Brendinooo

>but I don't understand how a device with such limited expressive power is bringing anything to the table

Well, to be fair, it is $35 hardware. Perhaps my defense of the idea in general led to some hyperbole about the specific thing.

I dunno. I'm hardly some "run 20 agents overnight" kind of guy and I'm not an ASI guy, but this sentiment sort of reads like a monk who makes a living copying manuscripts, dictating how the new printing press technology should be used.

We are about three or four years in to a technology that has the potential to be world altering! This is absolutely the time to experiment with form factors and techniques, and challenge our own assumptions of what it is we actually do.

And even if you reject all of that, a utility like this one isn't even incompatible with your vision! Couldn't you program a key to say "explain this concept in clearer terms"? However you work with the tool, this gives you ways to use it better. That...seems really nice!

For niche/hobby-tier hardware? Yeah, I'd say so

Pretty weird to see "Hacker News" coming out of the gate strongly against what appears to be a fun, cheap, extensible little hardware accessory. This is hardly the first accessory keypad to ever be made, and it's neat to see the AI use case driving people to mess around and try some ideas in this space.

(I'll add too - I am seeing a bunch of these come across my feeds now. Fun to see different options, people tinkering with hardware ideas!)

> It was an amazing achievement

Yeah, the thing that really strikes me is that their movement _did not exist_ in the last election. Went from scratch to power in three years. Whatever you want to say about their politics or their ability to lead...sure. But that's an incredible thing to do.

"Winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."

So, yes, I agree with you and I frequently make this point about music, that everyone thinks music peaked when they were in high school.

(And if I were to make an argument about a childhood console being peak, for me it'd be the 64 or GameCube!)

But I think the Wii was a singularly unique console because it brought a particular kind of casual gaming to the masses that no console before or after has been able to do. Looking back, it's wild that people wanted to buy a bunch of custom hardware to play Rock Band! And the Wiimotes are probably the best TV controllers ever made.

it is in no way weird, especially not for anyone who would have watched Star Trek on broadcast

There was a bunch of tumblr content awhile back that explored the premise that humans are collectively wild and irresponsible and also tremendously innovative, it's a great head-canon explanation for your gripe. I won't spoil it trying to quote it, just check it out;

https://cheezburger.com/13685509/tumblr-thread-the-staggerin...

I agree with you about the vernacular thing, and a note that it does sort of contribute to its own beauty intrinsically because there is a harmonizing design language across any particular area in a variety that goes from place to place and even complements its environs

>Perhaps a low quality, poorly performing, ecologically irresponsible building is what you want ?

I would call this a false dilemma. There are a bunch of examples in Manhattan of beautiful facades that are extremely ornate but are painted cast iron. It does not have to be styrofoam.

>I'd rather be paying for what I consider important for a building (longevity, ecology and thermal efficiency) than some esthetical addendum

First of all, I'm not even sure that modern buildings achieve these goals.

Like you are saying, you are speaking of cheap buildings for the masses. And a sibling comment talks about how people only look at the bottom line. If a building is beautiful, it is loved; if it is loved, it is more likely to remain. And a building that remains is best for ecology.

And also, buildings are not just for the owners, they are public works, and should be designed as such. An "esthetical addendum" is not mere vanity, it is an important contributor to quality of life in a city.

I would love to see a statue of a guy designing the statue at the computer

Perhaps this is because I've let Twitter radicalize me on this particular subject, but it seems like modern architecture is totally ideologically captured to be against this stuff.

There's this insistence that forms have to be "honest", so ornamental facades are out. Any attempt to revive a form is called "pastiche" (except modernist, which...uh, has been around for awhile now!). People always insist on "deconstruction" and "contrast" so they can never just build a rowhouse that looks like the other rowhouses. Etc.

There's study after study that shows that regular people are way more inclined to let things get built if it just looks good, and when people are presented with choices they'll basically always pick the classic-looking building. And yet we never seem to get them.

The more charitable read is that cost is part of the equation and people don't want to pay it, but that's 100% not the whole story. (Another part of the story is that people who buy the plans care the most about internal space with tons of light coming in, which probably drives a bunch of decisions on the outside.)

Straight to Mind Maze for me!

(Mouse is VERY touchy though)

I think I asked in HN last year if anything was happening in this space now that the click wheel patent expired. I ended up buying a $50 Chinese knockoff for one of my kids. It...feels like a $50 knockoff, haha.

>I think Jev is a good example of how great marketing fizzed out in the face of reality.

My read on Jev was totally different, I guess.

I first heard about it here. I found a video demo and thought it looked amazing, I saw a lot of discussion about it because other people probably also thought it looked amazing and imagined the possibilities, and then things quiet down because real-world use-cases for it are going to not happen right away, and definitionally it seems like Jev is more about supporting other stuff than being the thing itself.

All the other stuff about ambiguity and jargon and drama don't really register to me, I dunno. But it was interesting to see the author's take on that stuff, I suppose!

The purpose of my first sentence was to establish that I was I bringing in some associated thoughts into an article where some alleged collusion is happening, so it's not correct to read it as an attempted refutation of the article.

If there's actual collusion: sure, that's bad! But to be clear, this is not the total solution to the egg price puzzle; we don't know the extent to which this impacted the market.

I guess I just don't like the idea that every price spike is read as greed, because you lose the ability to tell cartel behavior from a supply shock, and actual bad behavior gets less scrutiny, not more. I'm seeing it in this thread: capitalism bad, republicans bad, khan good, etc. Perhaps I did the same thing in the opposite direction.

I mean, given a lot of the rhetoric that happens around egg prices, it does seem like setting prices in response to market conditions is a problem to many.

I guess during one of the last surges the question I had was: Isn't a big egg company damned if they do or don't? If I'm a massive egg farmer in an area that's untouched by bird flu, and I keep my prices low: then I'm the bad guy who's running struggling operations out of business. If I raise my prices to stay in line with those operations, now I'm colluding in some way. If we break up big companies so they don't have the kind of power over the market, we trade lower prices for more resilience since the lowest prices are going to come from the highest scale.

I dunno. It's a weird situation. And eggs are particularly weird because, as the article notes, people are definitely willing to pay more for them; the low prices have less to do with true demand and more to do with competition.

Reading through these comments, I'm wondering if it's better viewed as a purely artistic/fictional enterprise.

(Kind of like how McKay's VICE was really good as long as you didn't pretend it was actually a biographical film)

This is like saying it's stunning that fish don't know they're wet, imo

I've been pulling somewhere between 35 and 40 doing mostly hills and 45-55mph highways, I've been thrilled with that as well as the interior space. I'm very tall and I'm arguably more comfortable in this than in my minivan.

Haha I get that you don't want to share. I was just surprised to hear that! I got one a couple of months ago and am now wondering what kind of a risk I've been exposed to

Whoa, really? Where do you live?

Get an Elantra, keep the difference to pay for gas.

I suppose there's a bit of irony here, because when the iPad was released people weren't sure what kind of niche it would fill. I mean, isn't a laptop more capable? Isn't a phone more portable?

So I don't want to rule out that it'll carve out its own niche. But I do think that they probably wanted this to be a $200 device and RAM prices prevented it. If this was cheap enough and customizable enough, it'd be...really nice to have this on the wall in the kids' bedrooms! They'd get a calendar, clock, intercom, access to music. That's actually a pretty compelling value proposition, but $300 is gonna be waaaaay outside of that for most people.

If you read my lengthy reply and came away with "this guy hates to question Apple", you are not reading my reply at all.

Yup, that's why I said "depending on when you bought it"

Having spent a lot of time in the open source world, I'm aware of the concept that I can never know for sure if I can't see the code. (And even if I could, that wouldn't tell us with certainly how that the data that code creates/captures is used by the people using it.)

But I do think that, in general, Apple tends to be the least-bad actor among its mainstream competitors: its primary business model does not depend on harvesting and selling data, and it has made this value proposition a part of its marketing, and people high up in the company have spoken about ways that they personally value it. And, for any story about ways in which Apple has failed here, there are certainly twice as many for any other company they compete with.

I mean, step back: Who cares more about my privacy - Apple or Google? Apple or Roku? Can anyone seriously argue the latter for either?

> I'm only asking if people put faith in Apples claims because they're, well, Apple, or do we _know_ their claims are valid.

If we _know_, then there would be no need for faith. Given the lack of options and the lack of certainty, people must place their faith somewhere (or take on a lot of technical burden to roll their own); given everything I've seen, it's more reasonable to place faith in Apple than basically anyone else in "Big Tech" in this regard.

(But again: if there's a product out there that is very similar to Apple TV in every way except that it is more private: please tell me what that product is. I'd be thrilled to consider it.)

I think you read a bunch into my stuff and then responded to the arguments you thought I was making, then accused me of craftily dodging things, then implied I was a bot.