thewebguyd

Only if there's a competitor for Apple's locked-in customers to go to. Android OEMs aren't trying very hard to court Apple's customers, none of them yet offer anything equivalent to advanced data protection for iCloud & photos, and there's no full "ecosystem" outside of phone + ear buds, and if you buy through a carrier you get ads and bloatware shoved down your throat anyway.

I do agree that Apple is ripe for disruption, but it certainly isn't going to come from any of the existing players, nor is it likely to come from the AI labsp laying fast and loose with your data (and who will also be serving ads).

All of those quirks would be intuitive to a mac user, but to the parent's point, they are unintuitive because it works differently from Windows. Before the green traffic light went full screen it was Zoom, not maximize. It fit the window to the content, the logic being why would you cover a huge display with white space just to read an 800px wide document. Fullscreen breaks long time macOS behavior, throwing that window over to its own space and breaks the desktop centric design.

Likewise with the red traffic light. Windows couples process lifecycle to the window lifecycle. macOS separates process from the presentation, the paradigm is a desk full of papers, and so documents are separate from their application, the app remains ready to open another file when you close that specific document.

I'll give you app installation via drag and drop, if the background image of the .dmg doesn't have that arrow queue then you're right, it's pretty unintuitive but even then, the idea is you don't have to install an app on macOS. They are just bundles, you run them from anywhere. Dragging and dropping into /Applications is totally optional.

Windows has its fair share of unintuitive behavior/arbitrary quirks too that's overlooked because "that's how it's always been." What's intuitive or not still just comes down to muscle memory.

A backup without a restore test isn't a backup at all

Of course. At a certain point, it's just physics. There is only going to be so much you can get out of such a tiny sensor and lens. Software can only do so much without turning it into an AI photo.

Even just carrying around a small Micro 4/3 camera gets you 3x the sensor surface area of a smartphone. An APS-C Fujifilm like an x100V gets you 5.2x the sensor surface and is still mostly "pocketable" (in a bag).

What the iPhone has effectively replaced though are the old point and shoot digicams, which now have smaller sensors than the iPhone.

I'd suspect the average person won't notice much difference (on the main lens) until about iPhone 11 or older, with still photos. Computational image processing does a TON of heavy lifting with these tiny sensors.

With video OTOH, the improvements are much more noticeable. I also suspect that is why Apple focuses so much on video as its a harder problem to solve and so much easier to differentiate your hardware from competitors.

> only photographers care about that, to most people it's just pictures

This is largely true, when it comes to photos of other people/people they care about.

I'm a wedding & family photographer part time, and at nearly every wedding I shoot, the photos the clients and their guests favorite the most from the galleries are usually the quick candid snaps where the subject has an expression they like or are doing something fun. It could be a blurry, grainy, dark mess of a photo and it will consistently be their favorite photo of the day.

For most non-photographers, the subject of the photo is what matters and is all they will notice. Almost no one is making a distinction between bokeh shape, or noise (unless its so obvious as to completely ruin the photo), composition, etc.

All that to say, photo quality is only one very small part of the equation.

> I prefer physical books at home, but if I'm out and about travelling I always take my kindle.

Same. I prefer hardcovers, I usually look for first editions, etc. I'd prefer not to lug them around so I also have a kindle for if I want to read away from home. I usually borrow the ebooks from my library though when the ones I want are available so I'm not buying twice.

I don't think I could ever get rid of physical books entirely though. There's a somatic element to reading that I appreciate that you lose entirely with an ereader.

I suspect even some of the more "advanced" queries they demoed off, i.e., "what was that restaurant John and I talked about last week?" also not require LLMs whatsoever and could have been accomplished with a simple search.

Small claims is great in that in most states lawyers generally aren't allowed so right out the gate you remove the wealth asymmetry issue. The downside is the dollar amount is very small. I'd like to see small claims limits expanded tbh.

> Infinite investor dollars

This has another side effect in that it breaks the power that consumers have in the market to have a say in how resources get allocated, by voting with their wallet.

The entire AI buildout is non-consensual. Individuals have zero say. We could all refuse to buy AI subscriptions and it would not matter because businesses will still buy, and, investors have decided that we are moving forward with this no matter what, seemingly whether anyone is actually buying or not.

AI isn't necessarily unique here, but it is one of the biggest new examples of wealth inequality and how society at large are no longer the ones who get to decide how resources are allocated under a capitalist system, especially when the investor dollars behind it amounts to the GDP of a small nation.

> But it's an illusion

So is human consciousness. We are also dynamic and constantly changing, self awareness/consciousness is a conditioned process. There is no unchanging "you" or a little man inside controlling things, there's no narrator just the narration.

Do we care because we can reason and have meta cognition? Or are the narratives we build, built by our brains only after the fact to justify our biological actions? If an ecosystem's value is invalidated because its dynamic or ephemeral and lacking a permanent core then human consciousness also fails the same test. We can't dismiss nature as a naive projection while also treating our own post-hoc narrative making as the only real thing in the universe, its a double standard.

If the process that produces meaning is just another temporary biological phenomenon, which it likely is, then we (humans) are not special observers, we are then just one more thing shifting inside the same system we are trying to pave over.

> We just don't know.

That's the absurdity of this. We are trying to measure LLMs against something we don't even have an accurate definition of ourselves. If we don't fully know what consciousness is, how can we confidently determine whether or not an AI model has consciousness?

> Can this thing harm me back?

We extend moral considerations or legal protections to beings that have zero capacity to harm us back, though. The inability to fight back is the reason a lot of welfare protections exist in the first place.

That aside, if (and that's a really big if) we end up with a model that is sentient, as in has the capacity to suffer, using factory farming as justification to ignore model welfare is just admitting we intend to repeat the same abject moral failure again in the name of economic convenience.

I hope that we won't, but humans love cheap meat, and will probably love cheap intelligence as well.

> where we all are made to learn new stuff

Liquid glass didn't require any relearning at all, the iOS interface changed aesthetics, not functionality. The OS has worked largely the same for the past 10 years since the iPhone X.

But I fail to see how an AI generated interface would be any better. What if after several back and forth with the AI, it still can't get the design right for you just so? It's not deterministic, you might get a different result every time you open your phone. Expecting third party services to leave their APIs open just so OpenAI phones can consume them is awfully optimistic as the moment such a device becomes an existential threat to third parties, APIs will start getting locked down.

By all means, OpenAI should try, not saying they shouldn't, but I'm not optimistic it'll be a success. The smartphone is already basically peak form factor. No one is going to want to carry around a second device, which is why every other AI device/pin is DOA. It has to come out of the gate ready to fully replace someone's smartphone and the surrounding ecosystem of it or it also is DOA. Good camera? Support spotify/apple music? messaging, video calls, airdrop/nearbyshare, works with smartwatches and fitness trackers, etc. If it doesn't, it will fail.

And if it came to that, and that's how this OS worked, we'd see open APIs disappear real quick from all the popular services because of the support nightmare, and, services like Uber and others are going to want to maintain exclusivity with their first party app the moment vibe coding becomes that viable. APIs will get locked down, and we'll all be worse off for it.

If an "AI Phone" looks to be an existential threat to third party app devs and services, except everyone to do everything they can kill said AI Phone to protect their own products.

It's a bit of a different world today then when BlackBerry dominated.

RIM essentially invented MDM which is what allowed it to take off in the enterprise, via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Android and iOS didn't fully unseat them in the enterprise until third party MDMs were up to par and lock down the consumer devices just as effectively.

So whatever new phone/OS that wants to take a stab at the enterprise, out of the gate, must support MDM profiles from all the major ones at least (InTune, ManageEngine, MaaS360, etc.). Then, as you said, all the MFA apps, at least should have Slack/Teams, office apps, etc.

Not that it can't be done, but the cost of entry is much higher today if anyone wants to overcome the switching costs.

Simple baseball hat is one of the oldest tricks in the book and is a staple for a reason. The brim blocks your eyes and upper half of your face, facial recognition gets broken because the camera cannot find two eyes and a nose bridge, and the biggest one over these ridiculous patterns, zero suspicion. It's not weird to wear a hat, but you stand out immediately wearing any of these adversarial patterns.

Granted, a hat will not trick "person" detection, you'll still get picked up in the box, but any camera that records with motion will still detect you in the adversarial pattern too as a person, even if it doesn't pick up your face to ID you.

If I were up to anything nefarious, I'd rather blend in with other humans as much as possible, not stand out like a sore thumb.

Or they've hit diminishing returns that will collapse their valuation, so saying "this is a threat to humanity" sounds better than "This is about as good as the tech is going to be for a long time" to investors.

None of that has to do with blocking the content behind a login wall. X can still serve ads just fine to non-logged in users. I'm against the site running ads, at all, I'm against mandatory account creation. The internet ran ad supported without mandatory accounts for years.

> The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads".

Or in the case of X, how about just let me browse without creating an account? Likewise with meta/FB, IG, etc. The reality is businesses and other services post here, share status updates, etc. often before their main pages. I'd like to read those, and yet I have no desire to actually post or interact with any of the content, just read it. I should not need an account for that.

They are just stories, but narrative stories work really well for human brains when it comes to psychological transformation.

I like to think of religions as psychological technology. One doesn’t have to believe the stories are real for them to still have power. One can engage with the fantastic map of the mind that Buddhism provides without literally believing a being achieved “enlightenment” under a tree. Likewise, in the Christian tradition, the desert fathers through Hesychasm realized much of the same stuff as Buddha, and one does not need to accept the dogma as true to make use of the technology.

Humans are myth-makers, and our brains have a neat ability to use myth to enact real change. Ricoeur dubbed something similar as the second naïveté, re-engaging with faiths after a period of rigorous critical doubt, seeing them for what they actually are, stories that provide a technology for the inner working of the human mind.

People complained there was no SDK or way to install software on the iPhone outside of web apps.

It's weird to me how so many people just put up with crappy, low quality software. If you buy a physical good and its defective, you return it, stop buying that brand, maybe even leave a negative review or contact consumer reports, etc. If it does not live up to what was advertised, you go to the FTC.

But when it comes to software, we all just kind of accept that shitty software is the norm and totally fine? Let's start calling it what it is, its defective.

Even Apple, before caving in, didn't want apps. On the original iPhone there was no SDK, Jobs' "sweet solution" to expanding functionality was web apps pinned to the home screen.

Everyone complained, loudly, and they caved in and launched the app store.

> gratuitous over-use of technology.

That describes silicon valley tech culture to a tee.

> If you tell me to imaging an equilateral triangle, I can put it there in my mind's eye, and if you tell me to attach another equilateral triangle to it I can see the resulting parallelogram.

For me, I can't. With the Apple example, I don't see (or imagine) anything. I know I am thinking of an Apple, and my thinking is also entirely verbal/monologue based so it's like a thought of "I am thinking of an Apple" there's no accompanying visualization, etc. When I'm really deep in thought I have subvocalizations too, slight movements of my mouth and tongue as if speaking the words of my internal monologue. To me the absence of language seems impossible to my mind.

load-bearing was/is used frequently on the ops side of things, I assume the LLMs picked up from physical engineering texts or sysadmin type blogs.

> parking lots

This would do a lot on its own. Remove parking minimums and pull out the parking lots. This is why transit is important, and single occupancy vehicles as the primary means of human transport in urban areas is just not sustainable nor is it efficient.

We waste so much space to parking that does absolutely nothing but act as property storage.

Or go super old school and send a handwritten letter.

We've stayed in touch with eachother's social groups via various means of communication since antiquity without social media algorithms.

We need to re-normalize not knowing what is going on in someone else's life 24/7, and re-normalize not having 24/7 instant access to another person. It's not healthy.

Also, text messages don't need an instant response, nor should the other party expect an instant response. It's asynchronous communication for a reason!

There's a controlled experiments that did show a pretty significant benefit to being outside in a forest vs. in an urban environment. The Japan one on forest bathing from Chiba University saw a 12.4% decrease in cortisol, 5.8% decrease in pulse rate and lower blood pressure for the forest cohort vs. the urban cohort under identical physical exertion parameters.

There was also one I found from back in 1984 where patients in a hospital that had a view of trees having a shorter stay vs. the group with the view of a brick wall, although not entirely sure that one was robust enough to draw any real conclusions on if view matters.

Just going outside in daylight in general should get you most of the benefits (in the right season, depending on where you live. Where I am in the PNW, midday light in the winter isn't even strong enough to trigger a lot of the benefits), so if your only option is to go for a walk outside on the sidewalk then do so, but there are even more positive benefits to be gained by being in nature, outside of an urban environment.