speak_plainly

Rest in Peace, John.

It looks like Adam Curry and John’s wife Mimi will be hosting an episode of No Agenda tomorrow to share stories and anecdotes in remembrance.

https://mailchi.mp/nashownotes/rip-jcd-no-agenda-newsletter?...

It feels like AI is going to be the end of Google. The post-Schmidt company culture cannot produce consistent, consumer-friendly products that any sane person would want to use consistently.

This is a good thing for travellers.

In border security there are generally two camps, one that uses data and intelligence to go after the worst, large-scale criminal operations and networks, and generally makes travelling easy for the average person, and the other is like traditional cops using traditional tactics… the kind that will miss the person smuggling a kilogram of cocaine in their suitcase but will go after the old man who didn’t declare a pair of socks he bought on a trip. They generally make travel awful.

Support the intelligence-driven side of border security and reject the traditional cop camp.

Thanks for all the links, I love feeding my RSS reader.

I really like this: http://blog.beforemario.com updates are rare these days, but they cover Nintendo corporate history and products before the company got into video games.

I wonder what Jony Ive is thinking about his partnership at the moment.

I share your sentiment. I'm still paying for Gemini but it's almost useless to me. Google has some serious internal problems. Perhaps Gemini is merely being plagued by aggressive cost controls, or perhaps there are deeper flaws in Google’s approach. Either way, I can't trust NotebookLM with serious work and have stopped using it.

Apple is placing a major bet on Google and Gemini for iOS 27. If Gemini's decline is any indication of what's to come, Apple could be in serious trouble in six month's time.

If you were being fair, designers typically don't decide the website strategy or write the copy. Ente's site seems heavily optimized for a search-driven funnel – they are targeting people explicitly searching for 'photo storage.' When that's your primary acquisition channel, you can afford to be less pedantic about copy variety. They keep the copy incredibly sparse and let the context do the heavy lifting, there is also no need to repeat descriptions on-site when that context is already handled by the search description and App Store links. When people arrive on the site, they know what they've found.

In terms of the design, they cut through a lot of the bullshit developers and designers do on the web. The execution is great and there are a lot of high-fidelity details: the scale is on point, the text hierarchy is great, the use of colour is smart, it has a fantastic, almost brochure-like layout, and generally, the design is consistent throughout and plays an important role in customer experience and branding their product.

You're not their customer, they're not targeting Hacker News as a potential sales funnel. If your takeaway is the design team isn't interested in the product, I hope to God you don't work in web.

I spend my days yelling at various AI agents for lying, misunderstanding, or misrepresentation of facts. It feels like a modern spiritual process.

Kinda unrelated, but the art direction on Ente's site is really top-notch.

That would be ideal, but I think we're heading straight for Idiocracy's 'Ow! My Balls'.

It's crazy that they sort of deprecated chat in the new ChatGPT app.

Yeah I think the absence of problems is one way to think about it but it's closer to half the equation.

Quality is a set of characteristics that are ultimately decided by the user, and not every user will agree on what those characteristics should be. This is why user testing of all sorts is very valuable.

You have to go back to Walter Shewhart's work and writings while at Bell Labs. In 1931's 'Economic Control of Quality of a Manufactured Product' he draws a line between 'a thing' and the human experience of it, drawing heavily from the philosophy of C.I. Lewis:

"There are two common aspects of quality: one of them has to do with the consideration of the quality of a thing as an objective reality independent of the existence of man. The other has to do with what we think, feel or sense as a result of the objective reality. In other words, there is a subjective side of quality."

He draws a line between objective quality (the measurable, physical things) and subjective quality (the human relationship to those properties).

Later in 1939's 'Statistical Method from the Viewpoint of Quality Control' he gives a good example:

"Let us take a very simple example. Suppose we consider the quality of a glass of water. We may list some of its characteristics as follows: temperature, volume, chemical purity, taste, clarity, and color. If we look at any one of these characteristics, say temperature, we see that it is impossible to specify the temperature of a glass of water to the last degree of accuracy."

I would argue this is the standard to go for when looking for a definition. Ask yourself what makes a quality glass of water and you'll immediately realize you need to ask 'according to who?'.

You do realize that propositional logic, set theory, and mapping the limits of formal systems are philosophy, right? You're literally describing mathematical logic and philosophy of language.

The damage is done. The truly jarring realization isn't that AI companies made these predictions, but how eagerly countless corporations were willing to sacrifice their own people in pursuit of profit – even at the cost of economic collapse.

What I mean by "interactive Hollywood" is a game with a $200M+ budget that relies entirely on high-fidelity graphics and cinematic stories to differentiate itself, while offering almost zero new gameplay innovation.

Neither of your examples fit that description. Metroid Prime 4 wasn't chasing Hollywood cinematic design; it was a highly targeted attempt by producer Kensuke Tanabe to make a tight, isolated first-person exploration formula resonate (especially in Japan where it has consistently failed). Its goals are mechanical, not cinematic. Meanwhile, Star Fox is a classic arcade rail-shooter remake with modernized cutscenes, not a prestige movie-game. Early sales data shows it's actually working well, too, having just debuted at #1 on the physical charts in Japan and nearly doubling Star Fox Zero's launch week in the UK.

Ultimately, Nintendo operates like a Consumer Packaged Goods company. They treat their library of IPs like a diversified product portfolio rather than betting the farm on individual interactive movies. They use massive, high-margin, mechanics-first games like Tomodachi Life and Pokopia to generate enormous cash reserves. They then use those profits to subsidize legacy IPs like Metroid or Star Fox to keep core fans happy and feed their broader brand ecosystem. Because Nintendo spreads its risk across a wide spectrum of lower-budget games, they can easily absorb a minor product flop. Sony's interactive Hollywood model sinks $300M into a single basket, meaning one bad miss can completely wreck a studio.

At some point, the games industry decided it wanted to be interactive Hollywood, and the consequences are entirely predictable. Meanwhile, Nintendo just quietly shipped 3.8 million units of Tomodachi Life in two weeks, and 4 million of Pokopia in five. They're making actual games. Sony's obsession with prestige cinematic bloat, like Xbox, has also put them in a slow-motion death spiral that's going to become painfully obvious in a few years.

Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.

Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.

It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.

Medieval grifts are back. We urgently need a modern Jack and the Beanstalk movie.

The author is making a big mistake by making a normative claim about 'true' intelligence and consciousness.

Is there a correct way to cognize? And although he feels cognizing works in a very specific direction, his brain is basically doing a very similar guessing game on a deep level with training of pathways that started at birth. Basing the argument in a feeling about consciousness is not convincing.

The author thinks they are describing a unique human magic, forgetting Augustine's insight that human thought doesn't precede the word, but is brought into consciousness by it.

This is true. While Humboldt designed the overarching structure of the school, Johann Gottlieb Fichte argued that Prussia lost to Napoleon because they were too individualistic and was able to influence ideas of early education in those schools. The aim, through Fichte, became a system designed to break parental bonds, who he believed filled kids heads with selfish, private interests, and in turn, the goal of education was to develop children into workers and soldiers. Fichte famously suggested that a proper education should destroy a student's free will so thoroughly that they could never choose to do anything other than what the state required.

I think the technology industry has a long track record of selling false promises, dead ends, and over-hyped solutions.

AI is an interesting experiment with some real-world applications, but it’s no tractor or mechanical loom... not yet, at least, and it’s far from clear that it ever will be.

As things stand today, AI is not the future. It’s a tool with genuine uses that is being marketed as a revolution.

It's weird that a company can hype investors with bombastic AI announcements on one end to get some boost in value and then on the other end divvy out those results like they're in the Great Depression. Gemini and AI Overviews feel like they're running on war-time rations half the time. Hey investors, start to get worried because this may not end well if all consumers are lied to constantly and pissed off. I say this as someone who just bought a Google Home Speaker.

Governments are casting a wide a net but it all seems aimed at a foreign influence and espionage Cold War going on. The thought of using this for crime in most countries is tertiary and the real reasons for implementing these systems are so embarrassing to their respective governments that they will rarely mention what's actually going. In Canada there has been two recently large omissions, one is the Chinese government influencing Canadian elections and the other was Indian spies killing Indian immigrants on Canadian soil. Maybe this will all result in mission creep, but the upside will be getting to pay for things with your face.

Google seems to be filled with really talented people, technology, and every resource anyone would ever need, but their execution and management seems to be severely lacking. This account is a pretty damning indictment of Google.

Look at the entire Bard-to-Gemini launch, and from my experience, Gemini's performance is slipping hard recently. Then you have the sheer scale of the Google graveyard. And finally, take a look at Youtube lately.

The company increasingly feels optimized for internal politics and corporate metrics rather than building the best possible products for real people. I guess this is why monopolies suck.

In Canada the approach is going to be that social media and AI companies will need to figure out a system where those under 16 can’t access content. The government will be able to grant exemptions if the company can satisfy regulators that they have built and maintained adequate, alternative structural safeguards to protect children on their platform.

Further to that, companies are required to do this in a strict data minimization approach, results need to be anonymized and destroyed immediately after the check is complete.

The internet has grown into a bit of a letdown to some degree, especially social media. If I have to upload an ID or insert a grey hair into a scanner, that website or app will be dead to me and I will move on to something else or nothing at all.

I think people fall into two distinct camps here: the wildly exploratory, who chase everything from lost civilizations to aliens, and the hyper-rationalists, who refuse to budge from safe, conventional explanations. When it comes to Giza, It may be disingenuous to write all the banter off as either conspiracy or bona fide science. While we understand the general progression of pyramid-building in Egypt, the sheer scale and precision of Giza creates blind spots.

There are major gaps in all explanations provided and there are a huge array of interesting but unprovable theories. People fill those gaps with whatever is compelling, but really, none are good enough to prove anything definitively and that includes the academic explanations.

It's entirely possible that we may never have the definitive answer for how they were built or even exactly why, and will have to live with the mystery. But humans rarely will accept that conclusion and we would rather invent certainty than put up with open questions.

Thanks for adding RSS! Bringing Bubbles (and HN) into NetNewsWire is a game-changer for content discovery and keeping a clean reading list.

You mean the Coke flavour co-created by AI wasn't a resounding success with consumers? Who could have possibly known?

https://www.pcmag.com/news/coca-cola-uses-ai-to-create-a-fut...

The quality of Gemini varies so much throughout the day, the week and the month that it’s hard to rely on it for anything. It feels like Google is trying to throttle costs but has completely missed the mark.

The demo Mike Rockwell gave at WWDC was interesting. He kinda showed off Siri as like the Star Trek computer for your phone. I hope this is the direction Apple is going to continue in. Having AI as a user interface is way more interesting than chat bots, image editors, or copy editing.