End users should be authenticated so you can prove you're selling real eyeballs in the demographic mix you claimed to marketers and to provide lip service for the 'think of the children' regulators.
But anyone who's paying for ads should have as little friction as possible to dropping money and spewing garbage.
I'm surprised nobody is looking at some sort of "corporations are people" angle here-- we've attested the device ownership, but it's owned by the Lorem Ipsum Corporation, which is a legal/demographic dead end and spawned just long enough to buy the device.
Consider that the largest payment card network on Earth (China UnionPay, 7 billion cards) - decided it was easier just to bootstrap acceptance in the US by a partnership with Discover rather than connecting directly to merchants.
If you want a new scheme to work, distribute something like social security and welfare cheques through it. That immediately forces broad acceptance.
Because at the end of the day, "profits down to 0" also means things like "reserve capacity down to 0", "safety margins down to 0", and "any aspect of the experience that makes it less miserable than being crammed into the cargo pen down to 0".
A modest regulated profit could result in a healthier industry-- one where the least economic hiccup doesn't cause carriers to shut down with limited notice, where they can afford to not play chicken with hours-of-service laws and maintenance standards, and where people don't get promotions for trying to sell the idea of standing-room tickets.
The industry is extremely safe. Neither of the two recent fatal accidents involved safety lapses by the airlines and air travel is so safe as to be difficult to measure.
I don’t understand how higher profits would translate to a less miserable experience. Nice experiences are available now! You just have to pay for them. All regulation would do is remove the option of not paying for them. If you want to pay more for a better experience, nothing is stopping you now.
The fact that the airline that just went under was one of the most miserable, most nickel-and-diming ones out there suggests that this isn’t actually the way to compete, and the market does allow for some room at the bottom there.
I could see a synergy. Remember when there was a small trend of strip-mall "We'll sell on eBay for you" shops?
That seemed like a great idea for certain types of goods-- the market for plenty of collectibles are thin in any given locality, but it was always clumsy to get to the global marketplace. If you had a normal consumer eBay account with 30 feedback, you might have a hard time getting trust against sellers with 400,000. You had to deal with packing, shipping, nonpayment, complaints.
Handing it all off to a professional with experience and a high volume credible account was worth a consignment commission. But they seemed to dry up after a while, I think when eBay pivoted from "the world's garage sale" to "AliExpress but some products are in domestic warehouses."
If you had a widely deployed retail presence that was already used to dealing with used merchandise (pawnshop-style laws, routing items for cleaning/refubrishment etc), turning the tradein counter into a consignment counter is a potential win. New revenue stream, gets people in the door, and provides an expectation of legitimacy and predictability.
The survivors in the industry were the non-enthusiast players.
Cherry was selling mechanical switch keyboards for POS and specialty applications for decades before the enthusiast market emerged.
Unicomp was addressing the market of terminal-lockin customers who needed a replacement for the IBM Model M (frequently 122-key version) that had finally popped its last rivet at 23 years old.
They didn't have to chase trends, minimizing risk and keeping scale high.
Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names. They might be able to hold some ground by virtue of "You can get it for $89 today at Micro Centre and not have to dig into it too hard", but they're very interchangeable (maybe RGB and programming ecosystems matter for some)
Boutique vendors might be able to keep things running by going from trend to trend or relying on a small, dedicated audience-- group buys where everything is pretty much prepaid are probably better than trying to sell at retail and end up on a pile of unsold stock.
But I wonder how far off we are from "bespoke to order"-- a wizard with a bunch of knobs but some constraints, and it generates a stack of files that get forwarded to PCB and CNC/3D-printing jobbers, and in 8 weeks you get a parcel from Shenzhen with an assembled keyboard.
I'd suspect right now, the small-scale inefficiencies are what holds it back. It's doable but probably too expensive to make a viable product out of.
> Mid-price enthusiast players are under the risk of irrelevance from cheaper/better competitors. The higher-end of the market-- the Steelseries, Corsair, Razer, Das Keyboards-- are being perpetually undercut by the Redragons, Akkos, Aulas, and a bunch of AliExpress/Amazon no-names.
To be fair, you get what you pay for - I can’t really justify the fancier options since the cheap ones are good enough (I even occasionally return to my backup Logitech K120 and it’s okay for getting things done), but my daily drivers are Redragon and a bunch of lesser known budget options and they just work. At the same time, I had a case where a particular model (I think it was an older Genesis) developed the issue of the same keys not responding both before and after RMA and in the new keyboard the store sent me, must have been a bad batch/design.
I’ve had some keyboards with Kailh or Outemu switches for years and they’re okay, a bit hit or miss. Then again I have like three mechanical keyboards in total (and since I don’t need one for when I’m in the countryside anymore or office where I got o-rings to make it silent, I treat it as a stockpile of backups) so I’m probably good for years to come.
The more expensive options will buy you a bit more consistency across the board and decrease the risk of just getting a bad product.
I feel like we could go beyond that, especially for more app-like experiences. Maybe we want themes that do things like "add specific trim to make editable fields more identifiable." or adding "high contrast" versions of the themes for low-quality screens or low-vision users.
There's no reason a webpage shouldn't be as themable as, say, a GTK or Qt based desktop application.
We should be trying to snatch back styling power from the designers and putting it back on the user-agent's side. Let the page look brutalist until the user has chosen an appropriate theme for their needs rather than railroading them into what someone in Marketing decided looked good.
I'm frustrated that there's not "solid" instructional tooling. I either see people just saying "keep trying different prompts and switching models until you get lucky" or building huge cantilevered toolchains that seems incredibly brittle, and even then, how well do they really work?
I get choice paralysis when you show me a prompt box-- I don't know what I can reasonably ask for and how to best phrase it, so I just panic. It doesn't help when we see articles saying people are getting better outcomes by adding things like "and no bugs plz owo"
I'm sure this is by design-- anything with clear boundaries and best practices would discourage gacha style experimentation. Can you trust anyone who sells you a metered service to give you good guidance on how to use it efficiently?
yea that is probably the worst part of these techs becoming mainstream services and local-LLM'ing taking off in general: working with them at many points in any architecture no longer feels... deterministic i guess. way too fucking much "heres what i use" but no real best practices yet, just a lot of vague gray area and everyones still in discovery-mode on how to best find some level of determinism or workflow and ways we are benchmarking is seriously a moving target. everyone has their own branded take on what the technology is and their own branded approach on how to use it, and it's probably the murkiest and foggiest time to be in technology fields that i've ever seen :\ seems like weekly/monthly something is outdated, not just the models but the tooling people are parroting as the current best tooling to use. incredibly frustrating. there's simply too much ground to cover for any one person to have any absolute takes on any of it, and because a handful of entities are currently leading the charge draining lakes and trying to compete for every person and every businesses money, there's zero organized frameworks at the top to make some sense of this. they all are banking on their secret sauce, and i _really_ want us all to get away from this. local inference has to succeed imo but goddamn there needs to be some collective working together to rally behind some common strats/frameworks here. im sure there's already countless committees that have been established to try and get in front of this but even that's messy.
i don't know how else to phrase it: this feels like such an unstable landscape, "beta" software/services are running rampant in every industry/company/org/etc and there's absolutely no single resource we can turn to to help stay ahead of & plan for the rapidly-evolving landscape. every, and i mean every company, is incredibly irresponsible for using this stuff. including my own. once again though, cat's already out of the bag. now we fight for our lives trying to contain it and ensure things are well understood and implemented properly...which seems to be the steepest uphill battle of my life
When we first got our LG TV (a fairly cheap 43" LCD with mediocre brightness and WebOS) you could get an app to be the remote control. It was a convenient option when the remote fell under the couch.
They discontinued it for some elaborate "ThinQ" app which was designed to support a huge universe of different devices, and it was no longer something my parents could use.
I miss when phones had IR blasters; it was fun that I could control my old NAD 7100 reciever, which predated consumer smartphones by a good decade plus.
End users should be authenticated so you can prove you're selling real eyeballs in the demographic mix you claimed to marketers and to provide lip service for the 'think of the children' regulators.
But anyone who's paying for ads should have as little friction as possible to dropping money and spewing garbage.
I'm surprised nobody is looking at some sort of "corporations are people" angle here-- we've attested the device ownership, but it's owned by the Lorem Ipsum Corporation, which is a legal/demographic dead end and spawned just long enough to buy the device.
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