filoleg

> Until the rest of the market caught up, Bose's noise cancelling algorithms were top notch. As soon as Apple entered the fray a bunch of money was thrown at the problem, the bar was raised, and now good quality noise cancelling is the norm.

A minor nitpick: while Apple entering the ANC arena certainly set fire under the existing mainstream brands to improve their ANC headphones, imo Bose started facing serious competition on that front even before Apple moved in.

I remember Sony releasing their MDR-1000X par being the first crack in the wall. I specifically remember this, because I picked up those headphones in favor of Bose options at the time.

P.S. Yes, the naming scheme on Sony's side is atrocious, because MDR-1000X is the first gen of their very popular WH-1000XM line of ANC headphones that people treat as a flagship ANC headphone pair (with the most recent one being WH-1000XM6).

> Bose should not receive praise for this move. Bose only took this action after community backlash.

They received the backlash, they responded to it by properly addressing the criticism and doing the right thing. It should be praised. Especially since it wasn't some PR-centric damage control, but an actual direct address of the specific points their original approach was criticized for.

Compare Bose's response to that of Sonos (another large techy audio brand). Sonos had an absolutely massive backlash recently (within the past few years iirc) in regards to deprecating software support for their older speakers that I'd read about everywhere (including HN) for months and months.

Afaik, it didn't lead to Sonos doing the right thing in the end (unlike the scenario at hand here), despite the online outrage being way more widespread than in the Bose's case.

Agreed on pretty much all points. There is no "ultimate audio equipment piece" that is just perfect in all aspects, and the choice criteria are spread across both user preferences and specific use-cases as well.

I love the new airpods pro for my daily commute (subway, not a car; just clarifying before I get hammered down in replies for driving and using airpods at the same time), doubly so given their compactness+heavily improved ANC.

For home, I love my open-back Beyerdynamic DT1990Pro pair, due to the audio profile + insanely good physical comfort when worn for prolonged periods of time.

For gatherings with friends for when I need a somewhat-portable bluetooth speaker (that also happen to look good when sitting on a bookshelf outside of active use), I have a TE-OB4.

If I had a larger living space, I would consider getting a pair of high-quality speakers again too.

But there is not a single "this is it" piece of audio equipment that would just replace everything, so you gotta pick and choose your poison.

>"[...] fabric's work by utilizing the principles of a Faraday cage to block or shield against electrical signals, electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and radio frequency interference (RFI)."

But what's the point of bringing a phone at this point?

Other comments mentioned valid points about tradeoffs of using an offline camera vs. a phone, with pro-phone arguments listing things like "being able to livestream and get the evidence out even if the device is damaged/destroyed" and "messaging/coordinating/comms". The anti-phone/pro-camera side also had good points, saying that those things also make it easier to track/identify you. The choice between those two options is definitely not clear-cut, and it is all about individual tradeoffs and risk assessment.

But if you are rocking something that's essentially a wearable Faraday cage that block all signals (I am just assuming it works exactly as stated, without attempting to judge its efficacy), what's the point of bringing (an essentially fully offline) phone in the first place, as opposed to bringing a camera with zero connectivity?

> "Bose blows" is a popular comment amongst the audiophile community but, to me, it seems like they don't blow at all[0]

That comment is not wrong, you are imo just not making an important distinction that the criteria on which audiophiles judge Bose as “blowing” (which is almost purely the sound profile + a few other smaller things like physical comfort/connectivity/price/etc.) vs. what you judge it on (which is more in the long-term technical user/community product support, idk how to describe that area much better) are almost entirely disjoint.

It is perfectly fine and valid for an audio product to “blow” from an opinionated audiophile perspective, while being exceptionally great from the long-term product/user/community product support perspective.

I heavily agree with you btw, Bose should be heavily lauded for making a decision to open-up their speaker firmware after it reaches the official end of support deadline. The fact that this is an exceptional practice is imo, a little bit sad, because I believe that it should be way more common.

> To get promoted at Google from L5 (Sr SWE) to L6 (Staff SWE) you need to do the work of a GOOD L6 for 1y+ and have made some very solid internal networking connections and have multiple managers on your side and have an opening for such a role.

100% agreed. Just as importantly, you also need to be aware of what type of an environment you are in and plan accordingly.

Sometimes, you are just in an environment where it is somewhere between extremely improbable and nearly impossible to get promoted. At that point, you would be better served to put more effort into changing that environment, instead of chasing the grind. I learned that one the hard way a few years ago, at, ironically, Google.

I was on track to a promo, got a documented track record, got the backing of multiple managers + my team lead, etc. But guess what? Another reorg happened shortly before the cutoff for the review cycle, i got a new manager who literally just met me for the first time, and my chances tanked to essentially zero (which is understandable, because I don’t see how a manager who just discovered my existence a week prior would be able to effectively back my promo package). Since then, I had an average of 3-5 major reorgs and 1-2 manager changes per year. As I came to eventually realize, this type of a dysfunctional environment wasn’t conductive to a good career velocity.

Needless to say, my decision to just put my head in the sand and grind harder to compensate for this kind of organizational instability was stupid. It would’ve definitely been a better bet (in terms of time/effort, career trajectory, and compensation) to put even just a portion of that effort into changing my environment, as opposed to trying to compensate for organizational dysfunction with raw work effort.

TLDR: if you care about having a good promotion velocity, focus on the biggest blocker in your specific situation. Whether it is the lack of track record demonstrating sustained effort at the L+1 level, or your environment being dysfunctional in ways that make promotions improbable, etc. Just gotta keep the eyes on the prize, and pick the solutions that are the most appropriate for your individual situation (instead of blindly just doing "XYZ because I read that it was a great career advice" in a single-minded manner).

There was a period of time in my mid 20s when me and a close friend ot mine lived across the street from each other, and what you said here resonates with me strongly.

It is such a massive boost to quality of life to just be able on a whim to send a text like “i am tryna grab some food+drink in 15min, you down?” and actually make it happen more than half the time (and being able to receive similar texts from the friend too). Lots of spontaneous interactions and (barely-any-)planning for just normal low-pressure outings was absolutely my favorite part of that time period.

On a sidenote, I absolutely despise the “guest spreadsheet canva invites for an event scheduled a month in advance and endless emails booking a band” way of regularly doing social stuff. It is totally chill and reasonable to do so for special occasions and bigger events, but having it as the primary way of socializing makes me want to drill a hole in my skull.

I noticed the same with Severance (also Apple TV). After every episode, there is a short director commentary/crew interviews about random episode specifics or more higher level thoughts.

I liked it quite a bit.

> It feels like gaining weight is incredibly easy and losing it is incredibly hard

I feel like there is more to it.

Obviously, I sympathize with you, and I noticed that when I switch from a bulking cycle to a cutting cycle, it is a bit difficult to adjust for the first couple of weeks as well.

But by god, I truly am struggling to switch the other way around, and it takes me months to adjust to the bulking cycle, even with the help of stuff like weed. And when I don’t work out aggresively and don’t keep track of my cycle, it feels just natural for me to default to eating way less, as opposed to the other way around.

To be clear, this isn’t meant to be a dig at your take. All I mean is that, I feel like the whole issue is a bit more complex.

> There's a futures market for RAM prices if you want to hedge that risk. No different than corn.

Yeah, and that's a fine vehicle for insuring against this risk for a finance company or for an individual.

I am prepared to be wrong on the following take (as it is based on nothing more than just "it came to me in a dream"), but my hunch is that neither Airbus nor the EU state governments are currently even attempting to hedge the RAM price risk by accumulating a RAM futures stash on the market.

> DJI got banned

Not sure how that statement squares against the fact that a lot of major US stores (Amazon, Target, Costco, Walmart, B&H Photo, Microcenter, etc.) have DJI products available for purchase, as well as that there is literally a physical retail DJI store[0] within a ~20min subway ride away from my apartment in the US.

0. https://maps.app.goo.gl/yAUyv6LcmKMbsSyX6

You nailed it on the head, down to the exact examples.

I was still in high school in 2010, and was told the same thing about outsourcing to India/SEA/etc. making a CS degree/career (in the US) a terrible choice. It wasn't just random people saying this either, I was reading about it in the news, online, had some family acquaintances with alleged former software dev career, etc. I didn't listen, and I am glad I didn't.

As I was graduating from college, and deep learning was becoming a new hot thing, I heard the same thing about radiologists, and how they are all getting automated away in the next 5 years. I had no plans to go to med school, and I didn't know anyone at the time who went through it, so I didn't know much about the topic. On the surface, it seemed like a legitimate take, and I just stored it in my head as "sounds about right."

Cue to now, I know more than a few people who went through med school, and am in general more attuned to the market. Turns out, all of that was just another genpop hype, those news articles about "omg radiologists are all getting replaced by computers" stopped from showing up on any of my news feeds, and not a single radiology-specialized med school graduate I know had any issues with getting a job (that paid significantly more than an entry level position at a FAANG).

I have zero idea what point I was trying to make with this comment, but your examples mirror my personal experience with the topic really well.

First, no, it wasn't solved. In fact, many tech companies that previously allowed remote work went back on it. Technically yes, I can "solve my commute" by taking a very significant pay cut (more than 50%), in addition to limiting my career prospects overall (or get lucky to get hired by the few competitively-paying top tech companies that still stand by remote work, which would still significantly limit my career just to those few companies). That's a proposal/trade-off that a lot of people would reasonably consider unacceptable.

Second, do you realize that remote work isn't an option for a significant majority of types of jobs? In fact, even if we lived in some magical world where every single software dev suddenly switched to remote work, it would barely make a dent. Janitors, doctors/nurses, school teachers, etc., those jobs just by nature don't allow for remote work.

There is nothing fun about sitting in traffic on your commute to/from work, and neither there is much fun in doing long-distance driving in a straight line on highway for hours on end (regardless of the horsepower). That's what autonomous driving is for imo.

There is a lot of fun in driving a high-hp car on track or offroad or in some not-much-populated area or in plenty of other scenarios. That's where using autonomous driving mode would feel preposterous to me.

Your eyes will be fine (assuming that we are talking about automotive LiDAR specifically).

Automotive LiDAR is designed to meet Class-1 laser eye-safety standard, which means "safe under normal conditions." It isn't some subjective/marketing thing, it is an official laser safety classification that is very regulated.

However, if you try to break that "normal conditions" rule by pressing your eyeball directly against an automotive LiDAR sensor for a very long period of time while it is blasting, you might cause yourself some damage.

The reason for why your phone camera would get damaged, but not your eyes, is due to the nature of how camera lenses work. They are designed to gather as much light as possible from a direction and focus it onto a flat, tiny sensor. The same LiDAR beam that is spread out for a large retina can become hyper-concentrated onto a handful of pixels through the camera optics.

I mean Singapore has mandatory conscription (for men), and I wouldn’t call it militarized. Especially not in comparison to some countries that are in the latter category.

> I've watched a lot of live coding tools out of interest for the last few years, and as much as I'd like to adopt them in my music making it's not clear to me what they can add to my production repertoire compared to the existing tools (DAWs, hardware instruments, playing by hand, etc).

Aside from the novelty factor (due to very different UI/UX) and the idea that you can use generative code to make music (which became an even more interesting factor in the age of LLMs), I agree.

And even the generative code part I mentioned is a novelty factor as well, and isn't really practical for someone who actually makes music as their end-goal (and not someone who is just experimenting around with tech or how far one can get with music-as-code UIUX).

> It reminds me of people in BigTech that don’t sell their RSUs as soon as they vest and diversify. I make just as much now in cash as I did in BigTech with the difference being 40% was in RSUs. Why would I keep 40% of my income in AMZN any more than I would take 40% of my cash income and put in AMZN?

I mean, I didn't sell my RSUs as soon as they vested, because I worked for a BigTech company that I believed was on the upswing, and I was willing to take that risk of not selling.

Sure, it is an equivalent of buying those shares on your own, but again, it still felt way safer (and way more flexible/liquid, as I could sell my shares at any moment) to me than working at a startup with extremely illiquid equity. And I was already pretty much broke with no safety net (my internship over the summer back then made me more than my entire family combined earned in ~6 months; this is not an internship flex, there were plenty that paid more, this is just to illustrate the gap between some bigtech internship salaries and what my family was making), so I was willing to take the risk.

The risk ended up paying off, and that BigTech company went from ~$60/share to $300+/share in barely 5 years, turning my initial stock grant into a lifechanging amount for someone in my position. No, it isn't even close to being enough to buy a house outright or retire, but it is my (and my family's) safety net now. I can afford to help my sister pay rent with zero "can i actually afford it" thought in my mind.

TLDR: yes, not diversifying is risky. However, you cannot make lifechanging money without taking risks, whether it is through joining a promising startup or not diversifying your investments or anything else. I am not advocating anyone to do what I did, as I agree with you that selling RSUs on vest is the most safe option. There are no totally safe options for making lifechanging (whatever that means for you) amounts of money, so you gotta pick your poison, if that's something you want. For me personally, making bigtech salary at a company that I believed was on the upswing (and saving a good amount of it), while keeping all vested RSUs in my account (and selling no more than 5% of it each year), was an acceptable level of risk (that I wouldn't regret doing, even if the price of those shares ended up dying significantly).

Thank you for the response!

To be clear, I didn't mean for my original comment to be a dig at Orion at all. I am just genuinely excited for it, but an extension ecosystem is something I value a lot in a browser. So I was a little bit miffled, when the original post namedropped extensions, but didn't provide any details beyond that.

However, thanks for clarifying the current state of affairs in terms of extensions, and I am eagerly looking forward to checking out the docs.

Is there any info with a bit more details on extensions on the desktop version? More specifically, is Orion going to have its own extension ecosystem? Is it compatible with chrome or FF extensions? If it is gonna be its own thing, are there dev docs available anywhere?

Asking because I’ve read the article, and I noticed extensions being mentioned a few times (including in one of the subchapter titles). However, I couldn’t find any actual info about extensions there.

> What would happen if you had to tap a card/phone to get in to the subway system (and this was enforced, no jumping turnstiles), and then have to tap it to get out too.

Not sure about the "measure how long the subway rider has been in the subway system for a continuous period of time" feature, but otherwise that's how subway in Japan works. You gotta tap on your way in and out of the current system you are riding on (as there are multiple competing subway system companies running together even within a given city, often enough with their stops being near each other).

Their reason for doing so is a bit different though. In NYC, your ride is a flat fee, as long as you don't exit subway, no matter where you are going. In Japan, your ride cost is determined by your actual route, as some parts of it have different rates. They actually need to know where you exited in order to calculate the final cost of your ride.

> One third of all scams in the US are operated on Meta platforms.

And 100% of all internet scam traffic in the US goes through either US ISPs or US cell carriers.

Should those entities be held liable instead? Or maybe, Meta instead should scan users' private messages on their platforms and report everything that might seem problematic (whatever the current US administration in power considers as problematic) to the relevant authorities?

My personal take: there should be more effort in going after the actual scammers, as opposed to going after the "data pipes" (of various abstraction levels) like Meta/ISPs/cell carriers/etc.

> This will probably lead to a series of committees about how to scale back the laws [...]

> [...] which will create new rules which will be put in place [...]

> [...] and then the career eurocrats will move on to their next job, without anyone ever being held accountable for the mistakes of the past

As intended by design.

I don't think there is some grand conspiracy or anything like that in the EU government around this, but it is clear where their priorities are. With those priorities being:

1. Perpetual rule of bureaucracy that exists for the sake of bureaucracy, with the best outcome of it being creation of even more bureaucracy. Anything of actual usefulness being done is just a side effect, not the goal. Bonus: this principle ensures perpetual job security for those career bureaucrats as well (and it helps with creating even more of them), as you can never have one too many committees or processes.

2. Hyperfocus on things that actually need to get done to consolidate power needed to ensure staying power for those bureaucrats and that the previous priority is not encroached upon. Case in point: an HN post[0] from yesterday about the EU pushing forward another new Chat Control proposal, shortly after their previous one failed earlier this year. For the EU governing bodies being stereotyped as ineffectual and too bogged down by their own bureaucracy, they surely are really efficient when it comes to repeatedly pushing publicly unpopular (but seemingly popular among the EU government bureaucrats) measures like Chat Control so quickly after their previous attempt had failed.

0. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45970663

> [...] most websites just don't follow the law. Yes, they're doing illegal things, but it turns out enforcement is weak so the lawbreaking is so ubiquitous [...]

I just checked the major institutional EU websites listed here[0], and every single one (e.g., [1][2][3]) had a different annoying massive cookie banner. In fact, I was impressed I couldn't find a single EU government website without a massive cookie banner.

I don't know if it is due to the law enforcement being so weak (or if the law itself is at fault or whatever else). But it seems like something is not right (either with your argument or EU), given the EU government itself engages in this "lawbreaking" (as defined by you) on every single one of their own major institutional websites.

The potential reason you brought up of "law enforcement is just weak" just seems like the biggest EU regulatory environment roast possible (which is why I don't believe it to be the real reason), given that not only they fail to enforce it against third parties (which would be at least somewhat understandable), but they cannot even enforce it on any of their own first party websites (aka they don't even try following their own rules themselves).

0. https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/european-union/official-ser...

1. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/portal/en

2. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/

3. https://european-union.europa.eu/index_en

> There is no fun in typing out a well-researched answer only to face a torrent of one-second "nah, you are wrong" replies mixed in with AI slop. Bananas.

That "AI slop replies" excuse you mentioned would only apply to the past 3 years at most (aka ChatGPT 3.5 release on Nov 30th 2022). While the grandparent comment's take felt true to my perception for at least the past 10-15 years, way before "AI slop replies" were even a remote concern.

> The bullied have no respite from the bullies

I feel like I am missing something important here.

The great-grandparent comment was talking about things like not being invited/kicked out of group chats, not being spammed/harassed through the messaging protocol in question.

Unless I am genuinely missing something important, I agree with the grandparent comment. How does not being invited to certain group chats is different from not being invited to "cool kids groups" at school/playgrounds? As in, how is it "always on"? Not being invited to a chat or being kicked out of a group chat isn't "always on".

And also (an incompetent and lazy) lawyer’s worst nightmare.

At least once a week, there is another US court case where the judge absolutely rips apart an attorney for AI-generated briefs and statements featuring made-up citations and nonexistent cases. I am not even following the topic closely, and yet I just encounter at least once a week.

Here are a couple most recent ones I spotted: Mezu v. Mezu (oct 29)[0], USA v. Glennie Antonio McGee (oct 10)[1].

0. https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:US:a948060e-23ed-41...

1. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.alsd.74...

> There are so many base features that are inexplicably relegated to 3rd party apps.

> Like a better finder experience.

> Or keeping screen on.

Do you mind linking or naming which tools you use for those 2 purposes?

Asking out of pure curiosity, as for keeping the screen on, I just use `caffeinate -imdsu` in the terminal. Previously used Amphetamine, but I ended up having some minor issues with it, and I didn't need any of its advanced features (which could definitely be useful to some people, I admit, just not me). I just wanted to have a simple toggle for "keep the device and/or display from sleeping" mode, so I just switched to `caffeinate -imdsu` (which is built-in).

As for Finder, I didn't really feel the need for anything different, but I would gladly try out and potentially switch to something better, if you are willing to recommend your alternative.

> If you are happy to work for a for-profit corporation w/o any financial compensation then you are more than welcome to do that. Seems a bit irrational to me but that's just my opinion.

Not the person you are replying to, and it is a bit tangential, but you just basically described a solid chunk of open-source software work.

I am not mocking open-source software work, I am mocking how reductionist the parent comment was, because their logic often applies to volunteer open-source software work as well. And, I suspect, on HN we can agree that volunteer open-source software work can often be worth doing, regardless of how "irrational" it is or how much for-profit corporations could benefit from it.

> Just had to poke the touchpad every so often so it didn't go to sleep

Unwarranted tip: next time, if you use macOS, just open the terminal and run `caffeinate -imdsu`.

I assume Linux/Windows have something similar built-in (and if not built-in, something that's easily available). For Windows, I know that PowerToys suite of nifty tools (officially provided by Microsoft) has Awake util, but that's just one of many similar options.