But the iPad is not a console … it doesn’t even do Steam. All that horsepower to play … a couple of forever titles and that’s it.
I have the M1 iPad Air and it has never used that processor to its fullest. I think iPad is just an odd device for most people
People are bad with scale, everyone thinks moves make a lot of money. They really don't.
Just Gaming in general made something like $200 BILLION in revenue in 2025. Movies made ... $33B globally.
And of that $200B, mobile games were over half.
If the average HN'er would just think of the money they spend on their hobbies (or don't it usually doesn't end well =P) and now apply that to mobile games. They're a hobby or a way to relax for millions and millions of people.
They pay for the "predatory IAPs" because they consider the $10 spent a good investment on the fun they're having in the game they play.
There's a specific group of people who just have the mindset of "never pay real money for anything in a game" - I'm one of them. But even I have to admit that I'm in the minority.
Exactly. They read headlines like "Game X did 100 MILLION revenue in 2025!" and think that's a lot, meanwhile mobile games nobody's even heard of do 20x that.
But I'd argue that the demographics for "people that read gaming news websites" and "people that play and pay for lucrative mobile games" hardly overlap.
On the go video / photo editing is AMAZING on my iPad! More power speeds up some the effects / transition editing. Batch processing, all with a device that has great battery life and is smaller than a magazine. For super heavy stuff, sure, use my Mac, but when I travel and want to be productive on the go, the iPad is awesome!
But that's the thing, most "gamers" aren't the ones that games that normally on Steam are targeting. Mobile Gaming is almost double the size of Console Gaming by revenue. Some people just like having a huge screen for their games.
I've found a tablet convenient in 3 situations: Watching video, reading ebooks or displaying sheet music. (And a single tablet is rarely very good for more than 2 of these at a time.) Otherwise it's either too cumbersome or the I/O is too useless.
This is a very naive take - the iPad and iPhone are both multibillion gaming devices, and to dismiss it is short-sighted.
I'd even claim (but can't look up statistics due to a restrictive company network) that singular mobile games like Honor of Kings generate more revenue than 95% of Steam games. Yet a lot of people that style themselves gamers (like myself) never even heard of it.
I do wonder about this too… I'm cutting 4K video and doing SwiftUI development on an M1 MacBook Air. My current plan is to upgrade next year, but only if they upgrade the screen. An M4 seems like a dramatic over-spec for a tablet.
Yeah, maybe I'm too much of a "real gamer" but my iPad sits unused. The quality (and greediness!) of games on the iOS App Store is often worse than the direct-download console slop.
This just means I'm going to say microslop in random places - documents, slides, emails and Teams chats. "Copilot 365" is welcome to give me a red squigly all it wants.
Feel free to say microslop as much as possible, but it should be noted that many people will automatically dismiss your opinion when you do. I don't know if I agree with doing so or not, but it is more common than you'd think. And no, they aren't just microsoft shills.
Both their stances are flawed because their ethics apparently end at the border - none of them have a problem being unethical internationally (all the red lines talk is about what they don’t want to do in the us)
I don’t think deploying “80% right” tools for mass surveillance (or anything that can remotely impact human life) counts as lawful in any context.
Just because the US currently lacks a functioning legislative branch doesn’t magically make it OK when gaps in the law are reworded into “national security”
The tools are not good enough to be ethically deployed, least of all for surveillance.
Just because Congress is failing to do its job doesn’t mean the executive branch should simply do what it wants under the guise of “national security.”
I think there's a notable distinction between "domestic mass-surveillance" and use in international intelligence gathering.
The poster said:
> Both their stances are flawed because their ethics apparently end at the border
It seems like Anthropic is ethically concerned about use of autonomous weapons anywhere, and by surveillance by a country against its own citizens. Countries spy on each other a lot, but the ethical implications and risks of international spying are substantially different vs. a country acting against its own citizenry.
Therefore, I think Anthropic's stance is A) ethically consistent, and B) not artificially constrained to the US (doesn't "end at the border"). There's room for disagreement and criticism, but I think this particular hyperbole is invalid.
Some people feel that mass surveillance is wrong whether it is domestic or not. For those people, being ok with mass surveillance as long that it is not done to your kind is a morally wrong stance.
No other country should dictate what our military is or is not allowed to do. As they say all is fair in love and war, and if we want to break some international treaty that is our choice to do so. Both are based of domestic decisions of what should be allowed.
Your assistant can literally be told what to do and how to hide it from you. I know security is not a word in slopware but as a high-level refresher - the web is where the threats are.
It's in a pod with zero permissions, secrets or access to the local network. It's also restarted daily incase somehow someone manages to escape a browser.
Yeah, I was going to come here to say this. Apart from a) stars are a dubious metric b) 5000 stars is an insanely high bar, there is the issue that there are definitely lots of projects that choose not to partake in GitHub at this point.
That said, they do have a "contact us" line in there which implies some flexibility.
You can easily buy stars in bulk, like you can buy social media “likes” so they are kind of measuring the wrong thing and incentivizing the wrong behaviors.
No, it’s up to the government to create policy and legislation that outlines what is lawful or not and install mechanisms to monitor and regulate usage.
The fact that an arm of the government wants to go YOLO mode is merely a symptom of the deeper problem that this government is currently not effectual.
YOLO here refers to unsafe usage of LLMs. Your government is supposed to make legislation that protects all of its citizens, it’s not “what you agree with” game.
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