I used to be one of those people that would countdown the hours to Apple's launch events and tune in for the live stream. I was never someone who updated my iPhone every year, but I _did_ update my iPhone every two years.
Now, I can't even remember what version iPhone I have. I just remember that I bought it after my last one stopped working (after maybe 5 or 6 years of having it). I won't lie: part of the reason is that I'm just getting older and care less about these things.
But a bigger part is that new tech just isn't fun anymore...
I _hate_ using my current iPhone for surfing the web... because I can't run the full suite of ad-blocking software that I run on my computer (Firefox + uBlock, sponsor block; Little Snitch with tons of block lists). I hate that all that ad-blocking software is necessary... but that's a totally different rant.
I _hate_ that I'm being asked to spend $2000 on a device that will, by default, surveil me 24x7. I can spend HOURS trying to disable every feature designed to track me... and still not be certain that somewhere in the TOS that I've still given permission for them to vacuum up SOME piece of information about me.
And I _hate_ that Apple is now an ad company.
And yes, I acknowledge that with respect to privacy, Apple is STILL the less bad choice (compared to Android).
And yes, I acknowledge that there are other options. In fact, when this iPhone dies, I plan on getting a Pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it.
I guess what I'm saying is... I hope that there are more people like me out there... who are sick of paying thousands of dollars for devices that, instead of serving me, serve those who want to collect my information so they can sell me stuff.
edit: "because I can't" instead of "because can't"
> Keep in mind the typical user doesn't care enough to go install any ad blocker
I hate that you are right about this :-)
It really hit home for me today. My project manager was sharing her screen so we could see the free planning poker webapp our team uses. I had it open locally on my machine. She had ads, I did not.
She's not a programmer, but she _is_ technical. She's worked adjacent to programmers for many years, and she's very adapt at writing SQL to query our DB. But she didn't think to install an ad blocker.
I guess I really do live in a bubble where I think _most_ people run ad blockers.
Yeah, keyboard binding consistency is what I really want. Ideally, you could choose between Vim, Emacs, <whatever else> keybindings for the program you're using.
I think what's also needed is a standard way of navigating what I guess I'll call the "focus tree". For example, if I'm running Vim inside of a terminal multiplexer (eg: Zellij) inside of a terminal emulator inside of a tiling window manager (eg: xmonad)...
It would be GREAT if I could use Vi keybindings to navigate windows in whatever "focus layer" I'm at... and then have a "standard" keybinding to navigate up and down that tree (eg: "Ctrl + >" and "Ctrl + <").
Right now, everyone seems to solve the "focus tree" problem by trying to choose a control key combination that won't collide with any other process that might be listening for key chords at the same time.
Also, set up formulas for calculating speed, torque, forces etc, of each system.
Then create a modular simulation library and point and click simulator where all the component variants are covered so that the user can piece new systems together using those components.
For me it's a great dataset to train my own brain. This way when I'm in the field and need to come up with a fix for something I can query my intellect and come up with a solution. No accounts, internet connection, or compute needed!
That's a good training set for animation AIs. Image generators are terrible at mechanical understanding at the moment. That needs to be fixed.
AI videos of steam trains make a horrid mess of the engine linkages. Some wheels rotate in the wrong direction. Wheels rotate on stationary locomotives.
Just keeping rails in parallel is beyond many Stable Diffusion type systems.
Trackwork with switches is just rails all over the place. Some videos can't even keep the train wheels on the track.
Pseudo-historical AI generated videos on machinery related subjects are awful. I saw one recently on rolling mills. There are blatant errors. Some rolls are turning in the wrong direction. Useless rolls facing sideways to the direction of slab travel. Gears that don't do anything. Steel entering rolls headed for the roller, not the gap.[1]
That's for a rolling mill, which is a large but simple machine. AI misunderstanding of things with moving parts is even worse. There's now more AI slop about historical machinery in search results than real-world content.
> The ad system they built isn’t illegal, but it’s pretty clear who it’s for.
"If you're not the customer, you're the product".
Well, Amazon actually did it. They made us the customer _AND_ the product. Hooray.
Like LOTS of other people, I, of course, use Amazon. But, more and more often... if I can find a product somewhere else within, say, 5-6%... I'll buy it that someplace else. Especially if that someplace else is actually a building I can walk into and inspect the thing I'm buying before I pay for it.
Shopping on Amazon is getting worse every day. How can it be good for Amazon in the long run that every time I buy something from their site, I actually have to spend time convincing myself that I'm not getting a knock-off product?
In the modern world, every single time money leaves my bank account I feel like I'm potentially being scammed. I hate it.
Oh, I hope you are right about cars. If one of the outcomes of the memory crunch is that manufacturers start making “dumb cars” again, it would almost make it all worthwhile.
Cars get developed on a cycle that spans a decade in many cases. Four or five years is pretty much the minimum. It could impact development cycles going forward but it will take a good while for that to be reflected in the marketplace.
In the shorter term, you’ll probably see more “base” models on offer with some of the most intensive features disabled. There’s still going to be all of the telemetry stuff that makes them money through third parties though.
I believe they're referring to the friction point of this company/website not publicly listing a price. That's a huge barrier/red flag to a lot of people. Myself included. Last thing I want to do is waste time bouncing emails back and forth between sales just to figure out if the price range is even remotely in my wheelhouse.
However, if your target is B2B (Business to Business) as opposed to B2C/D2C (Business to Client/Direct to Client) and you're selling the install plus enterprise support, then the sales thing makes way more sense, and is more expected/palatable for B2B type customers than your everyday consumers, so depends on who you're targeting.
We are working on figuring out payments, logistics, hardware compliance (different countries have different requirements), state-level tax handling, customs clearance, etc. for D2C.
Also right now we are focusing on B2B here in Spain like you guessed, and once we have the other things figured out, we will start shipping to the US and Europe. And after that we plan on rolling out to the rest of the countries.
No worries. If you message me via the contact form or chat support on the website, I will try my best to provide you with one. The more feedback I can get, the better.
Thanks for liking my product enough to want to buy it right away :)
Sales friction is how you lose sales. Make your website one click purchase product page. One button - apply pay, customer pays with preset shipping and then you handle everything from there.
Trust me, I really wish it were that easy. We're based out of Spain, so to sell in the US (or other countries) we either need to figure out assembly of the device there, or we need to solve cross-border payments, logistics, customs clearance, tax remittance to individual states, and hardware compliance. That said, we're working hard on all of it and plan to go D2C as soon as possible.
I haven't used them myself, but it seems that services such as paddle.com takes care of the payment and tax compliance. There are probably similar sevices for logistics as well.
The thing is majority platforms like paddle.com don't supoort hardware products. I was looking at fastspring as well but hit the same wall. I will still try reaching out to paddle.com support to see if they will allow it. Thank you for the suggestion.
Your device seems to be an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi running custom software. Have you considered making the platform available in a BYOD form, either for fulltime use or for evaluation?
Yes, we're using an off-the-shelf Raspberry Pi for v1. We are working on figuring out a custom board for v2, because we can't scale with Raspberry Pi as a dependency, especially with RPi prices constantly rising due to the RAM shortage.
Also, we want to test our OS extensively before we release it to be used with a BYOD model. We are launching soon and after that we will try to offer BYOD model as well.
If you are interested in trying it out and helping me in evaluation, please reach out to me via email on my HN profile. Thank you
The "eww" part is that normally, anytime you see "talk to us for a price", that means someone is charging an absurdly high amount for the good or service.
I would suggest making the wording something more like "Launching soon, contact us for pre-release information". Same end result but it avoids the association with overpriced enterprise providers.
> The US also sees AI dominance as critical for their national security, and relies on a market economy and non-state-owned labs.
[...]
> but the fact the discussion here ignores the fact that these concerns and dynamics are real just lower the discussion level instead of actually discussing potential solutions.
We had this problem solved for DECADES. Build the best post-secondary education system in the world. Lure all of China's (and the rest of the world's) best and brightest. Educate them. Give them well deserved, high paying jobs doing what they love and invite them to build a life and stay here.
Took me a while but for the west the value of education isn't primarily in jobs but in democracy. It puts the bar much higher than we've ever accomplished. People are supposed to run th county (believe it or not)
> When you know you're essentially babysitting the workhorse to ensure it doesn't go off the rails
I don't have data to support this (other than, I guess, my LinkedIn feed), but my impression is that the management class is pushing AI _way_ harder than the worker / craftsperson class.
And if that's true, I think it's perhaps because it's something they understand: you tell AI to do something, and (with varying degrees of success and less complaining)... it does that thing.
To the extent that I've seen craftspeople adopt AI, it's been because they recognize its usefulness as a tool to further their craft. I don't meet many craftspeople that enjoy watching any[one|thing] do their work for them.
Does that mean the Human element can be condensed to a single Manager with the right skills? A Director above them? Is the VP above them directing the agents?
Is this another variation of Conway's law, where orgs design systems that copy their own communication structure? Seems like that is how my Manager/Director approach it. Then again, they are making slide shows and obviously AI assisted reports, not something that needs to be stable and responsive for the entire product lifetime.
But to your point, the manager sees it as a structure to manage to increase productivity. The craftsman sees it as a tool to further their craft. Each is driven by a different methodology and use case. Can that mesh unless specifically directed to throw AI at no joy work?
I appreciate you stepping in and clarifying. Thank you.
But honestly, this feels like damage control. This is (to me) clearly an innovation on a dark pattern that is basically just "accepted practice" nowadays, namely the "subscribe by default; make it hard to opt-out of said subscription at signup time".
That's why I think people are upset about this. By not taking a credit card, you made it feel like it wasn't an implementation of that dark pattern (yay!) -- however, secretly, it was!
If the intent is to be customer friendly, it's so perfectly clear to me what the answer is. OPT-IN. In other words, a checkbox:
"By default, when your free credits are consumed, all of your runners will be de-provisioned. Instead, if you would prefer that your runners continue working, check this box and we will invoice you for usage in excess of your free credits."
But honestly, you did more than I expect of most service providers today. You sent an email; you actually told them how many credits were left in the free tier. AWS, for example, can only give me an _estimate_ of how much cost I've accrued. They can make no promises about the rate at which I'm expected to accrue new costs. And, unless I've taken great care (by, say, terraforming every resource in a given AWS account), "turning off my cost accruing services" is not a simple matter. If I understood the article correctly, there was, at least, a "single action" they could have taken to immediately stop accruing costs.
Yeah, I hear you on the inversion of expectations and I think you're exactly right about how this affects perceptions of the product.
Candidly, right now, we're more likely to land on an opt-out rather than opt-in here since getting your builds to actually run again requires a code change. I think there's a full blog post to write about why we think this is the right default, but we're still thinking it through.
Regardless, we need to make the choice loud and visible, and our miss was making it too hidden. We'll close that gap.
Now, I can't even remember what version iPhone I have. I just remember that I bought it after my last one stopped working (after maybe 5 or 6 years of having it). I won't lie: part of the reason is that I'm just getting older and care less about these things.
But a bigger part is that new tech just isn't fun anymore...
I _hate_ using my current iPhone for surfing the web... because I can't run the full suite of ad-blocking software that I run on my computer (Firefox + uBlock, sponsor block; Little Snitch with tons of block lists). I hate that all that ad-blocking software is necessary... but that's a totally different rant.
I _hate_ that I'm being asked to spend $2000 on a device that will, by default, surveil me 24x7. I can spend HOURS trying to disable every feature designed to track me... and still not be certain that somewhere in the TOS that I've still given permission for them to vacuum up SOME piece of information about me.
And I _hate_ that Apple is now an ad company.
And yes, I acknowledge that with respect to privacy, Apple is STILL the less bad choice (compared to Android).
And yes, I acknowledge that there are other options. In fact, when this iPhone dies, I plan on getting a Pixel and putting GrapheneOS on it.
I guess what I'm saying is... I hope that there are more people like me out there... who are sick of paying thousands of dollars for devices that, instead of serving me, serve those who want to collect my information so they can sell me stuff.
edit: "because I can't" instead of "because can't"
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