thewebguyd

The problem is when every neighborhood is NIMBY, something has to give or the problem will never be solved. At the end of the day, valuing aesthetics, parking, or quiet is a preference. Having shelter near jobs, schools and public transit is human necessity which is what should be prioritized.

Freezing the SFH neighborhood also doesn't protect the community long term, as NIMBYs believe. When supply gets restricted, prices go up. It prices out the local teachers, service workers, aging family, and even the NIMBY's own children get priced out, until now it's just a neighborhood of million dollar+ SFHs with no young families, no local workforce. It's economic segregation.

Continuing to allow local vetoes and restrictive zoning just pushes us out further and further into unsustainable suburban sprawl, without the transit to match, and boosting emissions.

Not popular in individualistic America, but when we have the housing crisis we do, the needs of the many are going to have to take priority over the needs of the few NIMBYs.

Thermal performance degrades too. Paste breaks down over 2 to 5 years, you'll thermal throttle more often and more quickly than when new after a few years.

Phase change thermal pads help with this, extending that timeline out beyond 5+ years but still will eventually degrade.

There's all kinds of other hardware things we don't usually think about that can start having an actual performance impact after ~3-5 years too. Battery, obviously, as it degrades can limit your peak wattage, the power delivery capacitors lose capacitance over the years and develop more resistance impacting maximum clock states, fan bearings wear out, you get vacuum leaks in copper heat pipes, and micro-fissures in soldering.

Granted, most of it is going to be software but its easy to forget that hardware degrades, and degrades relatively quickly especially in higher power systems.

This is why repairability and user serviceability is so important. If you can't open up and swap parts in your machine easily, a $10 consumable turns it into $2,000+ ewaste.

> based on how much love OSX gets from some folks

I can't speak for others, but my preference for macOS basically boils down to "it's a *nix system that can run the commercial software I need, with a lot of nice little attention to detail features" I'm trading friction in some areas, for the removal of friction elsewhere.

Plus macOS has little niceties like readline key bindings in every text field OOTB, pleasant font rendering (on retina quality displays), and all the "ecosystem" features. I use universal control between my mac and iPad daily, AirDrop, universal clipboard, and airpods auto device switching, etc.

I don't pretend it's a perfect OS, it's far from it, but I willingly accept the tradeoffs and find ways to work around them to get the other features I want.

> Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?

I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently.

The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt.

Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work.

When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.

> I had an MP3 player on either side of 2000 that was slightly smaller than a deck of playing cards that could use Smart Media flash memory cards. The largest card at the time was either 16 or 32mb and was enough to hold 1 album at near CD quality.

I had something similar. The storage was the iPod's killer feature, along with iTune's $0.99 songs. Suddenly you no longer had to buy whole albums, and you didn't have to swap out what was on your MP3 player every day when you wanted a different playlist. A 5GB hard drive in your pocket was a huge innovation then.

I'd imagine most are on longer than 3 years for computers. Most (non developers) I know hang onto their laptops and computers until they die or get spec constrained, and that ends up being around ~6 or 7 years, so in this case the comparison to the M1/M1 Max makes sense, as for the next couple years that's going to be the cohort that's looking to upgrade.

Apple also just can't give up the idea of selling games through the AppStore either and you end up with situations like with AC: Shadows where it was ported, but you must buy the macport via the app store. Your copy on steam does not include the mac port, so if you wan to play on both your Windows/Linux desktop and Mac, you have to buy it twice. So stupid.

That'd be an interesting future for sure but first we need Google to stop their power trip of needing to ID you before you can install an app on your phone, and likewise Apple will never allow that either without paying the Apple tax.

I feel like both Google and Apple see that future, and are now actively working to make sure it can't happen to protect their app store commissions.

I suspect the filler comes from RHLF and the amount of web marketing content that was ingested. "Not X, but Y" is all over marketing copy, as is the triad of concepts "By doing X, Y, and Z...." because it mimics TED-talk style rhetoric, it gets rated highly because people think it sounds profound. So optimizing for what appears to be helpful ends up just creating a bunch of corporate-speak sounding garbage.

Plain, direct language gets selected against during post-training leaving us with slop.

We also need to stop immediately dismissing certain writing tropes as being automatically LLM generated.

I'm re-reading an older fantasy series, and the amount of em-dashes in the text and similar tropes (you know, normal good writing) would easily be called out as "AI Slop" on this very forum, even though it was written in the early 90s.

> "Apple’s position is that it should be permitted to charge fees on in-app purchases made by users of its devices as a means to recoup its investments in the tools, technology, and services that allow it to maintain its App Store and software."

That is such a ridiculous argument. Next they'll want a cut of everything you buy from Amazon using Safari, or any bank transfer you do via your banking app just because you happen to use an Apple device. Give me a break.

Mind you, this is about purchase made using "external links" inside of apps. Not even Apple's IAP infrastructure at all. Apple does zero here, the developer in this instance is offloading to their own payment stack. Apple deserves nothing more than 0% commission here.

Yeah that's what gets me. If, according to them, "software development is a solved problem" then there's no reason they can't make native, efficient, well integrated apps for each platform. If the problem is solved, just have the AI do it! If it's truly as advanced and accelerating as they claim, then there's no need for electron anymore.

Because Microsoft screwed up their native UI story. They are slowly starting to go native again with WinUI3, but Microsoft went through a rough period with UI frameworks, I mean how many do they have now all still "supported"? WinForms, WPF, MFC, WinUI, MAUI, etc.?

Flutter is solid choice, and Canonical seems to be putting weight behind it for Ubuntu as well. Canonical is also now the new lead maintainer of Flutter Desktop.

Series 9, which I'll probably be upgrading this fall anyway.

Yeah, Apple Watch definitely needs faster charging. It wouldn't be as big of a deal if it both lasted longer, at least 3 days to get through a weekend, and could charge to a meaningful level in 15 minutes or less so I could just throw it on the charger in the morning and by the time I'm out of the shower and dressed have it be at ~80%.

Online advertising is less and less about forcing a pitch to conversion in the moment its viewed. Even if someone with an ad blocker would never click on the ad anyway, repeat "impressions" build implicit trust just through exposure. Six months or even a year from then, when that user is looking for a specific SaaS tool, for example, the brand they saw 40 times already is the one that feels established and safe, and it's more likely to lead to a conversion without ever clicking the original ad.

The second part of putting so much effort into getting past ad blockers is tracking & fingerprinting, especially across devices.

In general, ads work by anchoring a brand name in your memory for when you eventually are looking for said product or service, the goal isn't always to force a conversion on the spot.

It's a bit more of a gray area in the US, where expectations of privacy in public spaces has been ruled against many times over. When in a public space, you are allowed to film or photograph whomever you want. This likewise extends into private property, where you set the rules of your own property, and also is the only place where you have an expectation of privacy.

> Why do we treat these cameras like they can do only one thing?

Because its useful messaging to disarm the populace. "License plate reader" sounds less alarming than "Internet connected camera" or "Mass surveillance device."

Public attitudes vary around a "license plate reader" but will be more uniformly opposed to "Widespread, automated government mass surveillance tracking your every move via camera in real time"

The penny press, and a ton of those pamphlets amount to what we now call tabloids. They were funded by advertising too, and used fear & outrage to sell copies. Led to some pretty funny conspiracies like The Moon Hoax (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Moon_Hoax)

Times are not as different as we'd like to believe

Oh yeah, of course Meta isn't the only one pushing for it, they are just one of the largest contributors in support of these legislations, generally. More specifically, it's governments coming up with these laws. Meta's lobbying is trying to make sure the laws stay focused on the app store's & OSes, rather than requiring social media and individual websites/services doing the age gating. Facebook does not want to police itself or its content.

Meta is one of the biggest ones pushing for this, because they don't want to be accountable so these types of laws pass the buck onto the delivery platforms (Apple, Google, other OSes)

Meta is then funding/lobbying alongside a bunch of other conservative groups like Heritage Action, and the digital childhood alliance (also made up of a ton of other conservative lobbying groups)

This is the only valid future for tech like this IMO.

Should any kind of "superintelligence" exist, it must be a public good, available to all. Not controlled by a small handful of oligarchs and profit seeking entities.

> I don’t wanna carry another device with me all the time

And that's why this (and any other stand alone "AI device") is doomed to fail.

We solved this problem already in 2007. "An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices."

The industry has been chasing that high ever since, failing to stop and consider that maybe the smartphone is effectively peak consumer tech as a delivery vehicle for various services.

OpenAI is just upset that they don't get to own the delivery vehicle, Google and Apple do.

> many talented bakers on YOUR platform

Time and time again I am shown that none of these big tech billionaires have any appreciation for human craft whatsoever. What's with the attempt to have an LLM do literally everything for you?

It's not healthy to try and be hyper efficient with literally everything in your life, nor is it healthy to remove all human aspects of everything.

Sometimes, it's totally OK to just slow down, allow imperfection, be inefficient, get things wrong, etc.

It's why all their silly consumer-oriented use cases for AI fall on deaf ears, at least for me. Crap like this, I'd never do. I'd also never use an LLM to book and plan my travel, I have no reason to, planning, finding hotels and flights, making my own itinerary is part of the joy. Finding recipes is part of the joy, etc.

They all just want to suck the fun out of everything, and make it hyper-efficient all while stripping away any human element.

Not legally binding, no. This is more of a lobbying attempt, Abbott just paused all new data center development in Texas until the state can audit them, they have an interconnection queue of about 474GW, ERCOT can't handle it that's more than 5x Texas's peak electricity demand.

The turnout in my state's primary this week was an abysmal 20%. I hope that's not an omen for November, because we are doomed if so.

Probably has less to do with quality and more of a copyright/license concern.

It keeps being tried because its an abdication of responsibility. Instead of doing the hard thing, you just offload security to the user, then throw up your hands and say "oh, well its your fault you got pwned, you clicked [Allow] didn't you?"

It's the easy and cheap way out.

Hasn't that always been the case with Google? Outside of a few that are mostly good and have stuck around, I've always seen Google has having great tech but being quite bad and making products out of it.