US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.
You wouldn't know where performance ends and the market begins. Elon bought his audience with performative outrage, he'll be locked in the pillory of public perception until he's a corpse with a dainty "T" logo tattooed on the asscheeks. This is what he wanted - dark comedy, transgressive politics, edgy juvenile quips, now it's all "performative outrage" when people react? When taxpaying Americans and corporate entities respond rationally to racism, antisemitism and sexism?
Elon never outsmarted the federal admin, and he can't convince anyone that he was too retarded to understand the consequences. He's the most embarrassing type of failure, now - a midwit, the man with no plan who went for the king and missed. He be bet it all on black, and struck out hard. He didn't even manage the shoo-in proof for Trump being a pedophile. Now bipartisan politics will resent him forever, and ensure he and his businesses would rather be dead. All because Big Balls told Mr. Silly he could make a killing in politics, what a touching little sob story.
I say this as a Starlink early adopter, general Elon apologist and space buff for life: if you actually think this is an insincere reaction, try copying any of Elon's mannerisms around normal people and watch how they treat you. You'll be a social pariah come Monday.
Apple is undeserving of its popular reputation as a leader in user interface. The article points out only a sampling of the egregious human interface issues with Apple software and devices. Whether it's iOS, CarPlay, or any other Apple software, they're all dramatically overrated. The trouble is, many of the alternatives are even worse. Android? Also awful. Most OEM infotainment systems? Even worse than CarPlay. I feel Apple is well-regarded simply because it's the lesser among several bad options.
We need a viable third option in mobile operating systems. At least with cars, we have high-quality infotainment systems such as those from Tesla and Rivian. In the mobile phone space, we have tow poor options and a few alternatives with vanishingly small market share.
I've been wanting a computing model I call PAO [1] for a long time. PAO would run personal application "servers" and connect dynamic clients across all devices. PAO is centralized, but centralized per user, and operating at their discretion. It avoids synchronization, complex concurrent data structures, and many other problems associated with alternatives. Its weakness is a need for always-on networks, but that complication seems ever easier to accept as omnipresent networks become realistic.
> Light mode might be annoying to read in no-light environments, but dark mode is nigh impossible to read in high-light environments.
Backlit screens are difficult to read in high-light environments regardless of whether you're reading black text on white or white text on black. I use white-on-black ("dark mode") on my e-ink Kindle to read outside all the time. And the same is true on our Daylight computer. White-on-black remains my preference in high-light environments.
I switched to T-Mobile at the last upgrade interval because of this. My family looks forward to no longer relying on Garmin InReach devices when out hiking.
Initially I thought the same re: hiking, skiing etc. The only issue I see is that cellphone battery life is terrible compared to inReach like devices. Not sure I'd want to depend on it for longer than a few hours.
Good news: people who pay more still get all those benefits.
And now, other people have some access (if non-optimal) to rescue services, despite the fact that they didn't (or couldn't afford to) pay more for inReach.
Same. Done a few trips to alaska and had to coordinate pickups and food drops via garmin inreach. Battery life on those is way better and more durable.
Modern smartphones can hold the battery for over a week with minimal usage. You could just turn data on when every few hours or so. It's not automated though.
At least my work S24 says ~16 days in airplane mode + power saver. Not tested.
With an inReach I have the option of periodically tracking my position and uploading that to a site my loved ones can check. Even whilst doing this I can leave the device on for a multi-day trip without worrying about battery drain. I'm not saying you couldn't do this with a cell phone, but the inReach is just a more robust solution for a safety critical application.
> The only issue I see is that cellphone battery life is terrible compared to inReach like devices. Not sure I'd want to depend on it for longer than a few hours.
I think it depends on the application you're using it for.
If you're constantly using the gps - yeah, I'd definitely agree with you.
But if you're using it purely for emergency communication, you can just turn off the cell phone, and it should be fine.
It's also possible to pursue a hybrid approach by bringing a battery to change the phone.
If you have zero signal, modern iPhone allows you to connect to satellite and text using iMessage. I just used it this week multiple times during massive Pacific Northwest blackout.
Works surprisingly well. You have to be outside and hold iPhone in the specifics position pointed at satellite, it tells you where to turn iPhone to to get signal.
You can initiate a conversation with anyone while you are connected via satellite. But you do need to set up an emergency contact and/or Family Sharing Group if you want to connect via satellite and receive messages that were sent to you while you were offline.
(I’m referring to the "Messages via Satellite" feature that launched two months ago in iOS 18. This is different from the "Emergency SOS via Satellite" feature that has been around since 2022.)
I'd still carry an old-school PLB (not a satellite messenger subscription service) for the enduring battery-life, ruggedness, and reliability when it matters. And use LTE-Starlink for the basic non-urgent but super convenient communication needs.
this is how i feel. especially in the cold. for a lot of the stuff i do, i'm not gonna trust my life on a glass screen with a battery that doesn't work well in the cold.
Software lag isn't unique to touchscreens. Software lag is always a terrible thing, and developers who de-prioritize performance should be ashamed, but that is true regardless of what input is used.
It's kinda bearable with buttons because you get feedback. The ATM I use isn't the speediest thing but the buttons have a very tactile feel and it beeps at you for every press. It might not be "impressive", but it does cause forty dollars to appear and that's really all I wanted from it.
Now ask anyone with a touch screen in their car what their error rate on that thing is. Even the really good ones are pretty bad.
Physical buttons allow for memorized action sequences, though. As long as the input layer has some kind of FIFO buffer, it doesn't really matter how much lag the actual application has. If "call home" is always just "button A, 3x button B, button C" it is absolutely trivial to repeat that without even looking at the screen.
Touchscreens don't work quite as well for this. Even if it allows for input queuing, you often still need the previous screen to finish drawing to have a frame-of-reference for your presses. Even the slightest delay turns into an annoyance, and when it involves some kind of drag-scrolling a 50ms delay already becomes unbearable.
A touch screen imposes additional lag, though. Detecting finger swipes for left/right, for example, requires more processing than spinning a fucking dial or pressing on a button. But, like you said, performance doesn't matter anymore to the companies that design these interfaces. We should have criminal laws for this type of thing along with the return to proper hardware interfaces. Lack of performance should be a criminal offense.
> Yes I do prefer analog controls. Dials for heat. Open close flaps for vents. On off switches.
Dials and switches can be fully digital (e.g., dials can be free-spinning, without locks at each end of a setting). So preferring dials and switches seems reasonable. But flaps for vents are very difficult to automate. Returning to manual flaps in cars would mean losing modern cars' ability to associate and restore HVAC vent preferences with driver profiles. It would mean returning to the time when it was actually necessary to adjust the HVAC vents every time you swapped drivers. While setting vent preferences on the screen may take a second or two longer than manually setting them, thanks to the setting being associated with my driver profile, it's a set-once-and-forget-forever setting. The net time and annoyance savings is large.
Surely climate controls change far more based on the weather at the current moment than on the preference of the individual drivers? My wife and I have polar opposite preferences for cabin temperature and airflow, but even if the car remembered our preferred settings we would both be changing them frequently anyway.
I would much rather retain the ability to quickly change temp or re-orient a blower without taking my eyes off the road than for the car to remember that I like it cool and breezy and she likes it like a furnace.
Thanks for explaining something I've never understood. I still think it is silly, tho - it makes sense only if each driver always wants vents pointing at the same place. my preferences change by season, by day, by hour, so needing to go through a screen is a time-loss and annoyance generator, not vice-versa.
For me there's no set-and-forget-forever setting. Depending on the weather, how I'm dressed, how many other people in the car, whether there's a smelly diesel truck ahead, etc., that's a setting I need to change all the time.
I guess everyone is different, but what you described absolutely doesn't resonate with me. I never have adjusted my HVAC vents after their initial configuration. Winter, summer, whatever. I always want the air to flow the same way.
Same. That's the beauty of automatic thermostats. They target the temperature you specify automatically. So you specify your favorite temperature once and never interact with them again.
> But flaps for vents are very difficult to automate.
Why? If I'm correctly understanding what you're saying here:
> While setting vent preferences on the screen may take a second or two longer than manually setting them, thanks to the setting being associated with my driver profile, it's a set-once-and-forget-forever setting.
it sounds like vent position is already computer-controlled. Do I misunderstand?
So, take the "move the vent up, down, left, right, more open, more shut" controls that you indicate exist on the touchscreen and wire them up to sensibly-positioned freewheeling/non-stop/whatever wheels that have lights embedded in them to indicate the actual position of the controlled aspect of the vent. [EDIT: For bonus points, you could use force-feedback motors in the wheels to indicate when you've hit the edge of travel for the controlled vent aspect. (Assuming that Sony doesn't hold a PS5-era bad patent on force-feedback tech.)]
Previously, it seemed the sliding sync required a Postgres-backed Synapse installation. Does the Matrix 2.0 version of Synapse provide a seamless upgrade path for those using the default Sqlite installation?
Yes. the sliding sync proxy shim is gone; Synapse now uses its native database for sliding sync, same as the old sync API - so it works with both postgres & sqlite.
US Executive Orders 14110 and 14141 did create fairly onerous regulatory regimes that could have constrained the dynamism of the marketplace. However, my understanding is that both have been rescinded, so they do not currently post a real threat.
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