somethoughts

It would seem like such an obvious win-win if these cleaning robotics companies just won a couple of contracts with some tech forward hotel chains.

  - Faster R&D since hotel rooms are regular/familiar
  - Cost center for hotels so revenue would be higher/straightforward
  - No privacy issues since robots would not be present in rooms with guests
  - Easier servicing/maintenance since multiple robots at same location

My hot take for Japan is that hybrids make the most sense until one the major markets (US or all of EU) has significant traction with respect to ubiquitous EV charger infrastructure.

Tesla can fund the project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in the US and make it make sense within the context of a profitable business plan.

Chinese manufacturers can similarly make it make sense financially.

Japanese auto makers who are heavily subsidized by the Japanese government can't easily fund the infrastructure project of making EV chargers ubiquitous in a foreign country like the US or EU and their home market is much smaller.

I don't think its quite so easy anymore that I can tell, with parental tools today - on a properly provisioned device you can require parental permission for app installs such as VPN, etc.

Yes it doesn't show up probably because you were able to pretty easily mindlessly click through the part where you were asked if this is being provisioned as a child's computer.

When you provision a Windows, Mac or Chromebook these days as a child's device using your parental account, it will require a parental account to enable new user accounts and/or re-enable guest user on the device.

Like I said - my preference would have been for Microsoft, Apple, Google and Meta and TikTok to have made an industry effort to educate parents about the existence of such tools a priori of any legislation, we could have avoided Linux etc. getting sucked in.

From a parent's perspective, that's the great part about bubbling it up to the OS user account level.

Its trivially easy to see if the user (child) has indeed created multiple OS level user accounts with different permission levels if you want to spot check the computer.

You'll see it on first startup and then you can have "a chat". With Guest account access disabled, spawning a new account on a computer takes 2-3 minutes, will send emails and dashboard notices to the parent.

Its very much near impossible to verify that the child is not just going to Facebook etc. and using separate accounts and just logging out religiously.

That said I wish Apple/Microsoft/Google had more aggressively advertised their Parental Control features for Mac/Windows/ChromeOS as a key differentiator to avoid Ubuntu/Open Source distros from having to implement them.

It was mostly in response to the secwar tweet:

"Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic,"

If this tweet is taken to the nth degree that'd effectively put Anthropic out of business since they have pretty significant Amazon[1] and Microsoft[2] cloud provider/funding relationships that would need to be nullified within 6 months.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/federal/defense

[2] https://military.microsoft.com

Sorry I was a bit unclear - this was referencing the Administration not Anthropic.

The United States Department of Justice under the Trump administration, supported Phillips.[20][5] While the Department asserts that anti-discrimination laws are necessary to prevent businesses that provide goods and services from discriminating, these laws cannot be used to compel a business into expressing speech they do not agree with, nor used to provide goods and services with such expressions without the ability for the business to assert they do not agree with those expressions. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masterpiece_Cakeshop_v._Colora...

While not exactly parallel, it seems slightly hypocritical that this is coming from the party of "a baker should not be forced to bake a wedding cake for a customer that they ideologically/morally disagree with."

I guess the rules are different if the customer is the government? If it's the government, then if the government doesn't get its wedding cake then the government can go so far as to prevent the baker from selling cakes entirely to any other customers.

My hot take as some one who follows the space is that traditionally a big blocker of factory built housing has been unionized trades people who lived in the area of the housing developments. These trades people had purchased their homes prior to housing costs skyrocketing in California.

For them, blocking factory built housing meant they had a monopoly on the local housing development projects and easy commutes from their homes (which are protected from property tax increases by Prop 13) to the local job sites.

As these original local trades people have aged out of the workforce they are replaced by younger trades people who can't actually afford housing in the area face 1-2 hour commutes, I think there will be less resistance..

The thought of living in a huge home in Riverside or Fresno with a 10-20 minute commute and building in houses in a climate controlled, OSHA inspected building will start looking more attractive.

I think this is the issue - if the NIMBYs want to protest things they should really start when the office space gets built.

The filled office space full of white collar jobs paying $200K is what triggers the eye of the residential developers of high density housing as it provides a basis for the profit margin spreadsheet model.

Interestingly it's popularity or unpopularity would prove out two things - both of which are somewhat of a win win for Apple:

1.) If MacPhone/MacPad is popular then it would prove that there does exist a currently untapped, unaddressed market who wants Apple HW and are willing to pay a premium but do not want the locked down iOS garden which means more money for minimal effort.

2.) If MacPhone/MacPad is unpopular then it would prove that their motivation and hypothesis was correct - people do indeed come to Apple and pay the premium precisely for the walled garden and the convenience it affords.

If its indeed unpopular you could keep it around for a couple of years as an EU regulatory compliance device. Then you can say to any future regulator who wants to tear down the iOS walled garden - we tried that back in 2026 and nobody wanted it.

I think the reverse offering on the Apple device roadmap would be interesting.

A MacPad and a MacPhone. Given its eventually going to be completely the same silicon this would enable them to offer a non App Store experience for people who want to experiment with alternative app stores like Epic.

In that way they could keep the average Apple target iPhone/iPad customer within the walled garden of iOS while being able to point specifically to EU regulators that they are allowing alternative app stores on the MacPhone/MacPad platform.

Pretty cool!

My hot take is that there are seem to be really two markets here:

1.) Candy crush type board games targeting kids with well-off parents. Basically really focused on immersive and interactive visuals like effects and cutscenes.

2.) Serious board games targeting older teenagers and adults playing heavy games with BoardGameGeek weightings of above 3.5 with money to spend on their own hobby. Think games like 18XX, Brass Birmingham, Dune, Terraforming Mars or Gloomhaven. They would find the digital board game experience useful for accessing expansion maps (i.e. 18xx) or expansion campaigns (Gloomhaven). Additional features of interest might be solo play against automated players, game state/score tracking, game tutorials.

It almost feels like these two groups would have such different profiles that two separate marketing approaches should be attempted.

I feel like they should target commercial applications first before worrying about trying to get into people's homes.

It would seem like the ideal target for this would be say a hotel operator. A team of these could clean a large number of rooms on an unoccupied floor of a hotel at once. Even if this was tele-operated remotely, this seems like it could be particularly beneficial for hotels in remote locations where its harder to hire people locally.

There was/is a pretty interesting board game roughly based on Python Turtles created by a middle schooler a while back.

Instead of a turtle you control a bunny and instead of lines of code with commands you collect up and then use sequences of cards with commands (i.e. left, right, forward, back). Eventually, I think you end up using loop command cards, etc.

I'd imagine you could have teams control each bunny.

CoderBunnyz - https://coderbunnyz.com

Quick overview on how to play CoderBunnyz

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCOBtdG3ctI

Some provided lesson plans even:

https://coderbunnyz.com/stem-schools/

Amazon

https://www.amazon.com/Coder-Bunnyz-Comprehensive-Programmin...

The burrito ballistic tech seems like it could probably handle the last 10 yards problem and enable drive by delivery.

Postmates - How we built a Burrito Cannon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=br_KqzLWunM

Burrito Cannon Demo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDdKYmStcIc

My hot take is that it will probably follow the Netflix model of pricing once the VC money wants to turn on the profit switch.

Originally Netflix was a single tier at $9.99 with no ads. As ZIRP ended and investors told Netflix its VC-like honeymoon period was over - ads were introduced at $6.99 and the basic no ad tier went to $15.99 and the Premium went to 19.99.

Currently Netflix ad supported is $7.99, add free is $17.99 and Premium is $24.99.

Mapping that on to OpenAI pricing - ChatGPT will be ~$17.99 for ad supported, ~$49.99 for ad free and ~$599 for Pro.

I feel like it'd be perfect if all these school replacements (home-school, charter school, online only schools) went after replacing the dearth of quality after school options.

Really the only options for after school activities after graduating from elementary school are competitive sports, competitive math, competitive music, competitive chess, etc. which are pretty much all zero sum in nature.

I'd love options for kids that let them gradually explore their interests to help them discover future vocational interests in a way that was beneficial to society such that they don't have an existential crisis when they hit senior year in high school and have to pick a college major.

It feels a better strategy for all parties involved to have transitioned these shows to ABC's streaming properties (i.e. Hulu) and made them "exclusive" content for these platforms.

This would have put them out of the reach of the FCC (based on the FCC's initial spectrum is for public benefit for all claim) for now.

There is probably significant IP in both of these shows that could still have been monetized given brand familiarity. It would have been less than before but still something is better than nothing.

I don't have any data to back this up but I can't imagine a lot of people still use Over The Air TV. And the intersection of people who rely solely on OTA TV and are clamoring to watch Kimmel/View is probably even lower.

This also would probably have benefitted the administration in that it wouldn't have trigger as many alarm bells from a free speech perspective.

I think there could be a case for a fixed amount of annual tax credit for each US citizen that is employed by a company - since presumably that person is not on the government payroll or on benefits so the US government is saving money.

The big plus is business owners love claiming tax credits. You would not really need that much paperwork or auditing as far as I can tell since you have every US employees tax info already versus trying to monitor/regulate "outsourcing".

Looking at this from a glass half full mindset, a decade from now we should have a pretty interesting data set from a public health policy perspective.

Prior to this, to get such a large subset of children to not take vaccines for an epidemiological study would probably be illegal or at best be considered highly unethical. Convincing parents to enroll their children in such a study in the name of science and for a small stipend would probably be next to impossible considering the potential lifetime impacts.

I posit that the challenge has been that in order to prove vaccine efficacy on a continuing/updated basis, you need access to a non-vaccinated control group that controls for developed world socio-economic conditions which didn't exist (until now). Thus there hasn't been an easy way to do large population scale studies on vaccine efficacy - so it did somewhat become a "trust us" tautology (until now).

I think a line up of specifically branded Android Phones and Chromebook that are locked into (at least initially) using Google Family Link and perhaps more importantly - a marketing campaign on educating parents on how to setup/use it would be a huge win from a PR standpoint.

It'd be a lot more deterministic than this AI thing. And more importantly would completely avoid the digital privacy issues that this solution might possibly present (where normal adult users are going to be blocked or have to provide government ID).

As a user of Family Link (and Apple Screentime) I think all the pieces are there from a usability perspective finally. Google (and Apple) leadership just needs to coordinate the push among the various internal groups.

haha - yes - sometimes when you look at all the Web 2.0 and beyond startups, all of the startups seems to be at least original founded to solve problems single people think need solving:

* finding good looking people in college

* sending dm's to other people

* carpooling with strangers

* crashing on strangers couches

* getting takeout delivered

* robots/drones that fight each other

* the meta verse

* the equivalent of digital beanie babies

Meanwhile automation to help out with stuff like laundry, dishwashing, cooking home cooked meals, other household chores, helping the elderly, etc. remain untouched.

A fun theory I have is that once you start seeing industry trade group sponsored lobbyists and influence marketing campaigns matching the level of spending of entrenched industries, you can probably start lowering the subsidies for said industry.

Like once we start referring to the solar industry trade group as Big Solar or Big Clean Energy...

Clip of an interview with Ed Smylie by the Smithsonian Channel

How Duct Tape Saved the Lives of the Apollo 13 Crew

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeEM_IBUv70

Food for thought - originally Netflix was a single tier at $9.99 with no ads. As ZIRP ended and investors told Netflix its VC-like honeymoon period was over - ads were introduced at $6.99 and the basic no ad tier went to $15.99 and the Premium went to 19.99.

Using Netflix as the pricing model, when VCs eventually say no to anymore Softbank style free lunches to buy market share - then ad free LLM services could go from $19.99 to $35.99 and possibly $49.99 at the high end (i.e. unlimited) per month.

Interestingly in Asia there are services that drive by hotels and pick up laundry bags and bring them back the next day washed and folded.

Perhaps someone here on HN will read this here, make an app out of it, get funding and set up such a thing in the US.

Actually interestingly the primary benefit of doing this would actually be trucking companies. The AI software could probably work way better and have less liability if not having to deal with corner cases of irrational human drivers.

Unfettered access to 5 lanes of freeway.

Agree -but the alternative is that at no point does anyone get to chose to opt out of driving amongst a sea of 10 ton self driving trucks.

Quite the opposite - right now (or at least in the future unless interventions are added) poor people have no option but to submit themselves to driving sandwiched amongst with 10 ton trucks driven by who knows what, vibe coded, beta tested, "AI" software.