Arguably, the camera evolved painting because it expanded the idea of what it
could be – that it could be more than the illustration of/"illusion" of reality.
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
Correspondingly AI expanding the idea of what it means to think and therefore what it means to be human.
By extension then also what it means to interact with other humans as we become more used to interacting with AIs, our interactions with each other will change.
Along with these improvements, depending on which side of the fence you stand, the releasing of humans to focus on consumption while AI produce the triggers for our consumption, i.e., the advertising.
AI is moving into far more spaces of human activity than the camera ever did. But that could also be because painting wasn't such a broadly practiced activity as thinking seems to be.
Yes, which was the point I was trying to convey. However it did also kill the profession of painters (the craft in art vs craft). Which might unfortunately happen to the more commercial side of music
Photography had particularly dramatic effects on the livelihoods of painters who operated on the fringe of the mainstream. This included the portrait miniaturists, whose markets fell drastically, particularly after the introduction of the multi-pose and cheap cartes de visite in the mid-1850s. Many gave up, while others turned to colouring photos [25]. Some painters of sentimental genre scenes were also particularly affected, as a result of the profusion of readily available photographic genre works, often composed in a painterly or "pictorial" style [26]. This was sometimes due not to the public’s preference for the photographic version, but simply because a particular subject matter lost its appeal to painters and their clients once photography entered the scene [27]. In addition, the introduction of “half-tone” photography in the 1880s also initiated a slow decline in the market for newspaper and magazine illustrators [28].
Nice wall of text, which part of that says painters jobs were killed?
Or did you just read the title of the second article and not realize it’s not being literal but capturing the anxiety of the painters in the 19th century?
I think the first article which is highly recommended (where the excerpt comes from) goes over subsequent effects on the profession. The second one goes over the different genres that disappeared, and concerns less with the artists themselves
Apart from that our interaction seem overly emotional for me so I'd leave it as that
It's a really pretty, humanist font, and those tend to be my favourite fonts. I was never the biggest fan of the grotesk-style Roboto/Inter/Univers, especially in the context of a user interface, which should feel a little bit friendlier imo.
I use Avenir on my Samsung phone, which is also pretty nice. I like Circular, Proxima Nova and Frutiger too, but they are all very expensive.
This font is free, flexible and genuinely really nice to look at. It's a good day for font nerds like me.
If you’re a Disney+ subscriber, be sure to watch The Imagineering Story miniseries. Fun fact, it was directed by Leslie Iwerks, who’s the granddaughter of Ubbe Iwerks, the co-creator of Mickey Mouse alongside Walt Disney.
Whoa, now that sounds like the use case I've been looking for since I jailbroke mine.
I have calibre set up to just email books to my Kindle, but that's an extra layer of indirection that I really don't need. I'll have to check that out.
Personally I'm most fond of Calibre + Calibre-Web, which masquerades as the Kobo Store and lets you use the built-in Kobo syncing mechanisms with your Calibre library instead of having to do it all within Koreader.
I've been experimenting with Syncthing on Kindle (https://github.com/Darthagnon/syncthing-kindle), but have had no luck seemingly because the Linux kernel included is too old and doesn't support network connections, or because the CPU is too weak.
I switched over to an Onyx Boox reader, so I don't have a Kindle anymore. But I definitely used the same project as you. I used a Kindle Paperwhite 11th gen. The linked project says it works with Kindle Touch, which is VERY old, so I don't think you're having network issues.
It's been a while, but I think I enabled SSH on my Kindle and set it up that way. I started Syncthing via KUAL, then used an SSH reverse proxy to configure Syncthing on my laptop.
It -was- kind of a pain, but once it was good, it was good!
I'm so optimistic about this, especially in the context of local-first web applications. With Postgres on both the client and the server, and something like PowerSync or ElectricSQL to keep the two together, you get a homomorphic database environment between client and the server. That has a lot of architectural benefits I'm actively exploring. The client and the server can share a lot more code, for one.
But I read the following posts, and I have some serious concerns about PGlite's performance:
It sadly makes me slightly skeptical about adopting what effectively feels like a hack... SQLite has obviously had decades of adoption and I'm not expecting PGlite to match that level of legacy or optimisation - but it's enough to give me pause.
I really, really want to adopt PGlite in a project I'm currently architecting, so would love some insight on this if anybody has any!
It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.
>It's the larger point. A device with a 64-bit SoC, higher-than-HD display, battery, gigabytes of RAM and storage being consigned to landfill is bonkers.
That's not a high bar to clear. Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?
You're going to think my answer is bizarre, but those kind of underpowered devices would be ideal for office work or non-IT businesses in general. They need computers to do the same things as they needed 15 or 20 years ago. Writing documents, spreadsheets, taking inventory, sending and receiving e-mail.
No, your idea is perfectly rational. Somebody I know consulted me on what kind of computers to buy for their new small business that would only be used for browsing, email, word processing. I found them a store that sold used Dell and HP workstations. They got 3 Dell machines (CPU + Monitor + Keyboard + Mouse), all Intel Core i5 with 16 GB RAM, 1 TB HDD with Windows 7 Pro, for $75 / each. We spent an additional $25 to purchase a cheap 128 GB SSD and installed Linux (LMDE), Firefox, LibreOffice and GNU Cash on it. (Preserved Windows Dual boot option, just in case they needed Windows for something). This was 2+ years ago and the owner was so happy that I reduced his IT hardware budget by a quarter. I recently purchased a used HP 25" monitor from Craigslist, for $60, in excellent condition and still having a year warranty on it, whose retail price was around $500 on launch. There is so much e-waste being produced ...
It's the same as with cars - companies want brand new because then you get a full warranty and theoretically you don't need to worry about it. So that $400 you saved would be spent in IT support for your old failing hardware.
But the thing is.....old PCs are really not that unreliable. If they survived the last 5-10 years then they are probably still chugging along just fine and for a small business there is literally nothing wrong with using them.
> Writing documents, spreadsheets, taking inventory, sending and receiving e-mail.
Well... Outlook is already a web app, the rest of the Office suite will follow rather sooner than later, and inventory - it's either web apps or SAP, both memory hogs.
But not all businesses need to use the latest versions of Microsoft Office. They might not even need to use Microsoft Office at all. iPads come with a stock e-mail application, as well as word processing and spreadsheets etc. And if you're using old PCs, you can use old versions of Office. Or WordPad and an e-mail client. They are light-weight.
You are thinking of big businesses, where as I was talking about Micro and Small businesses (in India). They don't even use Outlook today. For them email means Gmail, and even its use is declining as most business communication in India is done over WhatsApp!
>>Who's realistically going to use a laptop/desktop with a Core 2 Duo (2006), for instance?
I was literally still using a Core2Duo Macbook Pro as a kitchen laptop just for looking up recipes and watching youtube videos etc until last year. Worked absolutely fine until Chrome decided that it's not going to update itself anymore and since I'm on an old version of chrome I can't use google sync. That's what killed it for me - the hardware itself was still perfectly functional.
This looks like a solidly built app, but having used React Native to ship production apps I really don't think its the way forward – nor spending development effort on making apps "look native" with Liquid Glass and the like. It's so much more brittle than building a web app, even with the impressive steps taken with e.g. the New Architecture.
When nearly everything today is a walled garden, I find it really hard to understand why we'd want to fortify those walls with any more platform-specific code. Though it's imperfect and still in development, I see much more of a future in the open web platform and wasm.
Updating React Native every few months with breaking changes, no official upgrade path but "diff the two versions and copy everything over", having to update something every few months because Google introduces some new bullshit (API level updates that break everything! 16 KB page size! no orientation lock for tablets! yay!), using dependencies that get deprecated because React Native comes with no batteries included (Expo seems better but it's 1) another vendor lock-in 2) difficult to use with third party SDKs and 3) was not in the state it's now when the development of our app was started)... man I hate React Native and mobile development with a passion. Sadly I'm stuck with it for now...
I use Flutter with seems to fix many of these issues, primarily because it's not in the npm ecosystem so I don't have random breakages everywhere, because like you I also was tired of React Native.
There is a gap in Apple's offerings. Casual computer users like students probably can't justify dropping nearly a K on a MacBook, so they go for these 400-600$ dell/hp laptops, or a Chromebook. This fits that hole.
iPhone processor is surely cheaper from an economies of scale perspective, they are likely way easier to produce en masse and they already produce bajillions of them for the iPhone.
Over time the price of even a high quality LCD like on the existing MacBook Air will have decreased enormously. Apple is setting up to move to OLED on the rest of the line, so using existing LCD tech is likely to save a lot too
> There is a gap in Apple's offerings. Casual computer users like students probably can't justify dropping nearly a K on a MacBook, so they go for these 400-600$ dell/hp laptops, or a Chromebook. This fits that hole.
I could say the same about their cell phone lineup. If I have $400 to spend on a phone, what can I get from Apple?
A $400 iPhone would certainly increase market share--but Apple does not seem to want that market. Too low margin, I would think, or maybe too high a risk of "cheapening" their overall brand. Or maybe both.
I wonder if the play is to be able to differentiate themselves from the other phone manufacturers. Perhaps they think a free bundled laptop (that is cheap enough to make financial sense to include), instead of a wearable or tablet, could get a significant amount of people on the fence to choose Apple. Then again, they could likely get a lot of them by having a cheaper phone; perhaps though, their fear is cannibalization of the higher end iPhone sales? According to their latest statement, net sales of computer were
only a fifth of that iPhone sales. I suppose they think it’s a better risk carving out more sales in the computer market over what they might lose on the entry level MacBook Air sales.
That off requires committing to a $65/month plan for 36 months instead of paying $25/month with someone like Visible for an equivalent plan. So really you're paying $1836 for that iPhone 16.
There’s no free lunch here, cheap plans are noticeably worse in various ways, but like cable companies carriers don’t want to give you a good plan without bundling phone upgrades.
Visible’s $25/month plan mentions unlimited Hotspot for example, but good luck finding they always cap you at 5 Mbits on their website. Suddenly it makes more sense why someone might bump up to their $45/month plan for 3x the Hotspot speed. Even then 15Mbps isn’t that bad, but it’s a long way from 5G could provide.
There are definitely folks who need that hotspot speed but many who don’t. I’m on WiFi most of the time nowadays so switched to MobileX and spend about $5 a month on my mobile plan.
One thing that is different is that carriers regularly subsidize phones. I paid 0 for my current phone, an iPhone 13 mini (when it was relatively new), partner paid nothing for theirs, latest pixel.
Now, lower cost carriers do less of this, and you need to get the high end plan, so it’s not good advice for everyone to get the free phone deal. It is one way a laptop is different. A decent chunk of people aren’t directly paying for their phone.
No. Most carriers have free phone promotions regularly. I paid $0. I think the phone before that was also $0. No impact on my bill (since I was already on the unlimited 5g super speed blah blah blah plan, these promotions serve as a way to get people into the all the bells and whistles $80 plans)
Would it be consistent with this plan to continue to make the same M1 Air at the current price, stuffing it with whatever phone processor they happen to have a few extra million of?
Yeah that's one potential route they could take - repurposing the existing M1 air shell and components.
But I actually believe they'll do a completely new shell for this device, and one reason being they could probably save even more money and cut even more costs than the current prod cost of M1 airs.
The budget offering is a used MacBook from the massive aftermarket stock, but I take your point - it doesn't scale and some people are averse to buying used goods.
This is super cool, but I wonder what the application might be.
I can imagine wanting to use it to pepper in 3D elements into an existing RN app, but surely embedding the entire Godot engine is kinda heavy?
Then I can imagine wanting to embed a larger 3D experience into an RN app... maybe a 3D product preview or something? I guess that could be cool. But still, the heft of embedding the Godot frameworks...
I am actually developing an app that has 3d elements, but if i were to use this the Godot experience might just feel too separate from the rest of the app. like 2 siphoned off apps in one. Something like react native three might be more appropriate for a lot of the use cases I can imagine. But I'm probably missing something
I would think, if anything, it would be for creating a UI for a Godot-native game (after a prototype stage where the UI is Godot-native programmer art); and being able to break off the responsibility for that component to a UI team that can simply hire React frontend devs to do the design and development, where those devs don’t need any knowledge of how Godot works. Architecturally, the game UI wraps and controls the game engine, because of course it does; but organizationally, the UI team would serve the needs of the game dev team, rather than the other way around.
I could see this being interesting in treating game elements as React components and using that level of abstraction.
E.g. imagine a Snapchat "lens" type experience (one screen with little fun mini game experiences) that the user can easily add or remove characters or entire chunks of the "game" (turn on/off raining objects the character can interact with, configure, etc).
Could also make it easier for LLMs to generate unique simple game experiences with these building block "components" vs having to build everything from scratch.
If the team's goal is to be able to write a cross-platform game, but also have a great UI toolkit, they could have just used Flutter. This is eating massive costs just to use HTML, CSS and JS.
I build Zed for Windows aarch64 from source -- works great, though the build process is quite slow on my 16GB Surface Pro. Definitely hoping for official binaries, though!
I think I got as far as installing the Visual Studio Installer so I could install Visual Studio and I just bailed on that whole thing, lol. I'll have to take some time out on a weekend to take another look :)
I think and have always thought the exact same thing will happen with generative AI.
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