Simply refuse to send original stream packets / ignore seek requests by the client until the ad duration has passed. Sure you could pause / mute / alt tab for that duration but the point is being annoying so people buy premium if they hate ads so much.
The vast majority of the planet uses a touchscreen phone or tablet as their primary (and sometimes only) computing device. The tech audience on HN is very far removed from how the rest of the world uses technology.
Yes, mobile phones use touchscreens, and billions of people have smartphones, that is correct. Yes the audience of HN is far removed, not gonna argue that. Because that's not what we're talking about.
Grandparent very correctly points out that mobile phones haven't replaced traditional keyboards, in fact there's probably more keyboards being sold now than at any point in history before, that's because phone touchscreen haven't replaced keyboards, they're just a new interface for a new device. 15 years later other devices are still using other interfaces, and the actual places where it has been replaced are not that many. Only point of sale machines and cars come to mind having replaced keyboards (and I'm being very generous, honestly I wouldn't even call that keyboards) with touchscreens, and some car brands are even starting to walk it back.
You said it wouldn't "blow up". You didn't say it would replace mechanical keyboards. It wouldn't. Noone said people were going to switch from using a mechanical keyboard to that. WE are talking about its usefulness for phones/tablets. Also, a phone's on-screen keyboard replaces a mechanical keyboard in that phones dont have a mechanical keyboard and people dont use a mechanical keyboard as their input device for that phone. If my car doesn't have a mechanical key, it has been replaced by a digital key. It doesn't matter if I make 5 copies of my house key.
When my little cousin was three and already knew how to use the phone by himself people were claiming he was gonna be a tech wizard and everybody was talking about digital natives. But when he got to high school he didn't know how to turn a computer on. How useful is it to be god tier at getting results from LLMs, if you have zero clue if the result you got is any good?
I didn't like the idea that my money had paid for such a disservice of my favourite book, so it pushed me to cancel my Prime subscription that had been ongoing for years. I don't buy nearly as much on Amazon these days as a consequence.
I am annoyed by Rings of Power, but at least we got some fairly passable (if still very flawed) adaptations from Peter Jackson. I'm more salty about Wheel of Time, because that trashed the source material just as hard, and because it bombed it's unlikely we will ever see someone try again with an actual good adaptation.
I rarely get angry about bad content but RoP felt like a personal affront. I love Tolkien's world and the people who put RoP together did so with not just ignorance and incompetence, but some kind of malice. They intentionally butchered Tolkien's writing and world. This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it. It is, without any shadow of a doubt, the better approach.
> This stands in such stark contrast with Peter Jackson's position that it is not his right to inject his personal values and narcissistic hubris into the movies. He chose to honour the material as best he could while adapting it.
That's funny, because that's very much not what happened with those movies. Remember the character assassination of Faramir? I recall Jackson (or perhaps Fran Walsh) saying in an interview that they deliberately broke from Tolkien's story with that one, because the way Tolkien wrote it didn't fit the story they were trying to tell. They felt that having someone set the One Ring aside when tempted undermined the idea of building up the Ring as a threat in the minds of the audience. In other words, they chose to go with the story they wanted to tell rather than honoring the story Tolkien told.
Certainly the LOTR movies weren't as flagrant as Rings of Power with the liberties they took. And some of the changes were indeed due to the constraints of adapting to the medium of film, rather than a book. But even so, they chose to disrespect the source material pretty blatantly at times.
It's fair to point out the difference re Faramir but I feel it is rather small and inconsequential. He ultimately made the same decision in both the book and movie. Again, I am not contending that no changes were made. A movie adaptation requires changes. I'm claiming that the changes were in service to the material, lore, world-buildings, themes, and messaging. The RoP writers thumbed their noses at all of that.
To me that feels like sacrificing a detail to service the larger story, which when you're trying to fit three whole books into just three movies might be necessary. In RoP they made many changes nilly-willy, missing most of what made the source material great.
I have the same memories. Obviously we can never know for certain but if notch had decided not to hire anyone and continued to work on the game himself, I’m very confident it would have eventually made a billion. The core game hasn’t changed since 2010, and it was already absolutely captivating in those early days.
Absolutely, yes. Even as a professional software engineer I think software should be free, and tell everybody I know to pirate software, if they can.
Imagine we discovered a way to generate almost unlimited energy for very cheap, then we told poor people if they want any they have to pay it at the same price per kilowatt hour as current energy or it's stealing. It would be morally wrong. Digital content is the same, current copyright laws are unethical.
> tell everybody I know to pirate software, if they can.
I can see where you’re coming from on a philosophical level.
On a practical level that’s just asking for malware, especially for software that’s been cracked.
I would tell people the opposite.
I suggest you go to google/bing/whatever floats your boat and search "it will only get better" then filter results earlier than 2010. Things that I just found that were going to "only get better":
Jokes aside, Google Search results are worse thanks to so much web content being just ad scaffolding, but the interesting one here is music.
Music is typically imagined to be its best at whatever ages one most listened to it, partly trained in and partly thanks to meanings/memories/nostalgia attached to it. As a consequence, for most everyone, more recent music seems to be “getting worse”!
That said, and back to the SEO effect on Google Results, I'd argue mass distribution/advertising/marketing has resulted in most audio airtime getting objectively* less complex, but if one turns off the mass distribution, and looks around, there seems to be plenty of just as good — even building on what came before — music to be found.
Very much disagree. Current AI benchmarks are quite arbitrary as evidenced by the ability of a model to be fitted to a particular benchmark. Like the closest benchmark to objectivity is “does it answer this question factually” and benchmarks like that are just as failable really because who decides what questions we ask? The same struggles happen when we try to measure human intelligence. The more complex the algorithm the harder it is to quantify because there are so many parameters. I could easily contrive some “search engine benchmark”, but it wouldn’t be that useful because it’s only adherent to my own subjective definition of what it means for a search engine to be good.
Those are worse due to economic and cultural reasons, not technological reasons. The technology itself will only get better.
(Also, implying that music has gotten worse is a boomer-ass take. It might not be to your liking, but there's more of it than ever before, and new sonic frontiers are being discovered every day.)
Are you really trying to say that these models aren't going to get better from here? You think that the insane progress of the last 5 years just stops right here?
It's good as long as everything works out of the box, but it's a nightmare when something doesn't work. Or at least that has been my experience. I'm used to always troubleshoot first when I have any issue, but with Tailscale I decided I'm done trying to fight it, next time something doesn't work I'll just open a ticket and make it the ops team problem.
This is true for all systems that hide a lot of complexity. Apple is great until something doesn't work and you get things like "Error: try again later." A car is great until it doesn't start, and there are numerous reasons that can happen.
reply