26
points
culturestate
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- > It literally is shipping AI generated content in the product.
When someone goes three miles per hour over the speed limit they are literally breaking the law, but that doesn’t mean they should get a serious fine for it. Sometimes shit happens.
- I understand what you mean; what I’m saying is that they can still disable CarPlay and upcharge buyers for navigation and harvest the data to resell without bringing subscriptions into the picture.
It’s the foundational decision to make this an optional subscription instead of just pricing it into the sticker from the jump that I’m having trouble wrapping my head around.
- > the amount you're paying for the subscription is only a fraction of what they can get for your data.
This doesn’t clarify it at all for me because this model already works without the bother of subscriptions. They’re generating the data either way, regardless of whether the customer is paying $140 per year or $1,400 up front.
I think the real reason is probably closer to “we want to be able to add recurring subscription revenue to our 10-K” than it is to “we want a better pretext under which to mine consumer data.”
- > Probably because the LTV is at least an order of magnitude more than you are estimating.
This subscription costs $140 per year; even accounting for price increases over time, if someone has calculated that its 10-year LTV exceeds $14,000 then I think they need to go back and review the spreadsheet.
- I haven’t bought a car in a hot minute but those options usually also included different in-dash displays, etc. If Ford standardized the hardware, eliminated the option, and bumped the sticker, nobody would bat an eye and they would capture that revenue from every buyer, not only the ones who choose to subscribe.
It feels like such an obvious win that I know I must be missing something, I just don’t know what it could be.
- I’ve always wondered why manufacturers don’t just bump the sticker up by whatever the estimated LTV of these subscriptions would be. If you want to buy a new F-150, there’s functionally no difference between paying e.g. $52,500 instead of $51,250 and as a bonus Ford gets to avoid headlines like this.
Maybe the long-term goal is to push more people toward direct leasing?
- In a perfectly efficient market, yes, but the market is notably not perfectly efficient. People make decisions about which career(s) to pursue or not pursue based on a huge variety of factors that stretch far beyond money.
There is absolutely no scenario in which you could convince me to train as e.g. an underwater welder, no matter how much cash you’re offering.
- I don’t think you can really bake that in because the traffic rules can change day-to-day.
For example, there’s a street in my neighborhood that’s normally open for two-way traffic, but one of the buildings that fronts it is being renovated so the street was changed to one-way for about a month, and as of a couple of days ago it’s still one-way but in the other direction. Imagine trying to get a car to work that out on its own.
- I’m no lawyer but I feel like clause seven leaves a clear opening to undermine the spirit of this license:
> “The User may not sell this Work directly, unless they/she/he/it/ey/fae/ze/bun/puppy/foxxo … use it only as a small part of a work of a much greater scale.”
That said, TIL that there are two things that can be considered “Belgium denialism” and surprisingly neither of them involves refusing to acknowledge that Belgium exists.
- I‘m fairly sure that generation of MBP is USB-C only. If a UK plug prong is smashing its way in there, you‘ve got much bigger problems than a shorted port.
- That’s a great read, thanks for pointing it out.
- This story is incredible, I’m fascinated by every aspect of it:
- What decision-making process led to the idea of injecting human urine into a frog in the first place?
- How did the frogs escape? What kind of living and handling conditions are we talking about here?
- Did the bacteria that the government was concerned about make the frogs more susceptible to cold, thus the coincidental die-off at the same time as eradication was to begin?
- Will Welsh clawed frogs be the next species that we thought were gone but had just become better hidden?
I crave a one-hour documentary about this.
- I don’t mean to suggest that governments shouldn’t do things like this, I’m just abnormally delighted when I find them.
A multinational framework explicitly for the protection and restoration of eels would never have occurred to me (or most of the rest of humanity, I’d imagine) but nevertheless it occurred to someone and now there are civil servants who are paid real money to design and implement it.
To put it another way, I’m less interested in the policy than I am in the mechanics of governance that enable it to exist. One of my favorites is the National Cemetary Administration Operational Standards and Measures[1] program, which basically defines OKRs for U.S. veterans cemeteries.
1. https://imlive.s3.amazonaws.com/Federal%20Government/ID25151...
- Incredibly, I actually did learn this today because it was in the NYT crossword and I went down a very similar rabbit hole. I never made it to Freud, though, after I discovered and got sucked into the European Union Eel Regulation Framework[1].
If you, like me, are masochistically fascinated by this kind of “I can’t believe this is a real thing that the government actually does” documentation I recommend giving it a once-over.
1. https://oceans-and-fisheries.ec.europa.eu/ocean/marine-biodi...
- > Do not go to college if you have to spend any money on it.
“If your family isn’t well-off or you didn’t work hard enough in high school to get any scholarships, college isn’t for you” is certainly an interesting take, and it seems like a much too simplistic heuristic.
- All of the places around here that had first-gen units with a scale on the packing side (to make sure you actually scanned eg a banana and not a two pound block of cheese, yet were constantly wrong) have replaced them with newer versions that don't have scales or any other way that I can see to validate that what you scanned is what you put into your bag.
I'm not sure where I would find the data to back this up, but since it seems like an across-the-board change I imagine the labor savings have proven to outweigh (heh) the inventory shrinkage.
To me, the Uniqlo system where everything has an RFID tag and the machine just automatically scans the contents of your basket is the platonic ideal but I know that comes with issues of its own in different retail contexts.
- It seems like they only make the localhost requests on your first visit. If you open devtools in incognito mode (or just clear the cookies) before accessing https://ceac.state.gov/genniv/ you should see those 127.0.0.1 attempts as ERR_CONNECTION_REFUSED in the network tab.
Somewhat more worryingly, Little Snitch doesn't report them at all, though that might just be because they were already blocked at the browser.
- For anyone else googling this like I just did, Carter Clarke Jr. is the Gemesis founder.
Took me longer than I care to admit reading the Wikipedia page for Carter Clarke Sr. (also a brigadier general) who led a pretty interesting life of his own (e.g. leading the War Department investigation of Pearl Harbor intelligence failures) before I realized I had the wrong generation of Clarkes.
- > After 25 you can’t really learn new languages without considerable investment and effort.
It takes considerable investment and effort before you’re 25, too, you just don’t notice it because it happens slowly over a long period in school and via immersion.
I move around a lot so I’ve had to learn a few new languages as an adult - at least to basic proficiency, if not approaching fluency - and I don’t think it’s really any more difficult than it was when I was a kid, except that I now recognize how difficult it is.
- > The number of hoops you have to jump through to get results from the actual Google page when you are outside of the US is mind boggling.
Do you mean results in English, or results that are specifically US-centric?
- > You cannot buy a device with entirely Google-designed hardware and software - Pixels with Android come close
I don’t really understand this distinction. How is eg a Pixel 9 Pro running Android with GMS on a Tensor any less entirely Google-designed than an iPhone 16 is entirely Apple-designed?
- The ugly-but-functional digital parking timer market is alive and well[1] in Germany; maybe you can import one, if local law allows?
1. e.g. https://www.amazon.de/-/en/Park-Micro-Digital-Parking-Approv...
- Confusingly, there are two different MPEGs in this context.
MPEG the standards group is organized by ISO and IEC, along with JPEG.
The one you’re thinking of - MPEG LA, the licensing company - is a patent pool (which has since been subsumed by a different one[1]) that’s unaffiliated with MPEG the standards group.
- No, they’re in a patent pool. There’s what looks like a relatively up-to-date list at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Via-LA#H.265/HEVC_licensors
- It’s not a project per se, but one that I support and don’t see here yet is Public Knowledge[1]. They have a similar mission to EFF, but they do more hands-on lobbying in DC.
I understand where you’re coming from, but it’s perfectly sane if your legal system recognizes and accepts that speed detection methodologies have a defined margin of error; every ticket issued for speeding within that MoE would likely be (correctly) rejected by a court if challenged.
The buffer means, among other things, that you don’t have to bog down your traffic courts with thousands of cases that will be immediately thrown out.