Yeah, I know what he meant. But I'm not a big fan of taking ownership of everything that's fucked up in the planet and make it personal. These are local effects that I as a European have nothing to do with. Fishers in China and California are the problem. We have our own problems where I'm not even part of that are enough. I dislike the trend to globalize local problems and taking ownership of everything.
Well you have a phone or a car that is partially manufactured in China.. so there's probably some Chinese river pollution from that. Globalization goes both ways.
Not at all ragequitting and not degrading to NPR. Staying on the platform tacitly implies NPR accepts the label ...which would be degrading, from their perspective.
Around the time they left, the label had already been improved to mention funding instead of affiliation.
If they could just be a bit chill about it, is quite possible within a month it might have been replaced with a approximate-percentage-funding label, which should not be particularly offensive.
Would be really slick to see all media accounts have company ownership / funding listed.
Both. Elon's approach to all this is pointlessly erratic, alienating himself from numerous people and orgs he could really use as allies. He might be right that moving entirely to paid verification is needed... but even if that is needed, it could be rolled out over a long time, with much less alienation of the user base.
NPR could benefit from a bit of patience also: realize how erratic the counterparty is, and wait a bit to see what shakes out.
asking NPR to be patient while elmu abuses and insults them is like asking an abused spouse to just stick around in case their abuser with a history of abuse & gaslighting suddenly and inexplicably cleans up their act
at the very least, twitter & elmu have to understand their actions were wrong and show conciliation for wronging them – if they're incapable of that bare minimum, there's obviously no hope of them cleaning up their act
Experiences seem to vary a lot. Some people report the Twitter feed changed radically for the worse. Others (including me) have found it's about the same. I think it must depend greatly on what accounts you follow.
McDonalds, a state funded eatery,... (because they accept tax breaks)
Amazon, a state funded company,... (because they shopped around for the best tax breaks)
Or any single other company that does what a company does by making any deal they can to better their bottom lines by taking tax breaks or gov't funding in any form would need to be called state funded.
Part blog and part resources.
Blog: Home automation & some crypto & payments -
Resources: Deep on payments info, home automation, and anything else that interests me.
Thanks for the reference. Spinning up individual containers has become quite easy these days, but agree networking still takes some work to get everything playing together nicely.
Please correct me if I am wrong here regarding Ghostery functionality: In current Firefox & Vivaldi versions it behaves as you would expect....blocks ads according to your settings for every tab load. But in chrome, the default behavior (assume chrome induced) appears to be to auto disable the plugin until you manually re-enable the plugin then reload the tab....repeat process for every new tab load. Do I have a Chrome setting misconfigured or is this another example of Google's "what's best for you is what we say it is" attitude?
how's that related to parent's question? I can't find a correlation. are you suggesting he not use chrome? that's isn't much of an answer.
parent: I've not seen this problem. I only use chrome on mac. maybe on windows/linux it's doing something differently. as each new tab is a new process, it smells like a goofball file system permissions issue to me. does it still happen if you create a new profile?
it works as you'd expect both with google sync on, off, paused, and never-been-setup for me.
hard to imagine that this isn't some bug of installation for you. there's no way this would be tolerable behavior and if it were because of chrome per se, there'd be lots of uproar so you'd find your answer right away.
Yes, agree, expect would have seen more of an uproar if this was wide spread. Was trying to stay out the troubleshooting rabbit hole, thus posting the Q here in case other have observed the same. Still, with the other browsers proclaiming more privacy features and google somewhat begrudgingly trying to slow that conversation its hard to know what to expect in chrome without going deep into their roadmap.
My take? This is really a pretty simple equation for FB. Politcal ads = good business opportunity ....perhaps essential.
Since FB tends to be a self-reinforcing echo chamber on both ends of the political spectrum, political ads will keep users engaged with the platform. For a variety of reasons interest in the 2020 campaign is likely to be sky high so allowing the ads should keeps FB's DAU's & MAU's in the preferred direction. Not allowing the ads could in-turn adversely affect those metrics and subsequently pull down ALL of their advertising rates. Freedom of Speech rational of allowing adds? (scoff, scoff, snort, outburst of laughter.....)
It sounds like you’re saying that because Facebook wants more money, they can do what they want. No. They shouldn’t get a free pass simply because it maximizes profit.
Slight tangent: Regulation is a thing because businesses have been shown to not self regulate when its in their best interest not to. A corporation maximizing profits could be a good thing for consumers, but it could also be bad. And when it’s bad, that’s when regulation is supposed to come in.
No, I never said Facebook is justified to do whatever they want because of their desire to reap more profits. Slight tangent: I don't disagree with your comments about regulation. Back to my earlier point, FB stands to lose more if they don't run political ads so expecting them to change their position in light Twitter's recent announcement is just not going to happen. Cloaking their position as promoting Freedom of Speech is complete rubbish.
Yes, sadly. ....b/c Comcast, ATT, and a few others have been allowed to control all the pipes (including access to the internet). Most places only have two options. Where I live it is either Comcast or ATT. So if you want to "cut-the-cord" on cable guess what...you are still going to pay one of those two companies for the internet. ...And guess what if you don't buy a bundled (tv+internet) package? then the individual price of internet only goes up ...and comes with bandwidth limits (ie overage fees). Solution? Buy the fast internet option, bundled with lowest TV package (literally emergency services level tv). Cost $70 month @100mps with unlimited bandwith (b/c you now have a bundle). Then add a SlingTV package. Couldn't be happier with this setup. The Sling package is even better than the cable package I had before. Still....all the hoops to jump through is ABSURD.
Well, given the subject here, it seems relevant to ask how everyone is organizing their libraries in Calibre. Is there such a thing as "best practices"? Would really love to hear ideas as I've found library mgmt in Calibre to be cumbersome, sluggish, and rather none intuitive compared to something like Plex for movies & TV shows.
Between this and the Samsung Fold it feels like we have entered into the netbook (form factor) era* void. We're past peak smartphone development and are in this space where manufacturers are stumbling around for the next "it" device but creating nothing that is truly revolutionary. Yes, there are "some" use cases where a larger screen on my mobile device would be useful…. But by-and-large I still want it to fit in my pocket and be comfortable navigating single handedly . Adding dual screen & doubling the device thickness is not the solution I am looking for.
*Netbooks were low-powered mobile devices (basically mini laptops) that launched in 2007 and basically disappeared (as a viable market category) after the iPad and its kind were launched in 2010.
Except the netbook form-factor has seen an unexpected revival in the past two years, with machines from GPD and One Netbook (and other Chinese manufacturers) showing up (although they're metal unibody machines, some of them ultrabook spec rather than netbook, and vastly more powerful and useful than their 2007-11 predecessors). E.g. One Netbook just announced the One Mix 3 Pro, with a quad-core Comet Lake i5, 16Gb RAM/512Gb SSD:
These aren't cheap (like the original netbooks), but they're pitched against the low end of the ultrabook market, for folks who need a better keyboard/typing experience than a Surface Go.
(Disclaimer: I own a One Mix 3S, predecessor to this new version and I rate it quite highly, except for support from the manufacturer which is patchy at best.)
> Netbooks were low-powered mobile devices (basically mini laptops) that launched in 2007 and basically disappeared (as a viable market category) after the iPad and its kind were launched in 2010.
You're not wrong, by most definitions of netbook, but I think the parent commenter makes a very good point if you look at them in terms of their form factor. Netbooks of that era were these weird little machines with 8.9" screens and 70% scale keyboards. I remember carrying mine in a coat pocket. It was really exciting at the time to see Windows XP running on something like that. In the end, it was a bad compromise and those have disappeared. The netbooks of today are, for the most part, full size laptops.
IMO, the biggest issue with netbooks of that time is that they were so tragically underpowered! I wanted the form factor - but with enough CPU and RAM to actually use, well, anything, and a screen with a high enough resolution that I couldn't see the pixels!
Back then, all netbooks seemed focused on price alone - almost like they knew it was a fad, so made them cheap enough for an impulse buy.
The tech of the day just didn't stack up - but it does now. I wonder if we might see a netbook revival - small, cheap machines that are actually of doing things?
Those types of educational accounts have been home to Apple (and later Microsoft) in the recent past, all it takes is one school administrator to flip that district to a different solution.
Hence NeXT's focus on educational institutions prior to being bought by Apple.
Facebook is working on building out the tech via VR, but with an eye to AR and generally out in the open.
Apple is building out the underlying software support while working on some AR hardware in secret.
Microsoft has their enterprise hardware, but not sure what they're thinking about otherwise.
Using the phone as a computing device that powers a visual digital AR layer for the real world where you can interact with AR overlays either with thoughts (Neuralink?) or more likely basic gestures (like Oculus' camera tracking, or armbands) would be another revolutionary shift in platform UX and be the big shift away from phone screens.
I'm not sure how possible this hardware currently is or how soon this transition could happen, but people seem to be laying the ground work. Michael Abrash wrote an old blog posts about a couple of reasons why this is hard (primarily drawing black in AR), but he's been at Oculus a while now and I'd be curious how his thoughts have changed.
These foldable phones strike me as a dead end nobody wants.
There’s also magic leap, but I found their hardware pretty disappointing and I’d be surprised if they survive to actually be a serious player in AR platforms.
This device’s whole point would be outside of the “we” point of view.
In general “we” don’t need a revolution of the current form factor. A sizeable portion of users have stopped upgrading and wait for their current phone to be dead, some are already clamoring for less, going back to iPhoneSE like phones.
I think the duo is not targeting the “we”, but way more specific user niches who have non generic goals and are not happy with even the bigger phones we have now. These people could be enough to float a product line, even if it doesn’t fish the other 90% of the users and their dogs.
I’d compare it to the Surface Studio, which was never expected to be a general public device as well.
I'm not happy with today's massive phones, but that doesn't mean I want a massive phone that can fold in half!
I just want a non-slippy phone that fits in my hand and pocket, and has a high-res screen. Truely, I don't understand the trend for slippy phones that keep getting bigger and bigger :/
I would guess one niche is people that wanted the 7 inches tablets and ipad mini to succeed more. They opted for cellular models, and would have prefered to be able to message and take calls there, getting rid of their phone altogether (that’s one less device to care about).
Another niche is people who used their phone mostly as a notification device, but switched to the watch for that, and now are frustrated by the tininess of the phone as they use it more and more for “serious” business only.
I am not in any of these niches, but also feel that I am happy with a smaller phone only because I need to pocket it. If I was using a purse everywhere I’d want the biggest thing I can get away with.
I think the future is less/no screen. Typing on these folding phones seems like a worse experience. Typing at all isn't really natural, and neither is staring at planar, glowing glass.
I think the future is conversational computing. I don't own an Alexa/HomePod/etc (yet... maybe some open source on prem thing at some point), but I think that's where the puck is moving. It's just that today their capabilities are somewhere around a rotary phone vs. an iPhone. Better than a telegraph (which I guess in this analogy is _typing_ your words into a document) but still very rudimentary. All it needs is time and effort.
Similar to HomePods, we have AirPods and their equivalents. The phone is just a conduit through which can pass the data necessary for the OS to talk with you, to do what you need.
Strongly disagree with this. As someone who does own a number of Google Home devices at home and uses Siri on my phone... voice is a terrible interface.
For one, there is zero discoverability. I can ask Google today's weather. I can ask tomorrow's weather. I cannot ask yesterday's weather. Leaving aside why that would be (I would find it useful to know that it's X degrees hotter/cooler than yesterday) there's no way for me to know that without asking. It's the audio equivalent of fumbling around on a keyboard in a pitch black room. Just imagine placing a food order. It's going to have to read a menu to you and you're going to have to remember it all. No amount of tech improvement is going to change that fundamental fact.
Secondly, you can't multi-task. Or have more than one person using it simultaneously. Right now my wife and I might be looking at our phones at the same time, perhaps looking stuff up, maybe tapping out an e-mail. We'd have to go to separate rooms to do that.
But if I want to know today's weather or play a song, it works fine. As long as it recognises my voice correctly and there isn't too much background noise.
To be fair, when I Google "yesterday's weather" in my desktop web browser I don't get a nice little Google info card. I do get some web results for sites that show historical weather, however.
We definitely agree that voice interfaces are very rudimentary today. I try to run lots of things through dictation first that normally I would type out with my thumbs on the smartphone or on a keyboard on my computer. Text messages, search terms, commit messages, Slack conversations. Still, it can't perform very basic tasks like changing or backspacing a word or phrase, either because it misheard it or because you want to change it. (And actually as I dictated this paragraph on my 2018 MacBook Pro, it typed out everything I said twice and still required typing interventions, and eventually I just fell back to typing everything.)
You've laid out some good criteria though. I wouldn't say voice interfaces have really "made it" until it gets to the point where you don't have to ask how to ask it to do something (discoverability). You just ask it to do something and it does it. Although that's just one of many criteria.
The food menu problem is interesting, but pretty much everything that prints out on a ticket in a kitchen is structured data–it should be able to be efficiently conversationalized (preference notwithstanding, of course). Certainly there are many ways you could talk to someone about a menu: what kinds of dishes are there? Appetizers, grilled entrees, pasta, salads, desserts. What kind of entrees? Vegetarian, pork, beef, seafood. OK, but what styles of cuisine? Jamaican, Italian, Szechuan. There's probably an analog to the 5 Why's for figuring out what someone wants to eat! Asking yesterday's weather, though, is a specific case that could probably be solved by an intern, provided that data is easy to find on the Internet (FWIW, I've searched for the very same thing many times and it's much harder to find vs forecasts).
I concede that there will always be a need for graphical interfaces. How do you "speak" a map, or a CAD model? I guess I was just thinking of things that can accomplished with a keyboard. You can speak anything you can type, even if it's as rudimentary as today, where you have to say "period newline newline" to end a sentence at the end of a paragraph while dictating.
I agree it might seem tough to multitask. But consider WiFi routers serving multiple computers, or hell, even CPUs serving different processes, "simultaneously." If voice recognition and NLP become sufficiently sophisticated I could foresee being able to isolate multiple overlapping voices in an audio sample. If not, consider that you could ask it to look something up, immediately followed by your wife dictating an email to send–or one of you could even interrupt the other–and it could be able to handle the context switching and queuing at speed.
And I understand there's a lot I don't know, and I do remain skeptical that this could ever be perfected. Would it really be able to dictate poetry? Would the forms I create or creatively destroy in free verse just totally confuse the voice interface? Would it be smart enough to side step the confusion via some pseudo-meta-cognitive process and ask me what the hell I'm doing?
> Certainly there are many ways you could talk to someone about a menu: what kinds of dishes are there? Appetizers, grilled entrees, pasta, salads, desserts. What kind of entrees? Vegetarian, pork, beef, seafood. OK, but what styles of cuisine? Jamaican, Italian, Szechuan. There's probably an analog to the 5 Why's for figuring out what someone wants to eat!
To me this is the core of why voice interfaces will always be inferior. In the time it would take that voice conversation to happen I would have been able to scan a menu a dozen times over. Our brains are incredibly adept at picking out visual details - identifying the headers that note each section of the menu, picking out key words that may interest us and so on. There is no technological improvement that will help a voice interface rival that.
Have you ever watched a person with vision challenges using VoiceOver with the speed cranked up? I bet they could absorb the info they need to know about a menu before the average reader could, even before any hierarchical organization is exposed to the text-to-speech process. The visual hierarchical and keyword navigation you describe is just what I'm talking about with a voice interface, too.
Just yesterday a colleague I was pairing with was VoiceOvering JSON packed with API keys and stack traces. I, conversely, have many times stood with the fridge door open trying to find something that was plainly front and center. Of course, the answer for many things may be a combination of both hearing and vision.
I also wonder if this easily navigable menu you are thinking of is already cognitively mapped in your mind, and you know what to look for. What if the menu is in a foreign or second language, that the voice assistant could translate for you? Or is a completely foreign-to-you cuisine, or just creatively organized in a way you aren't used to, like by seasonality, emotion or geography? I've sat and stared at some dense menus, that I've had to reread multiple times to remember just a subset of the items. In the end I asked the waiter something like in my example: "something with shrimp" or "what do you like?"
I'm not so sure about the things you say will never or always be, and I don't even consider myself an optimist. Finally, thanks for taking this ride with me, it's definitely made me consider more things!
Except when you can't reply to a message on your phone cause you don't want people around you to hear that.
Let's be real, "conversational computing" may work in movies, but in reality you don't want people in the office or on the street hearing your interactions with your phone.
My thoughts too - it works in the home and at a push I can see it working for certain jobs, but it absolutely seems unworkable in public places.
But then I think again and wonder if maybe this is one of these things that seems unthinkable now but in 10-20 years, everyone everywhere will be doing it completely naturally, it's become part of the background noise of life, and nobody will care enough to really listen to what you're telling your computer to search for / do.
Yes on a silent train it might be awkward - but on the street I can honestly see it being fine, especially if attitudes and culture changes a bit as it's wont to do with new technology usage (see bluetooth headsets for a past example of this).
What are you going to watch your porn on without a screen?
Also, talking to any of those assistants is literally the worst imaginable mode of interaction with a computer, period. Touchscreens in cars are in close second place.
But I agree that innovation is often incremental efforts of exploration and convergence, like how we got to where we are in VR today. Magical phenomenal change like iPhone is rather exceptional.
I suspect the main reason this type of device tends to be more symmetrical in thickness is to carry an additional battery, needed to power the second display without shortening the total battery life of the device.
> Yes, there are "some" use cases where a larger screen on my mobile device would be useful…. But by-and-large I still want it to fit in my pocket and be comfortable navigating single handedly . Adding dual screen & doubling the device thickness is not the solution I am looking for.
I'm still waiting for a phone on which I can comfortably edit, build, and deploy code.
In developing countries, phone is the only computing device most people have and is the primary consumption device taking over TV. So a bigger screen will definitely be valued.
How cheap and easy is it to come up to develop a new version (even if it is a reskin) of Windows 10 and dual screen hardware? Surely it cost more in engineering than the marketing coverage they are getting.
