I'm still plugging away on my PostScript interpreter. Right now I'm working on the clip and eoclip operators which has turned out to be much more complex than I expected. Mostly because I am not using any 3rd party libraries nor any AI generated code.
On the house front I'm just about to install an IKEA kitchen.
>Possibly, this will bring a new era of decent macOS desktop and mobile apps, not another web app that I have to run in my browser and have no control over.
There has been no shortage of mobile apps, Apple frequently boasts that there are over 2 million of them in the App Store.
I have little doubt there will be more, whether any of the extra will be decent remains to be seen.
ai is trained on the stuff already written. Software has been taking a nosedive for ages (ex, committing to shipping something in 6 months before one even figures out what to put in it). If anything shit will get worse due to the deskilling being caused by ai.
To have none at all, yes, it would have to be very remote.
To have very limited public transport, then lots of places outside big cities.
I just dropped by daughter off at a friend's house. 4 minutes by car, 40 minutes by bus. Busses here are infrequent and unreliable. You need to take a bus to get to a train if you are going a longer distance.
This is in a town with a population of about 20 thousand in Cheshire.
Car drivers are always like this, everywhere. Even when I was a little kid, last century, it's a village school, every pupil lives in the same mile or so radius and yet loads of them get picked up in a car.
I now live in a big city but when I walk to the office it's just before school starts, so I see that yeah at first I'm passing kids happily walking with parents but just outside the school it's a jam of idiots who "just quickly" are here to drop the child from a car. The contrast in a few weeks when school is closed will be dramatic, that street is dead, but I bet every one of those parents thinks of it as a "busy road, they ought to do something about that" while not remembering that it's busy because of them.
4 min, rounded down by my navigation app, covering most of the distance on a clear road with a 60mph speed limit. I think half an hour+ walk each way. It was dark and raining when I went to pick her up which is another consideration.
To be fair in this case the big problem with the bus was probably that to go a small way around the edge of town she would have needed to take a bus into town and another one out again.
> Now be a frail 70 year old in the winter (+2°C and rain).
Not the OP, but walking may not be feasible. Sometimes the only connection is a road dangerous for pedestrians. Freezing or scorching or rainy weather is another problem.
Windows' moat was not the operating system code, but that they were able to get distribution via IBM, and then grow an ecosystem of applications that were targeted at Windows, which created a snowball effect for further applications.
Sadly we are going to get more ads (Apple Maps is next). If it goes much further people will start questioning whether Apple products are worth the premium price.
I have used Apple products for over 20 years, because I felt like a customer instead of the product. Apple’s services strategy has changed this perception. I question Apple’s competitive advantage when they shift to a Google-like business model. They are actively throwing away the very thing that made them a unique and valuable player in the industry, and for what? A couple extra percent profit in the short term?
Steve Jobs always said he wanted to make insanely great products for customers. Products they’d be proud to recommend to their family. It feels like Cook lost his way, spending too much time focusing on the stock, instead of letting great products drive adoption, and letting the stock follow.
If the rumors are true that Apple is preparing for a change at the top, I how we see a dramatic change in the services strategy and Apple can get back to making great products that people actually want to use.
And Slow Horses, which is perhaps my favorite show in years. I'm not a big TV watcher, and this show got me to subscribe (at least for a while) to Apple TV.
I've been an Apple One subscriber for over three years now. For the past few months, as soon as you open the TV+ app, a Peacock ad starts playing really loud.
Then I don’t know what to tell you. I just opened the app again, and right there in the home section I’m seeing an ad for the Super Bowl in Peacock. If you don’t get that, great, but I’m far from the only one complaining about it.
Maybe it’s just me. I’ve been an Apple One subscriber for a long time now. The Peacock commercial I’m talking about plays right when I open the app, almost full screen and quite loud. It seems to be some sort of add-on offer for Apple One subscribers.
While I agree that third party advertising is not the same as playing trailers from other same platform shows, once you are in the app, these highly promoted shows are really hard to miss, regardless of how many trailers are placed at the beginning of another show.
For Shrinking, for instance, they placed an almost full screen, auto play trailer in the main carousel. It is also first in the top ten shows, and it appears in a number of other lists.
Regardless of all this, they do play unrelated promotions for their add ons like some sports stuff or the Peacock deal.
Apple has a tv service and Apple also has exclusive content, which they brand with “Apple TV”…so it’s kind of both.
Same for the other big streaming services. Some of them (Netflix, Prime Video) are more involved in content production, up to and including having production facilities and an in house staff. But a lot of the “exclusive” branded content is made by semi-independent production companies.
Which makes it even more tragic that the few good streaming shows produced recently are all on a network no one watches.
I am glad that they bought the rights to Brandon Sanderson's books, because I know Netflix wouldn't do them justice and Amazon prime would be far worse than that, but it also means that it will have a tenth of the available audience that a Netflix contract would have brought.
I'm not sure how causality works on that one. Netflix made great stuff, back when streaming was still a small market, then they got big and started making trash.
It's not like they weren't trying to attract everyone when they were releasing content worth watching. Maybe it's because they didn't have any feedback yet on what works, so they couldn't even try to make safe bets, instead creating a little of everything, with most of it being bland, but a surprising portion being top-tier.
Hmm, your comment resonates in principle [caring about quality production of worthwhile narratives], but your specific examples show how much YMMV when it comes to subjective preferences. I was so grateful that Amazon Prime somehow did justice to The Expanse [I highly recommend the novels, and feel the show was one of the best-ever translations of sci-fi to the screen] and could never get into the Wheel of Time book series [tho I guess that was Jordan, not Sanderson, shrug].
Amazon didn't start The Expanse as a TV show, though. They bought it after Sci-Fi ran it then cancelled it. They didn't screw it up after that, but that's a very different sequence from creating it themselves.
Compare to their much-ballyhooed exercise in lighting money on fire that was their LOTR series.
I will never forgive them buying the rights to Utopia (UK) - probably the greatest show ever made - and remaking it into absolute shit. Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. Fuck Amazon (even if The Expanse was pretty good)
Leaf didn't capture the mind of people that EVs are good options.
Tesla made long-distance driving in EVs possible. Tesla made EV sexy, desirable. It catalyzed the Chinese EV industry. Nissan didn't remotely accomplish those things.
Like someone else said, people think in terms of a pre-Tesla and post-Tesla world. I don't know that there's a strong case against that framing.
On the house front I'm just about to install an IKEA kitchen.
reply