noelrock

A refreshing read. While not in the same lane as the author re maths/physics/SWE, I empathise.

I think on one hand, things are simply less novel as we get older and more expert in a given lane. That’s age old.

But the dopamine hit/attention deficit issue is altogether new, and it’s troubling from a societal perspective. I suspect it’s fairly universal that adults in 2026 aren’t reading nearly as much as they aspire to, or claim to be.

A project, ZerryBit, are working to do something similar - albeit on a far smaller scale physically than what you’ve done here. Might be of interest to OP or others though - further info at https://zerrybit.com/en-us (I have no link to them bar placing an advance order)

I very much enjoy Eric's commitment to new and novel and imaginative hardware.

Bought and am loving my Pebble 2 Duo etc - still yet to charge it once in fact!

This device doesn't quite hit the mark for me, but I love the commitment to thinking about what's novel and useful, and putting a prototype out into the world. To use an Irish phrase, "more luck to them" - and hope we see many more projects from them!

So odd - was listening to an account of this in an Audiobook just yesterday - "Why Nothing Works" by Marc Dunkelman. Was essentially making the point that this sort of thing would be several magnitudes of difficulty harder to pull off today, and certainly wouldn't happen within that timeframe.

Just a brief note to say: loved original Pebble, always a regret that my younger poorer self didn't buy one way back when, so bit the bullet straight away yesterday and am signed up for the first batch of the black Core 2 Duo in July.

Two features which I think it would be useful to give more prominence to especially as you move from pre-order stage to general sale stage:

Strap is replaceable in both models Both models count steps

Would be high priority things for me! Look forward to seeing how this develops and best of luck.

Yeah, I weighed up the possibility that people would perceive it that way. That also speaks to the negative perception of politics/politicians too of course...

As a former politician, I really don't love this.

It's already difficult enough to get people of the capacities that most of us want to see (good, smart, could be employed elsewhere, empathetic) involved in politics as it's so negative and divisive.

There are, as other comments highlight, loads of legitimate and reasonable reasons why somebody would be using a phone mid-debate: rebuttal research, communicating with colleagues in chamber, communicating with their own office/staff, the list is fairly long and reasonably legitimate.

Too many people seem to be confusing prior product critical commentary being invalid with all product critical commentary being invalid.

Apple Vision Pro won't do much as a product - it'll struggle for even minimal adaption and will be eventually all but withdrawn within 24 months. The patents etc may eventually lead to a compelling product.

But I'd be very confident I could look back at this comment and be proven correct.

iPad commentary on launch always felt wide of the mark - use case was clear. iPhone was limited at launch but you could see the path forward. Vision Pro feels like it could never be 'evolved' into a mass market product - though maybe the patents could be taken and become something useful, albeit different.

Irish company Manna have been doing this in two Irish suburbs for a number of years now. They're worth checking out - their CEO Bobby Healy often tweets interesting stuff around payloads, journeys per day, route maps etc. I've worked with them a little and think they're building something really interesting.

One thing that’s bothering me - the story text says it’s 32 bn kilometres from earth but looking it up it appears to be about 19 bn kilometres. Which is it?

I can definitely see a gap in the market for this now.

The present Twitter alternatives (Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible) are just too hobbyist or finicky.

Meta will presumably bring an ease-of-use to this service and, crucially, scale from minute 1. They're the building blocks of Twitter's current incumbency position, and Meta/Threads can replicate them straight out the gate.

That is a huge advantage.

On the other side of the ledger, the utility of Twitter keeps sliding. Not sure how many Hacker News users are Twitter users or what the crossover is, but the whole blue tick 'thing' has reduced the utility in one key surprising way: high quality replies under popular accounts are impossible to find. It's like if you could buy upvotes on Hacker News to get to the top almost. Secondarily to that is the stuff over the last few days with very low rate limits on how many tweets you can view - if you can't use a social network, it tends to stop being useful.

While I wouldn't say Threads is a slam dunk guaranteed success, I would say it's the most probable contender of all the ones out there.

Spurious enough comparison given there were phones, a developed phone market which was 150m+ globally even at that stage, and demonstrated clear use cases for an iphone (an ipod, a phone and an internet browser combined).

Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.

AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.

I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.

Ha, both the original post and the parent comment made me think of Harry Potter - I wonder if I knew either of you! The world is very small.

Was going to reply along these lines. I was fortunate to live with someone who was working on the James Webb and telling me excitedly about it — back in 2006! Surely even with the various upgrades/spec changes/delays, things have moved sufficiently that whatever is started even today will be a marked upgrade.

In any event, many many areas to aim at, and relatively limited funding unfortunately.

Completely agree - if the projection from Q2 wasn't also so negative, I would say the market has overreacted a little bit.

On the one hand: Has badly lost its way on content. Can understand why other providers are stripping out legacy content (e.g. old BBC shows), but equally Netflix's own content has been very much expensive quantity over quality.

They're at risk of blowing their relatively dominant position.

On the other: the headline figures aren't terrible. Their boycott of Russia saw them lose 700k subscribers, while the net decrease is actually 200k. Their projection for Q2 is interesting, and clearly they have some basis for projecting a steeper decline.

Ultimately Netflix have moved from what looked like a very strong incumbent position into a keenly fought battle where content will decide which 2/3 streaming services people subscribe to. For me this year it's probably the third most watched after Disney+ and Apple TV... so is at risk of the chop if it doesn't come up with the goods soon. Can't imagine I'm alone.

Not at all the same issue but vaguely relevant — I like the idea of ambiently joining some Twitter spaces without feeling obliged to contribute.

Would strike me as a decent trade off that non contributors should be able to join anonymously.

Whenever I’ve joined something in my specific area to date, I’m called on to contribute maybe half the time by the host - which is generally fine and I’m happy to, but sometimes you’re not able to… so it puts you off joining altogether.

This is wonderful how this has ended up on the front page of Hacker News. It's one of my favourite pieces I've read in the last few years - I bought the book arising from it - I don't even like Bailey's! It's just a very neat story of product development, branding, etc.

Just to +1 this - a major reason we picked the car we picked last year was because it had AA. Now, you can upgrade most any system to it, but given we were buying a new vehicle anyway? It's just.... superior to any in-car system, and I'm not even an Android user !

Many thanks. Was there a change in perhaps the hours they could be used, or was it floated perhaps at one stage? I’m nearly certain I read it more than once maybe 3-4 years ago.

Edit: I found a link about it - https://www.thelocal.no/20150506/norway-strips-electric-cars... - perhaps it has since been reversed again?

Norway has been leading the pack in this regard for quite some time. A few Government incentives, both financial and for instance the ability to use dedicated bus lanes (now discontinued in Oslo I think?) majorly helped.

One of the large issues around uptake is simply infrastructure. Here in Ireland, it is still patchy at best. We had an EV (Nissan) from around 2016 but gave it up in 2020 as there was simply too much anxiety around out of service public chargers and lack of backup. Range anxiety is definitely possible to overcome, but it requires the state to back it up with resources: Norway has most definitively done this.

Final thought: no surprise that ID.3 is making inroads in a huge way on sales. It's a sweet spot of a good car at an attainable price that looks, for want of a better word, 'normal'. Some EVs seem to be designed 'differently' almost for the sake of it - and while some will love that, it ends up adding another hurdle for a certain segment of the market I believe.

Very interesting. An idea that has long held interest (har) for me.

I note from your comments the socially-laudable aim of attempting to help people in financially vulnerable populations. I wonder if emulating more elements of a lottery-like game would assist with this... EG imagine if I could walk into a shop, buy what looks and feels like a lottery ticket, but I've actually effectively added money to my phone-number linked savings account. I think there would be real power there, but naturally real logistical complexity also.

I realise I’m probably not in a majority here on this one but: I’m not offended or too bothered by being targeted by ads on Facebook.

What I am offended by however is how poor the targeted ads are on Facebook. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything based on one or even been tempted to.

I note the opening says: "(Municipal elections today, May 26, will provide a crucial test for the plan.)"

Does anybody with familiarity with the area have a sense of how that test panned out? I can look up the basic results but wouldn't be familiar with how parties stood on the plan, and accordingly if people who backed it were successful or otherwise.

I’ve worked on ticket touting legislation for my own Parliament for two years now. It’s surprisingly complex and naturally has an unsurprisingly monied lobby funding opposition.

I find the parallels here very interesting and the suggestion from the first comment that a lottery could be deployed for all who purchase within the first X minutes. Maybe that’s the way forward for tickets too.

They literally have no parliament, Government or decision making capacity right now. Both days of closures in NI were clear copy and paste efforts within an hour of the rest of Ireland announcing same. Not a great way to make decisions !

Get real.

Political campaigns, outside of the States, are very much bootstrapped. And IT folks very much not minded to volunteer their time.

Citation: I'm a member of a European Parliament on his third term in politics. Of my 200+ volunteers, not one is in infosec. Within my party, maybe 60 staff total are paid for a campaign.

So, this happens to me all the time also - from the month I got the phone (Nov/Dec 2015) in fact.

It seems to die with battery as high as 60%, though it only happens in cold weather conditions, and then immediately switch back on if plugged into a power source.

It's definitely cold-dependent in my case, and only started to show same problems again in November of 2016.

Fitting that the link to the Wired story about Asheron's Call 2 in this is pointing to a page on Wired that no longer exists.

We had a whole spate of these in Ireland recently. A large % of mobile users on a particular network woke up to missed calls: http://www.thejournal.ie/mobile-phone-scam-slovenian-number-...