underbluewaters

I don't think it needed any kind of special foresight to write that script. The idea that the NSA/Intelligence community was monitoring communications to that degree was fringe but not outlandish. Snowden confirmed and provided crucial evidence for what many suspected for a long time.

As a mac user since 2006 I see the problem as twofold.

  1. Siri has always been terrible. The rise of chatbots has made that fact even more obvious. It's such low hanging fruit to integrate some sort of llm chatbot. Why didn't they do it years ago?
  2. Their advertisements all mention Apple Intelligence. Costco today was advertising "Macs with Apple Intelligence" as a headline feature. I use MacOS and iOS everyday and I'm not even sure what they are referring to. It's probably fine if their AI strategy isn't clear yet, but stop letting marketing act like they've already shipped it. That they have been promoting this non-existent feature since 2024 is embarrassing.

10+ years ago you could in fact just pick the best-reviewed product on Amazon at a certain price point and have a great experience! God help you if you tried that today.

This was a major barrier for me. I had to replace an existing natural, tanked gas water heater. Ultimately I just bought a $750 replacement because I could easily swap it out myself. Installing a heat pump would have involved an electrician to install a new circuit, and possibly other changes. While there were some 120v models available locally, they all had pretty bad reviews. So I would have paid a couple thousand dollars more. Maybe I could break even over 10 years paying less for gas but that seemed like a poor use of funds.

I think it's healthy for parents to have other pursuits. Not everyone is 100% fulfilled hanging out with young children all day, and that's perfectly fine.

Even with daycare, parents are spending a substantial portion of their time with their children.

This was surprising to me too. I think there was some guilt around having a child and not spending 100% of our time caring for them. The reality was that quality daycare teachers have a lot of experience and a support network that enables them to create a great environment for learning. Socializing with peers from a young age was a huge benefit. While I'm sure they'll catch up, when observing kids the same age who hadn't been to "school" yet, it was clear that these kids hadn't developed at the same rate. Even if I had all the resources in the world, I'd still send my kids to a good daycare vs trying to replicate these learning opportunities at home.

Very interested to see what improved runtime performance looks like when this is implemented in MapLibre GL JS. I thought this effort was just focused on reducing tile size (meh). I run into runtime performance issues all the time when visualizing scientific data layers in mapbox gl js. If you build a "traditional" web map portal around MVT with lots of layers people can toggle this can become an issue. Still better than other options, but I'm excited to see what a new format with tight gpu renderer support could achieve.

It's not about the feature set. The Music app is the only software I use which randomly locks up my whole mac, just trying to do basic stuff like play a song or navigate albums. Doesn't seem to be related to whether I'm browsing Apple Music or my own library. This is on both my M1 MacBook Pro, and on my M2 Ultra Mac Studio in the office. It's baffling that something that worked so well in 2008 is such a dog in 2025. It's like using winamp in 1998.

Oh my god they are continuing the story! Loved the first two seasons.

Successful standards usually start out scrappy, are embraced by a community, and then are blessed by standards bodies. What comes out of working groups of standards bodies rarely gains traction. See xhtml vs "html5".

I love it. The touch-scroll works so well it's like an extension of my mind.

That's funny. I had an LG fridge die one night after 1.5 years with a loud bang. It sounded like a gun had gone off in the house and at first I had no idea what it was, but I guess it was something bursting in the compressor.

Home Depot warranty paid for a replacement and we still loved the size and features so we got the same model. Ended up selling the house and only a few weeks later the new owner wanted me to rush over the warranty paperwork because the same thing had happened. This one lasted less than a year.

I will never buy another refrigerator without an extended warranty.

This is very not true since many (most) things we spend money on are in limited supply. I can make what I think is good money, but if remote FAANG workers decide to settle nearby then I suddenly can't afford a house. Same for automobiles after COVID, meat at the market, etc.

Web 2.0 times were great. It was just taken as a given that the future was open standards, interoperable web services, and creative tools like Pipes that let users and developers easily leverage them. Social media and the drive to monetize users at all costs destroyed that potential.

I feel lucky every single day that I can take a 10 minute e-bike ride into the office. I say lucky because I know it's not available to everyone, but it's so good for my mental health to get outside every morning and afternoon. That experience can't be replicated with a Tesla no matter how affordable they might become.

Having these amounts of RAM on the base models hurt walk-in retail customers as well. Recently I had a computer die and luckily my boss found some extra funds in our budget that needed to be spent ASAP. I had an opportune moment to get a machine that day, but only if I could walk into the Apple Store and get it off the shelf. I settled for less RAM than I would have liked because a "custom order" would have taken weeks to arrive.

I have no problem with low-memory being an option, but why stock only meager amounts of RAM on the models sold in the store?

Prime Video is by far the worst app on AppleTV. The are so cheap they don't even use 4k resolution icons and thumbnails. It shows how much they care about their customers.

I struggle to think of any institutions the VC/tech/internet era has produced with any long-term value. My assumption is that these companies go through a cyclical pattern of providing value and then destroying it once successful. That timescale also seems to be getting shorter.

Any going against that trend?

I think the problem is that the same people who care a lot about their phone's form factor also care about features. We need an iPhone Mini Pro with high end cameras. I'm not going to settle for so-so pics of my toddler.

Threaded connections are just another point of failure.

I just purchased a 2018 F-150 and was concerned about being able to drive it safely after reading threads like these. Surprisingly, I can be much more aware of my surroundings and have fewer blind spots in the truck than my CR-V. Even directly in front of the tall hood I can see fine.

There are a lot of valid criticisms of big trucks but most of the discussion around them is pretty ignorant.

This should be logarithmic

I'm curious what would happen if a privacy-focused nonprofit tried to purchase this bulk data and were refused. If it's only truly available to 3 letter agencies then they are acting more like contractors and the legal rationale might unravel.

I'd recommend people skim the actual report, it's written for a lay audience.

https://www.lse.ac.uk/News/News-Assets/PDFs/2021/Sentience-i...

I was a bit dismissive of the idea that they can define sentience in a useful way, but their framework is right there on page 7 and it makes a lot of sense:

> 1) possession of nociceptors; > 2) possession of integrative brain regions; > 3) connections between nociceptors and integrative brain regions; > 4) responses affected by potential local anaesthetics or analgesics; > 5) motivational trade-offs that show a balancing of threat against opportunity for reward; > 6) flexible self-protective behaviours in response to injury and threat; > 7) associative learning that goes beyond habituation and sensitisation; > 8) behaviour that shows the animal values local anaesthetics or analgesics when injured.

I'd be very curious what they'd find if they tested fish and even insects. Surely certain predatory fishes would exhibit thought provoking behaviour.

Yes. For many folks there is an intrinsic value to protecting the environment.

I find more and more that even within the NGO and environmentalist community people only care about how natural resources impact people in a utilitarian sense. I can respect that philosophical position, but it makes me equal parts angry and sad that it's taken as a given. I don't believe life on earth exists just to serve human needs.

This has been transformative for the project[0] I'm working on where I need to host a lot of ocean environment data using vector tiles. I've been able to build out a data upload and tiling pipeline similar to Felt using tippecanoe + pmtiles without a lot of trouble. It's so cheap to run and host we intend to provide a data hosting service free to our users with a reasonable soft limits. Using something like MapBox Tiling Service would have been a couple orders of magnitude more expensive and make the project infeasible. Really exciting stuff.

[0]: https://seasketch.org

It's moving towards the local maxima of whatever this clever use of statistics and big data can manage. People who realize these models are in a different category than AGI and how our brains work will be in a better position to maximize their utility.

I don't believe anyone could sincerely have thought this was a good idea. Maybe this was a petulant act from a dean that didn't think they should have to respond to every tragedy?

Ha! I've been to SF once in the last 5 years. Right in front of the salesforce tower a homeless person lunged at me with a broken bottle. It was a half hearted lunge but still, not exactly the sort of thing I run into regularly!

I found it made more sense to brew 10 years ago. Back then craft brew wasn't as easy to find, so if I wanted something particular I'd have better luck making my own and sharing it with friends. Now I can go down to Whole Foods and have more options than I can fathom.

Cost-wise it just doesn't make much sense. A batch might be somewhat favorable in price for ingredients if you do all-grain, but if you factor in equipment cost and time cleaning up...