at what point does it make sense to say “maybe you don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt” because it sincerely feels well past that point by all measures.
I read that comment as a steelman of the position that this is genuine anti-corruption activity, and pointing out via doing so that even if you give them an incredibly unwarranted amount of good faith, it still doesn’t make any remote amount of sense.
i needed an "oh, that's really nice" story today. this delivered.
in every way, this seems well-intentioned, quirky, cute, fun, and positive. unless there's some subtext i'm missing, this is just a good and nice thing happening that's great for everyone involved.
apple ebbs and flows in terms of how on the ball they are in any given area, but it feels we're at a strange inflection point where their hardware is the best it's ever been and the software is inexplicably in a death spiral
i've been a heavy safari user for a while, mainly because i do make extensive use of the tab and history syncing across all my devices, and safari is the only actual browser you get on iOS - might as well use the native version.
lately safari has this habit of, on some websites, entirely locking up my device while loading web pages. like full on hard lock can't switch windows, nothing can be done, sometimes for upwards of 30 seconds. to go to my electric company's website, i have to use chrome. otherwise my computer becomes unusable.
i am not suggesting that their website isn't awful (it is) but it is inexcusable that on an M2 max laptop with 64 GB of ram that loading a slow or bulky website should make my computer completely unusable. i do not understand how this hasn't been addressed. it was intermittent before but it's a daily occurrence now.
this along with all the weird visual glitches, notifications snapping between sharp-edged boxes and rounded boxes repeatedly, sudden drops in frame rate on my iPhone display that seem to start and end for no reason, and it's starting to feel like everyone at apple uses their devices as beautiful paperweights primarily and doesn't actually interact with the software at all...
the thing that frustrates me deeply is i've explored the android ecosystem extensively (i've owned several samsung and pixel devices, even very recent ones as second phones) and find that whole space even worse and more unpleasant, with the shovelware play store and a general unpleasant and janky UI that has never felt right to me. so it's like... what's the GOOD option now?
there hasn't been supersonic civil aviation, as far as i am aware, since the concorde was grounded. there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
this is significant because it's the first civil aircraft to reach that milestone since the ending of the concorde program.
There has not been supersonic civil aviation but "supersonic" is not the interesting point here. "Supersonic" is easy and solved often in aviation. The question is what else can they do to make it work. And there is no aircraft yet, just a scale model. Progress sure but not because "supersonic". The new engine would be more interesting.
And how is this a civilian aircraft? It is a cool one-off single seater with three military engines (oops, civilian engines derived from military and used in business jets - still not cheap for a one-seater). Two-seater for some definition of "technically". But perhaps they can sell a few of these to private pilots and then it would be a supersonic civilian aircraft. One pilot and one passenger if we insist on making it a business jet.
Supersonic is “easy” in the sense that rocket design is “easy.” Orbital rockets were still out of reach of non-government-funded efforts until SpaceX, and supersonic flight is still the sole domain of government contractors now. Boom is changing that.
Easy of course in the sense that that many aerospace engineers and aircraft have done it all over the world for many years. And most "government contractors" in the capitalist world are civilian private companies, many of which build both military and civilian aircraft and started small.
Which means, for example, that even this small private company knew pretty well what to look for in wind tunnel tests and other materials work. Their first transonic and supersonic flight was stable, did not destroy the aircraft, did not kill the engines, etc. Even, presumably, broke through the sound barrier the first time they tried - and was fully expected to.
There still isn’t, and this is not a very interesting stepping stone. We already knew that we could fly a plane quickly. This company has no engines for their allegedly full scale plane. The last manufacturer dropped them a few years ago, and there has been no movement in that direction. This demonstrates the easiest part of what they’re trying to do, not the hardest.
This is the equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation”, while not at all addressing the “AGI” part
The equivalent of a hand drawn ui mockup for a future “AGI workstation” would be a hand drawn mockup of a supersonic plane, not a functional supersonic plane.
"Civil" supersonic aircraft is a designation, that's it. Like the other comment said - you can fly supersonic military jets with a civilian designation as long as the jet is deemed airworthy.
The real question is whether this will ever scale up to be a passenger aircraft. There are still a huge number of unsolved problems, many of which plagued the Concorde in the best of years. I don't think a scaled demonstrator is going to give people the confidence to denounce traditional passenger jets.
This is the first supersonic aircraft in a long time that started as a civilian one and was never intended for military applications. Loses points for the military engines though.
"in a long time" kinda doesn't matter to me. America hasn't built a supersonic bomber "in a long time", you'll have to excuse me for not caring. The value of such a weapon is dubious and only made sense in a hype-laden Cold War environment.
Similarly I don't think we've learned the lessons of the Concorde yet. Not only do people not need hypersonic flight, it's going to create a premium class of hydrocarbon emissions that is already bad enough with passenger aircraft. Progressive countries will ban operation (much like they did with the Concorde) and routes will have to be changed. Removing the afterburner and making the boom quieter simply isn't going to bring these skeptics onboard, and they're right to remain skeptical.
We do. It takes me more than 14 hours and two flights to visit my son in Brazil. Even if there was a direct flight, it wouldn't be much less than that.
At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes. Knowing places faraway and different expands one's horizons. You learn that there are different ways of living, different ways of thinking, and that not everything that's different is bad, threatening, or broken, or "underdeveloped".
The more people know each other, the better we are able to work together. And the better we understand we are all on the same boat, regardless of what our governments say.
Are you willing to pay 10x the price for 1/2 the travel time? And even if you are willing to pay that, are there enough people besides you willing to pay that to sustain this business model?
I'd imagine most people in this wealth bracket would just fly private. I'll happily spend 5, 10, 15 hours in a plane if I don't feel like a sardine in a can.
The Concorde failed for a reason (actually multiple reasons). And they actually had an engine supplier - the hard part - whereas Boom has been shunned by the entire industry for this critical part.
> At this time, very few people visit places more than 10 hours away from their homes
I suspect if you were to draw a Venn diagram of "people who had never visited a place more than 10 hours from their home" and "people who could afford a ticket on a Boom Supersonic airliner at their target profitable ticket price range..." there wouldn't be any overlap.
You don't need hypersonic travel to discover places far away, and the target market who are so busy it's worth paying extra so they can get back to the US from their European office without staying overnight aren't going to be doing much of that anyway...
Boom will only be the first. Other supersonic airliners will happen once Boom validates the market. We can do a lot better than Concorde did now, with higher efficiency engines and lighter materials.
I just saw the other day China developing a rotating detonation ramjet. I guess missiles will come first, but, eventually, China will want to cross their 21st century empire faster than current airliners.
There's a difference between "better than Concorde", which isn't exactly a high point of efficiency, and defying the laws of physics to make supersonic flights so cheap they can operate flights between origins and destinations that aren't commercially viable to fly direct at the moment (like your trip to Brazil) in sufficient comfort to attract people that don't do long haul at the moment
The barrier to most people not to visiting places that are very far away isn't "flights are 40% longer than ideal". 40% cheaper flights would open up the world more, but this is a step in the opposite direction
as a person who likes airplanes (and airliners in particular,) i think it's cool that a commercially-focused aircraft manufacturer has managed to return to a type of flight that has primarily been relegated to military operations for a very long time
today i am not thinking any further ahead than "wow, they did a really cool thing and made a supersonic test platform for a commercial airliner."
there will be lots of future questions and concerns but we are far off from them, because they are not even close to scaling this up and there are so many gaping holes in the plan that i don't take it seriously at the moment.
I can't wait to see NASA's one. What I really hope is Mach 2 at altitudes higher than the Concorde, in order to minimize sonic booms on land. Even if we never get to fly supersonic over land again, a Mach 2 plane that can cross the Pacific would be incredible.
commercial and private jets generally cap out around mach 0.9
i am very rusty on the economics and details of supersonic commercial flight, but the general gist as i recall is:
- going much faster scales up the cost of flying at a rate that's hard to justify for how much time it saves. there is less case in the 2000s for "having to be in london in 3 hours from NY" than there previously was, too.
- noise restrictions and such limit the usefulness of planes that are set up to fly that fast as people don't like being underneath constant sonic booms, so the routes that supersonic passenger flights were relegated to are mostly over water.
it is just way cheaper and easier to fly subsonic, and if you're on a private jet anyway it's not like you're uncomfortable while traveling.
Air travel is more popular than ever and 2024 broke basically all records. Why would there be less case for faster flights?
Supersonic flight will be the preserve of the 0.1%, but the vast majority of private jets can't fly trans-continental (without stops along the way) and there are people out there paying $50k per flight for Etihad's The Residence suites. So, yes, there are people who will pay for this.
the way i've heard it explained is functionally that the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet.
people don't mind the experience of flying in a plane or the time it takes for the most part - they mind being uncomfortably crammed into a seat for hours on end with another person spilling into their lap in a loud, stuffy cabin. otherwise, it's just hanging out in a different place than you usually do.
at the point you're paying for a resort hotel room with a shower, bed, privacy, internet and a tv in the air... who cares if you spend a few extra hours? the only example of a supersonic airliner that i can point to, the concorde, was actually fairly uncomfortable and cramped because of the way it was designed. it's likely (though i've been wrong before) that future supersonic planes would make similar tradeoffs to try and minimize weight and drag and maximize fuel economy - you will trade comfort for speed.
i think most of the people you're talking about would prefer 8 hours in a private hotel room (or full on private jet) with a full bar, bottle service, a shower and fancy meals to 2-3 hours cramped in a relatively small cabin after the novelty wears off. given how much easier it is to effectively meet across the ocean without traveling, the market for ultra-fast flights to get a one-day trip over with is also likely smaller.
i can't say i know any of these facts for certain, but previously when discussing the return of supersonic flights with folks who know better than i, this was the general sentiment. it makes reasonable sense to me on its face.
> the ultra rich are either leaning towards things like those private suites onboard a large plane, or flying in a private jet
Anyone making $1+ mm / year is not in regular private-jet territory. That leaves commercial, which doesn’t have suites on most routes. (Most domestic routes don’t have lay-flat options.)
In between you have a $5k to $25k window in which something like Boom could operate. Same, dense domestic business seats. But lower service costs because you don’t need to serve a coursed meal on a 2-hour flight.
The real money is in business travel, not leisure. For long haul transpac flights in business class, it's not uncommon to pay 2-3x more for direct flights instead of a stopover, which means the market values the savings of a couple of hours at around $5000.
Air travel is more popular because of cheap flights, airline competition and a consolidation amongst manufacturers leading to standardisations. There's no evidence that the 0.1pct are going to swap their private jets that fly at 0.8 for sharing an aircraft flying on other people's schedules between airports they dont want to travel to/from.
Air travel is popular, but extremely price sensitive. Ryanair and its ilk have shown that people will suffer humiliation to save even $50 on ticket prices.
Supersonic will have to serve the rich, who are willing to pay to fly private. But how big is that market? Especially if you’re still going to raise prices 2-3x?
Some passengers are extremely price sensitive, but full-service airlines make 80% of their profits from the 10% sitting up in the pointy end. It already costs 4x more to fly biz than economy, and 9-11x more to fly first (actual first class, not US domestic).
And the range in which supersonic really gets interesting (to wealthy people/execs) is trans-Pacific. My dad got upgraded to the Concorde once from NYC to London and his reaction was more or less eh. Glad to have done it once but I'm now arriving in London at rush hour rather than having a nice dinner in first class.
There ar every few day flights from the US to Europe. A lunchtime flight arriving at 8pm is far nicer than 5 hours sleep on an overnight flight or the 7am flight.
West bound being able to leave the office at 6pm and be in New York to pay the kids to bed is great.
I'm not sure the people who pay full-boat fares for business and first today is a sufficient market for a new supersonic plane and a viable set of airline routes (within the range of the plane which probably doesn't include trans-Pacific).
i don't. i'm explicitly choosing not to be pedantic and instead hoping you'll take what i say as what it obviously is intended to mean and not as a very specific and accurate phrasing to be disassembled and torn apart without acknowledging the overall intent of the message.
I'm not sure why you're being downvoted because you're right: they have the technology, they don't have an engine, and this just looks like a civilian version of a fighter jet pretty much (except it has 3 turbojets).
And what people always fail to mention when it comes to supersonic flights is one of the main issue is neither a technological nor an economical one nor a supersonic boom one.
Traveling west bound is great: you leave in the morning and you arrive, local time, before the local time of your origin point. But traveling east bound isn't that great: you still have to leave in the morning and you land in the evening, so the only thing you gained is a shorter flight time but not a full day of work or shopping or what not.
So on regular flights (because Concorde was profitable, at least on the French side, thanks to charter flights), people would fly Concorde to go to NYC and fly back on a red eye...
As someone who worked for and flew on Concorde, I think what they're doing is amazingly cool though and I hope they succeed. But I'm still unsure what the long term plan is...
Right. Whether I arrive in London at 4pm or 8pm doesn't really make much of a difference. (Admittedly it probably lets you arrive on the continent without a red-eye--depending on supersonic over land rules--as you pretty much have to do today.)
All other things being equal, sure. But I'm probably not paying thousands of dollars to save a few hours. Maybe if that amount of money is basically pocket lint, but that's a tiny percentage of the population.
Concorde holds the world record in both directions actually.
F-BTSD did it:
- westbound in 32 hours 49 minutes and 3 seconds on 12/13 October 1992, LIS-SDQ-ACA-HNL-GUM-BKK-BAH-LIS (Lisbon, Saint-Domingue, Acapulco, Honolulu, Guam, Bangkok, Bahrein, Lisbon)
- astbound in 31 hours 27 minutes and 49 seconds on 15/16 August 1995, JFK-TLS-DXB-BKK-GUM-HNL-ACA-JFK (New York, Toulouse, Dubai, Bangkok, Guam, Honolulu, Acapulco, New York)
Might as well tell the folks at SpaceX to not land on the moon because it we already "knew" we could do it because it has been already been done before.
This sort of pessimism to dismiss this achievement is exactly how to lose and stay comfortable.
And if someone proposed to run a company for flying to the moon after every rocket engine manufacturer actively and overtly dropped them and they had no rocketry experience themselves, I would be equally skeptical.
> there are no active commercial aircraft capable of going supersonic.
Both the Cessna Citation TEN and the Bombardier Global 8000 were taken supersonic during test flights, as they have to demonstrate stability at speeds of M0.07 greater than max cruise.
They aren't certificated to do it in service, but structurally and aerodynamically have no problem.
Long-range business jets have been pushing aeronautical boundaries well beyond the mundane airliner state-of-the-art.
wow! this sure is great! gemini has worked so great up until this point - for example, i learned that a man who died in 1850 is one of three private owners of the airbus a340-600 last week! i'm so glad gemini exists and i absolutely cannot wait to experience a world wherein people get news from it.
as an avid apple music user i am continually frustrated by what an afterthought the windows app is
it's a continuation of apple's legacy of barely putting in the minimum to ship anything for windows.
there's a reason i won't use their password manager, etc. i still interact with windows, and basically any key app i use can't be apple-made because the windows experience will be utter trash and the linux experience will be nonexistent.
i make do with the windows apple music app but it is objectively a bad experience.
i mean the register is kinda more of a tabloid than anything, it's real-ish news but with a loose and snarky editorial style, so... it's pretty on-brand.
El Reg is basically The Onion but targeted at enterprise IT. That said, for things in that domain -- like SAP or Oracle, but especially SAP -- they really do know their stuff and offer frequently insightful content.
Apple Intelligence is kind of uniquely bad. I don't understand how, but its AI message summaries often completely flip the meaning of texts I've received. I've gotten summaries that say "X person hates Y" and I read the message and it's them talking about how much they love it. It is impressively, wildly inaccurate.
It confuses things like people's names and the messages they're sending and sometimes will paraphrase names that are also english-language words into related concepts and blend them into sentences that make no sense.
The only thing it seems to do accurately is describe images that have been sent to me, though I don't really see the value in a 2 sentence summary of an image being sent (folks with limited visibility will probably feel differently.)
I have never received a summary that gave me any idea of what the hell the messages it was summarizing was about. It's impressively bad. I'm shocked apple shipped this.
It’s bad because they are using very small local models on device, like on the order of 3 billion parameters as opposed to the trillion+ param models available in the cloud. They could keep the security model and have larger, slower models for summaries (what’s the urgency of a summary?) but that would be a battery killer. It’s clear they need to train on messaging content, but they have promised not to use their users content.
It seems to me they should let the local models train on local content while charging and do reinforcement learning on their summaries as judged by a larger (private cloud) LLM.
When I first setup apple intelligence on my phone, all the “summary” features seemed worthless, so I disabled them. But somehow it was still enabled for Messages. I can’t believe how bad and unhelpful it is! To add to the confusion that showing a completely inaccurate summary sows, it wasn’t even immediately clear that these were summaries - on the notification screen I thought the actual senders were writing these bizarre things.
there is a little icon that is like... three lines next to an arrow in an L shape, but it's honestly unclear what it means visually (it doesn't read as AI, and I feel like "little sparkles" is the de facto AI icon) and it's also not super visible or distinct, so it's not always immediately apparent at a glance.
I’m not shocked they shipped. This is their mo now. Same as the apple maps rollout. Big fanfare about some feature competitors already had that apple would clone and do it better because apple. Apple releases it and its laughably worse. Apple wins the long game for some users because they privilege their app in the os relative to the third party option. And repeat for next feature.
Apple Maps in particular frustrates me. It's integrated extremely deeply into the OS in ways that Google Maps can't take advantage of. Navigation on lock screen and built-in guidance on Apple Watch (versus having to use notifications).
As a result, users are "forced" to use Apple Maps if they want these very useful integrations. While I think Apple Maps is much better designed than Google Maps, this advantage is anti-competitive as hell.
It's a smaller version of the IE problem that got Microsoft in hot water, and yet it persists unabated.
We were discussing a book that I didn't like in a book club Slack thread. I mentioned how I'm against AI in general. Someone in the channel showed me an Apple Intelligence summary of the notifications from that thread, and it concluded that I disliked the entire book club channel, which wasn't true!
Agree, I'm hugely bullish on AI but this implementation is just so fucking bad. The Apple execs involved should feel a deep sense of shame and incompetence. What a joke. The Siri org leaders have proven to the world, time and time again, that they can't get anything right.
Years after siris release I can’t believe I am still getting 50 minute timers when I ask for 15. “Its only useful for setting timers” and not even that!
it's not a matter of what's complicated, it's a matter of what it replaces. the quote isn't reflecting on what's easiest to solve, it's reflecting on the impact that it has on culture as a whole.
a tangible impact of the current generation of AI tools is they displace and drown out human creations in a flood of throwaway, meaningless garbage. this is amplifying the ongoing conversion of art into "content" that's interacted with in extremely superficial and thoughtless ways.
just because something _can_ be automated doesn't mean it _should_ be. we actively lose something when human creativity is replaced with algorithmically generated content because human creativity is as much a reflection of the state of the art as it is a reflection of the inner life of the person who engages in it. it's a way to learn about one another.
in the context of the broader discussion of "does greater efficiency everywhere actually have any benefit beyond increasing profits," the type of thing being made efficient matters. we don't need more efficient poetry, and the promise of automation and AI should be that it allows us to shrug off things that aren't fulfilling - washing dishes, cleaning the house, so on - and focus on things that are fulfilling and meaningful.
the net impact of these technologies has largely been to devalue or eliminate human beings working in creative roles, people whose work has already largely been devalued and minimized.
it's totally akin to "where's my flying car?" nobody actually cares about the flying car, the point is that as technology marches on, things seem to universally get worse and it's often unclear who the new development is benefitting.
I'll agree that AI has flooded the internet with low-effort slop. I feel like I can make a pretty strong argument that this isn't new, low-effort SEO spam has been a thing for almost as long as search engines have, but it does seem like ChatGPT (and its ilk) has brought that to 11.
> just because something _can_ be automated doesn't mean it _should_ be.
I guess agree to disagree on that. If a machine can do something better that a human, then the machine should do it so that the human can focus on stuff that machines can't do as easily.
> I guess agree to disagree on that. If a machine can do something better that a human, then the machine should do it so that the human can focus on stuff that machines can't do as easily
Machines exist for the pleasure of humans, not the other way around
This isn't some kind of "division of labour, we both have strengths and weaknesses and we should leverage them to fill pur roles best" situation
Machines are tools for humans to use. Humans should not care about "doing the things the machines aren't good at". All that matters is can machines do something that humans do not want to do. If they can't, they aren't a useful machine
Replacing humans in areas that humans are passionate about, forcing humans to compete with machines, is frankly inhuman
> Replacing humans in areas that humans are passionate about, forcing humans to compete with machines, is frankly inhuman
I don't think it's going to "force" anyone out. We didn't suddenly fire all the artists the second that the camera was invented. We didn't stop paying for live concerts the moment that recorded music was available to purchase.
> Machines exist for the pleasure of humans, not the other way around
I am not good at art. I find it pleasurable to be able to generate a picture in a few seconds that I can use for stuff. It allows me to focus on other things that I find fun instead of opening up CorelPainter and spending hours on something that won't look as good as the AI stuff.
I could of course hire someone to do the art for me, but that cost money that I don't really have. The anti-AI people who just parrot "JUST PAY AN ARTIST LOLOLOL!" are dumb if they think that most people just have cash lying around to spend on random bits of custom art.
Last time I checked, I am human. The AI art manages to allow me to enjoy things I wouldn't have been able to easily achieve before.
there are a lot of contexts where i'd be pretty bummed to find out most of the content was written by a computer, or feel like i lost something tangible or meaningful because of that change
in the case of linkedin, i lose nothing. before AI the posts all seemed like they were written by weird robots anyway. it actually reassures me that a human didn't write some of the stuff i read, because i pray that no self-aware human would have written that thing into the internet.
LLMS shines in places where low-effort slop was already acceptable. It's undeniable that the biggest impact the current AI wave is having on society is the amount of slop everyone has to contend with.
