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The EU made Apple adopt new Wi-Fi standards, and now Android can support AirDrop (arstechnica.com)
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So what is it? Comanagement between EU representatives and Apple employees? It looks like the German model where unions co-manage the companies. On the paper it looks great, but the problem is the EU is not necessarily representing its citizens. It’s great for my Apple products, but I’m also paying for an entire lavish class of superior citizen in Brussels who implement laws written by lobbies.
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When sending photos on iOS, you have to select (every time!) “All Photos Data“ otherwise the images are missing some metadata like the full live image or raw slowmo image file. Has anyone tried sending a photo from Android to iOS? Does it send whatever Android’s equivalent of a Live Photo is?
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I'm libertarian, but I have to say watching the EU torment Apple has been delightful and one of the stronger arguments for muscular regulatory action. The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient. Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU). Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.
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[delayed]
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You're a libertarian but regulatory intervention made everything about the market better and a better world for everyone involved with a relatively small change that was being stubbornly refused by a company for a small marginal benefit to themselves?
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I wonder if it's related to Apple's change from AWDL to Wi-Fi Aware, but AirDrop seems much more reliable on iOS 26. I can send to multiple people at once and they often all succeed, but most importantly, if one transfer fails or is cancelled, I can retry and it works. In older versions of iOS, a failed transfer seemed to block all future attempts until the phone was restarted.
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So they forced Apple to drop an Apple proprietary thing in favor of… a Wi-Fi standard Apple helped develop specifically to replace their proprietary thing. Not quite as strong as the headline makes the case sound.
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The EU: Sacrificing privacy rights with one hand, while courageously fighting for the sacred right of Google users to AirDrop with Apple users with the other.
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Apple also helped develop USB C more than a decade ago, they still had to be forced to actually use it in their phones. There is no contradiction here
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Users all got to complain that the EU are the meanies responsible for their old wires and chargers and accessory no longer being compatible, but it seems infinitely more likely that Apple was going to adopt USB-C on largely the same schedule even if the EU didn't intercede. To be clear, Apple had already moved their laptops and computers to USB-C -- long in advance of almost any one else -- and had moved their iPad Pros to USB-C, building out the accessory set supporting the same, years before the EU decree. Pretty convenient when they get to blame the EU for their smartphones making the utterly inevitable move.
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Apple was forced to upstream the standard because the writing was on the wall so may as well preempt it. It’d also a benefit for Apple, since once upstreamed it shares the maintenance burden across all participants.
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I'll be happy when Airdrop works reliably on Apple equipment. It can't reliably work between two adjacent rooms in my home without arm-waving. A hundred or thousand mile trip through iCloud works tons better.
Ask HN: Why aren't more startups using .NET?
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A) It used to suck B) It's not that popular for frontend, which is a very important concern for most early startups C) Microsoft was historically only used because it was Microsoft, not because it was the best choice It's mostly a Microsoft brand problem that they rightfully earned by being bullies producing over-complex, stagnant corporate IT trash.
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Anti-MS sentiment is common in some corners of the tech world. People ignore the fact that the CLI and C# are ECMA standards like JavaScript and C++, and treat them like closed proprietary systems. .NET is a great choice and there are tons of people who happily use it.
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its an ms thing and how much does one want to be at the mercy of an ms roadmap
Why 90s Movies Feel More Alive Than Anything on Netflix (afranca.com.br)
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Movies also have gotten to long. I long for 5he days of 90 min. It also meant cinemas could run more movies and had space for smaller releases too.
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Modern writing for films is terrible is my feeling. I can’t remember any weekend in the 90s an first decade of 2000s where I could not find one or more movies that I wanted to watch. These days neither me or the kids can find anything and we have been going to Sunday matinees and watching old 80s, 90s and even silent movies with Buster Keaton and they are better than the slop that made today. Frankly I’m hoping gen AI lets new and exiting storytellers end the industry.
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Maybe it’s in part because films from the 80s and 90s were filmed on actual film.
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how does 90s movie compare with say 60s movies that would be interesting too.
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60s has so many good movies like 2001, psycho etc etc. it’s really the last 5-7 years where I feel the quality took a dive
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The biggest thing for me is the cinematography. 80s/90s movies were filmed as if you're standing alongside the cast. * Many more shots from eye level * Significantly less jumpcuts * People actually cast shadows onto the environment, and filmmakers would fearlessly shoot scenes with full bright or full dark elements in them without trying to make everything dark and bright visible simultaneously * Waist-up or even full body shots of multiple (3+) characters talking and/or walking around with few if any jump cuts I'm not even from that era but I find movies from that era to feel the most "real", like I can almost reach into the screen and just "be there" together. This aesthetic is perfectly doable in the modern age, even with digital cameras, it's just not the trend currently.
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It's also color grading that has changed. https://youtu.be/tvwPKBXEOKE?si=rnVOSw1h1vM60l7x
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There is only so much top talent to go around. We cannot have infinite new content at the same quality as the best Hollywood could do in the 90s.
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If you think the stories in 90's movies are good, you need spend some time with classic era movies (pre-1970). When you have to let the writing carry the story, the movie works much better.
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I watched All the President's Men on a recent flight and even on an airplane seatback screen it had me rapt. No romance, no sex, no violence except a cop pointing a gun in the first 5 minutes, just a good story with two great leads.
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I've seen many good films this decade too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There Is No Evil (شیطان وجود ندارد) 2020 Drive My Car (ドライブ・マイ・カー) 2021 The two Dune films Alcarràs 2022 Suzume (すずめの戸締まり) 2022 Monster (怪物) 2023 Fallen Leaves (Kuolleet lehdet) 2023 The Holdovers 2023 Perfect Days 2023 The Substance 2024 Bugonia 2025 (even though it's a remake)
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Several hundred new movies see significant distribution or screenings every year. Folks who say “there are no good movies now” have really narrow taste or aren’t looking hard enough.
A big part of this is that modern movies are carefully calibrated so that you can follow along while sitting on your couch focused on your phone. Movies in the 1990's didn't need to have so much clanky dialog explaining, in careful detail, why we were someplace. The writers and directors could presume that the audience was actually paying attention to the movie, and so would make the necessary inferences. Modern movies are mostly terrified of doing because the audience is also swiping on Tinder and scrolling Instagram at the same time and would never realize that he just stopped walking with a limp oh my God was everything he said in the entire movie a lie?
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The second screen effect is largely overstated when it comes to why movies suck. While it’s true for some movies and TV shows that end up being streaming exclusives, the same problem doesn’t exist in theatrical releases or even shows for TV for streaming services like HBO. Modern movies suck mostly because of Hollywood mostly being risk averse and prioritizing profit over everything else. This leads to IPs being sequels, prequels, remakes, “parts of the universe” or adaptations of existing successful IPs. This also leads to creative directions that are “designed to pull maximum audiences” or in other words average. Almost every single Marvel movie has the same plot with a few changes in characters. It also translates to situations where ideas that would otherwise be successful being tabled. K-POP demon hunters is a great example, an original IP, that audiences want, being sold to Netflix because the executives somewhere did a couple of focus groups and came to the conclusion that this won’t work. Another side effect is lack of innovation. Pixar animation has largely been stale for years now, meanwhile Ne Zha 2 is taking in billions worldwide, Demon Slayer is was one of the most popular movies in the US despite its limited release and Arcane is one of the best rated TV shows ever. There’s a lot more like fewer stand ins to save money that make scenes look “empty and soulless”, overuse of CGI, overuse of Pedro Pascal, etc. All in all, it’s enshittification if movies because less profit is unacceptable.
I don't particularly disagree with you, but do you have evidence that modern movies are calibrated and written to allow for someone to sit on their phones the entire time and understand? Largely seems like some movies are written to be mass consumed and some are not. No different then a movie from the 90s. Our attention span is decreasing a lot obviously, but it's never been that long.
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A couple of months ago I started listening to the Scriptnotes podcast, by Craig Mazin (showrunner for Chernobyl and Last of Us, also wrote for Scary Movie and Hangover sequels) and John August (Go, Charlie's Angels, Big Fish, etc.). They discussed receiving notes like that from executives on their scripts- that there needed to be a line of dialog here to explain, rather than just using the visual to explain, so that someone on their phone could follow along. There are, of course, ways that writers and directors get to ignore executive feedback, have a bunch of recent hits already is one, do your movie outside the studio system is another, have it in your contract because you gave up some money or whatever is a third. This is why some movies are still made in older ways, but from what they said that feedback is pretty universal now.
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https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-is-telling-writers-to-dumb-down-shows-since-viewers-are-on-their ( https://archive.is/RE0pz ) > Amid a push to perfect 'casual viewing,' creatives say streaming execs are requiring them to remove nuance and visual cues, and do things like announce when characters enter a room.
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Could be from https://www.pcmag.com/news/netflix-is-telling-writers-to-dumb-down-shows-since-viewers-are-on-their which mentioned https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-49/essays/casual-viewing/
That spoiler should be a crime.
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A crime with all the usual... er
My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot. And my inner artist is absolutely REPULSED at the notion that "oh I missed stuff in the movie cuz I was on my phone." Then put your fucking phone away. Watch a movie, or don't. Watch a show, or don't. Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies. I have a buddy, I absolutely love him, but I don't think that fucker has sat down with one medium at one time in YEARS. He leaves a stressful day job and he goes home and he watches YouTube or TV, while playing videogames. Every night. He got to the end of Pacific Drive and didn't know there was a fucking in-game radio station (with a whole host of absolute bangers btw). Like I just... idk it makes my inner creative absolutely die inside how everyone is so utterly and hopelessly dependent on their dopamine treadmill that they've lost the ability to focus entirely.
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It's all crap, my friend. You can pretend Super Mario is different than Predator longer than you can pretend the Big Mac is different than the Whopper or Home Alone is different than Home Alone 2. Little kids can hold two stuffed animals and make up stories where they are different, but when you're older you can meaningfully accept that it all scrolls by and your life is the same whether you ate a Whopper and root for the Bengals or you ate a Big Mac and root for the Cubs.
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I have no clue what point you're trying to make. Super Mario and Predator are both classics of their genre, they're massively different. A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place, or hell, even a chain that vaguely gives a shit like Five Guys or Freddy's. Home Alone 1 and 2 are both classics. If you genuinely have never felt different after consuming any art for your entire life, that sounds like my personalized version of hell.
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> A Big Mac and Whopper are both hilariously inferior to any decent local burger place You have agreed with me. They are essentially the same. There is no real situation where one cannot be substituted for the other. Now that you have stopped pretending, you may reach a point where you realize that my other statements are true as well. Or, you may not. That sounds like my impersonalized version of hell.
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> My most "old woman yells at cloud" opinion is the fucking DISEASE of smartphones that is truly a cancer in our society. Don't get me wrong, I love mine, and they're completely possible to use in a way that coexists with the rest of your tech and life, but my god, the wide adoption of them has demonstrated the majority of our population has the regulation capacity of a fucking carrot. Every morning, I am one of about four parents dropping Primary 1 age children off at school that isn't nose-down in a phone. While walking, while crossing the road, while standing there waiting to pick their child up after school - nose down, thumb going scroll scroll scroll. Christ almighty. I only carry my phone because in theory I'm still at work for that half an hour, and if anyone phones me twice it's probably important enough to look at, maybe even answer.
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"Commit to taking in ONE PIECE of art at a time you fucking dopamine junkies." "in-game radio station" You found a loop hole
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Kinda but not really. The music was all created for the game specifically, this wasn’t a GTA situation. It contributes a lot to the weird atmosphere of that game, hence me being flabbergasted he rolled credits on it having no clue it was there.
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I thought Saints Row IV and Sleeping Dogs did this really well, to the point where I'd go around in the car just to hear all the radio stations.
Anecdotally one thing I’ve noticed is that older films had much fewer characters. Take a movie like When Harry Met Sally — there are basically four on screen characters, giving more time to build chemistry and relationships
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They are also shorter which means they don’t overstay their welcome
> Modern digital cinema cameras can capture dark scenes far better than the film stocks of the 90s and earlier. So set designers don’t need to blast light everywhere to have actors be visible… > Go watch a 90s movie and look at a night or interior scene. You’ll see that everyone is actually lit by blue lights. Not natural darkness. That’s a major change. Let me introduce you to some film history: https://neiloseman.com/barry-lyndon-the-full-story-of-the-famous-f0-7-lenses/
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Any discussion about film should probably include a disclaimer like "what we say here doesn't necessarily apply to Kubrick because he was Kubrick"
Modern motion pictures are made for people who temporarily or permanently lack the mental capacity to understand deeper plots. The other audience is too small to bother with.
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It's the opposite. Modern movies are obsessed with plot. Inception being an example of this. It's everything else, the image and characters that's lacking. You're never going to get something like Tarkovsky's Solaris again that just shows you a highway scene for five minutes. Villeneuve commented on this a year or two ago in an interview where he pointed out that he hates the extent to which television has infected film with its focus on plot and dialogue at expense of what's visually on the screen.
I don’t think this was a 90s thing. I think it’s been a gradual progression to shorter, shallower attention spans. Contrast 2001 space odyssey to a 90s movie, it feels so slow. Then contrast a 2000s movie to a modern film and if you want to feel really sad, contrast that to a high budget YouTubers content.
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i think your mistaking stuff here. 2001 space odyssey is considered a masterpiece by cinema enthusiasts. tested through short years. who knows if it'll still rank high in 300 years from now like some arts of old mediums; Don Quijote book is a great example have been watched almost a hundred of hours of the early cinema (1920-1930) i found 2001 space odyssey boring as heck. had to go to a public theater to not sleep through, because the past 2 attempts at my house got me sleeping. cinema is a recent medium. it can go through a lot of stuff. and yet, you can find shallow films since the first era, till today. not every movie was made to be dense, slow or thoughtful. the 90s also had a bunch of shallow stuff
Also: Recency & survival bias. We remember what became the classics from the 90s and also what came out this year and was available on our last flight
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The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes. Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were. Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I ember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them. Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today. Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
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Escape from New York is the good one (in my opinion anyway)
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
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You will forget the bad movies, remember the good movies, and describe the 2010s as a great era.
Poop doesn’t get better with age. But you have good movies in the 2010s.
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I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster -type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
Crews claim Boring Company failed to pay workers and snubbed OSHA concerns (nashvillebanner.com)
xAI notched up EPA violations for running a mountain of gas turbines illegally Tesla collects a variety of regulatory violations like they're paid for it. SpaceX...OSHA, FAA, EPA Boring company... etc.
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Yeah the fines are designed to provide incentive to operate like you value your worker’s and others’ humanity even if you don’t have the humanity to really do it. It’s useful because our business economy mostly incentivizes businesses to treat people like fungible economic units of potential profit and loss. If the business is run by someone more interested in stroking their ego rather than optimizing profit and loss, the whole thing breaks down. Yet another example of the real work not working like an economics thought experiment.
I hate to moan, but in my professional career ( whatever that was) - nothing is more of a red flag than a missed payment
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I thought those were part of "the normal course of business" (quoting VP of Boring Company).
The original stated goal was to 10x the speed of existing tunnel boring machines by bringing up the cutting head RPMs, automating liner installation, and speeding up spoil removal with electric sleds. Which would seem like a good bet, except that there are a million other bottlenecks to the process. On top of that, it doesn't seem like they even solved their core problems. It would be cool if they'd post a postmortem or something, but I get the impression that reporting bad news is a good way to get fired in an Elon-run organization.
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I get the sense that the goalposts get moved to wherever he kicks the ball, even retrospectively. His whole vibe feels like he’s just real-life cosplaying Ironman.
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While ending closer to a hapless Justin Hammer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3JCdchkNSY&t=9m53s
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I’m not sure why anyone believed this load of lies, tunnel boring is a mature industry with multiple companies that make tunnel boring machines, and tunnel boring has been around for well over a hundred years. The cutting heads move slowly because they’re between 3 and ~50 feet in diameter (1 to 15 meters for non Americans) Anyone claiming they can 10x the speed of a physical process that has been worked on by thousands of engineers over more than a century is full of shit. Anyone who bought that explanation is either far too credulous or just doesn’t understand what it takes to bore a large diameter tunnel.
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Space launch is a mature industry with multiple companies. Anyone who thinks SpaceX can lower the launch costs by orders of magnitude is either far to credulous or just doesn't understand what it takes to launch a rocket.
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> Anyone claiming they can 10x the speed of a physical process that has been worked on by thousands of engineers over more than a century is full of shit. Metal machining processes had been around for well over 100 years when tungsten carbide tooling came along, and that increased cutting speeds by 10x over HSS. It happens.
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Sure but no one founded companies saying they were going to do exactly that until they actually had tungsten carbide tooling in hand and it was a production engineering issue. What technology or research was the Boring company sitting on that it expected to utilize to get this advantage?
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Tunnel boring is only partly about boring the tunnel itself, bracing the tunnel and removing the spoils probably take as much time as boring the tunnel itself. It’s a complex process with work crews, management layers, multiple subcontractors, multiple stakeholders, etc. Replacing the tool on a CNC mill with a tungsten carbide tool takes what, a few minutes? Assuming you already have the tool. It’s also insanely easy to verify a tungsten carbide CNC tool is 10x faster at cutting metal than high speed steel vs. testing ‘This tunnel boring machine will be 10x faster.’ One takes minutes, the other takes years.
> I maintain the belief that Boring Company's purpose, first and foremost, is to confuse and derail (pun intended) local efforts to build real transit. Well that was the purpose of the Hyperloop too
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Same strategy at different scales, Boring Company is to local transit what Hyperloop is to regional. The original proposal was squarely aimed at disrupting CAHSR, but existing bureaucratic dysfunction is more than sufficient to prevent anything being built at that scale in the US, so Hyperloop was proven unnecessary and abandoned.
They should rebrand Screwing Company.
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This is my favorite HN comment of the year. Thank you.
So, the Greediest Person In The World [0] also cheats subcontractors and workers out of their pay, and poaches employees — who would have guessed? [0] a far more accurate way to describe those who hoard wealth without helping the people or society who got them there, vs the usual praise as the "richest"
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Just like the president he looks up to. Maybe that's the American Way? (/s but not really).
TFW you realize real-life Tony Stark is actually Willy Wonka.
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Musk is Justin Hammer.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Show HN: Safe-NPM – only install packages that are +90 days old (github.com/kevinslin)
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As someotherguyy already mentioned, this is a default feature in pnpm. And as far as cat-and-mouse-games go in other package managers, I'd say that pinning dependencies and disabling postinstall scripts is a much better option. Sure, not a foolproof one either, but as good as it gets. edit: misspelled someotherguyy's user name
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Not controlling transitive deps makes this vastly less useful because direct deps can specify version ranges (e.g. latest minor version). Personally I'd stick with pnpm's feature.
Doesn't this just mean you're 90 days late on any patches?
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auto-updating is bad. Scheduled, audited updates are good. Installing random npm packages as suggested here is also bad. Especially with "-global", although I'm not sure if that makes any difference.
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This article was on the front page recently that discusses the idea behind this: https://blog.yossarian.net/2025/11/21/We-should-all-be-using-dependency-cooldowns Most of the time, you need quick patches because of fairly recent dependency changes, so if you just wait and kind of "debounce" you dependency updates, you can cover a lot of supply chain vulnerabilities etc.
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It's not debouncing, it's delaying. Ideally you can still update a specific dependency to a more up to date version if it turns out an old version has a vulnerability.
How does it differ from: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v11/commands/npm-install#before
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Seems like a worse version of `before` because `before` also handles indirect dependencies, whil this module does not seem to.
The most male and female reasons to end up hospital (leobenedictus.substack.com)
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This is so sexist.
Some of these categories are awfully vague. "Non-treatment procedures"??
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I interpreted that as "a procedure that does not treat a medical condition". So, possibly various non-doctor-ordered weight-loss-related procedures, cosmetic surgery, etc.
Who on earth are those 1.7% men who go for "obstetric and gynaecological devices"? Are they accompanying their wives, end up fainting during the procedures, hit their heads and have to be patched up?
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Babies. 8% of the patients under that category are Age 0
A Dixie cup probably
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I'm starting to think the person who handed me a bread bowl for this wasn't a doctor.
Dear Females, are males riding bicycles wrong? Thanks PS: Female and male riders had this year nasty crashes in our club :(
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I assume more men mountain bike than women.
The pregnancy numbers are a policy and not related to accidents. It would be similar to say that children at age 3, 5 and 12 months are much more likely to end up in the hospital than other age groups, since those are the ages when they get vaccinations. As with all statistics, there is some apple to oranges comparisons and some contexts that get lost.
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Surely "admissions" does not include scheduled doctor's appointments?
S&box is now an open source game engine (sbox.game)
For those unfamiliar, the studio behind S&box is Facepunch, creators of Garry's Mod and Rust. Facepunch as a company doesn't get much attention but they're wildly successful. Started as just some guy in a bedroom, now ~$100m/year in revenue (all via Steam), $100m in the bank, ~100 employees and almost entirely a company of game developers (maybe 20% of employees are administrative staff). Still owned and ran by the founder, Garry. S&box (and Garry's Mod and Rust) is pure game developers making things they want to make.
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Isn't Rust Unity-based? Was he just too fed up with Unity and decided to roll his own engine?
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I'd guess S&box is more an extension of Garry's Mod rather than a reaction to Unity
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That's an amazing story. I really like all the cultural oddities that Garry's Mod spawned. It was a big piece of machinima / virtual filmmaking history and absolutely paved the way for VTubing and Unreal Engine in film. Any idea if Facepunch or Valve retain rights to "Skibidi Toilet"?
Oooo, I remember Garry Newman! I found his UI library GWEN (GUI Without Extravagant Nonsense) when I was still in uni and working on my game engine. It's been abandoned for 9 years now, nice to see he's still working on cool tech. [1] https://github.com/garrynewman/GWEN
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He also made the UI framework used by S&box. It's based on HTML/CSS + Razor but is not rendered with a browser. https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/ui/razor-panels/
The comments are hilarious. Every file has multiple profanity-filled rants.
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Searching for "fuck" yields 81 files. Searching for "shit" yields 146 files. Only two files for "cunt" though.
I'd be interested in calculating the average profanity per-file count for projects that get open-sourced like this.
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It’s a lot. And more profanity often means better code. https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/is-code-that-contains-swears-higher-quality-than-code-that-does-not/
> Valve aren't really known for supporting their engines very well beyond their own internal needs They don't need to. S&box uses a fork of Source 2 that is maintained by Facepunch, with Valve's upstream changes merged in as needed.
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Oh right, that's more reassuring. I guess you'd still have to cut a deal with Valve to use FPs fork commercially though? Which is a wildcard since the licensing terms aren't public as far as I can tell.
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There is already a deal between Valve and Facepunch. I don't know all the terms but you will need to publish your game to Steam (not exclusively). https://sbox.game/dev/doc/systems/game-exporting/ (bottom of page)
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I doubt its much of a deal. Garrys Mod and Rust have both been wildly successful (which means Valve has made tons of money off them as well) My point is, if I were Valve id let Garry run wild with my engine--no deal needed. Hes proven himself more than once. Just a thought!
It feels like Valve's management changed a few years (decade?) ago. I remember when they were still shipping SDKs and proper mod support, even for their multiplayer games. Today they are just killing everything that could divert revenue from their cash cow CS2 and shipping a half baked js-based scripting engine for their maps. (And in the meanwhile they kill fan projects like CS:Legacy, which is a whole game and not even a mod, with their army of lawyers. I don't think stuff like this would have happened 13+ years ago).
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They just opened up the source to TF2 with an SDK not too long ago. Explicitly for modding and community driven development. https://www.teamfortress.com/post.php?id=238809
CS2 makes an enormous and non-negligible amount of money.
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Valve's financials are nonpublic, and any numbers you find are rough, indirect estimates. In any case, my point was not that these games make no money, but simply that Valve doesn't need them. The total number of people buying games on Steam vastly dwarfs the number of people who play Dota 2 and CS2 (even just counting total players - how much more when you narrow down to players who spend money).
Don't Download Apps (blog.calebjay.com)
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100% agree. The level of tracking has gotten to absurd levels. I needed a couple of grocery items and happened to be next to an Amazon Fresh. Cool, let’s try it! Went in, found every tu ing I needed and went to self checkout. When it was time to pay, the machine wouldn’t accept my Apple Pay. I ask an employee who helpfully informs me that I can pay with physical cards or my Amazon account. I didn’t have my physical cards, nor wanted to do my Amazon account so I had to leave. Why don’t they accept Apple Pay? Because they can’t track you. If you use a physical card, they can likely link that card number to an Amazon account and thus attribute the purchase to a person. If you pay with contactless payment they get a one time token that they can’t tie to anyone.
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I switched to using PWAs for social media apps for similar reasons the author outlines. A pleasant, but somewhat unintended consequence is that I just use them a lot less because the experience is pretty bad. It makes me a little sad because I’ve always believed in the PWA dream, but the reality is that they’re bad because companies certainly don’t want to make an experience that rivals the app they really want you to download. Expected, but just leads to reinforcing the idea that PWAs won’t ever be as good when every one people try from someone with a popular app is so awful.
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I'm convinced many companies purposely gimp their web sites to drive people to apps. Uber for example doesn't seem to work from my phone browser.
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An annoying trend I've noticed is being asked for phone number or email at checkout (IRL). I bought a blood pressure meter a few days ago, and the salesman asked "what phone number should I put on the order?" Zero. Fuck off. I guess most people just answer out of reflex, or believe it's required to complete the purchase. It's creepy and irritating.
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[Your Area Code]-867-5309 is what I always use - alas they are becoming wise to that
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Native phone apps give me the creeps. I assume the developer's are able to track me in various ways even without my giving permissions. Is that an unfounded fear on my part? Can an app uniquely identify me if I don't give it control over my phone number / nearby devices? Can apps geo-locate me if the location permission has not been granted? (seems like they could just make a network request to their servers and use the IP address of the request for a rough idea). I _really_ wish using the network was a permission (even if it was an "advanced mode" thing).
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Network is a permission on Android, it's just that phone manufacturers and likely Google don't want you to be able to control it. Most custom ROMs, including GrapheneOS expose it properly, often at the install dialog.
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Netguard solves this, available on the play store and F droid https://netguard.me/
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>Is that an unfounded fear on my part? Given the security record of app stores, probably not.
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Simply your IP address can be used to track you so any app or website you visit knows roughly where you are with every http request unless you use an always on VPN. It can also fingerprint you in various ways without the need for any special permissions.
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Giving your phone number is just as bad. I was buying stuff at World Market and they had big signs touting 20% off some things... but when you got the counter they told you didn't get that unless you coughed up your real working mobile number so you could receive some BS code. See ya, jerks.
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I've been dutifully following this approach for a little while now and it's had the nice side effect of pushing me to smaller and more local options. I think it's also saving me money!
Alan.app – Add a Border to macOS Active Window (tyler.io)
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Always glad to see more software in the window management space, especially for MacOS. Any reason to use this over JankyBorders? I'm using it alongside Aerospace right now and forget sometimes it isn't built-in. Kind of weird to me that after all this time this is such a sparsely implemented feature. But the combo with Aerospace works well. Only thing missing is support in Aerospace for a toggle to have a window expand to the size of it's container. Really liked that feature in Yabai, made working with multiple tiled terminals really nice
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There is also https://github.com/FelixKratz/JankyBorders Bizarre that this has not been fixed by Apple, it has been an annoyance well before Tahoe. Relying on the three dots in the top left corner to see which window is on top gets frustrating.
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Oh damn, this has been causing me trouble when working in half-and-half and quartered windows as recently as this week. I’ll be installing the one you linked, or the one the thread-link points to. Thanks, didn’t occur to me this would be a thing but of course it is.
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Somehow it's so cute that the name of the app is, well, a name .
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Border Is a pretty famous cricketer.
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In reading more from this guy's blog, he also wrote a game called "Steve". https://stevethegame.com/
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Maybe derived from “a line”?
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As an Aussie, I assumed it was a reference to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allan_Border
This has been a serious problem since macOS Tahoe. Whoever signed off on the UI for Tahoe needs a serious schooling in UI/UX design principles - it's incredibly hostile to users. Not only does it make it impossible to distinguish between overlapping windows as this tool seeks to mitigate, there's many confusing UI elements and lack of contrast not to mention why it has so much padding on everything - you're left with far less usable space.
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i cannot wait for OpenAIPhone and then OpenAIMac to come out and make Apple wake the fuck up
China Has Three Reusable Rockets Ready for Their Debut Flights (china-in-space.com)
In https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46061943 danishSuri1994 said that if others like China and ESA did not also develop reusable rockets they would be priced out of orbit access entirely. I have a question about that, but their comment got killed faster than I could type and submit my question so I'll ask it a level up. Why would not having reusable rockets price someone like China or ESA out of orbit access? I can see how it could price them out of the business of selling orbit access to other parties, but I don't see how it would stop them from accessing orbit for their own purposes.
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Because if you can't sell launches on the open market, your own launches become exponentially more expensive. Cost sharing allows for the economies of scale that let governments piggyback.
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Internal spending vs imports, I suppose. Keynes and all that
It's hard to see how China can sustain itself economically when the population is predicted to half by the end of the century and 30% the population will be >65 years old by 2050. Hard choices lie ahead.
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Every developed nation is looking at that cliff though.
The practical part of space flight is launching satellites, and weapons. Both countries are already doing both. If we're discussing manned missions to the moon or Mars, as an American I'd prefer China spent all the money and the US didn't bother. It'd be cool to see it happen, but no one can identify practical benefits, aside from a political win.
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That take is unbelievably shortsighted. A Far Side lunar base is not some cool sci fi brag. It is a massive strategic advantage, and brushing it off misses everything that actually matters. The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception. The Moon itself becomes a giant wall of rock that blocks sensors, lasers, and signals. It is the closest thing to perfect concealment anyone is ever going to get in space. From that position, gravity is on your side. Sending kinetic weapons toward Earth takes almost no energy. Sending anything from Earth to the Moon takes a huge amount of fuel just to fight the gravity well. The attacker on the surface is always at a disadvantage, and the lunar side barely has to spend anything to strike. A base on the Moon also survives whatever happens on Earth. Even a full scale nuclear exchange leaves it untouched. That means guaranteed retaliation. It becomes a true third strike platform, something no one can wipe out in a first strike. It locks in deterrence in a way that completely changes the strategic balance. And if one country gets there first, mutual deterrence is over. They hold an untargetable, unreachable launch point that the rest of the planet cannot neutralize. That is not a symbolic win. It is unilateral control over the highest ground humanity has access to. I honestly do not know why some people do not see it. This is literally rewriting Earth geopolitics. For hundreds of years we worked within Mackinder’s logic: Who rules East Europe commands the Heartland; who rules the Heartland commands the World Island; who rules the World Island commands the World. With a lunar base it becomes: Who rules the Moon commands cislunar space; who commands cislunar space commands Earth orbit; who commands Earth orbit commands the Earth. This is not about pride or prestige. It is about who controls the one location in the solar system that offers absolute strategic dominance. Whoever controls the Moon controls the high ground. Good luck competing with China if they get there first.
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Disagree on the technical aspects. It'd be inexpensive to monitor adversary military activities on the lunar far side: one lunar satellite would do it. The gravity well is not trivial, and any launches from the surface (should this become a thing) would be immediately visible from high orbit, by the intense infrared glow of rocket combustion exhaust. (Exact same way nuclear early warning systems work on Earth, for that matter[0]). Agree that the general concept is a serious one, but I don't think the numbers work out on your specific implementation. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Support_Program#History
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> The Far Side is the only place in the Earth Moon system where you can hide military hardware and basically disappear. No optical tracking, no radar, no interception. What prevents someone from sending a Lunar-orbiting imaging satellite to image everything on the Far Side? The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter has already been imaging the Far Side for over a decade. I agree with your general points about it being a difficult location to get to, but if it's possible to put regular satellites in Lunar orbit, surely its possible to park some warheads too just in case...
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If a big power gets there first, they’re not going to treat lunar orbit like some kind of shared international space. They’d treat it as their turf. At that point you can’t just assume you can drop an imaging satellite into whatever orbit you want they’d have both the motive and the capability to deny access.
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That Far Side base is irrelevant unless is can be supplied, at scale . Talk to a few folks who served in Afghanistan about the costs and miseries of long logistical pipelines to great-in-theory locations. Then, the base has to easily project serious military power to places that matter to us. Lunar escape velocity is ~2.4km/s, which is not trivial. After that, transit time to Earth is multiple days. Vs. current ICBM's can put nuclear warheads anywhere, in under an hour, without actually achieving LEO. BTW - if nation C can haul enough stuff to the Far Side to build a substantial base, then obviously it's neither untargetable nor unreachable for nation U.
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A concealed base with perfect third strike capability that costs a zillion dollars per bullet to load with ammo is actually not that useful.
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> Good luck competing with China if they get there first. The French, the English, the Dutch and the Portuguese all got to Asia. Which one was first and which one(s) were last to leave is not the same. The far side of the moon doesn't have a magic "dibs, it's mine" quality. It's big, and it's an extreme environment.
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By "there first" I don't mean - whoever sets the foot there. I assumed that was obvious.
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"If a thing which is remote and in the future takes the characteristic of being done first by my adversary then the mostly likely outcome is a marvel universe dystopia endgame where everything we do is fruitless and they win and we lose" Look, I get you don't think you wrote hyperbole, but you did. Getting to a strategic capability based on far side occupancy and assuming that automatically is non competitive and incurs first to file wins outcome.. please. The most likely outcome is an antarctica treaty. The next most likely outcome is broadly speaking comparable capabilities and MAD. By all means wargame your own vision where China does it solo and nobody else can compete.
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I'm not talking about planting a flag and saying "dibs." I'm talking about the first country that reaches actual sustained capability, moving mass, building infrastructure, supplying it, and controlling the surrounding space. Whoever gets there first shapes the rules, because that's how every strategic domain has worked so far! That's why "just let China have the Moon" doesn't really hold up. These places are only neutral when no one has the power to enforce anything. Once a country can build, maintain, and defend a Far Side installation, the incentives shift. If multiple nations reach that level around the same time, fine, you get something like MAD. But if one gets there years ahead of everyone else, it's not going to look like Antarctica, it's going to look like someone taking the high ground before anyone else can contest it.
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This doesn’t make any sense. You must be trolling or a bot. What good does inter-planetary bombardment do me? I already have enough nukes to destroy the world. I mean it’s a bit redundant
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You open by calling me a bot, which is an odd way to start a serious argument. It isn’t about extra ways to blow things up. It’s about survivability and leverage. A platform you can’t detect or preempt changes deterrence dynamics, just like subs do. The advantage comes from being untargetable, not from adding more warheads.
You are missing that the money and research into figuring out how to solve many engineering and scientific challenges related to the missions had tremendous benefit to industry later. As we gain ability to do my re in space more cheaply it will get more important
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I'm thinking that Apollo covered 90% of the useful spin-offs from developing tech for manned travel to the moon or Mars. And at least 90% of what's left was either covered by the ISS, or could be covered by a few small LEO space stations. The economic cases for manned moon or Mars programs look really iffy these days. The US has poured tens of $billions down the SLS rat hole, with very little to show for it. And Wienersmith's A City on Mars is a pretty damning dissection of the whole concept of Martian colonies.
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The SLS is widely understood to be less about research and development, and more about pork barreling, and jobs program. I don't buy that humanity should avoid investing in space travel because US Congress and surrounding governmental beaurcracy is not running projects effectively. That argument would stop just about any human activity. It's pretty difficult to predict what spinoffs would come from attempting to put a colony on Mars. I would imagine to succeed we would need to solve a lot of challenges with human biology, genetic engineering, automation, and many novel engineering solutions. But economics is not the only reason to do things, and I bet you don't expect everything humans do to have a purely economic rational.
Or indeed, ask them who won the space race, because by most measures, that was the Soviets too. Soviets achieved: - First artificial Orbit ( Sputnik ) - First animal to orbit ( Laika ) - First Man to orbit ( Yuri Gagarin ) - First Woman to orbit (Valentina Tereshkova ) - First EVA ( Alexei Leonov ) - First moon landing ( Luna 9 ) - First landing on another planet ( Venera 8 ) Many of these years before the USA achieved the equivalent. The first female US astronaut wasn't until the mid 1980's. The Americans were at one point beat so bad that they invented their own game that only they were playing. Yes, that spurred their entire economy and the boosted scientific investment paved the way for the decades of dominance since, and that should be rightly celebrated, but the idea that the USA "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense.
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They are still jerking on these 50+ years old achievements, without having new ones. "Space race" didn't stop after Venera landing, and soviets/russians are thing of the past now. Aside of useless ISS trips, they have no relevance in space anymore. > "Won the space race" because of the moon landing is Hollywood nonsense. "Won the space race" because they were first at the very beginning is a nonsense too. Following this logic, China won rocket race because they invented first rockets centuries ago.
DRAM prices are spiking, but I don't trust the industry's why (xda-developers.com)
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I don't understand when people blame AI for buying DDR5 DRAM - aren't they mostly interested in HBM? Or is the fab space being diverted to manufacture more HBM than DDR DRAM previously?
Might we perhaps see some meaningful investment into long-term alternatives to DRAM as a result of this price spike? Will Intel bring back their Optane persistent memory? What about HP's memristors/ReRAM? Magnetic core memory/MRAM?
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This is what I'm hopeful for, but haven't researched enough into whether there are hardware startups in this space as I believe the majors will chase the hype cycle. Optane being canned always felt like a poor, shortsighted decision to me.
I'm wondering if Apple will need to adjust their prices to maintain their margins. Given the scale of price rises I'd say yes.
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There's no way that Apple pays spot. They will have contracts directly with the manufacturers, guaranteeing them a given supply at a given price. Their whole business kinda depends on it.
What? Apple's memory upgrades are never reasonable. Last time I checked going from 16 to 32GB in a Mac Mini was more expensive (or as expensive) than buying two 16GB Mac Minis.
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Right now in this environment, they look reasonable. Not that they are
I do not have any particular insight into the market, I was just extremely confused reading this in particular > Right now demand for DRAM is extremely high bordering on endless. Prices are going up. The incentive for one of the big players to undercut the other on cost even just a little bit to pick up market share is extremely lucrative. Given this first statement, the last one makes no sense. Either the demand is limited, giving sellers that undercut the ability to move more products... Or the demand is higher then production, making it nonsensical to undercut anyone, because you'll sell out anyway, no matter if you're cheapest or not
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If demand is high and supply is fixed (generally the case) you can also pull a DeBeers, grab everyone by the balls, and charge 3x (or more) the already high prices everyone would already get when you sell out your inventory.
Can you blame them, though? Between the notorious boom-and-bust cycle of semiconductor industry, and everyone (including much of this forum) thinking that AI is a bubble that will crash any minute, is it really that unreasonable that they're not trying to massively ramp up supply?
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Like drug or oil cartels (OPEC), the reasons are obvious and reasonable, but also we don’t like to be grabbed by the balls. Both parties can have perfectly rational reasons to both exist and hate each other at the same time.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
A Woman on a Mission to Photograph Every Species of Hummingbird (audubon.org)
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fantastic! I love hummingbirds.
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A hummingbird builds a nest in my back trees just about every year and raises a couple hatchlings. They can be very territorial- buzzing my head as I walk by, constantly chirping at other birds. The nests are really impressive, made out of spider silk and other things the bird can collect nearby. They are very pliable and robust. Here's a movie I captured of the nest (from a distance) https://youtu.be/Q49XETLwpxI and if you want to jump ahead to momma showing up to feed the hatchlings, https://youtu.be/Q49XETLwpxI?t=609 Wish I could find the video I made of their first flight.
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Amazing! hummingbirds are so cool.
From blood sugar to brain relief: GLP-1 therapy slashes migraine frequency (medlink.com)
Obesity is associated with increased rate of migraine, so their symptoms could have gone away by virtue of losing weight. Let's see what it does for non obese.
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When I developed pre-diabetes symptoms (having to drink a lot - like 5-6l per day, consequently having to pee a lot, when not doing the first: getting headaches), I noticed that cutting on sugar meant (next to other benefits) that the thirst-induced headaches were the first thing that went away. Not the thirst itself (still have it). However, not an expert on headaches and can't say if it has anything to do with the migraines in the article. But the point that reducing sugar helps in a myriad of ways , stands and is worth repeating.
The Alzheimer """cure""" claim was already disproven by another study. Aside from that, the people who stop taking GLP, 75% gain 50-75% of their bodyweight back and lose all concomitant cardiovascular, cancer etc. risk benefits. No research out on, say, alcoholism yet, but I'd hazard a guess the results are the same. This is not a cravings loss drug but largely a cravings management drug. Which is still pretty great but it saddles healthcare funding systems with an enormous burden for the next 20 years. Or you keep it private, which means you introduce an enormous gulf of health inequality. I hate that our solution to obesity is not the way Iceland treated it's youth drinking problem: reduce access to the harmful thing, give people money and support to do the healthy thing. Stick with it instead of cancelling the program if it doesn't show results in 4 years. Modern food (started in the 80s) has carefully been engineered to be as addictive as possible, health consequences be damned. Let's start fixing the problem there.
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This is not a cravings loss drug but largely a cravings management drug. Which is still pretty great but it saddles healthcare funding systems with an enormous burden for the next 20 years. Semaglutide goes off-patent in 2032 in the US, and in 2026 in Canada and China: https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/stlr/blog/view/653 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK602920/table/t03/
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It should be treated like other important drugs. The U.S. buys the patent (or other variant) letting it become generic
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Effects on Alzheimer’s have not been disproven; it was shown that there wasn’t a perceivable benefit from oral semaglutide at the doses prescribed for folks with a certain degree of progression of the disease.
There is large-enough consensus on this drug for its main use cases (treating diabetes and obesity), but more importantly for this conversation: it's actually quite common for drugs to get new indications after their initial one --- at which point, there might be a new, broader consensus on what the drug is good for. Clinical trials are designed to treat a very specific subclass of individuals; pharmaceutical companies very carefully choose that subclass in an attempt to help ensure the clinical trials are successful, which is a combination of the following: - Positive, statistically-significant results. - FDA approval with those results. - Insurance companies willing to pay for the given treatment. - A decent-sized addressable market. Examples of drugs/medical technologies later getting other indications: - Minoxidil was a drug that only later got its approval to be used as a hair loss treatment; there are currently clinical trials for a more "advanced" minoxidil oral pill for this use case. - Re: GLP-1s: Tirzepatide later got an indication that it effectively treats sleep apnea. There are very many other clinical trials ongoing for GLP-1s, but perhaps most recently, Semaglutide (ozempic) failed to show statistical significance as a treatment for Alzheimer's. - The Galleri blood screening/test. The initial indication they are going for is folk who are at highest risk for cancer (I believe that's individuals between the ages of 50 and 70); however, that's not to say it would be bad for individuals younger or older. But, this is a way to help ensure the earliest product has a successful outcome. These are ones I know off the top of my head, but I suspect an LLM can give several more examples.
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> but I suspect an LLM can hallucinate several more examples. FTFY (great comment otherwise)
Nobody understands why it all helps, they just noticed it does work for something, quickly pushed it to the market first to get patents and get all the profits from it before generics + derivatives hit their pockets. Now, everyone is studying it because there's all new funding coming in for it and finding other versions of it that they can profit off it. Nobody knows what migraine really is, so this isn't a surprise to them that GLP-1 may help, the main question is; why? So they have another data point proving that gut health has a direct correlation to the brain. Keep in mind that a lot of the benefits go away once patients come off GLP-1 and we have not seen any studies yet on what happens to people who come off it for long term effects. It may in fact make things even worse and for a lot of people, they may have to stay on it for the rest of their lives.
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Do you know what else stops working if you stop taking the therapy? Diet and exercise.
OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 (ft.com)
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I feel like OpenAI could flip on the ad switch and make $20B a quarter like google... so this number isn't too crazy to me?
Unfortunately for OpenAI, they are not positioned to capture value from any of the "big margin" use cases that they highlight as key to their future. I think all of these are pretty unrealistic for them: - Revenue sharing from drug discovery (called out by OpenAI CFO): Why would a pharma company give away the upside to a commoditized intelligence layer? Why would OpenAI have a more compelling story than Google Deep Mind, which has serious accolades in this space? - Media generation for ads and other content: For ads, OpenAI is facing off against Google, Meta and Amazon, all of which have existing relationships with advertisers. For the foreseeable future, AI content will be a major discount product compared to humans. OpenAI will not get to charge $1M for an ad like a production company does. So the TAM of ad production (~$50B) shrinks below $1B because AI deflates prices so much. - Other agent use cases: OpenAI doesnt have a surface to build these on. Google has chrome, Microsoft has office, Apple has OS's. The other use cases like coding will be a low-margin competition between model providers until some of them throw in the towel. The players with the best cash position win - and thats not OAI. I think the place that they could win is retail (also called out by OAI CFO). They made deals with Etsy and other small retailers. I was fixing my guitar the other day and would have instantly bought the tools it had suggested that I would need. The problem is that they have to win against Amazon here, and there is zero chance of a partnership for obvious reasons.
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> - Revenue sharing from drug discovery (called out by OpenAI CFO): Why would a pharma company give away the upside to a commoditized intelligence layer? Why would OpenAI have a more compelling story than Google Deep Mind, which has serious accolades in this space? I am not sure I follow. They "give it away", because they have to. They have to pay any of the model companies. What do DeepMind's accolades matter if it's commoditized, as you propose? AI resources will remain scarce for the foreseeable future: I have to literally wait multiple Minutes to get an answer for semi-hard coding problems. The current demand is the delta between this, and the few milliseconds that it could take if supply was there. I suspect the tension will grow. Why would there not be multiple companies positioned to capture value? Assuming that any of them can turn demand into profit, that seems to be the most likely story right now.
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His point is AI's already getting commodified. So OpenAI won't get a portion of the profits or revenue sharing, it'll be a simple transaction. They simply pay for compute time. It's like pretending sulphuric acid manufacturers would get the right to demand a portion of drug company profits.
At some point, I'd expect the following pattern to emerge: - random user: hey chatgpt, I need a new mechanical keyboard, buy me one - openai will get money for mechanical keyboard vendors to be on top of gpt's agent list the ad business will shift from trying to hack google to hack gpt
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At that point why would I use ChatGPT if it’s just getting paid to show me stuff?
This is it. Their real moonshot should be search and ads. They're already taking big chunks from Google, they're just not monetizing at all (yet). I already use chatgpt constantly for product research.
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Yes but this is incredibly competitive and undifferentiated. It's a huge market but who will it be a profitable business for? Likely a company or multiple who own some sort of platform that people are already on, so not OpenAI. What they have right now is the strong ChatGPT brand and that does mean a lot. But how long will it last? They're not the technology leader anymore, and that spells a lot of trouble. They are at a stage where they need to dominate the market and then leverage the data that gives them, plus the brand, plus the tech advantage to establish a durable near monopoly, but it looks like it's not working. It's a bit as if in 1999 3 equally strong Google competitors had popped up, with some pulling ahead.
> Amazon will fight for its life to stop this. Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?
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Good point! On the other hand, Historically Amazon didnt compete with Google (until GCP). They do compete with Microsoft, which is pretty closely aligned with OAI. They also have large investments in Anthropic. Even if OpenAI did win here, would it be a profit monster like Google Adwords? Adwords had the auction model which meant that certain categories were hugely lucrative for Google. Can a chatbot do the same? If I know that the product I buy is simply auctioned off to the highest bidder, what's the point of using an agent to help me shop? There has to be a pretext of the agent actually looking out for my best interest, otherwise I would just use search. Nobody expects adwords to look out for their best interest. They are always free to skip the ads section if they choose. It will be hard for ChatGPT to implement an auction model since it will be different for each product category. Hiring a lawyer will probably have a different interaction from buying groceries. On Google+AdWords, its all just search results and ads. If there is no auction, then all of this is WAY less profitable than the Google model. So once again - not going to save OAI from negative margins.
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Because they make a shitload of money by arranging Amazon search results in a certain way, selling favorable placement on those results, and inserting upsells ("Try Amazon Prime!") into the checkout process, all of which are at risk if Chat-GPT becomes a frontend to buying on Amazon. (Note that they are already vigorously going after Perplexity for trying to be an Amazon frontend) In general, Big Tech will never allow itself to be just the backend to a service where another company controls the frontend and the relationship to the customer. That's how you get commoditized and ultimately replaced. Examples: you cannot get a streaming box with universal search ("which streaming service has show X? Just hit play and go"): the streaming services staunchly refuse to provide the APIs to do so. Nor is there interoperability across messaging apps to let users supply their own frontend clients. AI and MCP will go much the same way, it will be locked down as soon as it presents a business model threat.
if you make them $200/month subscriptions, that's only 17 million subscriptions. Or so.
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I was thinking the 172 figure was $20/mo times five years but in reality if OpenAI had a bunch of such users they'd value them at about 20x annual revenue and raise on the stock market so they'd only need like 40 or 50 million subscribers.
Honestly, this is huge for people like me who tend to over-research and over-think the hell out of product choices. "Find me a top-fill warm-mist humidifier that looks nice, is competitively priced against similar products, and is available from a retailer in $city_name. Now watch for it to go on sale and lmk." If they can figure out how to get the right kickbacks/referrals without compromising user trust and really nail the search and aggregation of data this could be a real money-maker.
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> If they can figure out how to get the right kickbacks/referrals without compromising user trust This is a complete contradiction. Once there's money involved in the recommendation you can no longer trust the recommendation. At a minimum any kind of referral means that there's strong incentive to get you to buy something instead of telling you "there are no good options that meet your criteria". But the logical next step for this kind of system is companies paying money to tilt the recommendation in their favour. Would OpenAI leave that money on the table? I can't imagine they would.
Gemeni does not have 'the lead' in anything but a benchmark. The most applicable benchmarks right now are in software, and devs will not switch from Claude Code or Codex to Antigravity, it's not even a complete product. This again highlights quite well the arbitrary nature of supposed 'leads' and what that actually means in terms of product penetration. And it's not easy to 'copy' these models or integrations.
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Speak for yourself - I cancelled the Claude Code subscription after testing Antigravity. It works quite well here, and my phone came with a year of free Gemini Pro, so I don't currently see a reason to pay extra.
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Gemini-cli existed long before Antigravity. It took Google very little. And the gemini app will come preloaded on any android phone, who else can say the same?
Voyager 1 is about to reach one light-day from earth (scienceclock.com)
It’s wild how Voyager forces two truths to sit together: Technically, what we’ve done is almost boringly modest. ~17 km/s ~1 light-day in ~50 years No realistic way to steer it anywhere meaningful now On cosmic scales it’s… basically still on our doorstep. Psychologically, it’s still one of the most ambitious things we’ve ever done. We built something meant to work for decades, knowing the people who launched it would never see the end of the story. We pointed a metal box into the dark with the assumption that the future would exist and might care. I keep coming back to this: Voyager isn’t proof that interstellar travel is around the corner. It’s proof that humans will build absurdly long-horizon projects anyway, even when the ROI is almost entirely knowledge and perspective. Whether we ever leave the solar system in a serious way probably depends less on physics and more on whether we ever build a civilization stable enough to think in centuries without collapsing every few decades. Voyager is the test run for that mindset more than for the tech.
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But the thing is, the Voyager project came about in a much more stable period for the US - and in a more optimistic cultural climate (we could say similar for the Apollo project which wasn't that much earlier). When we used to prioritize spending on basic science and projects like this that basically had no ROI (NASA didn't even much think in those terms back in the 70s). Now we're in a very different place where, in the US anyway, we're very pessimistic about the future. To create a Voyager project you have to have some hope, like you said "with the assumption that that future would exist and might care" - now we're in a very different place where people don't have a lot of hope about the future. And it's also different in that we now ask "what's the payback going to be?" - everything now seems to need to pay it's way. Not saying that other countries won't be able to do stuff like this - probably China is going to take the position that the US used to hold for this kind of exploration. It seems to be a more optimistic culture at this point, but hard to say how long that lasts.
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The Voyager project itself has long ended and it's just cute to keep monitoring it and getting data from it. If nothing else, it serves well as a perpetual PR vehicle for NASA. The core of the project I would not say represents long-term thinking of NASA or civilization. I'm not convinced that we're biologically wired to think long-term. It's extremely rare when someone pops up, and they usually end up becoming extremely impactful in society (Lincoln; Jobs; Elon)
This is not an example of nor even an attempt at long horizon thinking. Voyager wasn't built with the intention that it would last for decades. It was a rush job to take advantage of a very rare planetary alignment and it's primary mission was completed 12 years after it started. It is a testament to the ingenuity of the engineers who have worked and are still working on the project that they've managed to keep it to some degree functioning for so much longer than it was intended to last.
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Given JavaScript, my headcannon is our galaxy is actually full of "rush jobs" probes from different species.
> Space is so ridiculously big that I don't think it will ever happen You are underestimating acceleration. To travel and come to a stop at 4.2 light years, a spaceship with 1g acceleration barely needs 3.5 years in relativistic ship time (~6 years earth time). The technology to sustain 1g acceleration through 3.5 years is a different story, but very much within our understanding of physics (and not warp drives, etc). 20-50 years of engineering can get us there.
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Is there enough reaction mass on earth to construct a rocket capable of accelerating at 1g for 3.5 years?
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Whatever speed advancements we make on earth, they pale in comparison to sling shotting off of a planet. to make an engine that can go significantly faster, we would need the energy of a planet.
> current vehicles traveling about 10x the speed of voyager As I understand it, not really. Parker Solar Probe is crazy fast, but only because it has that trajectory, and is unable to just change course and keep that speed in other directions. If you want to launch something for deep space, the Jupiter-Saturn slingshot is still the most powerful trajectory we know of. Today's rocket engines would give the probe a higher initial speed, but the final velocity would not differ dramatically. A fair bit higher, but not orders of magnitude.
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You can do a Sun-diving Oberth maneuver too. Project Lyra was a proposal for an `Oumuamua flyby that got over 50km/s: http://orbitsimulator.com/BA/lyra.gif
Getting the travel time down to 500 years would be a reasonable goal. You'd ship embryos and caregiver robots, start breeding/raising people 30 years before you'd arrive.
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Imagine being born and told your life has been determined by some other humans living a comfortable life with unlimited air and water. You are told you are to about make the great achievement humankind has ever made but all you want is a little bit more food and to take a shower.
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Isn't that already all of us?
That colonization was primarily driven by the need to obtain resources. Today and in the future, there is no reason to should send humans to gather resources when we can send robots to do it instead.
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There's plenty of resources to be extracted from space. Metals, for one. Also, zero-G drug development and manufacturing is promising too.
First, what's the return on that? You are talking about massive investments to shoot off into space never to return. Who's paying for that? The only way you do that is if you're so fucked, it's your only option and the profit in it is the leaving. Not to mention, we need to solve the problems of living in space. Which we haven't yet. According to NASA. The space people. And it very well could be an insurmountable problem. We do not know. We do know that living in microgravity fucks you up. We know that radiation fucks you up. But we don't even know all the types of radiation one might encounter. > But if you get to the point where you are turning the asteroid belt into O'Neill cylinders That right there is an example of "solve this impossibly hard problem and the rest is easy". We are nowhere near doing anything close to that.
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My response to the money aspect of this it's just like any other business: money needs to be invested, and then a return will be realized. Resource extraction (i.e, asteroid mining) is one obvious example. The human compatibility issues with microgravity are well known, as is the solution, which has even been proposed by NASA: centripetal force to create 1G for the astronauts. As far the the radiation goes, we do indeed know exactly what kinds of radiation they would encounter. And the easiest way to shield humans from it in space is lots of water, or metal. We know this from extensive real work done on earth re: nuclear power plants. The real issue is money, not technical feasibility. Once the dough rolls in from asteroid mining, it bootstraps the financing issue and pays for itself many times over.
Voyager 1 is traveling at 16.9 km/s. New Horizons (which has the distinguishing feature of being the fastest human-made object ever launched from earth https://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/life-unbounded/the-fastest-spacecraft-ever/ ) is traveling at 12.6 km/s. The key part there is that it got multiple gravity assists as part of the Grand Tour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program . You can see the heliocentric velocity https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/10346/why-did-voyager-2s-velocity-drop-far-below-escape-velocity-before-the-first-gra https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-voyagers-odyssey The conjunction for the Grand Tour is once every 175 years. While you might be able to get a Jupiter and Saturn assist sooner, it is something that would take the right alignment and a mission to study the outer planets (rather than getting captured by Jupiter or Saturn for study of those planets and their moons). While I would love to see a FOCAL mission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FOCAL_(spacecraft) which would have reason for such a path, I doubt any such telescope would launched... this century.
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175 years isn't a lot of time when we speak in humanity's time scale. We've been around 200,000 - 300,000 years. That alignment will happen many more times in the history of humanity. That is to say, I don't know if a spacecraft to overtake Voyager will be launched on the next alignment or one 10,000 years from now, but it doesn't seem unlikely to happen.
Doesn't this kind of argument prove too much? Consider an alternate reality without food standards and regulations. Things like the melamine incident are commonplace and people regularly suffer due to contaminated food. Someone argues "perhaps the corporations should stop poisoning our food". Then someone else responds "Stop demonizing the executives, their objective is to make a profit, which they get from the consumers. The consumers are the ones buying the contaminated food, the executives aren't. If people don't want to get sick, they should exercise more diligence." It's easy to offload coordination problems on the people who make imperfect decisions as a consequence, but saying "just don't have coordination problems, then" is rarely useful if one wants to mitigate those problems.
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People don't want to buy poisonous food knowing it's poison. They might take a gamble on if it the odds seem good enough. (even in highly safety regulated western countries, people sometimes die from contaminated food). In contrast, people do want to burn petrol knowing that it 100% will pollute the environment every single time they drive their car. We do what benefits us personally despite the cost to the environment. So it's our fault. It's hard to correct your own faults while you're blaming somebody else for them instead of accepting responsibility.
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