seec

Definitely agree. He sometimes says things that sound interesting or true, but for the most part I believe he is full of it. The field of psychology is barely removed from charlatanism anyway, having a diploma from Harvard doesn't change that.

I definitely agree that it's nice but not useful enough that you could consider it a required feature. The point I'm trying to make is that Apple markets it as something that is essential and much better than what is out there, when it's really not the case.

The truth is that this is perfectly possible to do on other platforms; you just have to set it up. But most people don't since this is not needed often enough to be worth the hassle, or they just don't use computers that much. And the only reason it has to be provided by Apple is because they lock everything down.

Windows has had Clipboard Sync for a while with "Link to Windows," and there are many third-party solutions, from KDE Connect to third-party keyboards offering clipboard sharing. Nobody really cares, and in a world where you have to use the cloud to get stuff in and out of devices, it doesn't even matter. Chances are, the stuff you are trying to copy is also available on the computer.

Apple would have a lot more to stand on if they didn't go full retard with the cloud as well in order to increase service revenue. Those kinds of Apple technologies would make a lot more sense and have a lot more value if they didn't require using their cloud offering anyway. I wish Apple would go back to making personal computers with software that stands on its own and can work independently of any cloud. But they have been unable, or more likely unwilling, to figure out proper local syncing without going through their cloud, so the marketing is largely moot.

We end up with the worst combination possible: expensive hardware storage to promote cloud subscription and expensive cloud storage with weak interoperability/capacities (sharing with iCloud is a joke).

For this reason, I'm unwilling to consider any gimmicky "Continuity" feature as something inherently valuable.

So the typical nonsensical argument is that an architect should be a builder. Alright.

You can very much do the thing when it's not too costly to fuck up. For many important things, thinking about doing the thing is even more important than doing the thing.

Honestly, it is so infrequently needed that just having a synced note app is good enough for the few times you need it.

Apple has been focusing way too much on gimmicks like that and they don't have that much value.

Tim Cook is gay and thus works like a woman. He wants "consensus" and focus on appearances to pretend everyone is getting along. The traditional masculine way of competing to show who can do better is frowned upon. It is very unsurprising it has all turned to shit.

And yes, Ive couldn't do jack shit without Jobs' leadership, and everyone with half a brain cell knew it.

From experience, I can assure you LibreOffice is no real equivalent to Office. I can guarantee you that you will have people asking you about stuff that Office does just fine but isn't really possible in LibreOffice or is a major hassle.

I have been the one touting alternatives since I was very young and foolish (in particular advocating for the free Apple suite), but I have run into enough problems I couldn't solve that I don't bother anymore.

Microsoft is winning with Office because everyone else is more incompetent than them; it's simple as that. If someone could come up with a true, cheaper competitor, everybody would switch, regardless of the file format arguments. In fact, the generalized use of Google Suite for the simple stuff shows that it is the case. When people insist on Office, they generally have a good reason, and you should trust them.

Yeah, I don't understand how people can be so surprised by all of it. If it wasn't Trump and it wasn't happening in this manner, something like that was bound to happen at some point.

I think it's actually going to be even more violent in Europe once the fake money becomes harder to make and many find out they are not holding any valuable card.

At some point, real work has to be done, and if you keep bringing on more people to devalue this work and even make them pay for the people brought over, they are going to wise up and get mad.

Well, if you define any change as success, I guess that's true. But the reality is that the change that happened is rarely what was requested, nor what was needed. Power just shifts hands, and small concessions are made to keep appearances. Real change doesn't come from protest but from generalized behavioral change. Some protests are successful because they bring an issue to enough people that they change behavior with enough volume that it ends up making a difference.

Outside of that, I'm really skeptical.

Considering the target use case and location, they can very much replace the oil use with solar panels. It's actually perfect, because water usage is probably much lower at night, exactly when solar is weak.

I doubt they are going to go back to being poor that hard. They might not get as much easy money, but once the core infrastructure is built, it doesn't cost as much to maintain it.

Hilariously, you got downvoted. Of course, HN is a popularity contest just like any other social media or social group for that matter.

Truth doesn't matter that much for most people, they just want to belong with a tribe even if they need to come up or agree with a lot of bullshit along the way. Thankfully there are people who don't care too much and they push the envelope.

Econ is the only social science that isn't completely bogus. The replication rate isn't too bad, even though it is still worse than STEM of course. Everything else is basically like rolling a dice or even worse. Special mention to "pedagogy," which manages to be systematically worse than random; in other words, they only produce bullshit and not much else.

Yeah, the gatekeepers just want their political power, and that's it. Also, education/academia is a big industry nowadays; it feeds many people who have a big incentive to perpetuate the broken system.

We are just back to the universities under the religious control system that we had before the Enlightenment. Any change would require separating academia from political government power.

Academia is just the propaganda machine for the government, just like the church was the tool for justifying god-gifted powers to kings.

Well, that's because with the EU there is a law to allow any citizen from any participating country to receive a salary/payment. to any EU-based bank.

So you do need SEPA normalization; otherwise that can't work. It's hardly a problem, and the fact that it required a regulation just shows how ineffective governments are in practice.

Fintech banks came up with an easier-to-use, more efficient, and more convenient system in less time than it took them to do this. And they manage to be cheaper.

The problem with banks is entirely regulation related; they are established players, working with/for the government, and basically get rewarded for stealing. Once I had a problem with my legacy bank, who robbed me of over 1k euros because they were generating 150-euro letters to tell me they refused a government tax debit for a lack of provision (mind you, the rejected amount was 50 euros, less than a third of their fee for rejecting it).

As far as I'm concerned, banks are legal criminals, enabled by the even bigger criminals running governments.

It's just marketing bullshit. Make no mistake, the people using those things don't understand much more than you do; they are just going after shiny new toys, because that's much easier than building something solid that lasts and is cost-effective.

Not gonna lie, this kind of extreme sport doesn't attract the brightest people.

I have a fascination with this kind of stuff. Taking risks is sometimes necessary and worthwhile in life, but seriously, risking your life just so you can say you realized a specific feat is really dumb. Especially when we have the technology to do the thing just fine with no problem whatsoever. I think those people live too comfortable lives and try to feel something. They could apply those skills to some meaningful work, but of course it doesn't get the same recognition.

> A lot of businesses and even retail has moved online or out of town to deal with rates. Most of the town centres round here I have seen are deserts filled with vape shops, tanning salons and hairdressers/barbers.

I think there is a mix of factors. Boomers started the giant supermarket trend, and there has been a giant megastore for everything that followed them. In my relatively small town, many things have moved to the city periphery because people like having a lot of choices and cheap stuff. Most of the offering is low-quality crap, but they don't mind; they actually like to buy more and more. The less it lasts, the better. Then you have the increased taxation by cities, of course, but this also applies to the megastore. It's just that they deal with much bigger volumes and exploit cheap labor, so it's easier to cover them. Finally, many things have moved online indeed, and very often it's not worth physically going to a store if you need a specific item because there is a 50/50 chance a store will have it or it's going to be the same cheap Chinese crap, just marked up.

There are still some decent stores in the cities; the problem is that their volumes are so low that the pricing is very high, and funnily enough, the people most likely to afford them (rich boomers) don't go there and instead flock to the megastore. You can't fix a problem with the "intelligence" that created it.

In the big EU cities it's a bit different; since most people will be on foot, it's very impractical to drive around even if you have a car.

The only reason we have that is because fintech is eating the meal of traditional banks. They came up with ways to transfer with just a card (which benefits Visa and Mastercard, US companies) and do inter-account instant transfers for free.

SEPA normalization took forever, and even now instant transfers are still very often paid past the limit in your card bundle (probably around 3 if you don't have an expensive card).

Brussels rarely works for the little people; they just support whatever the big players at the moment want, unless they are foreign and can come up with a reason to tax them.

It is delusional to think politicians in Brussels care about the little guys; it is always about maintaining or gaining power, otherwise they wouldn't come up with absurd regulations that hit the small players much harder than any of the big ones.

Ah yes, I never used that. My car isn't very recent (about 10 years old now), and I drive very little (about 2-3k per year; I take the train to go anywhere far) because I hate it. But the adaptive part would make it much more useful indeed.

However, something that is extremely annoying in France is that speed limits tend to change very often and abruptly. I just think that trying to solve the problem solely at the car level is always going to have too many limitations...

I have no idea what you are talking about. I have been using Wero for a while in France and it works just fine and is completely free. It's basically instant bank transfer without any fee or limitation on how many you can do.

Wireless earbuds are convenient sometimes, but that comes at the price of inconvenience other times (thinking about charging and connecting).

I think the noise canceling is overhyped to oblivion. Sound isolation with good tips has been more than fine since the 2000s, and most of the annoying, hard-to-block noise comes from physical transfer via vibration anyway.

Yeah, people hating iTunes seem to have no clue how bad all the "alternatives" were back then. I'll be the first to shit on current Apple, but seriously, it was very successful for a reason.

Same. Even cruise control is kind of useless because people in front of you don't necessarily use it and are very inconsistent in their speed. So you end up constantly having to engage/disengage, rendering the whole thing moot.

I think something like autopilot could be implemented at the infrastructure level (sensors and emitters along the road), but people wouldn't like that because it would mean being unable to set your speed or overtake. The car exists for "freedom," but it is really an inefficient mode of transportation from both a time-use and energy-use perspective.

What we really need is a mix between rail/train and car/road.

Maybe that's it. It is really dependent on the radio environment indeed. And it uses Wi-Fi Direct for large transfers.

Once I had weird dropouts streaming to a friend's Bluetooth speakers because it had weird interaction with my Apple Watch, my iPhone, and his iPhone. That was in a cabin basically in the middle of nowhere...

But that's basically my point. Wireless everything is cool and convenient at first sight, but then you often have to deal with all kinds of problems, making you wish you could just connect a cable, browse the file system, and exchange stuff that way.

I have a friend who connects his Android phone to his Macbook, and he drags and drops the photos in/out of storage. Simple, efficient, no need for any cloud, no need for internet/wireless connectivity, no need to wait for any syncing, it just works.

There is no trackpad connected, just the Magic Mouse that was charging. Maybe it is because of some setting stored inside the mouse (it's a Razer mini). I think it has something to do with the scroll speed that macOS cannot deal with.

As I said, I'm sure I can fix it, but the point is that it works just fine as is on Windows and Linux.

Logitech mice are appreciated on Macs because they generally make drivers to deal with macOS idiosyncracies. A generic mouse will probably work OK but will be painful to deal with. macOS expects scrolling to work with inertia because of their focus on the trackpad or touch surface for the Magic Mouse.

Having used both extensively, it's not all bad, and I think they actually got some things right, but the problem is they make it hard for 3rd parties to make hardware because the APIs are lacking or inaccessible. For example, they just enabled linear mouse movement without relying on 3rd-party software; Windows has had that option since basically forever.

Apple does have some good things, but you can't argue with the fact that they make it very hard to integrate 3rd-party solutions (display are the same, notably for brightness control, etc).

If you answer a call on the watch and have AirPods on, it can figure out to switch the audio in/out to AirPods for the call; it just gets handled by the watch. Then you have to awkwardly lean into the watch and listen very carefully because if there is any noise, you won't understand much because of the tiny speaker. Completely defeat the ecosystem argument, and I think the speaker in the watch is largely useless.

The Apple Watch is popular but not very good at anything, really. All the apps are more cumbersome to use than they are worth; you can't properly make a real custom watch face, and sports tracking is extremely basic without additional software.

Haha, same. I actually prefer the layout and organization capacity of Music (I was an iTunes fan back in the iPod days), but there are so many things that don't work like you would expect them to or just plain bugs that it's too tiring.

Whenever I would enter a supermarket without network access, Music would just stop streaming after one song, no buffering. Spotify handled it just fine. Even the Spotify remote functionality is better and snappier than the godawful Music Remote. That is a separate app, because for some reason they can't integrate that functionality in the main app for their own hardware.

Apple is really in free fall; I don't think any of the top dogs actually use their stuff or care about it. It still looks good, and the base is strong, but now the cracks that started appearing a few years ago are becoming too big to ignore.

I recently discovered that for some reason, macOS doesn't want to work with a mouse with a traditional scroll wheel. It just jumps erratically all over the place.

I tried using it because I forgot to charge my dumb magic mouse. I'm sure it can be fixed in some ways, but I really shouldn't have to. The mouse works just fine when plugged into a Windows PC.

I'm always dumbfounded by people constantly praising AirDrop. It hasn't worked properly more often than it did. And that's not talking about the times when you send something, it gets accepted, and it just ends up in a void, not to be found anywhere.

At the end of the day, in most cases, it would be preferable to just connect the damn thing with a cable and send things that way. If you send a large file, it takes a while, and having to redo the process because of some bug kills any benefit from the convenience of not having to use a cable.

With older hardware the trick is to not upgrade the OS.

Apple's strategy is actually to make people auto-upgrade to make their work of maintaining older OS/software cheaper and make people who don't have recent enough hardware suffer.

It's funny that one argument for Apple was that you got updates for free. But in practice, Android doesn't need to upgrade the OS to access recent apps and ship security updates for old versions of Android. You just lose access to new OS functionalities, but it has been a while since there was much to care about.

This is satire, but it is so real that it hurts. I have encountered all of those bugs and more.

The worst part is the delusional Apple fanboys who will pretend it always works for them because they have associated their ego with the ownership of Apple devices.

Google might be bad, but at least it works most of the time. And hilariously, Microsoft, well-known for bugs galore, actually manages to make softwares that are less infuriating in the long run.