gumby

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49842487

I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.

Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices. This is explicitly the opposite of Apple’s philosophy until recently and Schiller is stepping back reputedly due to his opposition to this approach.

The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.

Yes, this is the problem I was referring to. There is internal opposition but the exec team will clearly turn over in the next few years (due to retirement) which will inherently bring in a team more aligned with the CEO’s objectives.

It’s CLV (customer lifetime value): the integral of the MRR. Something most companies mentioned on HN should understand though it feels like Apple is the only one that takes it seriously

(And with Apple’s new CEO, the early signs are that commitment is headed for the ash heap as well, but it seems the Mafia may have a longer horizon)

Yes, freezing insulin destroys it, which is a problem for me when I’m outdoors in the winter.

They are concerned that they will be the target for war crimes, such as sinking fishing ships in the Caribbean and Pacific, targeting civilian infrastructure in Iran, and the like.

> Data-only attacks ... have long been considered too sophisticated and niche to pose a practical threat.

I thought the whole point of fuzzing was an example of finding data-only attacks.

AR glasses with ad blocking would be a must-buy for me…though how would I learn about it?

Seems like a good feature for AirPods too, though the new CEO Ternus seems committed to the opposite.

> It seems that no other device makers are seeing the value in Apple's many-devices-acting-as-one approach. It makes for some serious vendor lock.

Xiaomi certainly does: they have billboards touting it: along the bottom they show phones, dishwashers, cars, laptops, and everything in between.

14 years, really, if you don’t count the roadster (which I think it is correct not to do).

This is why they are pushing into services. Now the devices are (profitable) channels for upselling. Cook was willing to do some of this, but the new guy seems more interested in this.

Unfortunately it degrades a major value prop of using Apple in the first place.

It’s because they’d prefer you interacted with CarPlay with voice rather than looking away from the road.

An admirable objective, but given how “well” siri has worked in the past, an unrealistic one. We’ll see if 27 is a significant improvement. If I had to bet, I’d bet no, at least for the next year.

More short names fit in your fovea than long names so for the most common operations they are the easiest to read. It’s the same reason the most common words in human languages are the shortest (and programming languages are for humans to use so subject to the same pressure.

Also, Back In The Old Days memory was very expensive and precious so short identifiers were important. Often labels were tightly constrained, for example being limited to six upper-case characters so they would fit in a single word.

I submitted this because, despite the headline, the system basically worked: a decision review cancelled the mission despite the automation saying go ahead.

> The problem with replacing the world reserve currency with something else is that nobody can agree on what that something else should be.

It isn’t a decision made by some sort of vote, or done overnight. It’s an emergent phenomenon. Sterling had already lost the role de facto by the time Bretton Woods blessed the role of the dollar de jure.

Whatever replaces the dollar will be messy because it won’t have the set of systems the dollar had at its peak (large, highly liquid markets; complete convertibility; bonds backed by huge government spending coupled with huge GDP).

There is really only one alternative and it’s not a great one. It’s not China, as the government is afraid of letting go of control (thus no complete convertibility) and markets lack credibility which impairs liquidity.

The only other opening is unfortunately the Euro. Large, liquid markets yes in aggregate but national markets (e.g. France, Germany) are not unified. They weren’t in the US when the dollar became the reserve currency either, but times have changed. The bond markets are likewise not unified, so risk is higher. But they do have complete liquidity, which is the most important of all after GDP size.

So there will be chipping away at the dollar for years.

McMaster’s paper catalogs were phenomenal, with an organization that quickly surfaced the part you wanted and often taught you taxonomy if you were looking for something unusual to you. A true masterpiece and they clearly carried their philosophy to their web design

Through hikers are used to an extreme version of this: tearing the pages out and burning them as you go. I am more of a random-access tease but weight is weight.

Yes, I remember seeing those double editions come out and thinking they were too large! I bought the volumes as they came out so luckily didn’t have to deal with that problem.

Some, like dickens, just write too long (though he had an excuse, being paid by the word, and in many cases being paid as he worked). Pynchon and Stephenson too. But it feels like Wolfe kept his books short, or at least shorter than they probably started out!

From the Reuters article:

> Australia and the European Union signed a free trade agreement in March after eight years of negotiations, removing tariffs on almost all goods and potentially easing EU access to Australian critical minerals.

Reuters left out the most interesting part which is to allow service providers to work on either side and four year visas (which include work) in both directions.

> appears to be relatively good at problems where finding the initial answer is difficult, but verifying whether a candidate answer is correct is easy.

The opposite can happen too, as Knuth’s recent experience showed. The system suggested an unusual approach that he explored.

Shrinking the battery is still a win as the vehicles can become smaller, or a same size one can have more storage. Also it reduces weight, which is significant.

Finally, higher density batteries make it easier to electrify other applications like trucks and trains.

> How can this happen to a modern fintech…?

It’s a modern fintech that’s most likely to be vulnerable. Banks tend to have a long history (either themselves or with the infrastructure they buy) of security, from physical to electronic. It’s what makes them often so clunky…there’s little incentive to streamline too much, and their insurance providers are reluctant to insure anything excitingly new.

Hell, banking is so conservative that their language is frozen in 14th century Italian from when banks were personally owned by rich families: the words “debit” (“give”) and “credit” (“take”) are from the bank owner’s perspective, not the customers’. But you tend not to see the kinds of breaches you see in modern fintech.

But, you know, move fast and break things, right?

You are forgetting 8” floppies. IBM used only the soft sector ones (one hole punched close to the spindle to mark sector 0) but there were also hard sector ones (a ring of 32 holes close to the spindle hole).

There was a lot of experimentation back in those days. The Wikipedia’s page on floppy disks is surprisingly long!

Unfortunately it emits methane and a lot of other toxic chemicals, as well as not providing a permeable surface for rainfall.

Whether you meant the attitude product or were jocularly using it a relevant metaphor for AI decanters both your comment and mine apply!

> 'Keeping Americans safe' is not on their agenda. If it were, they wouldn't be sticking America's hand into Middle Eastern quagmires...

Even though I agree with you that the US shouldn’t have been executing the foreign policy it did, especially in Western Asia, I’m going to push back on your statement.

Since the 1920s, oil has been the #1 input to any industrialized economy, and since the 1960s, any economy. And since crude oil is the #1 commodity product (despite coming in different grades), it’s in not just the US’s interest but almost everybody’s interest to have a stable supply since a disruption anywhere causes pricing turmoil everywhere (as seen in the current situation). Without that, you disrupt food, healthcare, and production of almost any goods. So yes, it’s a form of self-interested safety.

Naturally even when you consider this as the policy driver, plenty of people will misunderstand, sometimes willfully, and use the machine for other purposes.

More importantly, though energy will remain the pre-eminent input to all economies,it no longer need be petrochemical. The US seems to be ignoring this, to its long (and short) term detriment.

Apple has clearly done things that make it impossible for them to comply with such requests by not keeping certain data in the first place and/or doing work locally (in the customer’s device) to which it doesn’t have access. This is even in a couple of cases when the result can be inconvenient for the end user (e.g. they can’t restore lost data).

But you’re right to ask about the future. The new CEO doesn’t appear to have the same attitude towards the customer, but rather considers them to be a revenue source to be mined.

It’s turdles all the way down.

Something that it isn’t.

I was in Germany in those days and I sure remember the CDU and other more-right wingers using this argument, and convincingly. I’m sure there’s some long and worthy essay on the topic in the archives of die Zeit. Of course it was long ago now.