This feels like the kind of article that will confuse folks into more confirmation bias. The claim doesn't even seem to be that Meta/Alphabet are the ones doing it, but a totally separate advertising company who would have no control over the apps from those companies.
I hate how so many people think this is how this stuff works when the actual methods are almost scarier because they don't rely on something as clear as our conversations.
I know everyone hates subscriptions, and it sucks how much friction is being put in the way of folks who don't want it. But I've loved having an HP Smart plan. Most of the time I don't print a ton so I pay $1.50/month for the random items that come up in my life. Then every August I bump up the plan since my wife is a teacher and prints a lot more in preparation for the school year. I've gotten 3 ink refills which would cost ~$210, vs ~$90 for the subscription in the past 3.5 years and I never had the annoying moment of needing to print something but being low on cyan and having to run to Staples.
I think the ultimate solution will combine touch screens with physical buttons and dials that adapt to different contexts. Ford already has what is effectively a stylus dial and products like the Elgato Stream Deck have basically solved how it could work with regular buttons.
I'm currently remodeling my house and our contractor recommended adding a fire suppression system as part of the project. I always assumed that would be something I couldnt afford but the quote was pretty reasonable (~2500)
I wonder if these kinds of systems, plus advances in other building materials have reduced the risk profile to the point where multiple egress points are no longer needed
I really hope the world can accelerate it's adoption of energy sources that will replace oil. They aren't without their own flaws but besides Norway, I can't think of place where oil hasn't corrupted society in some major way.
I have mixed feelings on this. On one hand the idea of subscriptions for components that are physically present in the car and don't require ongoing cost by the manufacturer to support them is annoying.
On the other hand I think that there could be some advantages to that model. The costs of cars seem to going up considerably because of all the advanced features. If it is possible to standardize some of the manufacturing process to reduce cost and control access to items with software that could be a win. It would also be nice to have the ability to try features out in your real live before deciding if you want them. Or it could allow drivers to add features for short periods of time. It might not make sense to buy heated seats if you live in Florida, but are travelling to Colorado for a ski vacation paying $10 to unlock if for a month might an awesome feature.
I think the middle ground would be to require manufacturers to offer a lifetime unlock option for any feature that could be subscribed to without an ongoing maintenance cost.
The Verge has done some surveys on this[1] (not of their audience but of a national sample) and in 2021 90% of respondents had a positive view of Google, 89% of Netflix, 87% of Amazon, 79% of Apple, and 66% of Facebook (Instagram was 72%). I think plenty of people might have some kind of negative opinion about each of those companies, but view the jobs there as prestigious.
This assertion has always been strange to me. This American Life was releasing their episodes as podcasts for something like 7 years before they decided to do Serial. Shows like Adam Corolla, WTF with Marc Maron, the BS Report, Joe Rogan Experience, etc were all very successful before Serial. Major media companies like NPR, CBC, BBC were releasing podcasts and dedicated podcast companies like TWiT.tv had existed for years. I think you can kind of credit Serial for popularizing true crime podcasts but it gets way too much credit for the success for the medium.
I think Ford is on the right track of having a large touch screen with an actual physical dial that just acts as a kind of stylus. The ability for the screen to dynamically adapt to different use cases is huge, but in an automotive context having tactile feedback is also so important. If they could add a couple more of the dials that could be used for climate controls or radio stations and then some buttons that users could set up as shortcuts more people would be happy.
If you are sitting in a car next to someone being arrested it's very easy to be within 8 feet. If a person is within 3 ft without filming is everything fine? Who knows, but the act of filming doesn't seem like a reasonable differentiator between the two.
I’m surprised more automakers haven’t adopted something like an Elgato Stream Deck where physical buttons can be mapped to custom icons for each desired function. It seems like it would be much safer while also allowing for new changes as software updates happen
Beyond the fire risks mentioned by others, front loading washers and dryers are sometimes used as a hiding place by children which has led to serious injury and deaths
In Canada Toyota themselves offer Start+ which is long range starter add-on where you get an extra fob. I initially thought the subscription requirement was to give users a reason to keep buying it.
So interesting how different people's expierences are. Every time I've used Meet it feels like my system is trying to mine crypto and I find some thing I can do in Zoom that works 25% worse. At least we can all agree that we're glad it's not WebEx
I usually use the Canary build, and I'm a little confused based on the Insider blog post on how this works. It doesn't seem to just offer Zip as an option on any store based on my expeirence doing some Black Friday shopping today. If all it's doing is storing your credentails to an alternative payment system like it already allows you to store your credit card and prefilling it for retailers that offer this as an option, I can see the value of the feature. It'd be nice if they could do the same with PayPal or other services. But if the feature is now adding the option to use this service on websites that don't already offer Zip, I agree that is something that should not be enabled by default for all installs.
The SnazzyLabs was interesting to me, particularly because of Quinn’s experience as a Tesla owner and the flack he got about excusing their build quality.
https://youtu.be/KS1HdnKG0YY
Several YouTubers got to participate in a press event recently, and I found many of their first impressions to be quiet interesting. I’m trying to talk my wife into letting me put in a pre-order
I don't feel like it's unreasonable for a company to have a system where a user can say "Hey someone is sending me something unwanted using your service" and for that company to use technology to sort those complaints for humans to review and action appropriately based on their terms of service.
I wonder how things would have gone had Microsoft been successful in its acquisition of Yahoo. The value of the Altaba assets don't make the offered price seem quite so crazy in retrospect.
Defender is a good example of why we might not want regulators to decide product categories. To me it seems perfectly reasonable that an operating system would offer a malware protection feature. Just because a feature wasn't included in a previous version and an aftermarket offering was developed, shouldn't mean that a vendor can't improve the product by adding it in.
I mean, there are plenty of stories about Google, Amazon, Apple behaving in ways that could lead someone to that conclusion. Microsoft has the best reputation to me, but I'm young enough that the EEE days don't hold much resonance.