HN user
Even if you don't care at all about file sizes (which is definitely A Take), there is the whole other side of improving image quality.
Everything about computer imagery is pretty sadly limited when compared to the capabilities of human eyes and brains. And for quite some time now the ends of the pipeline (camera sensors and computer displays) have been improving, but are bottlenecked by the middle of the pipeline (image formats).
Yes, the unfortunate thing is that Google is not interested in a higher quality Web so much as they are in a Web that is cheaper to index and serve.
So it's unsurprising that they have pushed the format optimized for "as few bits as we can get away with before things like too terrible" rather than actually improving quality and extending capabilities.
I think an important driver in this is a persistent desire for (and faith in) novelty.
Every engineer has had unpleasant experiences with some giant convoluted messes. And there's a strong tendency to blame for that at the feet of the tools/stack/language of those messes, and believe that if we just choose something different, this time it will be clean and perfect.
Of course, some or all of that blame is undeserved. "Giant convoluted mess" is the state toward which every project will tend over time. But that rarely diminishes the totemic belief that new tools will produce different results, so an impetus toward novelty-for-novelty's-sake remains persistent.
Trust us.
While you should never trust any corporation in the sense that you might trust a person, you can trust that they will do the things that they believe will make them the most money.
What financial incentive do you believe that apple has to steal your fingerprints?
I think apple noticed a long time ago that the world is not exactly lacking in quantity of phone apps. If anything, the sheer number of them has become a hindrance to anyone wading through thousands of nearly identical apps to try to find the actually good one.
So if they implement policies that increase the average quality of apps and decrease the total quantity, that's an improvement for users twice over.
HN is basically anti ads. Tracking / Targeted or not. As has been the case since somewhere around 2016.
That's hardly unique to this site, and hardly as recent as 2016.
I would say that we can trace people with an understanding of technology being anti-ad back to at least 1989: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adbusters?useskin=vector
I was quite disappointed that the Photoshop generative fill stuff insists on running on Adobe's servers rather than locally. So however good it is, there are many of us who will never use it.
With SD you have a lot of control over not just basics like image size and prompt complexity, but also things like how many iterations of which different sampler(s) get used.
So speed can vary wildly depending on how you're choosing to use it. And that's without even getting into the wide variance of hardware.
But generally speaking, it will usually be significantly faster than one image per minute.
If Google forced it through but Apple refused, it would never be practical to enforce it. The numbers may not be as high, but they're plenty high enough that you couldn't cut all iDevices out.
Yes. Up until now, the amount of Google bullshit that Safari has saved us all from is _staggering._ It is unfortunate that this won't be another catastrophe deflected.
This is also why I'm concerned about legislation requiring Apple to open up sideloading onto their devices. As much as I love the idea of people having control over their own systems, in practice I'm afraid that it's just going to be the final nail that solidifies Google's complete control over the web all the way out to the client.
Whereas I feel that Desmond Tutu covered this pretty well already: "If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor."
And do you think an 80 IQ founder == 120 IQ founder all else being equal?
Musk and Bezos seem to have come to roughly similar outcomes, so evidence suggests yes.
The two scenarios are precisely symmetrical. The only difference is that the cause on one side is one that you agree with, and on the other side is one that you disagree with.
Yep! That's pretty much what agreeing or disagreeing with something means.
But the reasoning you seem to be proposing is "here is something you agree with and something you disagree with, therefore those two things are interchangeable and you should not favor one over the other."
Now what do you do? Both sides can say their cause is “advancing rights”.
I exercise human discretion and decide which of those rights is better, more valuable, more important.
In this case, that's not a tough call. Marriage provides a bunch of very concrete mechanical effects, from inheritance to medical decision making to finances to immigration. Whereas some people feeling happy about the fact that some other people can't access those rights is, at best, abstract and intangible.
And you'll also note that some of my previous references were to the uniformity of rights. Generally speaking, making rights more uniformly accessible to all people is better than having rights be selectively, arbitrarily limited to some people.
Nope! But that's because extending civil rights more uniformly to more people is a good thing, and selectively denying civil rights is a bad thing.
Any reductive moral framework that abstracts every possible political position into interchangeable spherical cows in a vacuum does a disservice to its users.
That CSAM detection method was something that apple published a whitepaper about to get feedback. The feedback was strongly negative, so they never implemented it.
I would hope that the grandparent was not referring to this thing that never existed as "the client side scanning ability that is built into the OS."
I disagree. Vehemently.
It seems disingenuous to sweep "actively working to deny people civil rights" under the rug of "having an unpopular political opinion."
Partially because this wasn't just a matter of having an opinion; this was an extremely concrete _action._ Even if you want to take the (dubious) stance that people should not be held responsible for their beliefs, surely we should still hold people responsible for their actions?
Ignoring the client side scanning ability that is built into the OS
Which client side scanning would that be?
True, but security and privacy are different things. At most, one could say that security is necessary-but-not-sufficient for privacy.
Google is generally excellent at security, but that doesn't change the fact that they're a nightmare for privacy.
"time nslookup"
Or as a slightly more thorough approach, you can use something like namebench or dnsbench:
More precisely, why 100 tabs in 1 window instead of 10 tabs times 10 windows?
I still don't understand why some people believe that the correct answer is anything other than 100 windows.
My platform has 40 years of well refined tools for managing windows, all of which work nicely and consistently across all applications. By comparison, all of the tab management systems are crude amatuerish knockoffs trying to reinvent the same tools from first principles, and isolated to a single application that's then inconsistent with everything else.
https://www.tumblr.com/foone/721395638537961472/i-see-people... remains the best take on Brave that I've seen.
"I see people talking about the Brave browser in the whole Firefox vs chrome debate, and while people rightly point out that it's just chromium and that they do shady cryptocurrency shit, I never see anyone point out that Brave's founder and CEO is Brandan Eich.
"He founded Brave after massive protests against him becoming CEO of Mozilla, resigning after 11 days. And the reason for those protests? He donated a lot of money to the Prop 8 campaign to ban gay marriage.
"So just remember: it's not just another chromium fork, it's not just a browser with cryptocurrency bullshit, it's also the browser founded by a homophobe because he got kicked out of his former organization for being a homophobe.
"Also, he invented Javascript. I'm willing to believe that maybe he has grown on the gay marriage issue, and made amends for his former mistakes. But Javascript cannot be forgiven."
That's a bit of a tenuous connection.
That decline is an anomaly. The majority of it is attributable to covid, and a significant minority attributable to fentanyl: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/nchs_press_releases/2022/...
I do agree that the "rising tide raises all boats" rhetoric is largely bunk. But I don't think that this one particular measure, taken at an anomalous time, is sound footing for a counterargument.
Yes, that famous marshmallow test has now been debunked several times from several angles. Many of them come down to the issue that the test was not measuring the participants' willpower so much as it was measuring their confidence that the test administrator would follow through on their promise.
So regardless of the validity of the method proposed here, I'd say that framing this article around references to that experiment is a mistake.
If a civilian is allowed to do it, so is a police officer.
That is often not the way it works, most especially when it comes to obtaining evidence.
If some random person breaks into your house, goes through your files until they find documentation of some crime, and then hands that over to the police, it would generally be admissible in court as evidence against you.
Whereas if the cops broke into your house and went through your files without a warrant that specifically permitted that, any evidence they acquired that way would be poisoned and inadmissible.
The problem with LCD windows like that is that they default to opaque, and require power to align the crystals to become clear.
Fine for your fancy boardroom, not so good for a vehicle when a minor hardware fault can instantly render the driver blind.
I assume that the previous commenter was referring to Google's monopolies in search, email, and video.
All of which they will use to yell at you to switch to Chrome, and will sometimes cause to actually be faster or more featureful when using Chrome rather than any other browser.
It's a pretty clear case of using your monopoly in one market to artificially prop up your entry into a different market, which is very much the sort of thing that has traditionally been frowned upon both legally and morally.
Sure, but even that cherry looks a whole lot more like the rest of the numbers I've found than the one grandparent comment offered.
The study you cite only examines the costs for cardiometabolic disease, not all healthcare costs. And then says that suboptimal diet is responsible for 18% of that specific category.
"18% of the costs of the one category most closely linked" and "5-10% of all healthcare costs" seem like plausibly compatible measures. Whereas the grandparent comment's claim remains out of synch with those by an order of magnitude.
Metabolic health is responsible for at least 3/5 of healthcare costs.
I would love to see a source for that, as it is strongly at odds with all data that I've ever seen. For example:
"Medical cost of overweight and obesity combined is approximately 5.0% to 10% of US healthcare spending." https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-789X....
"Costs attributable to overweight and obesity in Canada were $6.0 billion in 2006, with 66% attributable to obesity. This corresponds to 4.1% of the total health expenditures in Canada in 2006. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-789X....
"Costs attributable to obesity totaled US$ 269.6 million (1.86% of all expenditures on medium- and high-complexity health care)." https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
This is a notoriously difficult thing to estimate, and highly influenced by exact definitions of any given study, so some variance is to be expected. But going from around 6% to >60% seems like quite a jump.
Somewhat, yes. And not by accident.
For the last couple of decades, Google has been in an odd situation:
- They make a ridiculous amount of money.
- They already have a ridiculous amount of money, and also engineering talent and compute capacity.
- Almost all that money comes from one single revenue stream.
- That one revenue stream is very vulnerable. (If everyone in the world started using ad blockers today, Google would start going out of business tomorrow.)
So they were (and still are) extremely interested in trying to diversify that revenue. And, reasonably, tried to use those strengths to shore up those weaknesses.
That meant taking a lot of gambles on fairly wacky ideas in the hopes that at least one of them would pan out in a big way. It's honestly not very different from how a VC works, except that instead of investing naked dollars they were investing engineering time and infrastructure.
So far, none of these projects has turned into anything big enough to meaningfully diversify their business model; they are still almost exclusively an ad company. But it's probably still wise for them to keep trying.
(Source: I worked for Google for a long time.)
Flying a plane, driving a car, and probably riding a bike seem like a poor match when any system malfunction can render you instantly blind.
There might be some point in the future at which the risk/benefit tradeoff lands in favorable territory, but I wouldn't bet on it being any time soon.
Their call on the first bit, but I can assure that that your last statement is at least off by one. My budget for this year was eight figures, and extends to things like what this product appears to be.
And while I'll admit that I wouldn't make a purchasing decision based exclusively on javascript fuckery, it definitely does mean that my first impression is to doubt their technical judgment.