rrrrrrrrrrrryan

Tangentially related anecdote: I used to break tons of stuff all the time (my whole family growing up did), and I just assumed that all things just have finite lifespans, until I started dating someone who's tremendously careful and called me out on it. Then for a long time I just assumed I was a clumsier than average person.

Then eventually I finally was forced to admit that I'd just been choosing to move about the world as a bit of a careless brute who treats my things with disrespect, and by being more intentional with the way I move about the world, all my stuff suddenly lasts 10x longer.

Interestingly, I'm not sure it's worth the trade-off, but it's been kind of wild to experience.

More often than not these are usually cheap Chinese devices that are expecting a USB-C to USB-A (power-only) cable, because they're actually USB-A devices, with USB-A circuitry, modified slightly to appear as if they're USB-C.

Basically they skipped out on building power negotiation smarts that are required to support real USB-C charging, and instead just swapped out the physical connector.

Eh it's partially true - the browsers on phones needed to get better as well.

Zuckerberg famously made the Facebook apps basically just a responsive webpage under the belief that maintaining one codebase for all platforms would be best.

The performance on mobile was so terrible that Instagram started eating his lunch simply by maintaining native mobile apps that are actually performant, and Zuckerberg was forced to panic purchase Instagram (made by a team of 13 people) for a billion dollars.

Eventually phones got more powerful and mobile web browsers got good enough that PWAs could perform comparably to native apps, but it was too late, and Apple and Google had absolutely zero interest in promoting something that would damage their app store / play store revenue.

Executive level non-competes are probably the most damaging for the overall economy though.

If there's a market-dominating company, and execs are allowed to leave said company, start a competitor, get some investor dollars behind them, then start poaching employees from the old company, the market can have a really viable competitor quite quickly.

Without that ability, little monopolies spring up throughout the economy and use their size to crush upstarts, under-compensate their employees, overcharge their customers, and squeeze their suppliers.

Banning non-competes is an absolute requirement for free-market capitalism to function properly.

I wonder if Firefox is a better user agent string for bots or AI?

Or perhaps some big IT departments are switching the employee base from Chrome to Firefox because it now has better ad blockers?

A mass of end-users switching browsers on their phones or home computers doesn't seem to line up with the reality that I'm living in though, though.

There's a strong argument to be made that the banning of non-competes is the main reason California is the software capital of the world.

In Japan, if you get on a 1 hour train just before midnight, the printed ticket will say something like "23:05" for the embarkment time, and "24:05" for the disarmament. Same date for both - the clocks can just go beyond 24 hours.

Spend enough time out late in Japan, and you'll see hour 24, 25, even 26.

Yeah Steve Jobs was deeply frustrated with Obama when he got to meet him. Jobs hated unions, and felt like the Obama administration was not business friendly enough. He also felt the Obama administration was too reluctant to offend people.

He didn't live long enough to become the bad guy, but if he were alive today, I think there's a near-zero percent chance he'd support Clinton or Biden over Trump in either of those elections.

with short selling in public markets being possible, an accurate price will be established very quickly

It'll be virtually impossible to short sell the stock within the first month due to lockups, and it'll take 180 days for all the pools to be available: then, we'll have a more-or-less "accurate" price, as you put it.

In San Diego we're voting on a new property tax that only applies to nonprimary residences.

The landed gentry want you to believe that they can't be touched unless you're willing to kick your grandmother to the street, but we can absolutely write taxes that apply more narrowly, and sensible tax policy leads to better outcomes and fewer market distortions than hamfisted regulation.

Apple ultimately developed their own map application specifically because Google was unwilling to remove the Google logo from the Google Maps app, no matter the price.

It'll absolutely be interesting to see if "Google" or "Gemini" appear anywhere in the new Siri UI.

Something nobody's talking about

Nobody is talking about this because it's not a thing.

People here will shit on LLMs all day for being confidently incorrect, then upvote aggressively financially illiterate comments like this.

This is true for amateurs encoding video files to be pirated, but for the mega corps, sending more bits costs more money.

Many years ago, I had a couple drinks with a guy from Netflix who worked on their video compression processes, and he fully convinced me they're squeezing every last drop out of every bit they send down the pipes. The quality is not great compared to some other streaming services, but it's actually kind of amazing how they're able to get away with serving such tiny files.

Anyway, I think we can expect these companies to mostly max out the resultant video quality of their bitstreams, and showing the average bitrate of their pricing tiers would be a great yardstick for consumers.

Honestly, it used to be worse. I remember when 16:9 TVs were new, people would often stretch the aspect ratio of 4:3 content because they "don't like the black bars."

300k hours = 8 hrs per day, every day, for 102 years.

Worcestershire sauce is also considered a descendent of the fish sauces from ancient Rome.

Early twenties family formation bring the norm was more of a postwar thing. The guys that came back from the war really did have to grow up fast (seeing your best friends getting blown up at 18 will do that), and they essentially had zero desire to have racous twenties filled with dating around and traveling and soul searching. They'd had enough chaos already, and were all extremely eager to settle down into a peaceful family life immediately upon their return home. The age of family formation has slowly crept back upward since then, and historically, in normal peaceful times it's usually been late twenties.

Homicidal?

It's telling that you completely forgot HomePod.

Arguably their most AI-centric product line to date, and also their largest flop in recent history.

I played with a few alternative keyboard layouts in high school, and I can say from personal experience that it's surprisingly easy to adapt to a one handed mirror layout. You just hold a designated modifier key with your thumb then the whole keyboard flips. Took just a couple days to get to like 80% of my normal typing speed.

Don't the Beats earbuds have literally the exact the same chipsets and speaker drivers as airpods, but play way nicer with Androids?

I know that used to be the case a few years ago at least, but I'm not sure if it's still true.

Yes, these sorts of compensation features have become common on higher end headphones.

One example:

The crossfeed feature is great for classic tracks with hard-panned mixes. It takes instruments concentrated on one channel and balances them out, creating a much more natural listening experience — like hearing the track on a full stereo system.

https://us.sennheiser-hearing.com/products/hdb-630

Tim Cook'd

Do you smoke weed? It's well known that THC use causes dreamless sleep.

Wow, this video literally answers all the speculation and discussion in this thread.

Remember Quibi? It was a streaming platform of TV shows, where they were filmed in portrait mode instead of landscape, and the episodes were 5 minutes instead of 30.

Their pitch was basically: "Nobody has time to sit down and watch a whole TV show anymore, that's why the short form content like Instagram and TikTok is doing so well - we're going to make TV shows to compete with those platforms that you can watch while you're waiting in line for a coffee!"

They got like billions of dollars in runway because the idea resonated so deeply with the boardrooms full of executives that they were pitching to, but the idea was completely dead on arrival. Normal (non-career-obsessed) people actually have a TON of free time. They chain-smoke entire seasons of shitty reality TV in one sitting. They plop down on the weekend and watch sports for hours on end, not on a phone, but on an actual TV in their living room.

I definitely agree that a ton of these AI use cases seem hyper-tailored to the executives running these companies and the investors that are backing them, and may not resonate at all with the broader population nor lead to widespread adoption.

But to be accepted by people, it has to be better than humans in the specific ways that humans are good at things. And less bad than humans in the ways that they're bad at things.

When automated solutions fail in strange alien ways, it understandably freaks people out. Nobody wants to worry about if a car will suddenly serve into oncoming traffic because of a sensor malfunction. Comparing incidents-per-miles-driven might make sense from a utilitarian perspective, just isn't good enough for humans to accept replacement tech psychologically, so we do have to chase those 9s until they can handle all the edge cases at least as well as humans.

There's a new theory that we might actually gain a greater understanding of the human mind by studying the AI systems we create, because we can basically get a perfect X-ray of their neural nets at any particular state.

When we look at the "apple zone" part of an AI model that lights up, we see it in way higher resolution than our best scans of the human brain, and this might tell us something about how apples are perceived by both systems, or how language is represented neurally, or any number of other things.

the QA of car battery manufacturing is causing electric fleets of cars in parking lots to burn

I've seen a lot of grumbling on this site about why the U.S. doesn't have access to cheap EVs like China, but it's almost entirely because the cheap EVs that China is pumping out aren't even close to being up to the U.S.'s stringent safety standards.

Eventually they will be safe enough, and they will also be more expensive.

I work for a medical device manufacturer, and software absolutely can be designed to be just as reliable as physical systems, but the development and testing process looks completely different than a developing a mobile app. Things slow WAY down: if you want to change one line of code, it'll take literally weeks before it makes it to a production environment because of all the testing, documentation, justification, and human approvals. I imagine flight safety systems are subject to a similar level of rigor.