npunt

Was just looking at this. What keeps me from buying is the screen is just too small. I'd love to slap this magnetically on the back of my iPhone and have it on the go as a focused reading device but eyes after 40 aren't so happy about reading super tiny characters.

My two wishes are: to size it up so it is roughly the width of a modern smartphone (2.72" -> 2.8") and decrease bezel size. At these small sizes, even 1/2 to 3/4" screen size increase is a big deal in area gained, which leads to more comfort reading and less line scanning.

Hope they'll ship one with the size up 4.7" ED047TC1 display [1] instead.

[1] https://github.com/Xinyuan-LilyGO/LilyGo-EPD47/blob/esp32s3/...

Can we all band together and agree to flag articles that are so obviously AI written to be engagement bait and devoid of anything meaningful to discuss?

To use an AI-ism: HN isn't an AI blog dump, it's a community.

Just want to say I appreciate the effort that you put into this. I know HN sometimes doesn't vote up the big posts but if they're well researched and follow a thought through to a conclusion, I think they're a valuable addition to the discussion. cheers

> Important subject

> Uses slop AI art

Fastest way to make something into a farce.

This is cool! Is there an index of these ported games / OSS ports?

Even has a wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_astronaut

Joel's post was the genesis https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/04/21/dont-let-architect...

Salient indeed!

If it's a constant offset like you say, and given academia publishes and industry often doesn't, that might suggest it's dependent on the rate of advancement in academic research. Not in this field so I may be wildly off.

I feel like AI coding is accelerating everyone's work toward greater solution complexity and I think it's pushing people to build defenses and be more averse to someone else's complexity rather than being impressed by it. Bigco's are probably well behind the curve on this and are still impressed by complexity, but for people on the receiving end of AI stuff either directly via your own hand or indirectly via others, it seems like complexity is not as impressive as it once was.

This argument at its logical extreme would be that we should grow slop in vats because that takes less land to feed people.

Agree that climate and biodiversity are two very important factors, but there's others. Health effects (e.g. quality-adjusted life years) being one, soil health & resilience another. Monocropping pesticide-laden foods is not some ideal state.

Cracks in the voice are so visceral. One I love is in the Rolling Stone's Gimme Shelter, Merry Clayton is just about screaming and her voice cracks and they kept the band's cheering reaction to it on the record [1]. Truly a case of the subject matter trying to break out of the medium.

Related is that a lot of cultures embrace intentional imperfections in art for spiritual reasons, as it conveys authenticity and humility in the face of perfection. E.g. Persian flaw [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_carpet#cite_note-68

Sure the first first ones, but hedonic adaptation happens pretty quickly. If you watched a movie in the theaters and then got a VHS copy to watch on your TV at home, you'd notice the difference, especially if it was a well-worn copy. I remember being so excited about laserdiscs because they overcame the VHS noise.

We all want what we don't have. Back in the day we were desperate for a clearer picture and found these artifacts annoying. We longed for an alternate reality that was as crisp as our own. Nowadays folks that didn't experience the pre-digital era want aesthetics that embrace the imperfections that today's visual culture glosses over. They want reminders that life wasn't always this way.

Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno

> Cool man, but it might surprise you to find out that people knowingly opt into receiving this stuff and actually consent to it.

Consent is more than pressing 'Allow' on a notification pop-up. It's often not even informed consent, as those pop-ups are usually a part of some onboarding flow where users are just trying to get to the value the app promises and pressing 'ok' to everything.

Even if people do indeed want notifications at the time of the ask, one doesn't really know if the message provider will wind up spamming, that's a matter of trust. And once opted-in, even if the users no longer want notifications, a lot just don't know how to turn them off. People are often incredibly accepting of sub-par experiences like this because of the friction and capability demanded of them to opt-out. My parents get tons of spam notifications that would pass your test of 'knowingly opt into receiving' but that when asked they say they do not want.

Finally there's myriad dark patterns that tons of apps use, like changing and resetting notification preferences among others.

I'd hazard a guess that observed opt-in rates far exceed users actual desires, so I wouldn't put much stock in them. I do agree that there are some people that like them tho!

Fwiw I've worked on both the delivery side (OneSignal) and developer side (Margins) so I've lived these choices and trade-offs. My believe is in terms of power dynamics, senders generally don't deserve their power to interrupt and should not possess that power. At best, they offer opportunities, which ideally are verified somehow prior to being presented to users. I'm happy that devices and ecosystems are moving in the direction of triaging and filtering sender content, as power needs to lie in the user's holistic, most pre-frontal cortex driven expression of their desired experience, and not just one moment's opt-in button they pressed.

Thank you for writing the article, good discussion points.

The generations system in III was amazing. I didn't care that the art wasn't top notch, I loved the game and seeing the story over three generations. Decades later I wound up making a storytelling game mostly based on it.

Comes just a few days after the death of Dick Parry, Pink Floyd's saxophonist.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Parry

Bringing your own cup is also healthier, because paper cup linings are made of plastic that when exposed to hot liquids are likely to turn into microplastics.

My rule is: 1) keep hot stuff away from plastic, and 2) assume everything is/has plastic unless you know for certain.

Public relations for mil spending

I did this calculation a bit ago and don't think frontier models are just a few MacBook Pro generations away. Yes numbers reliably go up in tech in general but in specific semiconductors & standards have long lead-times and published roadmaps, so we can have high confidence in what we're getting even in 3-4 years in terms of both transistor density and RAM speeds.

In mid-2028 we have N2E/N2P with around 15% greater transistor density than today's N3P, and by EOY2028 we'll likely have A14 with about 35-40% density improvement.

Meanwhile, we'll be on LPDDR6 by that point, which takes M-series Pros from 307GB/s -> ~400GB/s, and Max's from 614GB/s -> ~800GB/s.

Model improvements obviously will help out, but on the raw hardware front these aren't in the ballpark for frontier model numbers. An H100 has 3TB/s memory bandwidth, fwiw

Wake up sheeple!

Oh.. uh hold on a second... removes anesthesia mask from patient

Wake up sheeple!

At least this gives kids the chance to be kids and know a life without it before they encounter it.

Many of us grew up in the offline-is-default time, but our cohort will age out. Then we’ll only be left with people who grew up with these technologies shaping their lives and perspectives, who have little sense for the alternative.

The window of time is closing for us in this cohort to use our understanding of what life was like without these technologies to advocate for a healthier environment for kids.

Please. At best HN has a very small subset of the problems in social media, and its positives easily outweigh its negatives. This is a well moderated forum with a lot of bright people and industry experts that a young person could learn from by observing conversation and debate. It bears a great deal of resemblance to historic methods of learning by watching experts interact and debate. Tons of pedagogical value is here for a young person to latch onto.

A most obvious difference besides that is HN isn’t a nonstop feed of short form video appealing to the insecurities of teenagers, using notifications and social feedback loops and the suggestion that you’d be missing out on what your friends are up to if you left.

HN doesn’t even let you follow people and barely lets you know who they are. It’s centered on ideas, not people. HN and social media are almost nothing alike.

Totally. Today’s social media is not the same as last years etc. Read Meta’s quarterly reports and they brag about Reels increasing time spent on site by 30% in a year. That’s not even considering the other ill effects like giving kids a firehose of all the worlds problems when they’re not yet equipped to handle that information, which causes them to internalize those things, making them feel like things are fucked, that they’re responsible, etc. It’s psychologically devastating. And so many other things! Let kids be kids.

Yeah engineering as a discipline tends to be pretty naïve to the consequences of what they build, and sociopaths take advantage of it. Norbert Wiener [1] observed this about the engineers working on nukes in the 1940s-1950s:

“Push-button warfare... possible for a limited group of people to threaten the absolute destruction of millions, without any immediate risk to themselves.... Behind all this I sensed the desires of the gadgeteer to see the wheels go round.”

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norbert_Wiener

Yeah tho most customers never even encounter that level of detail. Most people just know there’s a ‘new one’ and an ‘old one’. If they have an old one, they come in and get a new one. Everyone replaces on their own replacement schedule, and every year there’s a new one, so it kinda just works for everyone.

Apple at its best makes its product like so legible people only need dim awareness of what they’re buying. That’s only possible if you build a ton of trust with consumers, which is why Apple is so so focused on their brand value.

Agree about psychological impact outpacing likely actual impact, but that’s a relatively temporary phenomena as we are all adapting to the new way things work.

Productivity wise employment is far more than code production productivity in a vacuum, and productivity gains are rarely captured by employees (see famous chart on worker productivity where that correlation changed around 1970). I wouldn’t expect to see much in the next 1-2 years besides noticing effective teams increasing velocity of features.

I think people in forums like complaining about things and aren’t representative of the broader set of people who are just using the tools, so no real paradox. For vast majority of tech jobs, $200/mo is still an absolute steal in terms of what these tools offer. Only the dullest of companies would not realize this.

Fwiw in the 80s-90s computers also didn’t really register in productivity metrics. Qualitative changes occur long before accurate measurement catches up.

No particular opinion on this change, but generally pricing is a great way to separate dabblers from serious users. There isn’t a great deal of value in dabblers or what they produce, I imagine that training data isn’t worth much relative to the pro users. Similar pricing story with $100 yearly price for Apple developer accounts that people complain a lot about. The reality is if you’re serious about making something, these costs are pretty cheap.

The folks hurt most by this are serious people in developing countries and young people starting out. Occasionally a dabbler turns into a serious user but I imagine that’s far less likely than people wish it were.

The value to companies who make these changes is they don’t have low value users or low value contributions to worry about, which has its own not insignificant overhead. In the age of AI slop everywhere we’re likely to see a lot more attempts to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Basically. Tim is the ablative heat shield.

Especially when ads win out over UX. Just a month ago I searched for UPS locations in Google Maps and filtered by open, and one place nearby popped up. I put the package in my car and drove over and lo and behold they were closed. When faced with a choice, Google chose to be greedy and make money on an ad unit over providing the correct user experience.

I've used Google Maps for two decades and have 1000s of saved pins. I could have been a customer for life. Haven't used it since.

You want to be careful about who your customers are, and what they will do to you as an organization. Enterprise customers create enterprise teams create enterprise culture creates enterprise rot. Apple is wise to play to their strategic position as a consumer product company that lives or dies on great product, because when the buyer is the user thats what they demand.

The real strategic risk for Apple is if it overly locks-in users and falls back into complacency. The discipline of having to continually win customers with better product is ultimately the only thing that will cause them to thrive long term.