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I know this may come across as saying "who would want to carry a telephone in their pocket?", but the idea that we would all be required to sit with googles on all day, in a virtual 'office' environment, in order to do our work, is beyond all dystopian imagining, in my view.

Today I'm coding by my window, with the sun shining outside - some birdsong audible from the trees in the yard. One of my kids just came home from school, and we chatted for a couple minutes. I had a few (too many) meetings today, but they were all video-calls and for some of the time I could carry on with a current task.

I think the receptiveness of the HN crowd overestimates the utility of this technology. It would probably be used to enslave underlings into being 'present' at the virtual office without pee-breaks for 10-hours every day.

PS: I see everyone else in this thread questioning the idea that we should sit in a virtual-reality world with goggles strapped to our faces all day is getting downvoted. I think people outside the tech-nerd bubble would probably disagree.

> The only option is Safari and the conflict of interest is fully realized because other browsers aren't even allowed on the App Store.

This is such a persistent myth on HN - I think I read it at least once a week - usually on one of the many alternative browsers, plenty of which are available on the AppStore.

WebKit is the building block of browsers on iOS, but there are an extremely varied selection of browsers using it.

> Which of these two gentlemen understands the zeitgeist better?

I sort of understand the downvote for citing Gruber (I'm no fan of his Apple adoration, either - although I don't see it's relevance in this context). But Twitter??

I have Twitter redirect automatically to Nitter in all my browsers, but even ignoring the technical shortcomings of the platform, it's mostly such a sewer of garbage these days, I honestly think Gruber was right in this case.

I think John Gruber[0] already said all that needs to be said about this latest Elon Musk fantasy:

'who looks at Twitter of all things and says “I’d like to see this expand in scope such that a lot more, if not all, of my digital life can be here”?'

[0] https://daringfireball.net/2022/10/everything

> Does the radio sync work for you? I have a 15 year old G-shock watch and the sync stopped working for me years ago

The radio-sync may have stopped working due to simple geographic limitations? Where I live, I'm on the edge of the Berlin radio-signal, and I find it sometimes fails (atmospheric conditions?), but then you can always try apps that synchronize with a sound signal.

I actually have no idea how, but they do actually work! I've used one called Clock Wave from the Apple appstore[0], and it has worked flawlessly.

I'm totally loving my G-Shock. Mine is also solar-powered - which is such a liberating feeling. And includes a barometer, thermometer, compass and altimeter (the altimeter is pretty useless unless barometer-pressure is constant, though - but it's incredibly accurate for elevations of short duration).

I was using my iPhone as my watch for a while, but each time I took it out of my pocket to check the time, I'd get distracted and drawn into some meaningless cellphone activity. Now I check air-pressure and where North is instead :)

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clock-wave/id1073576068

> The one working at Apple was able to check their spouse's spending trend on App store

You obviously could back this hearsay up with actual evidence I assume?

This is happening on an unfathomably large and devastating scale in Sweden, right now.

Old forest is being savagely clear-cut and replaced by monoculture plantations to the detriment of animals, insects, birds and the entire rich ecology of the ancient woodlands. The new plantations have introduced new diseases and encouraged pests that further damage the old-growth trees - leading to even more clear-cutting to prevent the spread of the new blights.

Near to where my family have a cottage, a forest that surrounded the visible remains of a bronze-age settlement was brutally clear-cut using the usual enormous machinery that completely churns the land and scars it irrevocably. The forest itself was probably five or six-hundred years old, and it was felled by these monstrous machines in a morning, leaving just horrifically bare soil and the cratered disfigurement of industrial forestry. No-one cares.

> With iOS you’re SOL. No extensions

I’m reading this using iCab Mobile on iOS, which is a browser apparently no-one on HN has ever heard of, as I need to mention it every time this tired old and inaccurate assertion is trotted-out again.

This browser allows you to define your own blocking lists, including filters for every conceivable combination of JS, CSS, cross-site, cookie-based and URL tracking.

So which part do you want to ban exactly?

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/icab-mobile-web-browser/id3081...

> 2nd edit: this used to be the case many years ago, thanks for those who confirmed

No - what other posters 'confirmed' is that www.apple.com was one of the choices that could be made for a new tab or homepage - absolutely not the Apple store as you said.

Worth correcting yet again because of what's become a knee-jerk 'but whatabout Apple?' in comment threads about Google on HN.

> Our family Mac we got in ~2011 did show Apple as the new tab page, or at least the start page when you opened Safari after booting

Pretty certain this is also incorrect.

My recollection seems to accord with the Wikipedia page on the history of the Safari browser which (although it doesn’t itemize the default StartPage for each version) doesn’t cite any inclusion of an AppStore link, as far as I can see.

[O] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safari_(web_browser)

> Safaris default new tab page is the Apple store and most don't know how to change that.

There are a list of alternatives in Safari that the user themselves can choose from, including Favorites, Frequently visited, and so on.

None of the choices are the Apple AppStore.

> it will mean older people accepting that the world has changed and they aren't worth their inflated salaries any more.

Kind of a sideline - but very worried to see this combination of ageism and the "we're hiring" in your profile.

The whole article felt like one of those awful and shallow, self-promoting LinkedIn posts.

> What is the most bizarre thing to me about the online zeitgeist is how so many people will allow comments of anonymous or pseudonymous strangers on places like Reddit or Twitter to shape their world view. Including journalists.

I totally second this, and have a recent concrete example where at the beginning of this year Sweden's (probably) most serious newspaper (what I'd consider a 'journal of record' whose articles should be a point of historical reference), published a long-form retrospective article comparing Sweden's handling of Covid with the way other countries had handled the epidemic, and included several internet 'myths' that had bandied-around on social media, citing them as facts, and even including one 'interview' with what purported to be an eyewitness of one event, which turned-out to be taken from a Facebook post.

I wrote and complained to the responsible editor with citations showing how and where the article was wrong, and a few very grudging emendations were made (effectively saying that even though the reports were still probably true, they couldn't be 'verified').

Totally horrified me that, in wanting something to fit their facts, journalists simply accepted fiction they read on Facebook and regurgitated it in their articles.

I used to hold them in greater regard than that.

Genuine question: is there a possibility that Monero is being monitored covertly?

It seems an obvious target to be a Trojan horse in the midst of criminals and tax-evaders.

If an app needs a webview, it should always strive to open that view in an embedded Safari webview (called an SFSafariViewController) or link to the view in the user's own choice of browser. The app is prevented from seeing ‘inside’ this view.

Sometimes an app needs to control some aspect of the external view - for instance listen to some Js event, or inject authorization - and this can be for totally legitimate reasons in the flow of the app. Then the application needs to use another type of embedded webview called a WKWebView, which by definition allows the app to see into the user's interactions in the embedded browser.

Most developers and apps use these for totally necessary reasons - but Facebook is deviously abusing this functionality.

Some of the posters in this thread are blaming Apple for Facebook's evil behavior, but a lot of totally legitimate functionality that needs this type of app/browser communication would be impossible without the ability to enable it for genuine and well-founded reasons.

Also worth mentioning (not discussed in the article) the awful, memory-hogging Spotify Electron app on MacOS.

(For clarification, I meant the performance of the desktop app isn’t discussed).

> sometimes people miss the obvious

I agree. But one of my (many) bugbears with Spotify is the poor audio quality of their ‘best’ setting.

I haven’t tried Apple Music, but if Apple allowed access to their uncompressed stream through an API (currently only via AirPlay) to devices like my BlueSound Node then I would switch straight away.

Compared to CD, the best streaming quality from Spotify is pretty abysmal.

> Doesn’t mention if they went into Spotify’s Settings—>Audio Quality to set it to the non-default ’Very High’ (=320Kbps). The experience described makes me think no

The reviewer begins by giving a rundown of quite a range of equipment they use, their knowledge and enthusiasm about music technology, and how important sound quality is to their listening experience.

But you think they didn’t do the simplest and most obvious thing to maximize the sound quality on Spotify?

For those people in the thread talking about Adobe Animate or AirBnB's Lottie - Flash was capable of so much more than frame-by-frame animation.

As long ago as around 2001, with ActionScript 1 or 2, I was already building smart drag-and-drop calendar applications, where conference attendees could book all their sessions online in an easy-to-use and intuitive interface, that included tips, and complex hover states, with extra information at user's fingertips.

I'd say web-apps are almost getting to the same state of sophistication and user-friendliness around about now.

After that, with ActionScript 3, I was building interactive and immersive promo sites where users could explore alternative environments, build their own 3D worlds, or do crazy stuff like mash-up their own facial features (captured through their webcam) together with different celebrity musician's faces, and then do a remix of the musician's music (for an 'art' event that the musicians were taking part in).

There were masses of other capabilities - both serious and playful - but I must admit, even though I'm sometimes sad we lost Flash, in the end - especially when it was obvious that Adobe had let it drift - it was a shitshow of insecurity and bandwidth-waste.

I love self-checkout. But I wish stores at least were generous enough to give us an incentive for doing some of the work ourselves.

The normal checkout at my local store includes free fruit bags, while the self-checkout has nothing.

Maybe they think skipping the long queue should be enough reward.

Weird take.

While watching the presentation I was thinking “this looks like cool stuff”. But FastCompany thought I should be afraid.

Is it a cultural or a personal divergence?

> This is not really about crypto, or tornado cash. I think it's more about ownership and surveillance. The only solution is to innovate in the area of evasion. Since there is no middle ground amenable to the ones who make the laws in their own interests.

I’m genuinely unsure what your point is?

Are you saying that because the rich and powerful are destroying society by evading taxes and weakening the fundamental infrastructure of our civilization, the rest of us should have crypto so we can be in on the loot?

> Co-signing a letter is hardly covertly doing something, isn't it?

Daszak made strenuous efforts to hide:

• that he was the organizer and writer of the letter

• that he had direct and invidious connections to the Wuhan Institute

• that the signatories to the letter had any connection to EcoHealth Alliance or the Wuhan Institute

All of the above were later confirmed by emails obtained via public record requests under the Freedom of Information Act.

> If you click on the link in the thread, there's an editor's note clarifying that this paper is being used to prop up dodgy claims, for which there's no evidence.

Note that the addendum to the paper was added in March 2020, when Peter Daszak and many others directly associated with the Wuhan Institute were working covertly[0] to destroy any rational or scientific debate about the origins of covid. The Lancet letter was published on 7 March 2020.

[0] Daszak and many of the other co-signers to the Lancet letter which "strongly condemned conspiracy theories” declared no conflicts of interest.

> Of course lab leakers are working hard to try to deny this or claim the data is wrong or yada yada. It's an ongoing battle and they have several highly dedicated 'independent scientists' (lol) working on it seemingly 24/7.

I think the downvotes are because of this type of statement, which suggests that people who have read the papers, and thought about the conflicting evidence, and finally come to a conclusion that differs from your viewpoint, dislike the implication that they are simply nutty conspiracy-theorists tirelessly and obsessively working to undermine rational science.

> There is now evidence firmly against lab leak and firmly in favour of natural origins, covered in depth by a domain expert here...

A counter:

https://ayjchan.medium.com/evidence-for-a-natural-origin-of-...

As for Angie Rasmussen - she is hardly the dispassionate scientist that you seem to want to portray her as, in your post[0]

[0] https://disinformationchronicle.substack.com/p/a-toxic-milie...

Also the sound of the falling tree should be at least 7:1 Surround for the Pro tier

What an incredibly superficial article.

The second (of just two) factors they 'examine' - that working from home could be expected to introduce new efficiencies by eliminating the commute and improving work-life balance - they suggest that this gain in productivity may not be realized because "[a]t home people might be able to focus more on “deep work”; they are also able to spend more time walking the dog".

Incredible that this type of worthless filler article even gets published on The Economist.

I’m thinking if Greg Rutkowski can get himself removed from the AI-prompts half of this art will disappear overnight.