I figure it's probably just reducing SKUs. The people who care about the fastest chip are likely also the people wanting lots of storage so you can save on having to create a ton more products by bundling them.
There's also the very real trap of traditional forum comments being ranked higher in your brain's algorithm for "relevance" since you can explain it as reading alternative perspectives. There's real FOMO in reading news without having comments for me sometimes, because what if there's a perspective that I'm completely missing here?
Of course, long term I know time spent this way is mostly wasted for the value I get out of it.
It’s no different than traditional social media, except in intensity. It’s less intense, because of its text-based format as opposed to video, the clickbait-resistant culture, and the fact that while it’s very large, it’s not infinite. You can consume the top page under half an hour and there are only so many stories posted here a day.
Depending on where you are in the AuDHD spectrum, you can be as addicted to HN as a teenager with 7hrs daily Instagram usage. pg acknowledges this.
I recently tried to put my phone into black & white mode via iPhone accessibility shortcut (triple click on power button)
This did not seem to work for me. I would forget about it and after a while just left it on color.
Now I use a shortcut on the action button. By default my iPhone is black and white, pressing the action button gives me color for two minutes.
The crucial step is that after this time it is automatically switching back to black and white. Even when the phone is locked.
This now seems to actually help. And as a side effect I also enjoy looking at a few things in black and white. A new experience.
All these great ideas for how to prevent you from doing something, they all need to allow me to bypass it when I want to, but they also need to automatically switch back to the “locked” mode.
This needs to be seamless so that the “yes I am sure I want to read this” bypass does not become a new, meaningless habit.
What is also interesting is that apparently, for me, a hard lock-out, a hard disable, is not good enough.
Instead, reducing the joy (black & white filter) seems to work much better and does not motivate me to work around the restriction.
I doubt I would be happy with a dumb phone either. So this is a good middle ground.
One other thing I’ve always hoped to see is a kind of scheduled check in with me, where I am asked / reminded to get out of my Netflix / Reddit / YouTube tunnel vision.
Hardware and software to do that is tricky. iOS locked down too much.
But there are today quite capable and cheap Esp32 based smart watches (~$25) and I am trying to figure out how to integrate one of these into my life purely for tunnelvision-interrupting “are you really sure you want to do this right now?” notifications.
I feel privileged to have had a childhood before smartphones.
At least I can remember how we used to be.
All of these measures are not because of how it is today but because I am afraid of where we will be a few years from now. Endlessly engaging generated AI content.
Better try to build some boundaries while I still can.
I'd speculate those came first (kinda popular with streamers and such, I think) and they basically just added a usb port. In the product video you can even see that they arrive as individual sticks to be plugged in.
It is probably easier and cheaper to have 6x separate display & microcontroller and update each one independently
There is a lot of discussion in the comments about using VMs for dev work. I too try to at least use containers whenever I can but it's sometimes not very practical. Better than nothing.
99% of the threat model is software trying to extract data. Either for myself (e.g. blackmail) or to learn about me and attack others (impersonation for scams, fraud, blackmail against others) or to access systems I have access to (tokens, API keys, online banking)
Currently I am playing around with local LLMs on a Mac. The whole field is moving so fast that it is impossible not to rely on recent releases to quickly try new features. Unfortunately there is no way to access the Mac GPU in VMs.
So right now to have at least a tiny bit of separation I have the local LLM tools set up on a separate local Mac user that I can then ssh into and use to expose a web server usable from my main (dev) account.
This of course is far from perfect but at least a little better than before.
I fully expect supply chain attacks on AI tooling and perhaps even malicious LLM models to happen at some point. That target is too juicy.
Setting this up I was a bit irritated by some of the defaults of macos for multi user setups.
- All mac software is usually installed to the global /Applications folder. Homebrew needs a workaround to work across multiple users
- By default all files of a local mac user can be read by all other non admin local mac users. Only Apple-created folders like Documents, Desktop etc. are locked down
If you want to store files outside of those Apple-created folders, perhaps because you sync Documents with icloud and want to store project repos and larger files, perhaps because you have ssh and github configs, dotfiles etc. in your home dir, then they are all by default readable by other non admin users.
This is not to say that this is a huge issue that can't be fixed (just need to remove default permissions for group 'staff' yourself) but it is interesting that this is the default.
The concept of multiple local users seems to be completely ignored by users and by Apple, and has been mostly unchanged for decades.
There are tiny improvements such as Apples permissions dialog when an application accesses Desktop, Documents or Downloads for the first time. But this seems pretty useless all things considered.
Why is it not more common to have stronger local separation? I don't need and don't want total iOS-level sandboxing (and lack of file system) but why isn't there a little more progress on the computer side of things?
I agree that VM-level isolation with good usability and little performance loss would be a great thing. But this is aiming for perfection in a world pressured by more and more supply chain attacks as well as more automated (read: AI controlled) computer use.
As an 80% "OS-native" solution it would be great if I could easily use local users for different project files _and_ stream GUIs across users (to work seamlessly from one main account).
Then we could probably avoid the majority of security risks in every day computer use for developers and other "computer workers" alike.
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I skipped over that last part but this is the real blocker. It should be possible by now to easily stream a "remote" (local, different user) application UI into my current users window management with full support for my many screens, resolutions, copy/paste and shortcuts. All while having zero quality loss or performance overhead if done locally.
I don't want remote desktop, I want remote application UI. This is not a new idea (X11 forwarding)
Here's a fun thought:
AI workflows and agents have surprised us all. We see them clicking and typing and changing files on our machines. If the OS-makers don't come up with appropriate mechanisms then we will somehow end up recreating a new form of OS. It is already starting with AI-focussed browsers or ChatGPT as an entry point to delegate "browse the web for me".
It will be web based with compute happening on VMs in the background, probably billed like a SaaS and disappoint all of us wanting to preserve the ideal of personal computers.
Eventually it will make desktop OS's irrelevant and we all end up working with a form of chromebook
I don’t think so. Bombs are usually found during construction so leaving them in place would not work if they block progress on a hole/tunnel etc
For reference the state of NRW (Germany) alone found 2811 bombs in 2018 so it’s much more common than you’d think.
Laws seem to differ by state but afaik new construction must include some kind of bomb assessment, often done via aerial photos to quickly filter out areas that were not bombed at all
I saw this video [0] from the creator of this project the other day. Here he shows how to connect a USB joystick with a playstation access controller [1] by mapping from USB to 3.5mm analog output.
I found this because I was looking for something else for the access controller.
It's basically the other way around: I want to use the controller on a mac and need to remap it's outputs to something useful. I don't have a playstation and apparently you need one to remap the controller keys once before plugging it in to a PC, otherwise only 3 out of 8 buttons will send something that is recognized as USB HID
You could totally use HID Remapper to do what you want.
The PlayStation Access Controller has profiles that can be configured from a PS5 as you say, but regardless of the current profile or mapping, it always sends the raw button/joystick states in the report. They're not properly exposed in the report descriptor, but they're there. You would have to use what HID Remapper calls "custom usages" to get to this raw data. I can assist you with that if you're interested. Though it might be easier to find someone with a PS5 for the one time setup.
So this made at least some sense.
I guess yields might be good enough that they can afford to bin with another core in there as well.
Memory is probably still the main reason for binning in the first place.