BMW's subscriptions for heated seats already installed in your car are the poster child for enshittification. The damn heating elements are already in the car, that I paid (usually a lot of money) for, and now you want me to pay you a monthly fee to unlock their use??? Get fucked is what most people said to that and BMW heard us loud and clear. According to a BMW board member, "people feel that they paid double — which was actually not true, but perception is reality, I always say. So that was the reason we stopped that". Good stuff, but subscriptions aren't going away for BMW (or carmakers in general). BMW will focus on "software and service-related products" like driving assistance and functions that require data transmission.
Anthropic, the AI company Google has thrown their weight behind in a manner akin to Microsoft's lovefest with OpenAI, have released Claude Pro for US$20/m. It is basically ChatGPT, but with a "100,000-token context window, which means it can process about 75,000 words at once", which means "Claude can analyse longer documents or hold longer conversations without losing its memory of the subject at hand. ChatGPT can only process about 8,000 tokens in GPT-4 mode". That said, it appears to have a stronger "morality filter" (Anthropic is more afraid of negative PR) and suffers from more frequent hallucinations (i.e: making shit up) than ChatGPT. Meanwhile, ChatGPT's monthly active user count is still dropping despite US kids going back to school after their summer break.
This story is for those reading with kids in primary school - Roblox's developer conference took place over the weekend and there is stuff you might want to be aware of. First up, it's getting a video chat feature called Roblox Connect that "lets you chat with other people as your Roblox avatar, and your avatar will be able to mimic your real-life facial movements. The call will also take place in a shared virtual space that you can run around in, like a campsite or a dock". It's also getting a PlayStation version (damned if I thought there wasn't one already!) and they want to enable a "dating experience" and "real life relationships" for its 17+ verified adult users.
Rode has some new wireless microphones, the Wireless Pro. There's nothing particularly amazing about them if you discount the fact that the entire concept of a wireless microphone is fucking magic, but these new ones have 32-bit float recording. If you're unfamiliar with 32-bit audio, it's kinda amazing. Normally you'd have to set the gain on a mic prior to recording and if it's too high or too low, you've fucked it and it's tough or impossible to fix later. With 32-bit recording, there's so much dynamic range in the recording that if you do set the gain incorrectly, it's easy to normalise later. This video from Rode explains it well. It's not exclusive to Rode, other audio recorders from Zoom and Tascam support 32-bit float audio too, but this is the first Rode product to have it.
Advertisement for Visa in Wired's December 1996 magazine. (warmidge / Internet Archive)
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