- I’m reminded of a Reddit thread long ago about a reconstruction of Roman garum by some American scientists. In their paper they conclusively declared that it tasted foul and a Filipino Redditor replied saying “This actually sounds a lot like the fish sauce we use in SE Asia. I wonder if people from a different culinary tradition would find it less off putting or even tasty?” Cue a bunch of Redditors downvoting the poor sap to hell for daring to disagree with the scientists’ assessment of the flavor.
- If you already have a NAS I’m not sure what this does for you that just getting a bigger NAS wouln’t?
- The only data point I referred to is the dramatic rise starting in 2015, and the divergence by gender. I don’t think anyone seriously disputes that, just the presumed usage patterns he thinks go along with those. The criticisms of him are basically orthogonal to the point I’m making.
- I think 70-80% of it is the business model, but the other 20-30% might just be baked into how it is.
Jonathan Haidt talks about how once social media usage became ubiquitous among teenagers around 2015 mental health problems began to skyrocket. And a big part of this was the algorithm serving up content designed to make people feel bad, but another part around feelings of being bullied turned out to largely be kids seeing their friends hanging out with each other without inviting them and this provoking feelings of alienation. That’s inevitable, I felt bad when I found out about parties or hang-outs I didn’t get invited to at that age as well. But I didn’t even know about 90% of them, and those I did I heard about through passing references rather than a stream of pictures and albums about how much fun everyone was having without me.
I think some level of a sense of isolation is inevitable under those circumstances, though I’m not sure that by itself would rise to the level of banning it outright. At least not before trying other interventions like addressing Meta’s “19 strikes before banning you for CSAM” rule. Kids are just the canaries in the coal mine here. Whatever these services are doing that is cooking developing brains is still turning up the heat on adult brains too, we can’t try to pretend we can be psychologically healthy engaging with something that we know is spiking depression and anxiety in our kids.
The culture of interacting just changed as more people got online and more tools became available to expand access to things. You used to just be able to have an unsecured comment section where anyone could come to your website and directly modify the page’s HTML and most of the time nothing would happen. You ought to have sanitized your inputs but there just wasn’t this background miasma that was going to flood your comment section full of spam, scans, and injecting malware into the page if you left an open text-entry box on the internet. Once it hit a certain scale and there was a certain amount of money in it then a lot of mess came with them.
- What do you mean? Nylon and polyester can be extremely durable, that’s always been their appeal. A knitted pocket is very likely to be a BIFL item even moreso than typical cotton or wool fabrics unless they’re specifically designed to be hard wearing, like canvas. That and the fact that it’s designed to fit any size and model of phone means it’s likely to be significantly less wasteful than putting your phone in a high end leather case that will age out when you upgrade.
Apple is clearly trying to experiment with more textile elements on its products, like with the Apple Watch band and FineWoven/tech woven cases to move away from using environmentally damaging leather and cheap feeling silicon. Stuff like this, sold in small lots, is how you test out whether people are into it before trying to work it into a product meant to sell to hundreds of millions of people.
- Hey now. If they allowed you to simply enjoy the stuff you have without butting in to remind you of everything you don’t have, you might actually feel a moment of lightness and happiness. If they want you spending money they need to cultivate feelings of covetousness, inadequacy, or fear. Contentment doesn’t sell.
- Yeah Apple’s evolution over the past decade has been very frustrating and disappointing to see. It seems like whatever scraps remain of the company’s core values now exist solely with a handful of old heads at the company and will likely not survive their retirements.
A lot has changed in the tech industry, but the rapidity of hiring and expansion of headcount just seems to have engendered a broad homogenization of business strategies, design conventions, and product vision. I think they started hiring people based on narrow defined ideas about skills and resumes to fit certain roles and they all end up shuffling the same bunch of people around across the same incestuous company hiring pipelines until they’re all doing stints at every company and driving them in the same broad direction.
- Surely the fact that the current ruling party has an influential faction who explicitly reference Nazi Germany as an ideal worth striving for is relevant to setting the current moment in historical context. Yes we're not LITERALLY Nazi Germany for a variety of reasons but that doesn't mean it doesn't paint a picture of what they want to do, regardless of how successful they will be or what that will look like in practice.
Personally I think the most apt historical comparison is the Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, but since we don't LITERALLY live in the Middle Ages and have ethnic divisions between Greeks and Latins one might say that's not a relevant comparison either.
- > First people complain the app store has a ridiculous approvals process and people keep getting rejected unfairly. Now people complain that they are too loose and letting in shovelware. What’s it going to be?
When the ridiculous approvals process blocks good apps and fails to block shovelware from flooding the platform I think people have plenty of reasons to complain it’s not working well.
For the most part Apple is in a bind of their creation here. They don’t want to surrender the cut of money they get from the App Store so they’re overly permissive about exploitative casino games and scams as long as they have in-app purchases. But they DO want to have standards, so they enforce standards on the books somewhat arbitrarily and it ends up falling on normal apps that just have some kind of functionality that hits an unknown third rail.
And even worse, there is an informal two-tiered system where companies like Meta and Amazon and Netflix can almost flagrantly violate App Store policies and mostly get away with it because of high demand for keeping the app in the store and because they have legal teams that will sue.
It would be better if they had an actual two-tiered system where developers with a track record of being good (defined however) can get a non-transferable “hunting license” to fast track approval and get more sensitive API privileges. But they’ll never do that either, because companies like Meta absolutely would not earn the privileges but demand them anyway.
- They stacked almost ALL the actual stuff, like the camera system, SOC, etc. inside that little plateau and the rest of the slab is basically just display and battery. If I was going to make a clamshell phone, experimenting with miniaturizing and arranging the whole thing into a small corner of the footprint would be where I’d start.
If you scroll halfway down the press release page you can see an image of the internals https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/09/introducing-iphone-ai...
- It’s pretty instructive to compare an iPhone to a consumer product that’s priced for affordability first, like a Nintendo Switch. The differences in build quality are very evident.
- The screens could definitely break, they were just very small so the likelihood that they would suffer an impact that would break them was comparatively small. In fact, the reason for the flip form factor was to protect the increasingly fancy displays when it’s in your pocket. They also didn’t weigh very much so they didn’t fall as hard.
Modern phones are extremely sturdy, people are just more precious about them because they’re much fancier and more expensive and more of a requirement for everyday life.
- This tends to happen a lot with news of regulatory policies in the global south where Western commentators will hold them to standards of libertinism that don’t even really apply in their own countries. It’s some combination of ignorance about what the regulatory environment actually is at home and a certain condescending assumption that OUR regulators are fair minded and competent but THEIR regulators must all be corrupt incompetents with an authoritarian streak.
- You might be good at making whisky but not that great at marketing. Either way the market has a desire for generic, unlabeled product and people go in to fill the need.
- I know distilleries will often contract with one or more other distilleries to create a custom blended whisky to sell under their label to get some revenue while they wait for their first batches to mature. There are distilleries that basically specialize in doing this. I assume the wine market probably has similar strategies. I know 3 buck chuck basically started like this, buying overstock from other vineyards and blending them into a generic white or red wine.
- It doesn’t surprise me if they found that the emergent behaviors didn’t change given their method. Modifying the simulation to make them behave differently would mean your rules have changed the model’s behavior to “jump tracks” into simulating a different sort of person who would generate different outputs. It’s not quite analogous to having the same Bob who likes fishing responding to different stimuli. Sort of like how Elon told Grok to be “unfathomably based” and stop caring about being PC” and suddenly it turned into a Neo-Nazi Chan-troll. Changing the inputs for an LLM isn’t taking a core identity and tweaking it, it’s completely altering the relationships between all the tokens it’s working with.
I would assume there is so much in the corpus based on behavior optimized for the actual existing social media we have that the behavior of the bots is not going to change because the bot isn’t responding to incentives like a person would it’s mimicking the behavior it’s been trained on and if there isn’t enough training data of behavior under the different inputs you’re trying to test you’re not actually applying the “treatment” you would think you are.
- The weight loss mechanism largely just comes from suppressing appetite though, so it still lines up with the penance for sin narrative. It’s not that different from wearing a hair-shirt and whipping yourself if you find yourself having lustful thoughts. Only instead of a whip you just feel kind of uncomfortable and nauseous if you eat too much.
- It’s a shame the evolution to DVD and later Blu-ray went with the VCD/CD size rather than Laserdisc sized discs. It was the right call for the time, that makes them much easier to transport and store and allowed the players to double as CD players and let game consoles double as blu-ray/HDDVD players. All huge perks to encourage adoption.
But now that we are entering a world where physical media is largely an enthusiast past-time I think something laserdisc sized is much better suited for appealing to geeky collectors as a “trophy” or collectible item. It’s more pleasing to flip through them, the size of the sleeve ends up functioning as a display poster. Commentary about “warmth” aside, it’s the same reason music nerds have revived vinyl, with even half the vinyl market consisting of people who don’t even own turntables and just listen to the music off the included digital download codes that come with the records. Plus, the sheer size would mean you can encode a LOT onto this hypothetical next-gen laserdisc before having to resort to compression and exotic layering tricks to increase data density like they do with these 8k Atmos releases now.
- The existence of the LLMs will themselves change the profile and proclivities of people we consider “programmers” in the same way the app-driven tech boom did. Programmers who came up in the early days are different from ones who came up in the days of the web are different from ones who came up in the app era.
The way in which any open text box on the internet is guaranteed to turn into a malware vector is new now, and makes casual and marginally technical users trying their own thing much higher stakes and annoying.