hendrik

Sure. I’m not entirely sure how PCIE works these days. But in it good old days we had methods to read pretty much arbitrary memory regions via PCIE or early Thunderbolt(?).

I just figured it’d be massively complicated to wait for the user to pull something on the screen, do computationally expensive OCR, some AI image detection to puzzle documents back together, and then you’d only get a fraction of what’s really stored on the computer and you’d still need a way to send that information home… When you could just pick a plethora of easy options like read all the files from the harddisk and send just them somewhere. I think it’s far more likely they do some easy and straightforward solution. And it’d be more effective as well.

Open-weight AND Open-Source??

And why the Chinese ones? Are the Americans losing the AI race?

Yes. I wouldn’t focus too much on someone being able to tell which map you’re playing, and which color your car has in Need For Speed. It’s way more unsettling what’s in networking equipment. Or inside an Intel Management Engine, and the firmware blobs of all the computer chips. Or the software running on it.

I temporarily disabled the ‘data consent’ option because I wanted to see whether […]

Well, now you know?!

(And by the way, don’t 100% rely on cloud services. Your account might get flagged for “suspicious activity”, or some other thing goes wrong and then your Google Drive is gone. Can happen any day, even without clicking on random things to see what it does. And if you do rely on suppliers for work, pick a good company. And have a (paid) contract which includes service and backups.)

Probably not allowed to transmit in most places of the world, except America.

Also got a nice Dell 7390 for a similar price a year ago. Though you really can’t compare a laptop bought in 2019 with a laptop bought 6 years in the future. You’d need to compare it to a refurbished one available for a similar price in 2019 and then factor in how that turned out for you a few years later. I mean technology always progresses and you’ll always get more a few years later. But yes, I’ve always been a fan of refurbished enterprise-grade laptops instead of the super-cheap consumer ones which include as much cost-cuttings as possible and a legacy CPU which is upmarketed because it’s cheap. I think my old desktop Celeron N4500(?) was like 40€ when it was new, because it was leftovers in production. At that point you can always buy a used processor for the same price with double the processor cores.

Correct. Why do they write “some” cooktops, though? Don’t they all buzz on a high setting? I don’t think I’ve ever seen one able to boil water within 2min which doesn’t make considerable noise while at it.

Well known in the industry how you don’t assess programmers by lines of code. You kind of want them to be efficient and clean. Spend their day thinking and design clever solutions… Not pump out lots of unmaintainable low quality stuff. And have a million lines of that by tomorrow. But yeah, guess every aspect of this aligns well. You should be using Linux by now. Or at least do the switch in the near future.

I’d say that depends on exactly what you’re trying to protect. They’re both large American companies with control over your data and your data and metadata will end up in their respective clouds. Push notifications will be handled by Google services if you use Android, but there’s an equivalent mechanism for iOS just that it uses their servers. They handle some details differently, but I don’t think any of those options deserve the word privacy.