For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today.
The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later.
The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot.
The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used.
Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes.
That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money.
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Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works."
And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves.
It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot.
And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do.
They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry.
And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all.
But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.
Didn't it come out that their cameras were uploading everything to the cloud even though they swore it didn't? I feel like I remember being very disappointed with Anker for something...
They own Eufy which sells cameras with main feature being “no subscription needed”, that are very unreliable and full of ads (which isn’t being advertised as much as lack of subscription). They do also go big on labelling a lot of simple features as AI where in reality it’s something as simple as “detect a person in a photo”.
I have Eufy cameras and it’s complete garbage, sadly competition is also mostly garbage.
Bold unsustainable claims at st the core of their business, it’s not just thumbnails.
I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a_rAXF_btvE to be more balanced than the LTT video, but I think it mostly depends on your expectations of the cameras. The videos themselves are stored locally, not in the cloud. But if you have thumbnails turned on in the notifications, then the thumbnails have to be stored somewhere temporarily (I think this is an Apple/Google requirement), and they're being stored on a cloud server rather than in your home network (which would require opening up a port).
Anecdotally, I've always been reasonably pleased with their products. I think I've owned a couple of powerbanks, and a USB/HDMI hub. Of the <Insert_random_smattering_of_letters> brand names on Amazon, I do tend to lean towards them a bit more.
edit: having said all of that, relating to this article, I don't want AI anywhere near the products of theirs I'm currently buying.
Anker is a brand where buying a product feels like pulling the lever on a slot machine. I'm either going to get a product that works great and I love it, or it's going to feel half-baked and fail early.
Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too.
But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame.
They're killing it.
They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.
I love my Eufy camera: no subscription fee, plug-and-play, never a problem, just a crystal clear view of my driveway with never a glitch. Cost me around $35 a couple years ago.
Did not realize the Eufy brand was affiliated with Anker. Feels like a missed opportunity, Anker has earned some goodwill from me that might sway my purchasing decisions in the home automation category
Love my Anker chargers. I like them even better than my Apple chargers now. Liked their wireless phone charger too, though the blue light on that was excessively bright. I have lots of Anker USB cables, no problems with them.
Didn't know they made Eufy. That would make me highly consider Eufy for anything.
Same. I ended up getting something called "FLANCCI LED Light Blocking Stickers" on Amazon that had some 80% light blocking circles that were just the right size. The brightness is definitely a design flaw, Anker should work on that (and maybe have the color change when charging is at 100% too).
I've been using the same Anker charger brick since 2014. It was $13.99, delivered.
It has two USB A ports. It has always charged everything at a good rate, regardless of brand, model, or age. It's reasonably-compact, the prongs (it's made for US plugs) fold for convenience when traveling, and it is UL listed.
Its present duty includes keeping an iPad running 24x7 and also charging my phone every night. It has charged my phone many thousands of times so far.
I'd update it to something newer, with USB C and USB PD and the bee's knees, but this old Anker thing is exactly the right kind of consistent and boring.
I don't think about it much because it has given me no reason to think about it.
That kind of boring behavior is remarkable, I think. So many other charging bricks I've used were just trash to use (slow or fickle, causing me to waste time with a USB power analyzer before giving up), or they died prematurely.
Same with the powered Anker USB 3.0 hubs on my desk. Those have only seen about 5 years of continuous use but so far they've been resolute in their trouble-free performance.
This stuff seems to be very much buy-once, cry-never.
Aside from that everything just works, and it has multiple ports (2 USB-C + 1 USB-A) & that build quality seems excellent... the Anker chargers I use are really small, highly portable, and they have a straight up-down design. I'm using the Nano II 65W and the 737 GaNPrime 120W.
Something like the Apple MacBook chargers assumes there's lots of space below the power outlet for the charger to hang down. But often that isn't the case in a cafe, or sometimes even an airport, where the power outlet is almost level with the base of the desk you're working at. In those cases, you can't plug a MacBook charger in directly. You could use an extension power cord, but that means you're now carrying extra cables.
With the Anker models I have, I just carry the charger itself and a short USB-C cable. The charger and cable fit into the zipper section of a small Lacdo USB Flash Drive Case I carry with me, so I have my charger & cables & USB sticks all in one small case. I usually take the 65W Nano II, which only has enough wattage for my laptop. But if I use the 737, I can charge my laptop and also charge my phone, plus maybe a Pebble watch while working.
And this is all in the size of something that's maybe half as big as my old Apple MacBook power bricks and their single USB port.
I did like how the Apple chargers had interchangeable heads for traveling overseas though. You can't do that on the Anker chargers. But the Anker ones do support international voltage, so you only need to plug a prong adapter on the end, no step-down converter or anything. I can fit an adapter for one country into my Lacdo case as well. It's nice to be able to grab just the one case and run out to the cafe when traveling.
Pretty much what one of the posters above summarized. They were one of the first aftermarket brands for phone chargers that you didn't have to worry about what protocol your phone was going to try to use for fast charging, it'd just work™ and be more affordable than OEM. Add in mostly decent build quality and they got a surprisingly strong base for it.
They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.
I didn't read the article but based on the title and subheading I assume they say "accidentally" because he was trying to reverse engineer the communication protocol to use his own device and he did not expect to find something as dumb as master credentials that would work on others' devices.
What are companies needing all of these hard drives for? I understand their need for memory, and boot. But storing text training data and text conversations isn't that space intensive. There's a few companies doing video models, so I can see how that takes a tremendous amount of space. Is it just that?
Hearing about their scrapping practises it might be that they are storing same data over and over and over again. And then yes, audio and video is likely something they are planning for or already gathering.
And if they produce lot of video, they might keep copies around.
All the latest general purpose models are multimodal (except DeepSeek I think). Transfer learning allows to improve results even after they exhausted all the text in the internet.
Everyone moved to SDDs or NVMe. If you're right, that includes manufacturers. HDDs still have advantages over SSDs for specific needs, like more reliable long-term unelectrified storage. It's also possible that the high price of SSDs made HDDs an option again.
Really if you're writing large solid files hard drives aren't that bad. If you can have the system split out one file per drive at a time then you'll avoid a lot of the fragments
Speaking from personal experience.. we treat cloud storage like an infinitely deep bucket. At rest data efficiency is not really a consideration because compute costs are so absurd. Why worry about a $2M year storage bill when your compute bill is $500M? It’s not worth the engineering time to optimize
I think the somewhat hallucinatory canned response is that they distribute data across drives for a massive throughput. Though idk if that even technically makes sense...
Problem is, once it's a trend you may be too late.
In saying that, a lot of the stocks I purchased over a year ago peaked about 3/4 months ago but have had massive sell-offs since. Still trading above what I paid so I'm considering doubling down on some as the timeframes to production are still years out.
So interesting that with this link, I saw the whole article is a couple paragraphs. With the original link, I gave up after the second ad that almost covered my whole screen on mobile. Too many ads are a terrible user experience that doesn’t let us read anything.
Something new I found - go to any link (news article) on commondreams.org in Firefox. Now use the Reader View button in your address bar - they've figured out how to hack Reader View to not show the content and only a beg screen for money.
Reader view on iOS is often a lifesaver. Some sites load the content then block it with JavaScript, but if you move to reader quickly enough, it allows a nice experience.
I just wish it automagically expanded Wikipedia headers.
Actually this stereotype is about Chinese women. Thai women aren't that materialistic, and where it is true, it only applies to poor Thai women, who are attracted to the man because he's probably 1,000X richer than her, which would be attractive to a poor woman from anywhere. If a prince from Lichenstein came to rural USA, he'd have no trouble dating.
This thread is bizarre and confusing. There's only been like 5 posts and already people are conflating rural Chinese, Singaporeans, and Thais.
"Thai women aren't that materialistic" is incongruous with the West's image of Thailand as the home of pervasive prostitution, trafficked or otherwise.
It takes only a single documentary to disprove your claim that this is just a stereotype. There are so many about cringe westerners that buy thai wives.
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