"For many years, all flights featured 2-by-2 leather seating (in aircraft usually fitted with 3-2 seating), ample legroom, complimentary gourmet meals, and warm chocolate chip cookies. This made the airline popular with business travelers. In addition, Midwest Express operated a sizable executive charter operation with a specially configured DC-9."
"AirBnB’s present dominance isn’t the product of real innovation. He and his friends stumbled upon an idea after listing their apartment on Craigslist for under-the-table sublease during a popular conference."
This barely qualifies as a critique; it's a hit piece with no constructive criticism and some anti-capitalist rhetoric thrown in.
> The National Design Studio is a clear case of nepotism, and they're greatly overpromising. Dismantling 18F was a massive mistake.
There, I just said the same thing but cut out the personal attacks and the ridiculous take that Airbnb was somehow built by thieves (does anything actually believe this?).
I'm surprised this article has stayed up this long. Have the mods read it? It's low signal-to-noise ratio.
Mistake to me implies unintended consequences that differ from the original goal. I've never heard anyone say "Opening Auschwitz was a massive mistake", as its consequences were exactly as intended. In the same way, dismantling 18F is not a mistake.
There's a lot of use cases for that definitely! Alarm monitoring, text messaging, some users are reporting YouTube works at 360p.
One problem though is that in the terms they say that if you're using a lot of data or using that plan for more than 12 months they may require you to switch to a different plan or lose access.
Apple should acquire Perplexity - it's a pretty great product and combined with some privacy enhancements it's a win, and they could likely integrate it better than Google could with Gemini.
I was gifted a pro subscription for a year and after trying it for a few weeks I instead signed up for an Anthropic Claude subscription (which I pay $20 / month for) and I use that all the time.
I signed up and I no longer use most other websites. I only use Kagi for basic searches, where I want to get to a destination and not get information.
Perplexity “does the googling for me” and summarizes or seeks for me. No more skimming and synthesizing. No more crafting search queries and comparing. Ask a question, no matter how obscure or specific, and it fetches the real time answer.
Honestly not much has ever so drastically changed how I use the internet.
As a cultural synthesizer ("create a sketch...") or translator (i.e., from human to programming) perplexity is as good as the others and maybe worse. But I like it as being an alternative semantic web search engine. Search engine because most of the time the facts are referenced at the end of the paragraphs and when it fails to insert them, I usually ask to expand. It's a new feeling after all those years of PageRank dominance. For example, It sometimes creates a paragraph with a reference to some recent research that according to the PageRank logic should be at the bottom (because almost nobody cites it). It's like the relevance was reborn. Once it was in a primitive sense of the early AltaVista, then Google killed it with PageRank, now when an engine really understands the question, the answers might become relevant in a new sense while being tangential to the reputations of the sources
+1, I bought perplexity pro annual subscription last year, and hardly use it now.
chatGPT+o3 search is much better.
My typical workflow is fire the question to Google AI mode and chatGPT+o3 at the same -- AI mode is fast but meh answer, chatGPT is slower but pretty good answer always.
https://maticrobots.com/ - Lidar seems like a stopgap, check out this robot vacuum which works with vision only. I am not conflating a car and a vacuum, but it's an interesting technological exposition.
The reason I brought up roomba wasn't to talk about Lidar or vision necessarily. It's more a story about how the first-mover in a technological space became entrenched in what works and became resistant to investing in newer technologies. The result was rival companies taking away marketshare from a market roomba once defined. Roomba has since incorporated lidar and other innovations after being stagnant for a decade, but its too late - their competitors now dominate the market.
To complete the analogy, Tesla is invested in vision-only technologies, while its competitors are making gains with Lidar and other tech that Tesla refuses to acknowledge. It's very reminscent of Roomba in the mid 2010s.
Seems very Star Trek Enterprise when they polarize the hull plating.
"To prevent this from happening, once a sperm cell has made contact with it, the egg quickly employs two mechanisms. First, its plasma membrane rapidly depolarises – meaning it creates an electrical barrier that further sperm cannot cross."
Somewhat related: Before launching our new long range (5 day) turbulence forecast tool (for nervous flyers), we spent time experimenting to see how far out we could reliably predict turbulence. Once we had something promising, we started posting daily snapshots—each showing the forecast from five days earlier alongside what actually happened. The model updates continuously, and we’ve kept the process public to demonstrate how well it works, not just claim it does.
They can, and then they’ll have to face their customers directly with it being exactly clear (even to “normies” who don’t follow obscure tech news like this) exactly whose greedy fingers are taking things away from them.
Up till now, situations like Kindle were just weird quirks to most people and most people wouldn’t have been able to tell you why you can’t do this very normal-seeming thing on iOS. If/when Apple takes it away, it’ll be obvious to everyone what’s going on.
And if Apple yoinks them out, then why should the developer respect the "no disparagement" or "no telling your customers about payment/alternatives"? Which to me was always the ultimate expression of Apple absolutely knowing they are being greedy. Not just "You can't tell your customers you can pay less elsewhere", but "You can't even tell your customers about our involvement in your pricing decisions".
If this significantly cannibalizes Apple’s App Store revenue I would actually expect that they come up with a different way to monetize (maybe based on installs or number of users).
They could also implement that independent of the injunction, which applies to steering rules.
> They could also implement that independent of the injunction, which applies to steering rules.
They actually can't, not with the latest ruling that unlocked this Kindle change. Apple annoyed the judge enough with their shenanigans that she shut this down, too. The ruling reads (emphasis mine): "Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users *nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases*."
It cannot be overstated just how furious the judge is with Apple. I cannot imagine the judge will tolerate anything that undermines the spirit of the ruling.
Yeah, this is already in territory where he's pushing criminal prosecution referrals for Apple executives. It's well into "protect your own hide, personally, by making sure you comply with the ruling" for people making the decisions at Apple.
I'm surprised they haven't simply forced tiered pricing for their developer program.
You still need that to get on the platform. They could charge based on the relative size of the business. Why not charge Netflix 50K? They won't give up the platform and the consumer - even for Netflix - likely wouldn't enjoy going to the web browser exclusively.
Perhaps that pushes more PWA's but really, I doubt the big corps would balk at this.
Their scale would need to be exceedingly reasonable to keep the smaller shops from rioting though.
If Apple penalized apps for having many users that would be cataclysmic to their platform, though I image they'd work out sweetheart deals with Facebook etc.
It could be like a platform subscription fee, but the app developer pays instead of the user.
The justification would be something like, "a more equitable and transparent system that aligns costs with platform usage and developer access to the user base, while also potentially fostering a more diverse and competitive app ecosystem" (generated)
I left Apple years ago, right on the battery-gate scandal. Since I'm in Android since, I imagine that if Google Play Store would introduce a fee to "a more equitable..." I would do all my 'shopping' to Aurora, APKPure, and others.
Here's a thought: Apple should NOT be able to "monetize" third-party apps. At all. They have no right to the work of other people.
Apple wants to mandate a review? That's fine. Charge developers for the reviewers' time with a reasonable profit margin, and Apple _already_ charges $100 a year for access to the AppStore.
"For many years, all flights featured 2-by-2 leather seating (in aircraft usually fitted with 3-2 seating), ample legroom, complimentary gourmet meals, and warm chocolate chip cookies. This made the airline popular with business travelers. In addition, Midwest Express operated a sizable executive charter operation with a specially configured DC-9."
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