henrikschroder

A million times yes.

If you gather all your garbage, especially plastic garbage, and burn it, recovering heat and energy, you can offset a lot of oil- and gas-powered electricity generation. As an aside, it doesn't matter how many plastic straws and plastic bags you make, as long as you burn them after use.

Landfills also emit greenhouse gases, uncontrolled, over a long period of time, so it's not so much of a trade-off as you think it is.

Since 1990, Sweden has cut greenhouse gas emissions from trash to one fourth of what it was, and that's by moving from landfills to trash incineration: https://www.naturvardsverket.se/data-och-statistik/klimat/va... (Blue is greenhouse gases from landfills, dark blue is emissions from trash incinerators.)

Backfired?

> While recycling campaigns can help limit what heads to the landfill

Oh, backfired in the US. Gotcha. Right. And because it didn't work out in the US, there's absolutely no way that any other country could have this shit figured out, right?

Landfills. Jesus.

> That's just farmed blueberries.

No, it's a different species, vaccinium corymbosum. It's farmed, because it can be farmed, because of the bush size and growing conditions.

Wild European blueberries, vaccinium myrtillus, can't be farmed. If we could, we would, but we can't, so instead we employ hordes of seasonal workers to go out in the forests and harvest them during the month-long season.

I spent yesterday picking a bunch, got maybe 4kg, gonna make jam today and bring home with me to the US. Absolutely superior. Worth the time and effort every time.

> but in public "A thing is not all possible!"

...and the media picking it up, shouting that thing did absolutely not happen, could never have happened, the debate is over, the science is settled, and anyone who breathes a word in opposition is stupid, dumb, smells bad, and votes for Trump.

There are of course tons of underlying long-term causes, but the idiotic lockdown policies shifted the equilibrium of the city.

Before, the gentrification and influx of tech money caused a positive spiral, more offices, more office workers, higher income office workers, higher end restaurants, all of that pushed against the unsavory elements of the city, keeping it pretty much confined to the Tenderloin. Hell, when I left in 2016, Market Street was in better shape than ever.

But the forced closures of stores and restaurants for far too long, shifted this equilibirum, rapidly, quickly, and much further than anyone anticipated. That was the proverbial straw.

And of course absolutely not a single mention of the fact that the city killed itself with its harsh pandemic measures.

When I was flying to Sweden in summer 2021, I had a six-hour layover in SF, so I decided to take the BART up to the city to take a look, since I had previously lived there, and I almost didn't recognize the place. Half the shops around Union Square were boarded up and closed, it looked like a warzone. It was always a dirty shithole, but at the same time a vibrant, cool city. In 2021 all the good things were gone, and only the crap - literally - remained.

If you forcibly close all the things that make a city worth living in, for over a year, you don't get to act surprised when people stop wanting to pay for the high cost of living and move out of the city. SF is in a death spiral, as all the high-income workers leave the city, companies start leaving, foot traffic lessens, stores and restaurants start closing because they can't make it or because they're overwhelmed by shoplifters or homeless, ther city becomes less desireable, more workers leave the city, more stores and restaurants close, and with no-one filling the gap, you get a ghost town. Property values plummet, commercial real estate plummets, and it becomes a service and retail desert.

All because of their own choices. None of this was inevitable. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, and there's no better illustration of that than what's happened to SF.

Worse, they actually think it matters and that Tesla looks at the reports or uses them for anything.

> They wanted to wait another 5-10 years to get the miniaturization and price down so it can just be a pair of glasses. But they don't have that luxury; Zuck is trying to own the market, and Apple needs developers now rather than later. They know this device won't have high volume (and they've told shareholders that for months) but they're investing for 5-10 years from now when the tech is at the point where it does.

This is the best defense of the device that I've seen. I can absolutely see the appeal of AR in a pair of glasses, that's a form factor and convenience that makes sense.

But how will Apple retain excitement for this device and retain developers doing stuff for it, if the install base is tiny compared to the competition? Over ten years? Once this thing ends up on people's shelves, why should any company develop for it? "Trust me bro, Apple Vision Air 5 is finally going to kick off!"

The iPhone introduced the app store, which allowed for a literal gold rush, it suddenly became a whole lot easier for developers to earn money for their software, of course developers flocked to it, even though the install base was small. There's no such mechanism in place this time, all the other VR headsets have app stores. So what's the draw? All the Apple Vision owners are rich, so you can price your apps higher?

I understand the long term goals of Apple, they have to make this bet in case VR becomes the next revolution, but VR has been a solution looking for a problem for thirty years now at least, and this product is not going to become successful, and yet this thread, and every other one like it, is full of people predicting the VR revolution.

> To me the market is still being discovered.

The *WHOLE POINT* of this HN post is to poo-poo Dvorak's take on the iPhone *AS IF* the introduction of Apple Vision is comparable to the iPhone's introduction.

"iPhone critics were wrong then, therefore Apple vision critics are wrong now" is *NOT AN ARGUMENT*. It's emotional manipulation where you are supposed to reminisce about the glorious smartphone revolution that Apple ushered in, and apply that to this product launch. That is what is going on here.

And every time I press the point on what the hell the Apple Vision thing is for, the only thing I get back is mealy-mouthed corporate bullshit like what you just wrote.

"It's gonna be revolutionary, trust me, bro"

No. There is zero reason to believe that these things won't end up collecting dust on a shelf somewhere, just like the majority of VR headsets are already doing.

> but the ultimate goal appears to replace computers, phones, and monitors

This is a completely empty statement. That's a flimsy corporate wish.

Do you not understand how completely different the introduction of the iPhone into the mobile phone market was, compared to the introduction of Apple Vision to the VR market?

The iPhone introduced with concrete examples of what it could do that the competition could not, it wasn't half-baked and aspirational, it solved existing problems, it was better than the devices that billions of people were already carrying around in their pockets from the start.

I'm writing this comment from my home office. To my right is a window where I can look out on the street below, I see cars and people, I see birds flying over the trees, and a couple of blocks away is the beach and the ocean. It's a pretty view. I can relax my eyes and my brain and look away from work or HN for a bit. How does Apple vision improve this experience?

> but I don’t love uninformed cynical takes not backed up by data or experience

Here's some data: When the iPhone was introduced, the global mobile phone market moved over a billion devices a year. The iPhone solved very real problems that people were having, and delivered a device that did everything better than the competition. They put a real browser in the thing, removing the need for WAP and other shitty technologies for consuming content on mobile. They got the form factor and keyboard right. It was expensive, but not 10x more expensive. The iPhone replaced a device that everyone was already willingly carrying around in their pockets, and had been carrying around for over a decade at that point.

The global VR headset market moved 20 million devices last year. For most people, VR headsets are a gimmick, a novelty, they bought one, tried it, put it on a shelf. People aren't carrying one around, people aren't using it as their main computing interface, people aren't throwing away their monitors or TVs or gaming consoles. If someone has a VR headset, it's a non-essential plaything.

The Apple Vision is ~10x as expensive, in a market that's 1/50th of what the mobile phone market was in 2007, and it's still not solving obvious pain points that are stopping people from getting a VR headset. What problems does it solve? What device does it replace?

> When unsure, I remind myself it’s best to reserve judgement and see how things play out and not overgeneralize from my own limited preferences. I tell myself that I am one small speck in the market — i do not represent the market.

"God^H^H^HApple moves in mysterious ways, it's best not to question The Lord!"

Come on. Apple Vision entering the VR market is fundamentally different from the iPhone entering the mobile phone market, which is why posts like this, trying to make Apple Vision criticism equivalent to iPhone criticism, are completely wrong.

I agree. The iPhone came out in 2007, and that year over a billion cell phones were sold. That's a solid market that Apple entered, and the iPhone brought obvious improvements over existing devices. Apple solved the problem of wanting a large screen, a full keyboard, in a small device. That was an existing pain-point, they solved it, everyone understood that this was the future of cell phones.

In 2022, there were 20 million VR devices sold globally. Apple has now entered this market with a device that's 10x as expensive as the competition, and one that doesn't solve any existing obvious pain points.

The iPhone out-competed dumb phones and communicators and blackberries and stylus notepads and, eventually, pocket cameras. It did all of that, better, in one device.

What exactly is the Apple Vision replacing in an obviously better way? If I buy one, what device can I throw away? I have yet to see an answer to that question.

> People said the same about the first iPhone.

That must have been an extremely tiny minority of people who wrote off the first iPhone.

Apple solved an actual problem in an actually existing huge market, i.e. how to maximize screen space while having a full keyboard in a tiny phone-size device. Everyone and their mother already had a cellphone, and then they switched to iPhone, or Android when they made the switch to all screen smartphones. Everyone switched! People with clamshells switched. People with Blackberries switched. People with Nokia Communicators switched. People with simple featurephones switched. Big screen + an app store was leaps and bounds better for everyone, regardless of how they used their phones.

There is no huge VR headset market. Everyone does not have a VR headset. Everyone isn't already using a VR headset for stuff, but are annoyed at how sucky the existing ones are, and are waiting for Apple to "fix" the market. If you own an Oculus right now, why would you switch?

There's simply no way you can make the case that Apple Vision is as disruptive as the iPhone was, and that therefore all the naysayers are wrong. It's just as gimmicky as all the other VR headsets, the use cases are just as convoluted as the others, there's nothing setting it apart from the competition, except the price and some tech specs. The iPhone introduced a new paradigm. What does Apple Vision introduce?

> I agree, the prospects for cloud gaming do seem promising.

Every attempt so far has failed, spectacularly. What is promising about that?

I got an Atari STE in 1988, it used double-sided regular density 3.5" disks, with a capability of 720kB each, and back then it was a bargain to find no-name ones for ~$1, while the quality name-brand ones (Verbatim! Maxell!) cost about the double.

> So yeah, no matter how good at cooking you are, if you "just follow" a recipe properly and it doesn't work, then the recipe is wrong or incomplete.

No, this is 100% false, and this is exactly why recipe collections are popular, because people think they can just follow a recipe to get a delicious meal. There is an immense difference in quality and properties of ingredients, difference in cookware, difference in appliances, etc. What's "medium heat" ? What's a "medium-sized potato" ?

You need to know basic cooking to work around these differences, you need to know what something feels like and looks like when it's done, otherwise you will forever fail.

When I interviewed for software development, I used to have a very open-ended question about optimizing a system I would describe, and there was no right answer, there were tons of directions to go in, and the point was to get the interviewee to ask questions so I could figure out if they'd been around the block and which blocks they had been around.

Why would you only want cookie-cutter "correct" answers to your questions? That doesn't tell you shit about the candidate?

That's infuriating. There's a clear distinction between asking "how do I do this thing?" and "what do you want me to do?"

I can't read your mind, and that goes both for interview questions and determining product needs.

As if I needed more fuel on the fire of my burning hatred for recipe collections.

Everyone who is interested in cooking should do themselves a favour and buy a proper cookbook. Something that starts with the basics, and works itself up to full meals. It should have cheat-sheets for basic ways to cook all your staples, here's all the ways you can cook a potato, with times and temperature. Here's all the ways you can slice an onion, with examples of what it's good for. Here's how to cut a cow into pieces, here's what the pieces are called, here's how long each piece takes to cook and what it pairs well with.

Unfortunately, most people think they can cook something from a recipe collection without being proficient at the basics. "I'll just follow the recipe!", and then they wonder why it didn't work. A timer can never replace the knowledge of how something is supposed to look, feel, and smell when it's done or not.

And yet recipe collection regularly outsell cookbooks by a wide margin.

I guess they look good on a coffee table at least.

> Given most sites still support HTTP/1.0

Uh, HTTP 1.0 doesn't support the host header, which means that you need unique IP addresses for each host you want to serve.

Ironically, you could solve that problem with IPv6, but...

> considering you conveniently left off the very next part of my sentence

Sorry, it wasn't meant as a direct comment to you, more of a comment on the thread in general.

Still though, using the words "supreme leader" about any constitutional monarch in a liberal democracy sounds so weird to me, that's a title for dictators, which is the complete opposite of what they are. They're heads of state, and they are completely dependent on popular support for their reigns.

> As a Canadian, the whole thing is so bizarre because he is the supreme leader of our country.

I agree, I don't understand why any former colony would want to keep that.

The case for the UK is that they've been doing the king thing for 1100 years now, it's an integral part of the land and the people and the history, and that gives it symbolic value that contributes to the power or cohesiveness of the nation state.

> What is the "value" in that?

It is incredibly valuable to a nation state to be able to project longevity and stability. Are you seriously questioning the value of a thousand years of unbroken tradition? Every country has a founding mythos, and to be able to connect the current head of state to its founding has immense symbolical value.

Imagine that the US were to elect a president who was a descendant of George Washington. As silly as it is, Americans would cream their pants en masse at the thought. ...while vehemently arguing that they absolutely don't do that royalty thing, of course.

> In the UK, even with their hereditary head of state, they still had Boris Johnson who was definitely populist and divisive.

Yes? What? Boris was the elected head of government, of course they'd get a populist asshole now and then. Are you saying it would be better if both the head of government and the head of state could be populist assholes?

> you pick the part that isn't the bulk of it?

Well, the answer to that bulk was simply no, there's no contradiction, because you're conflating different kinds of power. And again, if your country has always combined the two roles and their powers, it might be hard to understand the separation of and difference between them.

> It is the idea that the state is a creation of the people, and that all power - real, ceremonial, even trivial - derives from the power of the people.

And yet the first line of the constitution of this constitutional monarchy is that "all power derives from the people". These things are not mutually exclusive.

Rex dei gratia hasn't been a thing for centuries, it's rex populi gratia these days. If any royal family fucks up too much, they're out on their asses, and they know it.

> but having a hereditary monarch is bananas.

My country has been a kingdom for over a thousand years and has enjoyed unbroken sovereignty for five hundred. The current royal house has reigned for two hundred years, and they can trace back their ancestry to the ancient kings. There's value in that.

The purpose of a head of state is to act as a personification of the state, so what better symbol could you pick? Like it or not, it's an excellent source for national pride. Yes, it's ridiculous blood magic, but the pomp and circumstance and ceremonies of any nation state can be just as ridiculous.

I'll take that over an elected populist divisive asshole any day.

> On one hand, the King is the supreme leader of the country

The US is one of few countries where the head of state and the chief executive is combined into one office. I wonder if that contributes to Americans always having weird takes like this?

The purpose of the head of state is to act as a check on the legislature and the chief executive, that's typically the only real power they have, the rest is just ceremonial. And yet many Americans seem to think that constitutional monarchs are like the president of the US and has executive powers?

Well, English is the lingua franca du jour, after all!

To me, in Swedish, Ā and Ä and an A with two small dashes above would be the same letter, but with stylistic typeface differences. It doesn't change the letter itself. I have never heard of any German insisting their umlauts shouldn't be dots, so I think your German teacher was just a bit pedantic/insane.

Conceptually umlaut dots are different from trema dots, but who cares?

Yes, that's actually a great example! The dot over i doesn't have a name and isn't a diacritic mark any longer, it's an integral part of the letter. It probably originated as a diacritic mark, though.

Ä in Swedish originated as the AE ligature where the E moved upwards and above the A until it became stylized as two dots. In Danish and Norwegian, they instead promoted Æ to a distinct letter.

Wikipedia does a great job for example for Ü, distinguishing between U-umlaut, U-diaeresis, and letter-Ü: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9C

A fun example of the opposite effect is that it took me forever to realize that Häagen-Dazs, the ice cream, is supposed to be pronounced HAH-gen-das, and not HEY-gen-das.