> I hope these OSS CC clones converge at some point.
Imo, the point of custom CLIs is that each model is trained to handle tool calls differently. In my experience, the tool call performance is wildly different (although they have started converging recently). Convergence is meaningful only when the models and their performance are commoditized and we haven't reached that stage yet.
I'd argue it's not a choice of "let's open a campus in flyover country," but a reflection of how the industry has changed.
The "older" companies were manufacturers. Even places like Mountain View and San Jose were the working-class towns with HP factories and semiconductor plants. The concentration of engineering talent (HP/Intel/Apple/Atari) is what created the affluence, especially after manufacturing itself was outsourced globally.
The newer Web 2.0 companies don't make physical things; they make software. Their most critical infrastructure isn't a factory but a dense network of developers. They go to the Bay Area, Seattle, etc., because that's where the network is. For the parts of their business that don't require that network, like customer service, they locate in less expensive regions, just as PayPal did with Nebraska. They were even the second largest employer in Nebraska iirc.
I'm a convert on this topic. I went from wanting a small phone to being unable to wait to ditch mine.
Like the OP, I switched from Android (Pixel 3a) to an iPhone SE 3 specifically for the smaller form factor. After using it for over a year, I've found the trade-offs in battery life and camera quality are too significant for my daily use.
These limitations aren't an issue when I'm at home or my desk with easy access to a charger. However, they become acute the moment I'm out for the day. For example, using GPS for navigation or connecting Bluetooth accessories becomes a liability. I can't rely on the phone to last. Also, photos are noticeably more pixelated, and the quality drop-off is clear compared to larger, contemporary phones.
This thread is evidence that the niche for small phones exists. But it's for people willing to accept these compromises by carrying a dedicated camera, a power bank, and using wired peripherals. For me and as the market suggests for most consumers, small phones just doesn't work out as reliable all-in-one devices. I'll probably wait till early next year to pick up one of the new iPhones after they iron out the initial kinks.
> carrying a dedicated camera, a power bank, and using wired peripherals
I'm a small-phone person, and I don't think these _should_ be necessary. I'm fine with wired peripherals (and prefer them), but in 2025, with efficient chips, I don't see why we can't power a device much longer than 24 hours. What if it had decade-old hardware, and -- this is the bit I think is the problem -- the operating system and apps were efficient?
Same with a camera. It seems more about thickness than width; I don't believe it should be impossible to put a large-phone-format camera in a smaller phone. It may take battery space, but see above, we should be ok there these days.
"the trade-offs in battery life and camera quality are too significant" - a small but thicker phone would have no trouble with battery life and could for sure have the same good cameras as larger phones – and could possibly even ditch the camera bump if it just made the entire phone as thick as the camera bump to fit a larger battery.
(After all, easiest way to increase battery size is to increase the smallest dimension. Add 1mm to a 4-4.5mm thick battery and you'll increase the battery size by 22-25%. Make the iPhone 13 Mini as thick as its camera bump and you would probably add ≈2.4mm, which would make the battery 60% larger)
If one were to make a iPhone 17 Pro Mini as thick as the iPhone 4 then it would:
- Likely still weigh less than a Pro Max
- Have a battery with a capacity larger than the Pro Max
- Have the pro cameras stick out about as much as they did on the iPhone 6
And it would feel as robust and solid as an iPhone 4 – my favorite iPhone so far
The iPhone SE 3 might have a poor camera, but the one on the iPhone mini 13 is excellent!
My conclusion is the same as the author’s: it’s a matter of you get what you pay for. The demand here is for a small premium phone. This would come with a good set of cameras.
Since Pixel 3a and iPhone SE 3, the battery technology has improved and especially the charging times have gone down dramatically so the battery life experience you had then would not occur today with the same form factor.
The Thunderbird search bar really sucks. Advanced search with the actual functionality is hidden away behind some weird menu while the big honking bar at the top of each page does basic text search and offers nothing more.
Well is the loss of training data from customers using self-hosted Llama that big a deal for OpenAI or any of the big labs at this point? Maybe in late-2022/early-2023 during the early stages of RLHF'd mass models but not today I don't think. Offerings from the big labs have pretty much settled into specific niches and people have started using them in certain ways across the board. The early land grab is over and consolidation has started.
I actually appreciate the YouTube's auto-translate feature a lot because it allows me to search through videos in languages I don't know but still like to view videos and listen to videos in. For example, I listen to a lot of city pop and anime title songs on YouTube and a lot of them have titles in Japanese only. I absolutely would not find it as easy as I do to search through this content and listen to the music if the auto-translation feature did not exist. It just makes it easier for people who don't know the language to view videos in that language. Sure the translation quality might not be the best but it makes search a whole lot easier. This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
Having said that I am against the automatic audio translation that some people are reporting. I have not experienced it myself but that seems poorly thought out. It should be easier for people to search through items in a foreign language but that content should be served in the content originally intended.
I do not understand how this got rolled out. Surely there are _loads_ of multilingual people working at YouTube. How is there not at least an option to flag multiple languages that you speak?
At least the audio translation I can turn off. I do not know how to get the actual title of a video or its description.
It's so frustrating that I've ended up just changing my UI language from English to another language so that at least those don't get butchered.
So is from external users. The only feedback that may be heard must be numeric and translate to $$$ KPI. Hint: Youtube viewers are not Googles customers.
It got rolled out due to how MASSIVE the bounce rate is if the video is in a language users don't understand. I can easily see this on average providing a better experience and lead to less people bouncing. The false positives are not enough to counteract it.
Just feels relatively easy to change the language preference to be a multiselect though.... like ignoring user backlash, I'd assume _internal users of YT_ would just get extremely annoyed.
I don't really need magic, mainly want "if language not user's language" to turn into "if language not in user's language(s)"
Haven't we learned in the last 15 years or so that options are bad for users? ;-)
Moreover, watching videos in a foreign language with subtitles in that same language used to be a popular tool for learning languages. Clearly, the proliferation of language skills is a serious danger to the market for AI generated instant translations and must be stopped at all costs.
Ah, well, the content has to fit localized ads! That's it!
(You don't want that distracting break in languages between revenue earning productions and embedding media fluff. I guess, in this context, the plug-in is as evil as ad-blockers are.)
In fact, there must be an incentive here for Google to auto-translate a video only when it can sell an ad in the translated language for more than one in the original.
I suppose we should be glad that they've not (yet!) gone that far, or it would become even more of an unpredictable mess from the end user's point of view.
Can't wait for consuming content in its original form becoming a violation of the ToS! :-)
(I can see a bright future where smart TVs come with mandatory, non-optional instant translation… and maybe, if we were allowed to dream, with realtime character replacement and background adaptation to fit the next ad context. It's the logical step forwards from colorized B/W… /s)
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
Two words: Preference and choice. You prefer it one way and are happy. Other prefer it another way.
The fact that they are unhappy is not that you can do what makes you happy. It is that the choice isn’t easily available to choose to do what makes them happy.
But you're arguing for auto-translation of a language you don't speak. The problem is when it does it for a language we speak. If it auto-translated japanese or polish or whatever for me I wouldn't mind as I don't speak those. But it auto-translates titles from English to my native language which is just bonkers. That's the difference here.
I use English while using any YT client so I didn't notice it as much. So I changed the language on my browser to German, went to a couple of American channels and now I get some of the outrage on this thread. Weirdly, some videos get their titles translated and some don't. Not only the titles but also the descriptions get translated. Honestly, I'm surprised they aren't translating the comments at this point.
I still do understand and like the feature a lot. It's a good way to push the engagement rates I guess. A simple solution would be to show a dialog with languages where the users can pick what they speak, not touch videos in those languages and translate everything else.
I'm against auto-translate for the exact same argument.
I don't want japanese band's name to be translated. Nor I want my own music titles to be translated into other languages. There are many reasons why I wrote or said something in a specific language.
I also agree. Spotify actually went the other way, about six or seven years ago. They used to use translated song titles where available, but switched to using the canonical title in the canonical script.
My response to having whole playlists effectively change language was the most reasonable one: start learning Japanese. Now I can at least read kana and get a solid chunk of titles, and I pick out phrases here and there in the lyrics now.
I can't imagine trying to search for something with a specific title and having the results screwed by bizarre machine translation.
My main point was that I like the auto-translation because information retrieval was so much better. But the intent behind the video of the uploader has to be maintained and respected.
> This is why I find some of the comments on this thread surprising.
In general, some of the loudest voices in any given community are the ones who are dissatisfied with the thing in question. So, there are many people (or at least the two of us!) who are reasonably satisfied with this feature and find it helpful.
Well, it's not that I don't see how this feature can add value for others, it just doesn't add value for me (it directly detracts value, actually), and I would like to be able to disable it without installing a browser extension.
The main issue I feel is that Apple's internal threshold for what quality of software is acceptable to be launched to the public has dropped a lot in the years since the last major redesign.
Yes, they iterate through versions and drop things that don't work with their design philosophy (parallax effects on iOS 7) but the first major version they released always seemed well thought out and solid from a design perspective.
I don't get that feeling from this redesign. I'm sure that this Liquid Glass redesign would look and work great next year or the year after that or even by the public launch of iOS 26. They'll fix the issues with readability, control center etc. But the fact that the first version of Liquid Glass doesn't look good is what's problematic.
iOS 7's first beta design was worse than this. They walked back some pretty distinctive parts of the design - mainly the ultra thin fonts - during the betas and following releases.
This hasn’t been “launched to the public”. It’s a developer beta so that developers can start working on testing and updating their apps for the new OS.
You're right that this isn't "launched to the public" and is just a developer beta. However, I meant it in a more "outside of Apple" kind of way. I guess that should have been clearer.
Imo, the point of custom CLIs is that each model is trained to handle tool calls differently. In my experience, the tool call performance is wildly different (although they have started converging recently). Convergence is meaningful only when the models and their performance are commoditized and we haven't reached that stage yet.
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