This feels like romanticizing the past. There are plenty of people today writing articles that claim to be taking a “scientific, serious approach” to, say, astral projection and people who will casually discuss such topics over coffee.
Apple claimed during WWDC ‘22 that 79% of U.S. buyers would only buy a car if it was “CarPlay-capable”. Biased source, sure, but the data indicates most consumers value music, maps, and voice assistant in their cars and the manufacturers are responding with about 98% of new cars supporting them.
Even if there is a chance it’s all a mirage, wouldn’t it be better to behave as if these and other creatures have an inner life?
Appealing to the philosophical zombie seems like an excuse to discard that our actions might cause real suffering from their perspective, on the unknowable chance they don’t mind.
On focal depth: In the real world you can look at an object close up and your eyes will adjust so that it is clear and objects at other ranges are blurry. Then, when you look at an object far away your eyes re-adjust focus.
You can test this by looking at your hand 6” from your face so it partially blocks your keyboard a couple feet away. You’ll notice that either the keys are blurry or your hand is as you shift focus between the two.
Future gen headsets will use eye tracking to understand which object in a scene you are looking at, and make that object sharp while making other objects blurry. This helps produce more realistic depth, while also dramatically improving performance as most of the scene can be rendered in lower resolution.
I worked at FB in a partner team and this isn’t exactly what happened.
When these products were chartered Clubhouse was in the middle of a massive upswing and the industry was convinced that live audio was the next format threat akin to TikTok’s short form videos or Snap’s stories format. Just as we’ve seen with those formats, every big company got the wheels turning to compete in the space.
It turned out that the hype around Clubhouse was because it was a particularly great product for tech influencers (VC and media), but consumer experience wasn’t enough to cross the chasm and retain users at scale. When it became clear that Clubhouse was destined to be more like Houseparty than TikTok, all the big platforms except for Twitter basically cooled on the space and focused elsewhere.
Do you have a position on a better alternative business model, or do you feel that a service like YouTube shouldn't exist?
It seems to me that YouTube and many of the ad-supported services out there provide broad benefits to people, and I am swayed by OPs point that a regressively priced business model which restricts these benefits to the global rich is a greater disservice.
If plant-based cheese is ever going to gain mainstream acceptance, it will be necessary to fall under the "cheese" category alongside cow, goat, and other animal-based cheeses. The founder of Impossible Foods has a great framing on this about targeting meat-eaters with a substitute, rather than going after the much smaller group of highly incentivized vegetarians/vegans.
There are multiple legal fights by animal agriculture lobbying groups to exclude plant-based products from using the meat/cheese/egg terms, specifically (IMO) to try to maintain the status quo and prevent these products from gaining traction.
Ultimately there are no natural laws governing language, and given the above acceptance of plant-based products under these terms is a fight worth fighting for anyone hoping to see them gain traction and mainstream acceptance.
They also say, "We're in the business of making software, and a few tangential things that touch that edge."
Advocacy on the policies of one of the world's foremost software distribution gatekeeper seems well within how they define "their business". I don't think it takes much squinting to see how they can view this sort of advocacy as in their lane, while the popular political discussions of the day are not.
There are pros and cons to growing up in a smaller metro. While having access to top tier culture and internships are great, there’s also a grueling competition to stand out.
In SV, the pressure on kids and parents seems extreme even at the median. While there are less opportunities and resources overall in a small metro, it’s all available to an ambitious child.
In the end, at least some small town kids are out-sprinting the “competitive city” kids and taking their loot back home. Otherwise we wouldn’t have all these articles about it.
I think this is the better approach. OP’s take feels almost nihilistic in disregarding any urge to “catch up” with peers or role models.
We can acknowledge that others have gone further, faster in an area and use that as motivation without falling into despair.
At the same time, life is about managing trade offs across many aspects. Often investing in one area means taking from another, and just because someone is further in one area, doesn’t mean their whole life is richer.
+1 as a current member of a Big Tech product org and a trained journalist.
The basic information gathering skills of a junior reporter would be completely foreign to most engineers. These are real skills like navigating a FOIA request or pulling financial information from public filings. Soft skills like effective interviewing, structuring an article, translating technical topics to non-technical audiences, writing good headlines.
If your idea of a functional newsroom is a wordpress instance, sure, but the hubris here is cringeworthy and demonstrates a clear misunderstanding of the work that goes into good reporting.
To that end, they do appear to be making a genuine effort pushing the Impossible Whopper with a television campaign and, at least in the bay area, placement on the combo board.
This accounting, while pointed, aligns with most of the reporting and the facts of the case.
I spent some months at Oberlin years ago in close contact with student organizers there. Nothing about this case is too surprising. It's a boring town with arguably the nation's most progressive politics and many students looking for something, anything, to organize around.
The ultimate solution here, I think, is to allow creators to encode the desired setting, frame rate, or content category in the metadata so that a user can benefit from the technology when watching sports without it detracting from a film later on. Then the default setting could be "auto" and diehards could override one way or the other.
I'm glad to see a brief tip to that solution in the article and hope it becomes part of an industry specification.