Dave

VOA News is not a reliable news source—it’s literally a taxpayer-funded propaganda outlet of the USA. Since the Trump administration the organization has been pumping out odd conservative talking points.

I mean, 1 in 5 is a lot, just to be perfectly clear, so anything even approaching that is a pretty bad. When I was growing up, the number of cars inappropriately using high beams in city traffic was basically zero, so this is a massive regression.

You can tell that a car is using high beams because their light fixture appears fully and evenly lit from eye level. Low-beam headlights look “half full” from an opposing driver’s view. You can also tell because many lower-end cars have a separate housing just for the high beam that only light up when the high beam is on.

PSA: The preferred term is “transgender people”, not “transgendered people”.

https://glaad.org/reference/trans-terms/

I am that old, but I am not this old:

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It’s the humidity. Whatever is water-soluble in the dust absorbs water and becomes sticky. Then the water evaporates and it’s like you’ve glued the dust to the wall.

Is the answer no? It’s no, isn’t it?

Yep, Axios straight-up printed an ad as news.

I thought this was a new Chuck Tingle novel.

It’s gotta be some kind of meme, where friends tell friends to do the thing, and they pass it on, because it’s gotten worse and worse over time.

Here in the SF Bay Area, it’s Tesla drivers. All those BMW drivers have traded in their cars for Teslas.

I live in the SF Bay Area and about 20% of cars are driven with their high beams on all the time. The drivers just click that stalk and leave it there no matter what. It’s an epidemic.

Define “complete”.

A 1.0 product is by definition the worst product the company will make of that type. That’s no different from any other product by any other company.

There is no complete product. There are only products you can buy, and those you can’t.

You’re conflating the perfect with the good. The question is not whether Vision Pro is perfect, it’s whether it’s good enough for today. I happen to think that it is for the goals the company has set (well under 1M units sold). But it will of course improve rapidly every year.

This is not new. This is every new product Apple has introduced.

I heartily disagree. This is a 1.0 product, and though it’s deeply flawed in so many ways, it also nailed interactions that other companies have struggled with. They’re going to iterate and pivot on this platform for the next few years (and sell cheaper models) and they will find the sweet spot. This platform is here to stay.

I think so.

Apps can get woken up when a remote notification arrives that has the content-available key. Apps are woken up in background mode, at which point they have a few seconds to do whatever they need to do to refresh their content cache. This, of course, often leads to the app making a connection to the server, which exposes the user’s IP address.

I think the sin here is that some apps always set the content-available key regardless of whether there is content to be retrieved or not. That turns the notification into a surveillance tool, allowing the app to check in periodically.

“Externalities” are just expenses that corporations incur that have to be paid by the public.

Make externalities losses again.

DDG is ok for most searches, but they have definitely hit a plateau. Programming search results are quite poor, for instance.

I’ve started paying for kagi. Their results are just way better at this point.

Among tech companies, RTO has primarily been about one thing: maintaining real estate investments. This was likely the primary reason Apple began RTO much earlier than most of its peers (Aug 2022). Apple has enormous RE investments in Apple Park, in San Diego, Austin, and a bunch of other locations, and RTO was a way to ensure their values stay up, and they can remain qualified for tax credits by bringing commerce to those areas.

The fact that RTO also causes the most expensive people to leave was a fortuitous bonus. In 2023, interest rates went high, and money (and thus revenue) became tight, so companies like Amazon enacted RTO to force their most expensive employees to leave.

Make no mistake: Apple, too, used RTO as an attrition tool. They fully expected some single-digit percentages of their engineering workforce to quit due to RTO.

That’s just a bug.