I already cancelled my subscription. They've demonstrated far too reckless behavior for me to trust something this critical to them, especially as they present themselves as the private and secure alternative.
Same here. Been a paying customer for probably about 3 years now. Off to either Fastmail or Tuta most likely. I'd like to self-host, but corporations have thoroughly ruined what should have been an open and decentralized system.
I don't know what Apple is looking for. The iPhone ships with a Weather app preinstalled, you allow it to your location so it can warn of severe weather, and several weeks later "OMG WEATHER APP IS USING YOUR LOCATION!!11!".
Same with MDM agents. Ours are installed automatically as part of the Apple Business Manager configuration, we manually grant them precise location in the background, and months later "HEY USER, WANNA BLOCK LOCATION FROM 'MDM SERVICE'?".
Edit: To avoid replying to the two following comments with the same reply, my gripe is not about the notification, that's a good thing; my gripe is with their implementation, which seems very in tune with Apple's way of complying with regulations. There are definitely many user-friendly ways to handle privacy compared to seemingly random notifications.
The first scenario is due to anti-trust complaints forcing Apple to treat their pre-installed apps identically to third-party ones. (Also why you can "delete" system apps.)
If that was completely true I would have deleted the News app long ago. Maybe for weather apps but there's still some selective enablement by Apple on this front.
Providing you with a routine notice that applications are repeatedly tracking your location is improving your privacy. If the legal requirement is 1st party applications don’t get special treatment, then yes asking you for the weather app too as opposed to just not asking for any apps is improving your security.
Okay, to me it reads like a lazy swipe. You seem to be aware of the power of AI to build you whatever you want, so why ask this question like this? It seems like you're just trying to tell people they should fully trust the software they install.
It used to be. The core offering is still functional. But with every update it becomes less usable. Orbs, badges, glittery avatar borders, aggressively animated, rainbow gradient text usernames, and now ads embedded directly into the UI.
For me all these things are good except the last one (if you mean partner games in the bottom left corner, I hope they're not A/B testing Google Ads in the app). My profile is more low key but I don't hate others for going heavy on the effects. It's just self expression.
What I don't like is the way they used to sell Nitro before they came up with the flashy cosmetics, restricting features that used to be free. And how they used a third party service for UK age verification that ended up hacked. And their security record in general. And being closed source with no official export tools.
I've used it once. It worked to recover some messages from DMs that were far enough down in my history they were no longer shown in the web/desktop UI. However, it only included my own messages in each DM/channel, without the context of whoever I was talking to.
none of that makes it less usable. That side bar where its shown is mostly just to see who is online and I found for many users, they don't even have that bar showing. The core chat/voice/streaming is just as functional as ever.
Animations from peoples' names and from their super reactions playing over other content after happening to move my mouse over them is something I'd consider a slight usability issue.
It's actually not just as functional as ever. Quality of voice and video chat took a noticeable dive this year, maybe coincidentally right as vibe coding really took off in the industry. And all that extra crap might not make discord unusable but it does suck. Like I said, not great.
Both the groups I have regular video calls with noticed, to the point that one of them switched back to zoom. It seems to have gotten better the last few months, though I don't think it's quite back to the near-flawless peak it was on in, say, 2024.
> The Ultimate 4K System includes every 4K movie available (at the time of shipment) pre-loaded onto two Terra Prime 120TB movie servers along with one Strato K movie player.
The system retails for over $100,000, and appears to essentially be a streaming service with local cache, so the bulk of licensing fees are probably only paid for movies customers actually watch.
Firefox is "copying" from Zen, and I think that's good. I do like Zen, but I wouldn't mind having all the features in Firefox (and imho some of the UI lately in Zen is... weird)
Pretty sure in most/all the cases mentioned, they were available as extensions long before Zen had them. In particular, both Zen's and Firefox's built-in vertical tabs feel like a bit of a downgrade from Tree Style Tabs (which I continue to use on Firefox, and also used on Zen last time I tried it).
Depends on what one values. I tried TST and Sidebery among other extensions for Firefox, but their "bolted on" feeling always bothered me. That can be somewhat fixed with userChrome mods, but those tend to be fragile and it's not unusual for them break with updates, and even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.
For my personal usage I find the deep nesting of TST to get in the way more than it helps and so the simpler model of Arc/Zen where nesting only happens intentionally is nice.
Indeed you need to write some firefox css to use either TST or Sidebery. But it's pretty rare for it to break. It actually broke a few days ago, I fixed it in a few minutes - ctrl+shift+alt+i opens the developer tools for the browser UI itself, then it's a matter of selecting the faulty element and writing the CSS to hide it or whatever. Or, ask a LLM to write the CCS for you. Or check out https://www.reddit.com/r/FirefoxCSS/ since probably someone has posted a fix there
> even with the mods they're not as integrated as native vertical tabs.
I was maintaining such a setup for a while and didn't have such luck. Sometimes it'd fully break and sometimes things would shift around due to other CSS changing, but whatever the case it's more than I had the patience to babysit.
> Hmm what's Sidebery missing?
The extensions themselves aren't lacking, but they suffer from being extensions and not part of the browser proper, which makes for occasional weird interactions and glitches and the "seams" between extension and host becoming tangible from time to time. Things just work better when the browser "knows" about the tabs being vertical and having deeper organization than is possible with horizontal tab bars, or is even designed around vertical tabs being the only option (like Arc/Zen).
I used and love TST (plus a huge number of extensions - TST is an extension that is extended with further extensions!) but it's complex and clunky.
Sidebery can do the 80% of TST that matters, with a better UI and UX and saner defaults. Also it has a feature to save and restore all tabs, with the whole tree structure preserved (even though I think it should be its own extension)
Only problem is that I suspect that Sidebery has severe memory leaks (not entirely sure it's the culprit though)
No it doesn't, don't cherry pick what fits your narrative. Firefox has vertical tabs, that's it. It's great that Firefox finally has native support for vertical tabs, but its roughly 10% of what I like in Arc/Zen.
The 90% remaining are UI gimmicks that are irrelevant anyway (mods, custom cursor, free canvas?). Even when Arc was still alive they're useless which is why the browser died (it sucked at doing things that matter). Zen just picked up this lack of focus and make it worse with the solo maintainer situation.
Not OP, but I am not a fan of the newly introduced library. Exploring my history is bad in Firefox, and this is even worse. It doesn’t show full page titles, so it’s almost impossible to find the right page.
History feels like the only part of Firefox that is still stuck somewhere in the late noughties. They should just copy what Chrome and Safari have done and make it a webpage instead of a separate window.
Firefox's visible UI is made of webpages. They just decided to open this webpage in separate window without an option to do otherwise. Still can access it by visiting `chrome://browser/content/places/places.xhtml`.
Slight correction with Safari, it uses a native NSOutlineView rather than a webpage, but the point that history works better in the main browser window stands.
Honestly, I haven't found browser history to be useful anymore. Not in 6 or 7 years. Too many sites are SPAs with server-side state, breaking the back button, breaking multiple open tabs in the same application, or breaking both.
I go hunting for pages i read months ago and need to reference again pretty often. Browser history containing only the site and title isn't great for that but it's what i have
Maybe I haven't looked too deep into Firefox multi-profile config, but:
- The distinction between pinned (soft-bookmarked) tabs and other tabs is very useful for me organizing things at work. (I didn't like when Arc added a setting to auto-delete other tabs X days after creating, though)
- Multiple "spaces" on the tab bar combined with global bookmarks at the top mean I can have a space for planning work and one for implementation work, and from both of those I have an easy link to Jira to search up tickets without needing to hop back and forth.
Personally, I just like the design of Zen more. With Firefox I felt like I was stuck with the same old UI forever. I'm not sure what Mozilla was doing with those bags of money from Google. I imagine Arc managed to do a lot more with their browser with way less money than Mozilla.
Not sure if that's the case, few of my hn posts do get de-ranked on hn very fast such as [1] and [2]. If you can prove it using https://news.social-protocols.org, you should report it to [email protected]
I question whether the numbers they are looking at capture everything that's going on.
$100/mo on Claude Max for me (probably headed to $200/mo by years end). The time saved on tedium, the analytic insights I can generate for clients, and the progress I can make on R&D is difficult to assess and measure within my small business P&L.
Perhaps the average employee at this organization is ill-equipped to make good use of AI. Efficiency and effectiveness might be a function of a good engineer wielding it, while a bad engineer might burn through tokens just to keep up.
Or maybe that's just me in the bargaining stage of my career collapsing.
This is not a "might". That's literally how I've seen it way too many times now.
The same employees that are already not the greatest, that take the longest, that get stuck in rabbit holes the most, that have to be corrected in code review the most (because they took a fundamentally wrong turn/decision and just ran with that) are the ones spending the most tokens to do more of exactly that and "faster".
They still take the longest because they do something with AI, badly, and then try to fix it, with AI, for more and more tokens. They get stuck in rabbit holes because AI takes them there just like they went there before by themselves but now it just also costs tokens on top. Code review usually means you catch a wrong turn within like the second sentence of their three page AI generated PR description that invalidates a huge 1500 line PR entirely. That thing cost lots of tokens and now needs to be redone for eveb more tokens.
The US is 150% of China's GDP (in nominal numbers) [1]. AI claims that China's "purchasing power parity" GDP is $44t compared to $32t for the US. There is no way that the US, which has been the world's largest economy for decades, is 3% of China's GDP.
Exports to the US is about 20% of China's GDP [2].
Regardless of any of China's contingency plans, US exports are well above noise-levels.
Exactly. I had incorrectly assumed that people would use context to make the correct inference, but it looks like prewett ran out of tokens, and failed to parse it.
That's not how you would want to measure this, as it doesn't much matter whether a good is directly exported from China to the US, or whether it is routed through a third country like Vietnam, or used as an intermediate input to a different good which is then exported to the US, etc.
What you should take note of, is that China's trade surplus tracks the US trade deficit extremely closely, and this has been the case for the last 20 years.
Said another way, most nations in the world run roughly balanced trade. There is only one nation on earth that can sustain large and prolonged trade deficits. Only one. That is the US. So if you are a nation whose entire economic strategy rests on running large and sustained trade surpluses, then you are going to be exporting your surplus to the US, directly or indirectly, and only to the US.
Now in practice, some of that will be direct sales to the US, some will be indirect sales to the US, but at the end of the day, if you want to run a 1.2 trillion dollar trade surplus, then you have to hope to God that the US is willing to run at least a trillion dollar trade deficit, because no other country is going to do that for you, the entire rest of the world may be willing to accomodate a hundred billion or so, but for everything else, you will depend on the US, directly or indirectly, to absorb your surplus.
This is a good analysis, but coming full circle - having a trade surplus is not itself a vulnerability. Rather the actual vulnerability would be needing US dollars, to pay for imports (raw materials and whatever else they don't manufacture themselves). If China doesn't need more US dollars (because perhaps they are already holding plenty of treasuries), then they can simply prop up their internal economy with financial stimulus. And longstanding currency controls make it so they can manage this easily. Print yuan to buy that stream of goods that were previously being exported, and just bury them in a hole in the ground. Or more fruitfully, give that yuan away to their poor rural population to boost their standard of living, improving the country and shoring up support for the Party.
I don't think things are so straight forward because everything is connected in ways that are sufficiently complex to defy any sort of straight forward thinking; when you change one thing, 10 other things change and in ways that will invariably end up with completely unexpected outcomes. For the most straight forward example - those things that are exported are not just buried, but end up being used in various processes. And China itself is also heavily dependent on imports, importing upwards of $3 trillion in goods and services. When your exports are no longer available, you may soon find that neither are your imports, and suddenly everything starts breaking.
I was merely responding to the implication that a having trade surplus is itself a vulnerability. There of course may be other constraints whereby China is reliant on external trade, but those are separate arguments.
The reason why you need the dollar is because of the balance of payments identity: changes to the capital account + current account = 0
So to run a current account surplus against the rest of the world of $100, you need to accumulate $100 of financial claims belonging to the rest of the world. There are complexities, for example I switched from "trade surplus" to "current account" because things like interest payments also need to be added in, but with these adjustments, you cannot run prolonged trade surpluses without storing your money in some other nation's jurisdiction.
Now the question is, which nation is willing to accomodate inflows of a trillion dollars a year? That's right, only a single nation is willing to do that. Most nations ban or severely restrict foreign capital inflows. Those that don't ban it, they don't have the necessary financial infrastructure to accomadate the scale of surpluses that China needs to run. This is why I laugh at all these reports of "China is dumping treasuries". China accumulated over a trillion dollars of dollar claims over the last year. That's in addition to what they already had. Why? Because who else would allow those levels of foreign capital inflows into their economy.
So once again, the US is the only nation willing and able to absorb these capital inflows.
Personally, I don't think this is sustainable, it's deindustrializing the US and is highly destabilizing, but since the liberalization of global capital flows launched by the Clinton administration, we have been doing this 30 year experiment in what happens when you let countries print money and use them to buy your bonds. The results have been, in my opinion, highly destabilizing, and it's not going to end well. But many of those who grew up in this period, think this is just how the world works and they can't imagine any other system, one in which capital inflows were highly restricted and as a result, no nation ran large trade surpluses against any other. Or they don't think about this at all and believe that China's hard work and industrial prowess is why they are able to run large trade surpluses, completely ignoring the whole money printing to buy US bonds that is happening in the background. When the US was the world's primary industrial power in the period 1870 - 1920, we ran current account deficits, not surpluses. What China is doing, industrializing while exporting capital -- that is truly unprecedented and possible only due to the combination of fiat non-convertible money combined with the US allowing unrestricted capital inflows. It's a truly bizarre state of affairs.
> you need the dollar is because of the balance of payments identity
This is just tautological with the trade surplus. Yes, the two go hand in hand.
My point is that "trade surplus" is always trotted out as if it is some vulnerability of China's - that if we stop giving them dollars and they stop giving us goods, this would create an unsolvable problem for China's economy.
But this is merely fanciful fiction borne from western thinking where we don't have the political will to take sustained direct action to subsidize domestic industry. But China isn't bound by this! Rather it is merely wishful thinking as if we hold power here.
Hence my focusing on whether China actually needs more dollars (ie is reliant on exporting to get those dollars), or whether they could make do with what they've already saved up in treasuries (and other USD investments) while being unable to export as much to the US. My gut says their economy and industry is now large enough that they could weather it just fine. We're still looking at them as if they are the little kid from the 90's (who would have indeed been hurt if we had never started the arrangement), and failing to see that they are all grown up. The pump has been primed.
> the US is the only nation willing and able to absorb these capital inflows... The results have been, in my opinion, highly destabilizing
In my opinion, the destabilizing results were not inevitable. Rather they were the result of deliberate policies that were kept outside of the Overton window by the entrenched interests who were benefiting from them.
Having others say "I'm willing to accept IOUs from you rather than requiring payment in cold hard cash" (aka having the world reserve currency) is an inherently lucrative position! The downsides can only come from how you react to having that ability - a spendthrift might write IOUs without limit and spend all their cash, making the position itself look like a vulnerability. Whereas a frugal person who wants to avoid that fate but isn't very creative might keep a stack of cash that 1:1 corresponds to IOUs they've issued.
The two deliberate policies of which I speak are 1. USD must always inflate (which precludes the frugal option) 2. the legislature/executive government is prevented from spending the newly created money on (most) deliberate constructive activities (like the industrial subsidies I was talking about above).
So most of the wealth we received from having the world reserve currency (represented in-system by newly created money) was simply given away by the Federal Reserve directly to banks (as low-interest loans) to blindly "invest". This resulted in the everything bubble - unproductive assets as a safe haven, intemperate investment in new industries, but failure to maintain the industries we had (since mature industries don't achieve outsized investment returns).
In a different world the legislature would have spent some of that wealth directly subsidizing domestic industry to maintain it, backed up with laws about not being able to move production lines out of the country. But of course this was not in the interest of the corpo class as it would have meant less money going into their own pockets. Hence it remaining on the fringes of the Overton window. (the one place it did actually happen was the defense industry, of course)
Now that the deindustrialization scam has run its course, the corpo class is on to the next thing - economic consolidation to further cement their position. They're channeling echos of what would have been prudent decisions back in the 90's, which makes grassroots voters think they are finally being listened to. But it's nonsensical to talk of closing the barn door after the horse is long gone, right? So in reality they're pushing upside-down bizarro revanchist economics (like framing strong currency itself as a problem!), to destroy the economy that we actually did develop. Then they can mop up and further centralize.
I was under the impression that AI was terrible for translating Asian languages (at least Chinese, Japanese and Korean) because it doesn't capture certain contextual nuances. Is it actually good now? Are there bilingual speakers who use it and vouch for it?
It’s extremely good. Chinese, Japanese, Korean. Had multiple instances of confusion because the counterparty thought I was actually a native speaker because we had only communicated over text. Both commercial and social contexts. Translation is now effectively solved.
Edit: I should add like all LLM usage, you need to prompt well. I also like to run the translation back through DeepL for a more traditional technology read on it and to identify any obvious issues.
Well I'm grouping these under AI- they have been around a while for sure, but maybe they have reached some kind of critical mass there: I'm imagining people on Chinese social media talking about it as a way to make money.
Also the text to speech is in their own voice. Some are using this as a way to help pronounce english (maybe there is some language training software available for this, I don't know).
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