This feels like romanticizing the past. There are plenty of people today writing articles that claim to be taking a “scientific, serious approach” to, say, astral projection and people who will casually discuss such topics over coffee.
I may be romanticizing the past, but I have been interested in hypnosis and trance phenomena for 20 years, studied with teachers, got certified, practiced for some time with clients, and have, I may say, a good deal of experience in the field.
The practitioners (i.e., not academics) back then (Milton Erickson, Dave Elman, Henry Munro, and many others) were much more knowledgeable and interested in studying the phenomena they were investigating and applying than are today's practitioners, who seem instead much more interested in fooling people and making easy money than in advancing the discipline and making new breakthroughs.
I just pulled out of my library the book "Suggestive Therapeutics" by Munro, and it is, however naive in parts, a serious and passionate investigation of hypnotic phenomena. It is evident, even just by reading the text, that these were serious people who thought they could make a huge difference in the lives of others.
Apple claimed during WWDC ‘22 that 79% of U.S. buyers would only buy a car if it was “CarPlay-capable”. Biased source, sure, but the data indicates most consumers value music, maps, and voice assistant in their cars and the manufacturers are responding with about 98% of new cars supporting them.
The issue is that car UI has historically been terrible. People just want usable maps and music, and maps are terrible in 99% of cars pre-2020.
Carplay is a common interface, and has niceties like being able to selecting different playlists from different music apps instead of needing to pre-select your music choice for the car ride.
> The issue is that car UI has historically been terrible. People just want usable maps and music, and maps are terrible in 99% of cars pre-2020.
This.
One of the nicest cars I've driven, controls-wise, was a Fiesta I rented a few years back. I just plugged in my iPhone, and directly got access to maps, spotify, etc via the car's controls.
It had physical knobs to adjust the volume, the air conditioning, etc. When I put it in reverse, the camera feed would replace whatever was on the screen.
It worked perfectly because it just didn't get in my way and didn't have me futz around in some three-level-deep menu to do anything.
Just because people want those things doesn't mean they also want to control AC from a touch screen and janky driver assist features.
And as others said, CarPlay is so much better than the older OEM systems for music and maps. Even current OEM systems in 2023 don't neccessarily have maps that keep themselves updated.
One feature of CarPlay I didn't think of until I used it, is the ability to plan your route on your phone while you're drinking a coffee or walking to your parking spot, and have your navigation ready to go before you even start your car.
I'm in the 21%. I prefer my phone in a dash mount for navigation. I don't need or want an expensive, outdated head unit that costs an arm and a leg to replace. Give me Bluetooth and analog knobs and I'm happy.
I'm of course with you on the physical knobs and having direct access to the vehicle's functions.
But I absolutely prefer having CarPlay instead of having to stick my phone in a random location, blocking the view, or having to make sure wires don't interfere with anything, or finding a way to have the phone not vibrate, etc. I usually rent my cars, so I can't set up something sturdy and have cables get there nicely.
I also like my phones small, which makes them less than ideal in a car, being sometimes far away (I hate talking to my phones so have to be able to reach them with my hands). The aforementioned vibrations don't help, either.
My dad's Toyota, as well as a Fiesta I rented a while back, were perfect for this. I could stash the phone somewhere out of the way, and have the map or whatever displayed on the big screen of the car, which didn't vibrate and was well-placed.
The dash mount I use doesn't have any of the problems you described. It's easily visible at a glance without obstructing my view of the road or mirrors. Arguably safer than looking down at the head unit would be. The cable routing never got in the way of anything. And no vibration issues either.
My first car didn't even have a battery. I drove it for 2 years, always being careful to park on a hill so I could "pop it". So yeah, leave out the useless 12-volt battery, too. /s LOL
I wonder if cars from 50 years ago came with two wooden ramps that you could place next to the rear wheels and back up onto them before turning the ignition off.
My grandpa used to tell me about hand-cranks to start an engine[1] and maintaining a car prior to antifreeze (had to drain all the water from the radiator in the winter).
People want carplay, but also buttons and knobs for AC, seats, volume. Car manufacturers dont want to pay for both screens and buttons so they push everything into screens.
I wonder what the market share makeup would look like for people who want smart appliances. This is another one where most people that I know want as dumb as possible.
Even if there is a chance it’s all a mirage, wouldn’t it be better to behave as if these and other creatures have an inner life?
Appealing to the philosophical zombie seems like an excuse to discard that our actions might cause real suffering from their perspective, on the unknowable chance they don’t mind.
On focal depth: In the real world you can look at an object close up and your eyes will adjust so that it is clear and objects at other ranges are blurry. Then, when you look at an object far away your eyes re-adjust focus.
You can test this by looking at your hand 6” from your face so it partially blocks your keyboard a couple feet away. You’ll notice that either the keys are blurry or your hand is as you shift focus between the two.
Future gen headsets will use eye tracking to understand which object in a scene you are looking at, and make that object sharp while making other objects blurry. This helps produce more realistic depth, while also dramatically improving performance as most of the scene can be rendered in lower resolution.
I worked at FB in a partner team and this isn’t exactly what happened.
When these products were chartered Clubhouse was in the middle of a massive upswing and the industry was convinced that live audio was the next format threat akin to TikTok’s short form videos or Snap’s stories format. Just as we’ve seen with those formats, every big company got the wheels turning to compete in the space.
It turned out that the hype around Clubhouse was because it was a particularly great product for tech influencers (VC and media), but consumer experience wasn’t enough to cross the chasm and retain users at scale. When it became clear that Clubhouse was destined to be more like Houseparty than TikTok, all the big platforms except for Twitter basically cooled on the space and focused elsewhere.
Exactly, everyone got burned by TikTok (assuming it would die like Vine did) and so now anything that appears to be the "next TikTok" causes a flurry of activity.
Do you have a position on a better alternative business model, or do you feel that a service like YouTube shouldn't exist?
It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
I disagree completely with the author's point that the ad model is not regressive. The author points out correctly that charging everyone some $ is regressive, because for some people that amount of money is a lot, and for others that is a little. Totally makes sense.
Then, we go on to ads. Ads charge everyone a similar amount of bandwidth, attention, etc. But you know what? Some people who have more resources or knowhow will understand how to block ads. And they probably won't be paying by the MB on a crappy cell phone plan such that they spend their money on bandwidth to load the ads, while the content they want to read languishes below the fold of the ads and they struggle to navigate to it on their crappy device struggling to render ads.
The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars, but surely we can recognize that the cost of ad supported web pages is also not felt evenly by everyone. As a privileged software engineer, I can guarantee you that the impact of "paying" for things with ads is felt far less by me than many others. That is regressive in my opinion.
> The costs are more abstract than when paying in actual dollars
Keep in mind people are still paying in actual dollars. Companies spend money on advertisement because they want something in return, and that comes from the people being targeted from the ads. I wouldn't be surprised if the poor end up paying much more than the rich in the end. It might even be more regressive than a subscription model.
Also worth noting that their are other negative externalities as well. Health for example - the poor tend to have a much worse diet that leads to bad health conditions, and there's likely a large connection between this and the advertisements for unhealthy products.
> Do you have a position on a better alternative business model
Sure! Thanks for asking. One idea I like is this: you pay a small, fixed subscription on top of your internet bill. This amount is then given proportionally to the services you visit.
This is nice for several reasons: even a small amount (~3-5$) gives a similar or higher revenue for content creators than ads do (a very rough back-of-the-envelope estimate based on youtube CPM). Plus, there's no problem with the friction of paying for things: you pay the same, regardless of watching 1 or 1000 videos (the netflix model, the cable tv model, heck any subscription model). Plus of course: no ads :)
Ads should not exist period. Youtube worked without ads before and it can work without ads. I don't need to be paying a premium to use a service.
Why are ads the way to generate revenue? Like I don't care about buying a coffee grinder. Ads not only help contribute to needless purchases but also directly affect the environment cause of that.
Does YouTube need to exist? I think most of us were alive before 2007 and I don't remember it being some kind of apocalyptic hellhole in which I could never find information or entertainment.
If plant-based cheese is ever going to gain mainstream acceptance, it will be necessary to fall under the "cheese" category alongside cow, goat, and other animal-based cheeses. The founder of Impossible Foods has a great framing on this about targeting meat-eaters with a substitute, rather than going after the much smaller group of highly incentivized vegetarians/vegans.
There are multiple legal fights by animal agriculture lobbying groups to exclude plant-based products from using the meat/cheese/egg terms, specifically (IMO) to try to maintain the status quo and prevent these products from gaining traction.
Ultimately there are no natural laws governing language, and given the above acceptance of plant-based products under these terms is a fight worth fighting for anyone hoping to see them gain traction and mainstream acceptance.
They also say, "We're in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge."
Advocacy on the policies of one of the world's foremost software distribution gatekeeper seems well within how they define "their business". I don't think it takes much squinting to see how they can view this sort of advocacy as in their lane, while the popular political discussions of the day are not.
> Note that we will continue to engage in politics that directly relate to our business or products. This means topics like antitrust, privacy, employee surveillance. If you're in doubt as to whether something falls within those lines or not, please, again, reach out for guidance.
There are pros and cons to growing up in a smaller metro. While having access to top tier culture and internships are great, there’s also a grueling competition to stand out.
In SV, the pressure on kids and parents seems extreme even at the median. While there are less opportunities and resources overall in a small metro, it’s all available to an ambitious child.
In the end, at least some small town kids are out-sprinting the “competitive city” kids and taking their loot back home. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all these articles about it.
