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Hah, that's a good point. When I think of it, the first Android skins, like HTC Sense (~3.0), were quite customizable. Every widget had a few stylistic variants, and I think you could even change the look of many components in the OS. Windows was very customizable until around Vista, too. I suppose people don't buy products for their theming features anymore.

On a machine with good specs, this is perfectly fine.

I think the VMs are fine on the type of machines most people would buy for Windows/macOS. Chromebooks go exceptionally low-spec on the low-end to the point that I'd say their lowest-spec machines probably aren't direct competition for Windows laptops, wouldn't you agree?

That's a good point. And it's a noble effort by the Google Design team. Unfortunately good will and good efforts are sometimes abused.

Well done to the team for good documentation and sneaking in many good UX lessons, too.

For example:

Notifications should: Be about the user, not the product [..] Give users easy controls to opt out, Not be used to send unsolicited ads

... is really good advice lots of tech companies should use.

I don't entirely agree with other commenters saying it's uninspired. It is neutral, but many functional considerations go into making a UI framework, and neutrality serves an important purpose.

However, given Material's popularity, I think it's inevitable that poorly designed/unergonomic apps will cheapen M3 a lot in the coming years. Same as it happened with Material 2. It used to be associated with clean, professionally developed apps; then it became associated with the worst of the worst and a lot of mediocre stuff, too. Sturgeon's Law is not kind to these things.

People say more Linux availability would make it mainstream. However, Chromebooks are one of the most available laptops. The software is 100% compatible with hardware, and in many cases, the Play Store is included to address the lack of software. That is more than enough for casual computing and office work—two massive segments of the PC user market. And people still don't like them. ChromeOS's market share is similar to that of all the other Linux distributions.

I think the Windows and MacOS brands have become lifestyle choices. Windows is the "gamer" and "corporate" choice. MacOS is the "student" and "luxury" choice. Linux is the "hacker" choice (they use Arch, by the way). Like iOS vs Android, Xbox vs PlayStation, Toyota vs BMW, and all other brand tribalisms, it seems like most people are emotionally drawn to one or another.

You can buy a PC with Linux off the shelf in some countries. In practice, it's an open secret that the machines are for people who don't want to pay for a Windows license but will use Windows anyway.

I think it's a 3D visualization of Earth with simulated clouds. You can ask an AI to generate a GIS layer to visualize an event. Then, you can talk to parts of the event in chat.

Learning from copyrighted works to create new ones has never been protected by copyright

The term "learning" (I presume from "machine learning") shoulders a lot of weight. If we describe the situation more precisely, it involves commercially exploiting literature and other text media to produce a statistical corpus of texts, which is then commercially exploited. It's okay if that is licensed, but none of the AI companies bothered to license said original texts. Some (allegedly) just downloaded torrents of books, which is clear as day piracy. It has little to do with "learning" as used in common English — a person naturally retaining some knowledge of what they've consumed. Plain English "learning" doesn't describe the whole of what's happening with LLMs at all! It's a borrowed term, so let's not pretend it isn't.

What's happening is closer to buying some music cassettes, ripping parts of songs off them into various mixtapes, and selling them. The fact that the new cassettes "learned" the contents of the old ones, or that the songs are now jumbled up, doesn't change that the mixtape maker never had a license to copy the bits of music for commercial exploitation in the first place. After the infringement is done, the rest is smoke and mirrors...

All these fines are coming, but corporate lawyers stall as much as they can. Then, they appeal first-instance court decisions to stall some more. And they do get fined, 3-7 years down the road. Then, they change tactics just enough to violate a different law. If they were to change the nature of the crime more often, they'd open themselves to more prosecution.

But big tech can handle a few government penalties every decade. It even creates moat - artificial barriers to market entry. The multiplicity of penalties is insurmountable for new market entrants, but pocket change for the established ones. For example, the UK Online Safety Act is putting all the small social media sites out of business in the UK, but it won't change moderation standards at Facebook. Ergo, it has become Meta's moat. "If a fine is set for a crime, then it's only a crime for poor people".

Tech is full of clever and fast people who run circles around slow-moving government bureaucracies (even judicial). These courts need to resolve these cases every week. If it's 1 week for first-instance, 1 week for appeals, that's the pace that would stop big tech. Twenty-seven fines with a bite a year would have the intended effect.

But we're talking about a "landmark" GDPR win in this thread that took about 5 years. And the fines so far are less than 500 euros per data collector (250k euro fine / 600+ companies in IAB). It will not even warrant a footnote in GAAP financial statements at the end of the year for these companies; they'll just put it in operating expenses (along with the 1,500 euro office coffee machine, 3x more expensive than the privacy violations). A small blogger collecting analytics data incorrectly may not have much to eat in the month they get fined 500 euros (not that they will have had much to eat in the months of expensive court proceedings), but of course, they also risk the full extent of the penalties.

I’m sure some grifters won’t get their second Mercedes, but sites with no context and just ads disappearing would be a wonderful, almost dream-like outcome for the internet. It might even solve the dead internet problem to a degree.

There’s no way the advertising industry giants will let it happen. But the thought alone clearly illustrates the damaging effects of advertising.

That’s understood.

But is 250k euros an appropriate fine for the personally identifiable information that’s been collected and associated with behavioural metrics, political preferences, confidential health data, and other private data points by the 600+ companies that make up IAB and their partners?

This is less than 500 euros per company. They probably pay more each month to host the illegally collected data.

And they probably have the data for millions of EU citizens. Maybe a billion+ profiles worldwide. Granted, the numbers are pulled out of thin air, but what’s a reasonable estimate if not that?

Unless I’m misunderstanding…

250k euros for an association of 600+ advertising agencies (IAB) is an exceedingly cheap cost of doing business.

As I always say, you can’t outlaw being an asshole. But I am curious about what sort of assholery we will see next. Maybe all tracking will become “legitimate interest” (I’m kidding, please don’t actually entrench that garbage any more than it already is).

Every two months, “Half-Life 3” flashed on the screen.

The humans have invented Tyler McVicker.

It's missing a dash of contemplative philosophical anxiety for a proper Ted Chiang story. But close, indeed.

That's true for large urban areas like Oslo. However, the small tourist towns in Vestlandet, Norway, have some shuttle-sized hop-on-hop-off buses. Or at least had them when I last lived there circa 2016. And in Klaipėda, Lithuania, the mini-buses are regulated and integrated into the public transit system. Where there isn't a large urban transit demand, these mini-buses serve a meaningful function.

I think the circumstance that they pop up "when public transport sucks" is seen more in the US. Jitneys are considered "paratransit" there — fundamentally a substitute. In many Eastern European countries, a common issue was that marshrutki cannibalized existing public transport options by duplicating routes (more on that in the Wiki article I linked in my parent comment). They compete more as equals, not fill an under-served market niche.

By the way, a marshrutka serves one of the last NATO-Russia routes[0]; a very meaningful route in both public transit and diplomatic, cultural contexts. I will concede to you that this is a case of "public transport sucks" to the highest degree, on a global scale.

These route taxis are very versatile, and the diversity of how they are used and their relationships with public transport is huge.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GIxov7xVxo

Many cities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia have (or used to have) Marshrutki[0]. These mini-buses and passenger vans don't stop at bus stops but where they are flagged down. You press a button where you want to be let off.

I say some cities used to have them, not because they went out of fashion (though sometimes they did), but because a Marshrutka is a specific type of passenger van, usually an old one not subject to modern safety requirements for economic reasons. Many of the companies operating them have modernized, and they have low-floor accessible shuttle-style buses with air bags and seat belts, including for disabled people, but they still go their route, can be waved down to pick you up, and drop you off when you ask.

There has never been a similar mode of transport in any Western country I've lived in, though I have heard rumors, and apparently, some US states have/had jitneys. Norway may also have something similar in the western tourist towns, because I found buses drop you off where you ask. But perhaps it's a courtesy. UK companies have made some similar efforts[1]. Generally, such mini-buses are not needed in urban areas. But there are areas where either super quick travel from point A to point B is essential and walking to and from a bus stop is unacceptable (airport-rail links and similar), or where there isn't enough demand to run a proper bus service. These could benefit from a taxi bus approach.

Anyway, Marshrutki and their contemporary counterparts address all the issues you've listed.

P.S. The solution for scheduling is the free market. Operators compete for customers, flooding the streets[2] during relevant hours. There may be 20 uncoordinated mini-bus operators, but for the user, the overall experience is that they usually have to wait only a few minutes along the route before waving one down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-44614616

[2] https://www.alamy.com/fixed-route-taxi-minibuses-move-along-...

I was under the impression WiFi Calling was just regular phone service through WiFi. It seems to work that way for me, 2FA codes and all.

The dad’s photo in the end in SDR looks so much better on a typical desktop IPS panel (Windows 11). The HDR photo looks like the brightness is smushed in the most awful way. On an iPhone, the HDR photo is excellent and the others look muted.

I wonder if there’s an issue in Windows tonemapping or HDR->SDR pipeline, because perceptually the HDR image is really off.

It’s more off than if I took an SDR picture of my iPhone showing the HDR image and showed that SDR picture on the said Windows machine with an IPS panel. Which tells me that the manual HDR->SDR “pipeline” I just described is better.

I think Windows showing HDR content on a non-HDR display should just pick an SDR-sized section of that long dynamic range and show it normally. Without trying to remap the entire large range to a smaller one. Or it should do some other perceptual improvements.

Then again, I know professionally that Windows HDR is complicated and hard to tame. So I’m not really sure the context of remapping as they do, maybe it’s the only way in some contingency/rare scenario.

HDR is when you’re watching a dark film at night, looking at the subtle nuances between shades of dark and black in the shadows on the screen, making out the faint contours the film director carefully curated, and the subtitles gently deposit 40W of light into your optical nerves with “♪”.

Not everyone wants the cheapest, but lemons fail and collapse the expensive part of the market with superior goods.

To borrow your example, it's as if Mercedes started giving every 4th customer a Lada instead (after the papers are signed). The expensive Mercedes market would quickly no longer meet the luxury demand of wealthy buyers and collapse. Not the least because Mercedes would start showing super-normal profits, and all other luxury brands would get in on the same business model. It's a race to the bottom. When one seller decreases the quality, so must others. Otherwise, they'll soon be bought out, and that's the best-case scenario compared to being outcompeted.

There is some evidence that the expensive software market has collapsed. In the 00s and 90s, we used to have expensive and cheap video games, expensive and cheap video editing software, and expensive and cheap office suites. Now, we have homogeneous software in every niche — similar features and similar (relatively cheap) prices. AAA game companies attempting to raise their prices back to 90s levels (which would make a AAA game $170+ in today's money) simply cannot operate in the expensive software market. First, there was consumer distrust due to broken software, then there were no more consumers in that expensive-end market segment.

Hardware you mention (iPhones, Androids, Macs, PCs) still have superior and inferior hardware options. Both ends of the market exist. The same applies to most consumer goods - groceries, clothes, shoes, jewelry, cars, fuel, etc. However, for software, the top end of the market is now non-existent. It's gone the way of expensive secondary market (resale) cars, thanks to how those with hidden defects undercut their price and destroyed consumer trust.

There are many behavioral economics ideas about smartphone choices. There are various psychological aspects, such as lifestyle, status, social and personal values, and political influences. That is all true.

The strongest decider for whether a good will show positive or negative elastic demand (and be considered superior or inferior) is probably how it's branded, pricing strategy included. For example, wealthy people shop in boutiques more than large retail centers, though the items sold are often sourced from the same suppliers. The difference? Branding, including pricing.

You're right about basic goods, such as groceries. Especially goods that are almost perfectly identical and freely substitutable, like milk. What's a superior or inferior good becomes hard to guess when there is a high degree of differentiation (as you say, ecosystems, cameras, security). It's easier to measure than predict.

Anyway, this is all a "fun fact." My original comment really does make the assumption that software, which is relatively substitutable, is like the milk example — the price and the inferiority/superiority are strongly correlated. And the entire expensive software market has collapsed like the expensive secondary market for used cars.

I mean "inferior good" as a macroeconomics term: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/inferior-good.asp. And the point of my comment is to show that product quality alone doesn't determine whether it's an inferior good.

By the way, inferior goods are not necessarily poor-quality products, though there is a meaningful correlation, and I based my original comment on it. Still, a OnePlus Android phone is considered an inferior good; an iPhone (or a Samsung Galaxy Android phone) is considered superior. Both are of excellent quality and better than one another in key areas. It's more about how wealth, brand perception, and overall market sentiment affect their demand. OnePlus phones will be in more demand during recessions, and demand for iPhones and Samsung Galaxys will decrease.

No objection to your use/non-use of the Market for Lemons label. Just wanted to clarify a possible misconception.

P.S. Apologies for editing this comment late. I thought the original version wasn't very concise.

I don’t think this leads to market collapse

You must have read that the Market for Lemons is a type of market failure or collapse. Market failure (in macroeconomics) does not yet mean collapse. It describes a failure to allocate resources in the market such that the overall welfare of the market participants decreases. With this decrease may come a reduction in trade volume. When the trade volume decreases significantly, we call it a market collapse. Usually, some segment of the market that existed ceases to exist (example in a moment).

There is a demand for inferior goods and services, and a demand for superior goods. The demand for superior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes wealthier, and the demand for inferior goods generally increases as the buyer becomes less wealthy.

In this case, wealthier buyers cannot buy the superior relevant software previously available, even if they create demand for it. Therefore, we would say a market fault has developed as the market could not organize resources to meet this demand. Then, the volume of high-quality software sales drops dramatically. That market segment collapses, so you are describing a market collapse.

There’s probably another name for this

You might be thinking about "regression to normal profits" or a "race to the bottom." The Market for Lemons is an adjacent scenario to both, where a collapse develops due to asymmetric information in the seller's favor. One note about macroecon — there's never just one market force or phenomenon affecting any real situation. It's always a mix of some established and obscure theories.

You are right, but you picked a game by a studio known for its technical expertise, with plenty of points to prove about quality game development. I'd like them to be the future of this industry.

But right now, 8-9/10 game developers and publishers are deeply concerned with cash and rather unconcerned by technical excellence or games as a form of interactive art (where, once again, Guerrilla and many other Sony studios are).

I guess some sandwiches are made in a way that has awful long-term health consequences, if we were to overanalyze it...

That's true. I meant it in a broader sense. Quality = {speed, function, lack of bugs, ergonomics, ... }.

There are many exceptions.

1. Sometimes speed = money. Being the first to market, meeting VC-set milestones for additional funding, and not running out of runway are all things cheaper than the alternatives. Software maintenance costs later don't come close to opportunity costs if a company/project fails.

2. Most of the software is disposable. It's made to be sold, and the code repo will be chucked into a .zip on some corporate drive. There is no post-launch support, and the software's performance after launch is irrelevant for the business. They'll never touch the codebase again. There is no "long-term" for maintenance. They may harm their reputation, but that depends on whether their clients can talk with each other. If they have business or govt clients, they don't care.

3. The average tenure in tech companies is under 3 years. Most people involved in software can consider maintenance "someone else's problem." It's like the housing stock is in bad shape in some countries (like the UK) because the average tenure is less than 10 years. There isn't a person in the property's owner history to whom an investment in long-term property maintenance would have yielded any return. So now the property is dilapidated. And this is becoming a real nationwide problem.

4. Capable SWEs cost a lot more money. And if you hire an incapable IC who will attempt to future-proof the software, maintenance costs (and even onboarding costs) can balloon much more than some inefficient KISS code.

5. It only takes 1 bad engineering manager in the whole history of a particular piece of commercial software to ruin its quality, wiping out all previous efforts to maintain it well. If someone buys a second-hand car and smashes it into a tree hours later, was keeping the car pristinely maintained for that moment (by all the previous owners) worth it?

And so forth. What you say is true in some cases (esp where a company and its employees act in good faith) but not in many others.