system16

As advanced cruise control? It's great. As what it's marketed as? It's fraud.

This is what I find the most surprising. I was under the impression that ChatGPT was still "research" and wouldn't be ready for prime time for a while. These rushed products that don't live anywhere near up to the hype seem like they will sour public opinion on it.

Seeing a lot of criticism towards Sundar lately, and it's not without merit. There is blood in the water now and I wouldn't be surprised if his time is limited.

He is good as a caretaker who didn't rock the boat, but Google needs bold innovation and competence if it intends on staying relevant in the years to come.

It's hard to find the real chou doufu in major cities these days. Even the stuff in most night markets is toned down so as not to scare off tourists and piss off the other vendors.

I remember the first time I encountered it was in 2000 outside Shenzhen, China (which was mostly a construction site at the time). I literally thought a sewer main had broken.

Ads aside, the UI of Youtube and Maps is atrocious. There is so much room for improvement here, but it will never happen from Google. It's just not in their DNA. Unfortunately, they have such a huge moat here I doubt we'll see anything better for a long time.

Sort of, similar to how an email domain does and how others might perceive you based on whether you have an @hotmail, @gmail, @outlook address.

I'm using mastodon.social since I signed up years ago, but if I were to create an account today, I'd just look for the coolest sounding instance that has a lot of users. Like the other comment mentioned, you can always migrate to a different one (although you might lose your post history, you'll keep all your followers/followings).

I guess it depends who you follow. Most iOS Developers I followed on Twitter have all migrated to Mastodon, as well as many indie game devs. My Mastodon feed is actually significantly more interesting these days than Twitter. For fun I just logged into Twitter and the first 20 tweets I looked at in the "For you" tab were from brand accounts, major media accounts, sponsored tweets, suggested accounts, and tweets others have liked. Over half were from accounts I don't follow. The "Following" tab was entirely brand accounts and media accounts.

It's actually pretty simple. Just sign up to any instance/server. It doesn't really matter which one. You can follow and interact with anyone, regardless of which server they signed up for. Then it's just like Twitter for the most part.

I feel the "multiple instances" aspect of Mastodon really confuses people. Highlighting it to new users is not working in their favour.

Exactly. It will be a huge misstep if they don't take the opportunity to do a rebranding here.

It's not that Bing is terrible (well the name is, but that could be arguable). It's that after at all of these years Bing has become - deserving of it or not - synonymous with mediocre. When it comes to search, it's not even thought of as 'second best' - it's more like 'last resort' (or even "I'm feeling lucky")

Interesting to compare this to the same page from 2019: https://web.archive.org/web/20190407072718/https://www.tesla...

Full Self-Driving Capability

Navigate on Autopilot: automatic driving from highway on-ramp to off-ramp including interchanges and overtaking slower cars.

Autopark: both parallel and perpendicular spaces.

Summon: your parked car will come find you anywhere in a parking lot. Really.

Coming later this year:

Recognize and respond to traffic lights and stop signs.

Automatic driving on city streets.

If the wine glasses were sold with the promise that in one year I'd receive a solution to apply to them that would truly make them unbreakable? Yes, I would call it fraud.

At minimum, I can't see anything other than Tesla being forced to refund FSD purchases. It's fraud, plain and simple.

But whether it's due to the embarrassment of being swindled or being drunk on the Kool-Aid, the amount of Tesla owners I know that tell me they are happy for paying up to $15k for what is essentially cruise control, and who honestly believe 'real FSD is only a year away' is shocking.

For the average user does it even matter what server/instance you join? From what I can tell, once you sign up you can search for, follow, find, post, re-post etc. anything from anyone regardless of which server you sign up with.

I said the same thing even a few weeks ago, but the momentum for Mastodon is growing rapidly and it's really impressive to see, and Ivory is a very impressive client even in beta.

Almost everyone I followed on Twitter is using it now, and I actually prefer the experience. It's like Twitter but without all the bots/spam/hate, at least for now.

Another short-sighted and bizarre move by a bizarre. fragile, little man.

The number of users on third-party clients could not have been significant enough to justify this. At very least, the developers could have been given some notice or an ounce of respect about API access being phased out.

Not to mention third-party client users are mostly power users who are responsible for a lot of the content on Twitter that the rest consume.

On the bright side, Mastodon has been gaining traction and can't be dismissed anymore. I'm actually using it more than Twitter now. Fantastic clients are coming out like Tapbot's own Ivory and IceCubes, and it's exciting to see what developers can and will do without the confines of Twitter. I'm optimistic this will turn out to be a very good thing for everyone but Twitter and Elon.

That's hardly the case anymore and it's one of the main points the article is making. It doesn't matter who you follow when well over half your feed is composed of ads, suggested reels, and two week old TikTok reposts from random strangers.

Playing dumb and framing himself as just a kid who was out of his element appears to be his team's strategy to try and minimize his personal consequences in all of this. He is a highly educated individual that was literally born on Stanford's campus to professors. I'm not sure many will buy his Steve Urkel "Did I do that??" defence.

It's convenient, until you've written 90% of your app in record time and then end up so blocked on the remaining 10% you wish you would have just used UIKit.

I love how quick and easy SwiftUI is for simple, Apple-like / stock app interfaces. But the second you try to do something outside of their guard rails (some of which you don't even see until you've gone outside them), SwiftUI quickly makes you realize you are swimming against the current. I also find debugging SwiftUI to be exceptionally painful compared to UIKit.

As others have said though, this improves with every release so I'm confident things will only get better.

That's not really a comparable analogy. More like "Here is this cool feature I'm going to make by the end of the year, pay me $5,000 for it now." and you never actually get it. It's fraud.

Comparing a bad psychedelic trip to a bad experience with cannabis or alcohol is kind of trivializing it. A moderate LSD dose can last 8-12 hours and at its peak is much, much more intense. Unless you have some valium on hand, if things go south there is no escaping it. You can't just go to sleep like you could with alcohol or cannabis.

> There’s no grand value proposition like you might see on a short form Instagram video about how to make cute popsicles for summer. At the end he didn’t approach the camera and say “Hey if you liked that, be sure to like and subscribe and hit that notification bell.” It’s just someone dancing their heart out and enjoying themselves.

To be fair, TikTok has a lot of videos that do end with "hit the + or heart on the right" or "what do you think? leave a comment" or "if you want part 2" etc.

What a bizarre statement. By that logic, someone can't say Trump is a failed president unless they've become president themselves.

> It also doesn't help that there's a Twitter replacement (Mastodon) waiting in the wings

As much as I want to see Mastodon succeed, I don't see it ever happening. Its biggest feature (multiple instances) is also the biggest reason most users are never going to use it. It's just too confusing for the end user. Also it's bizarre that the one instance that actually has the potential to gain mainstream interest (mastodon.social) is not accepting new invites.

I'd put my money on something new taking Twitter's place way before Mastodon.

Taiwan (Province of China)

https://ipv4.dev.sarl/@zoom=10&ip=203.187.74.93

Interesting that a Taiwan IP range would be listed as "Province of China".

I miss the days when Jobs would tell shareholders to pound sand rather than make product compromises.

Under Tim Cook, there is no possible way things will get better, and I suspect they will get much worse. They'll continue making whatever comprises to the user experience are necessary to obtain quarterly growth. And the more difficult that becomes, the more drastic and user hostile the changes will be.

It's bizarrely short-sighted, and I can't figure out why. I mean there are several videos of Steve Jobs himself warning about this exact trajectory, and I'm sure Tim Cook must have seen them.

Similar story here. 20 years ago I was a Windows user. I had no love for Windows, but I put up with it. I had never even considered buying a Mac because to me they were just overpriced dumbed down PCs for people who were not technical. I didn't know anything about them.

Then I bought an iPod with click wheel.

I fell in love with it from the minute I opened the packaging. It just felt like a device that a lot of care was put into. I loved holding it and it was a pleasure to use. It made me rethink Apple.

When it was time to buy a new laptop, I bought the 2006 black MacBook. I felt the same thing all over again, but now for my primary computing device. I loved OS X.

Fast forward to today and I also have a house full of Apple products. Just in my line of sight I have several Mac laptops, Magic Keyboard/touchpad, a few iPhones, an iPad, AirPods... over the years I've purchased dozens of Apple products. Not to mention my subscriptions to Apple TV+, iCloud Storage, Apple Music...

But Apple is increasingly a very different company than before. I now feel like they are nickel and diming me at every possible turn and it's no longer even subtle. When I picked up my iPhone 14 Pro at the Apple Store, I was in disbelief at how hard the Apple Employee tried to upsell Apple Care using hard sell scare tactics.

I doubt anything will ever change under Tim Cook. Maybe some day Scott Forstall will return in Jobs-like fashion and correct the company's course.

> Imagine how embarrassing and annoying it must be for Chinese people to see the relatively sub-par quality of the end result.

While this may be true for many shady developer-led real estate projects, it's absolutely not the case for the country's major infrastructure projects like airports, subways, high speed rail, highways, bridges, dams, etc. They rival or surpass anything you will see in the west in scope and quality, and built in a fraction of the time.

I enjoyed it, although not as much as most critics. I found it took a few episodes to hit its stride, and enjoyed the first and second seasons. At its heart it's a character drama, so if you're watching it only for the science interesting moments are few and far between.

Later episodes fall victim to lazy "a major catastrophe is about to occur, engineering team comes up with moonshot solution just in the nick of time to save the day" more often than I'd like. And the lesbian romance storyline seemed forced. I could barely finish the third season as it really went off the rails.

At my company when we celebrate something like Christmas or a big project milestone, we have a short celebratory huddle in the office / Zoom where our CEO will relay some anecdotes and thank us for our efforts, and then just tells us: "take your family out to dinner at your favourite restaurant and the company will cover it."

I think it's a great way to show your employees they are valued. I don't need a pizza party with co-workers or some junk I'll toss in a corner and never use.

It's just another thing to add to the pile that should make anybody question why on earth people think he is a genius.

The mythos he has created around himself is comical and it's mind-blowing that anyone actually believes it. He literally spends his entire day trolling on social media, yet people think he's out there solving the world's greatest engineering problems.