compounding_it

In order to go from 360p video 15 years ago to 4K HDR today, I have upgraded from a 2mbps 802.11g WiFi on a 1366x768 display to a 200mbps connection on 802.11ax and a 55 inch 4k television.

The experience is quite immersive and well worth the upgrade that happened very progressively (WiFi 5 1080p then WiFi 6/7 4K).

As someone who works with networking (consumer prosumer enterprise everything) the problem is far more complex than : make it open.

Manufacturers can support devices for long but it costs money which the consumers / businesses aren’t willing to pay or value. Cybersecurity is a joke and the general consensus is : we will pay for things as and when there is a fire. We don’t put a price on prevention because we can’t really show it to shareholders how we profited from not being attacked since we blocked those. So we create an arbitrary certification and pass things according to it. This certification doesn’t say anything about firmware. But if we do get attacked then we can convince the shareholders to spend money on better equipment this financial year and then not bother until the next time we have a problem.

Some of these certifications focus on what the devices allow you to do (like acls and firewalls) and see if they pass these tests. But actually looking at the firmware and finding vulnerabilities is not in scope.

>Since when were payment networks latency sensitive?

Apple Pay is extremely fast from my experience (at least the web version). There is a high percentage of market loss if payments take long or fail. Im sure there must be a graph for where it plateaus with diminishing returns when it comes to speed but faster payments definitely help with sales.

The funny thing is that this same 60LPA person will happily take a 300k job (assuming parity) with a 50% tax cut because the standard of living is still quite high in maybe Atlanta or Pennsylvania compared to Hyderabad or Bangalore.

In the above scenario the federal government is collecting zero taxes for the employees and the shareholders are getting richer.

By cutting H1Bs the Americans are actually losing money by outsourcing jobs and creating a larger divide between the rich and the poor. Something that the rich actually don’t have a problem with and something people just seem to miss.

FAANG employees here are cheap to hire. They work very hard to remain rich or become rich from nothing (50-60LPA will basically make you rich in 5-6 years if you save and invest well). Leetcode grind and competitive problem solving is Indian childhood bread and butter these days. And given how much househelp exists in India this kind of model is perfectly suited to be outsourced to young and middle aged Indians who have virtually no life beyond CTC anymore.

I’m just surprised it took them this long to outsource.

The risk of course is people start their own companies learning from big tech and Indians get more UPI like tech.

The Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM. Fundamentals shouldn’t either. Don’t see why schools should see this any differently.

According to Google AI > A vacation (American English) or holiday (British English) is a designated period of time for rest, recreation, or travel, often taken away from home. It involves a break from work or school routines, usually lasting several days or weeks. Vacations are crucial for mental health, reducing stress, and fostering better relationships.

So maybe different meaning for everyone. For me it’s getting away from technology and into nature.

Ikr. Vacation for me would be : get away from electronics as much as possible. Maybe stay connected with family or do payments but not beyond that.

Would be interested to know if automating rewrites makes the disc run hotter which affects the disc lifetime physically as opposed to writing it and then removing it which cools it off (but may cause physical wear and tear from handling it). Does heat play a role in degradation or whether it’s the opposite and helps it in some way.

And the ‘features’ also involve lot of performance updates that can leverage something like newer metal. Given that a large chunk of the user base uses an iPhone from 1-2 years ago it simply makes sense to use this and abandon old SDK.

This makes me wonder though how Apple seems to deal with this for their core apps.

Montreal and Paris means the europeans and French can move in and out when it comes to hiring. I really like how the world has interest in EU, Canada and Australia now that the west has become unstable for immigration.

Europeans have free healthcare and retirement. They consider putting their money with long term benefits not just become CEO on Tuesday and declare bankruptcy on Wednesday.

Hopefully Tim’s exit soon will bring some fresh perspective at Apple where designers and engineers are given a driving seat and not the shareholders.

Apple can do a 180 here and completely take over windows market share. They just need to stop making useless changes and stop with planned obsolescence when people literally are looking to switch.

I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.

When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'

If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.

I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.

note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.

I was able to do all this on the M1 maybe 2 years ago. On Tahoe, everything is just awful.

Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.

yes pretty much this. make useless features use up resources and make basic scrolling slow.

the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy just a couple of years ago on a fresh install.

Young men and women have such unrealistic expectations from relationships that it’s trashing their mental health when reality doesn’t match what is thrown at them by social media. Social media is the real culprit no doubt but the number of people actually doing anything about it is scary low.

The Canadian defense budget is quite small (30bn). 4bn is a big number compared to that but in general this is quite small compared to most developed countries. I believe Canada has been quiet thanks to their neighbors protecting them but with that changing I’m wondering whether there will be a shift in defense spending.

This will also create new jobs and a market which the economy probably needs.

Nope it doesn’t but it’s coming soon apparently. I’m assuming these POS just get a firmware update to get it to work.

That’s how all my non resident friends pay. They have chase bofa discover Amex etc cards that they use to pay most places. Ease of payments is the catch and credit cards bring that process down a lot. There is something psychological going on with cards that UPI and ApplePay simply don’t have. Swiping probably was fastest.

I don’t see why there can’t be tap to pay via UPI. There is no holding back when it comes to technology. But it’s not implemented yet. We still have high corruption. Maybe they don’t want to make digital payments too easy that people forget cash. Just enough to win elections.

Small businesses generally dont because the setup for a merchant POS is quite a bit of hassle. In fact maintaining that device also costs money. A UPI merchant on the other hand is quite easy and free from what I know. This setup with visa mastercard might change in the future (with square like devices). However there is also a security problem so fraud might increase with that. Very interesting times for visa and mastercard who have basically not innovated since their existence and yet somehow have grown so big.

If you look at the top companies in America currently by market share, pretty much all are selling addictions while maybe a handful actually selling tangible products.

>Real people are annoying

They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.

If previously 3 merchants had visa / Mastercard out of 10 who only accepted cash or cheques, then with UPI all 10 now accept UPI but 7 or 8 accept a universal POS which allows more type of payments. If previously 10% payments were via cards that costed them 2%, then now if sales are 2-3x because of UPI and online payments, letting go of that 2% for even 20% share of cards is fine because they captured a larger market with more sales. Not so long ago, India was a cash dominant economy so UPI actually opened that up. UPI actually helped Visa and Mastercard. Credit card spending has gone up a lot because of digitalization.

If in EU a local payment system captures the cash market, then the habit of using digital payments will actually also help Visa and Mastercard make more sale.

I currently don't have a credit card, but when I do, I find paying by a Visa/MasterCard much more preferable than UPI, simply because it's easier by tapping.

The competition is high with online ordering (which accepts cards), so the incentive is to not lose customers. in fact people have become so desperate for more sales that they would let you take something and pay later but not lose you as a customer.

My darwinian theory:

About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.

Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.

The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.

I am hoping though things will be different in the future.

Don't know about inverting the pyramid but we may get more pyramid schemes. Like Google and Oracle doing 100 year bonds for AI.

When India moved to UPI in the last few years something very interesting happened. The same devices that accept UPI (usually some android based POS) also accepted a plethora of cards. Previously merchants would be hesitant to take anything other than cash or charge 2% for visa/mastercard. But with wide adoption of digital payments they now just accept any payment with the goal that they don't want bad reviews and/or lose customers.

Point being that with a cheap alternative, it's actually much more convenient now to use a Visa or Mastercard especially with tap to pay because with competition being so high, the diversity means people allow all payments.