Qualcomm to collapse the payments to Arm,” which “feels like in our chess game we left ourselves very exposed.”
Re: Handheld gaming - The dedicated Xbox gaming handheld was cancelled because AMD required a minimum of 10 million units in its contract. With Steam Deck only selling ~5 million units and ASUS ROG/Lenovo Legion only selling 1-2 million MS didn't want to take the risk.
Reduce that BOM, go with ARM, and realise there's an incumbent leaving the market, and you have a compelling argument for Qualcomm. Particularly given the Nintendo Switch 2 sold 1.6M units in June, the highest launch month unit sales for video game hardware in US history
One of the main use-cases of the Steam Deck? Wii-U and Switch emulation!
Valve managing to land Steam Deck within 2 orders of magnitude on their first handheld hardware launch, without some of the largest exclusive gaming IP in the world, selling direct to consumer... represent salient arguments for its ability to compete at a far greater extent when on more equal terms.
I think the AI bit is overblown. Why does every large company have to do everything in technology, AI is horribly over valued in the market right now. The other issues are much more important as those are threats to Qcom's current profit method mostly MediaTek squeezing the lower tier market. It's unclear if Qcoms going to be able to dominate upper tier where they own like 60% of market share if they don't also compete at lower tier where MediaTek has been very successful
The honest answer is that they see AI interaction as being the next human to computer interface, one that will function much in the way that super-apps do today, with the benefit of accelerating the purchasing pathway.
In a way this mirrors how people opt for using apps even though a web version exists, because the apps are generally more performant.
I'd argue that ChatGPT is already there. The instant check out feature they've added, along with integrations was that crucial link between recommending and fulfilling a purchase. It turns ChatGPT into something that can very directly assist with typical "life stuff".
As examples: You're having a dinner party, it can set the menu, then buy the ingredients. At christmas, spend a few minutes talking about your kids and then it can make christmas gift suggestions and go and buy it for you, then do it again 12 months later.
Getting between the consumer and their purchases would be highly lucrative, it functionally replaces one of the core functions of advertising and retail.
"With the money they earn, they can buy more police and political power. Then they come after us. We have the unions and gambling, and they're the best things to have, but narcotics is the thing of the future. If we don't get a piece of that action, we risk everything we have. Not now, but in ten years".
Apple's vertical integration is formidable but Google are still really struggling with their execution, their Tensor SOCs are consistently years behind Snapdragon in performance and efficiency even after their switch to TSMC this generation. Qualcomm is probably safe at the high end of the Android market for a while yet.
The gap between Google’s and Apple’s SoCs is insane. Current Pixels bench at around a third of what current iPhones do.
Not that performance matters to all users, but with how much Pixels cost you have to ask yourself what it is you’re paying for. Even if you don’t care for Apple, for a little more you can get a competitor for a Snapdragon.
as a pixel owner, i'm unfortunately paying for the operating system more than anything else. most other android phones are infested with unremovable bloatware and lack of update guarantees, and iOS is crippled by apple. I used maemo when I could, and now that I can't pixels are pretty much my only option for a decent phone.
Pixels get first class support by google in terms of software which means I can rock my phone for several generations before upgrading.
I've owned a 2, 6, and now 9. Even though the 9 is much faster than the 2 or 6, I've reached a point where that performance difference simply doesn't matter. I'm not being held back by the CPU in any real way. That leaves security, software, and battery life as the main reasons why I might decide to update my phone.
same here, got six years out of a pixel 3 and hope to get another six out of my current pixel 9. if it hadn't been for the battery life degrading I might even have hung on to the 3 for another year or two.
I have an Xperia as a secondary phone and test device which comes with relatively clean Android. Sony is wavering on the NA market unfortunately so I may not be able to replace it with another Sony when the time comes.
It's definitely not that bad for the Pixel 10. One source[0] shows Geekbench 6 scores of 3701 single core and 9460 multicore for iPhone 17 (maybe add 5% more on each on the iPhone 17 Pro). While the Tensor G5 in the Pixel 10 is at 2345 single/6581 multi. So around 63-70% of the speed of the latest iPhone. Still a pretty poor showing but a far cry from 1/3 the speed.
google is competing with a different offering. with a pixel you get google's ecosystem. apple is also not neccesarily top dog in performance (maybe they are - havne't checked lately), nobody buys an iphone because it ranks highly in benchmarks. thats some nerd nonsense that 0.1% of the audience seriously cares about.
for google, pushing 3rd parties out of the supply chain gives them a ton of security and stability concerning pricing and budgeting. its a smart long term move, and i think the industry is going to continue to push towards consolidation and in-housing.
Apple A series CPUs and now M series CPUs have consistently been top of the benchmarks in single core performance for most of the last decade. This even holds true when pitted against desktop Intel and AMD chips. For someone who works with workloads that struggle to be very multithreaded, I do watch this. I must be that 0.1% of the audience
Qualcomm is and will remain patent holding company. They have a crazy number patents for all manner of wireless communication, and they treat them like their golden geese.
Yeah, there are only a small handful of companies making radios for mobile networks that I am aware of - its really hard. Qualcomm, Samsung, Mediatek, Apple?
There is also HiSilicon (Huawei), Unisoc (formerly Spreadtrum) also exists in the ultra-low-end segment formerly occupied by Mediatek, and then a bunch of miscellaneous ones like Leadcore, Nufront, and Rockchip.
I've been out of the hardware game a minute but Qualcomm was a great partner for helping you ship products. Everything about them sucks, but they will actually send engineers to your office. They always took bug reports seriously and pretty much always delivered patches. Also they always had ample samples, both in terms of dev boards and software. I know of several products that basically shipped the sample code with minimal modifications.
If I were a company trying to ship V1 of our first product, I would hands down pick Qualcomm. MediaTek et al are great for when you know what you're doing with minimal handholding.
I absolutely hated working with them, but at least they were a vendor you could work with. Perhaps the cheaper vendors have upped their game here but I wouldn't know.
I heard that Qualcomm can be decent to work with - if you are in a company the size of Qualcomm, or can dangle "500000 units to ship" in front of them like a carrot.
But "decent" is Qualcomm at its absolute best. And Qualcomm at its worst?
I'd rather chew down broken glass than work with Qualcomm.
I can add a minimal anecdote. I got some support from a couple engineers on a telecom project, and it wasn't even that big of a thing, but they were more than decent to work with.
I did say to one guy, "you guys are a lot cooler to work with than some of the stuff you see in the news"
and matter-of-fact he was just like
"oh, yeah that's legal"
my vision of them is that the engineering side can be great to deal with when they want to be (and my personal experience is they want to be).
but the other part of their business is like set the standard, and then enforce it.
To get to the engineers, you need to get through the viper pit that is the sales first.
The only time I have seen this incredible feat accomplished was in a company large enough that they had a department dedicated to dealing with other large companies.
Qualcomm still are the only relevant ones in town who actually sell high performance ARM designs to third parties and have no political quarrels attached, there's a lot of money to be made in that game.
As you said there is competition from Mediatek, but who knows how long Mediatek has before the US government sanctions them to hell and beyond. Apple doesn't sell to third parties (no matter how much one might dream) and so does Google. Samsung I haven't ever seen used outside of their own phones and TVs.
The remainder is NVidia's Tegra lineup but other than automotive and the Nintendo Switch I haven't seen these in third party products either, I doubt they'll even take your calls if you are not coming in with millions of units sold of demand.
Cooked how exactly?
- Completely missed out on the LLM boom, just like everyone except nvidia.
- Apple never used qcom SoCs, just their modems, Google doesn't even register on the radar of sales, their first foray into SoCs isn't great.
- Idk where you get that, they still hold the entire market in their firm grasp and Nuvia stuff has been nothing but outstanding, it's just a shame that MS are cowards and dropped the Windows-on-Arm stuff again.
- Google are partnering with them for the Android on PC projects.
I hope they provide better Linux support for the next gen PC grade chips.
Cooked hardware companies get bought into it seems. Intel is the most egregious example, but AMD is being circled by OpenAI now for 10%. Companies like Marvell and even hard drive companies are up due to how they fit into the AI pipeline.
But intel being "cooked" was a massive psyop. how was intel ever "cooked", when they were still designing, taping out, and delivering massive quantities of CPUs to DCs and consumer products?
AMD briefly gave them a run for their money, but it was nowhere near the catastrophe that bulldozer was, where the company basically needed rescuing. For a brief moment, they weren't a monopolist - that's all that happened, right?
AMD being circled by OpenAI makes sense since AMD makes NVidia knockoffs. that's objectively useful. Harddrive company make sense for storing weights and generative content. Marvell is networking...
what does QCOm present here, that openai or the AI scene at large needs? the only bet is robotics - but why on earth would I put some washed-up adreno into a 40kg man-sized apparatus which would very comfortably fit a H100?
Intel was in danger because they went from having massive amounts of cash on hand to losing billions per quarter with no roadmap to retake the market in the face of competition from both AMD and ARM. They also didn't have competitive GPUs, they lost the automotive market, they lost the networking market outside of desktop/laptop WiFi, and they'd lost any potential market in handhelds/embedded ages ago. Intel is a company that is massively capital intensive, and they simply cannot afford to be in that position. Looking at the need for billions in investment while burning billions per quarter and no good pathway to profitability, investors leave and the company is forced to make dramatic cuts which furthers the death spiral.
I don't think OpenAI has any plans to buy AMD. That's just another moving paper around and we all get rich in the AI space - like the nVidia, OpenAI, Oracle circle of funding.
You should feel dread. They're a pretty awful company... one of those outfits that seems to employ more lawyers than engineers. Basically the Oracle of chips.
I can't begin to guess what motivated them to engage in an intentional culture clash of this magnitude.
I have a fancy kettle and warm water to the lowest heat it’s got (~160f) then pour it into an insulated mug with a spoon. Stir the water with the spoon then put the spoon on the bite. Works insanely well and I can usually treat all the bites we get in a night with one mug
Oh wow, I knew that you could link to page headings with the "#Heading Text" syntax in URLs.. but had no idea that you could link to any random text in a page like this.
> Closed. This question does not meet Stack Overflow guidelines. It is not currently accepting answers.
I think almost half of the most useful questions I have found on stackoverflow since the beginning have this text.
And I wonder if the reason why the percentage isn't higher is because earlier they used to delete them as well instead of just slapping this text on it and locking them.
Good. I probably need a reminder from time to time about why I don't participate there anymore.
Must have missed the many Congress laws that can suspend such a disbursement by various parties of the Executive Branch: immediate, 7-day, 15-day, 90-day, reallocated, indefinite.
I just feel the cutting has to start someplace and with Trump not having to be elected again he has nothing to lose. I am sure a Democrat will win next term to try to right things. Trump is mart enough to see there is a problem but not smart enough to get in and fix it. It is like a farmer burning the fields for next season. Democrats will have a field to build back better on.
I think the war in Iraq really cost a lot of money and we have to pay for it here. Might as well start with Trump doing some slashing and burning. We will have build up from the ground up again.
We have to do this by choice rather than having it because our hand is forced. It's not a choice anybody wants, but it'll be less pain now than later.
I know republicans created these wars but now we just are all going to have to take the pain. Trump is starting with other people taking the pain first.
> Might as well start with Trump doing some slashing and burning. We will have build up from the ground up again.
Well, there's two ways to get a balanced budget.
1) You could increase the tax rate as was done for pretty much every single other war. This of course is not going to happen.
2) You have to lower expenses. The problem with this is that we know the US Budget and unless you cut anything from the big 3 (Defense, Social Security, Medicaid) you cannot have a balanced budget. The deficit is about ~1.75 Trillion per-year. Federal Employee Salaries is about 320 Billion/yr so you'd literally have to fire everybody and stop all non-big 3 spending (~1.5 Trillion) to have a balanced budget this way.
This is the problem, the approach is just not going to work and is going to cause a bunch of problems for the economy as it's enacted.
Car Thing was only a remote for your phone's Spotify app. It was targeted towards people that had bluetooth or aux inputs to their car's stereo, but not Apple CarPlay or Android Auto that allowed you to control Spotify directly through the radio.
I have a Car Thing for my 2015 Chevy Volt, and I really enjoyed it. For exactly the reasons you mention, it lets me control Spotify with a great UI. I can also just play my phone over Bluetooth but it's not like I can select different playlists, browse songs, etc. from my car's dashboard - all I can do is go back or forward.
I'm also surprised they're bricking Car Thing. Given how it works, I didn't realize it would even need server data in the first place.
Seriously. I don't know anything about mobile development, but once it's working in the first place, how hard is it to just NOT delete its API hooks from the codebase. As a developer, I can only guess that maybe the code which supports it, or the code where it has to poke its fingers into into in order to be able to draw its UI, is poorly-architected and removing the Car Thing code across the board will allow them to more easily refactor or something.
My guess was that it was sending back analytics which was developed in such a way that if the servers are not responsive, the thing won't work. So if they unplugged the servers, then no more working Car Things. However, I wouldn't not consider that being bricked. So maybe they plan on pushing on OTA firmware update to brick them???
What would happen if you just stored the unit so that it was not able to receive OTA updates? How long would they keep the OTA update server up and running before assuming all units were bricked and could retire that server? Does part of the bricking process collect the serial number to add to a completed list that your rogue unit would not show updated?
Just curious how far one needs to go to avoid it getting bricked if it would be possible to avoid at all
> how hard is it to just NOT delete its API hooks from the codebase.
Someone has to maintain that API. Not only on mobile, but also potentially on the server as well. Those "hooks" become a nuisance and a hindrance when services change or get deprecated. When data schemas get updated. When new data types get introduced etc.
And that's before we get into discussion about architecture, code quality etc.
Most of the things in Spotify are done through the server. There are two major reasons why:
- customer-facing reason: Spotify Connect https://support.spotify.com/us/article/spotify-connect/ We have to be able to know which device you're playing on, show it in device pickers and even let you play stuff on devices not in the same network
- second major reason: most of the decisions of what to play cannot be made on the client. This has to do with licensing and related analytics. Even different types of devices will have different licensing applied to them. So to even simply say "play next song" you have to tell the server you're going to listen to a track. And that track might not be available for the specific combination of account/device/country/phase of moon which client has no way of knowing about.
Source: I work at Spotify, but I can't answer any questions about CarThing (didn't work on it, and it would be NDA anyway)
That's one use case. The other use case is people who want a dedicated Spotify display in their car. It's especially nice in a new car because you can have your Nav or something else on your car screen and have a second display for your music. Yes, you can also use your phone for that, this is just another option.
I think it was more so for people who want a dedicated spotify app - as in they want to go through their likes, playlists and radios without using their phone.
You don’t need to cancel it. Most electromagnetic surveillance systems have detection thresholds (e.g. in radar you have distance gate and return signal filters). Same applies for magnetically activated mines. Reducing the signature below detection thresholds is often enough. Alternatively masking the signature with another signal to confuse the detector also often works well.
EDIT: on second thought, if you can build a device to generate 20T you can probably build a contraption to cancel it out as well. It would most likely boil down to the economics or the scale of the contraption required.
Is this where we’re at with AI?