Absolutely, however that's not really going to significantly change the global energy demand. It may well eventually free up a decent amount of brainpower to more worthwhile things.
Remember though, most of HN users are funded from ad revenue
I've worked with a major retailer on similar backend systems and can echo the post above - all of them are running these systems and they almost never discuss the specifics (until someone like Walmart sues Everseen and we get a glimpse behind the curtain from the court documents).
If you go to an org's website offering these tools (eg, Everseen mentioned above, RetailNext, etc), they don't directly advertise the full breadth of their capabilities until you have them in a room for a sales pitch. They can combine multiple data streams such that an individual can be traced throughout the store via cameras, wifi, and bluetooth, which gives the retailer an opportunity to sell that information. Did a customer pause in front of the corn chips but then decide not to buy? Print them out a Frito-Lay coupon at checkout and see if you can't get them next time, and Frito-Lay will pay you to do that.
I have no first hand experience outside of North America so I won’t speculate. There is a cost of entry so you need to be moving enough volume in a market already working on razor thin margins. I’d expect that this means it’s only for the regional/national players here.
Sorry, "cost of entry" meaning that the software and the supporting hardware platforms makes it cost prohibitive for a small org that isn't moving a lot of volume from their shelves. Grocer margins are razor thin already.
More recently, TPM and the systems surrounding it are being effectively used for attestation of the entire OS and driver stack at boot time, from UEFI up to a running OS. DRM sucks, but I do appreciate having some degree of hardware-level defense against rootkits or other advanced malware.
Practically though those systems seem to be pretty weak and are always getting broken, the TPM itself is another place where malware can hide, it's not clear to me that the benefits could ever outweigh the risks.
I'd rather suspect it has a lot more to do with 40+ years of application backward compatibility and the ludicrous stack of software available for the platform.
This org has gone to some dubious lengths to make a name for themselves, including submitting backdoored packages to public npm repos which would exfiltrate your data and send to a Synk-controlled C&C. This included the environment, which would be sending them your username along with any envvars like git/aws/etc auth tokens.
This might give them some credibility in this space, maybe they stand a decent chance of scanning MCPs for backdoors based on their own experience in placing malicious code on other people's systems.
I'm not an IOS guy so I'm trying to track this - from the thread I'm to gather this allows robotic process automation on IOS which I guess isn't easy to do? I could see the use case if you're trying to build an agent that can navigate and use apps on IOS.
Here's the question - why is this difficult on IOS? What "magic" does Sky bring to the table to make this happen?
You can sometimes get a committed use discount within certain regions. Not as extreme as the EC2 discount, since S3 storage costs are honestly pretty low when you use storage classes correctly.
I do have FreeCAD Ribbon addon, but I think the rest is as is. Indeed, it is the development version and it is stable, but I'll probably switch to 1.1 stable once it is released, just so that I automatically get the package from my distro.
It's still very useful for repair techs (and I don't mean parts-swappers, I mean actual techs). This data is pretty quickly reverse engineered and shared in China, and then made available to shops through services like ZXW, WuXinJi, JCID, etc. There's an entire shadow industry around creating and then sharing schematics and PCBs for common products which might need repair.
It's not really useful for most repairs. These PCBs are very dense. The traces and even vias are buried below the surface. At best it might give them some hints about where to probe if they've never worked on that phone model before, but in a practical sense they're not going to be doing many repairs based on the schematics.
The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Most of the parts on the PCB are custom and not available for purchase separately. The passives aren't likely to be points of failure, but even when they are they're usually swapped from some other donor board rather than purchased new.
> The repair process for a modern phone involves swapping salvaged parts on to salvaged PCBs.
Right, but, knowing what the nominal in-line resistance is between any two pins on the board, will let you do some empirical tests to determine whether a given black-screen fault lies in the board itself, vs in one or more of the SMT components, no? (And so whether you should bother attempting to salvage the board, vs just scraping off the high-value parts and chucking it in the bin.)
Yes, that's what people like Louis Rossmann famously do. Apple, in turn, tries to serialise each chip and make it only boot if all the serial numbers match.
Aftermarket board and passive components; transplant the Apple chips from a damaged board. Then you don't need to cannibalise the board, you use a new one.
I assume most physical damage and corrosion etc affects the board and passive components.
Go ahead and look it up, you might be overstating the problem by a bit.