I think I do, as in I'm pretty sure I've never ever voted for this European Commission thing, neither has any other EU citizen that I know of, and yet they're running the whole show here in Europe. If if walks and quacks like a duck it most certainly is a duck. Granted, they don't have North Korea's interesting military parades, I'll give them that.
Later edit: I think you might me on the wrong understanding path by the so-called "democratic deficit" expression that is often-times used when referring to decision-making inside the EU (and hence to the European Commission, its executive arm), I think "dictatorship" does a much better job of telling things for what they really are.
You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission, though I'm sure you know that, just conveniently decided to leave it out, you're a known troll on Reddit too.
Candidates are not elected by voters but positioned.
Once people have cast their vote, members of the comission are not automatically determined but negotiated across political families, and the bureaucracy.
Time to tear down this ridiculous administrative, bureaucratic, corporative and very expensive leviathan.
> You've voted for the people who elect the European Commission
And they 'magically' approved a short list of US-lobby-backed unelected personas for leadership positions, who are pushing everything ranging from the chat control law to this privacy-killing 'deregulation', while ruining Eu's trade relationships with everyone from China to Africa to boot.
The ability of citizens to vote doesn’t make the country not a dictatorship. There are many examples here, e.g., Russia, multiple middle eastern countries, etc.
Brexit worked out so well that it basically quelled any dreams of other EU countries exiting after seeing it just creates a lot of headaches and almost no benefit to then just go back to having trade agreements with the EU while not being part of it.
> 6GHz barely makes it through a concrete wall, so you're only receiving your own AP, so you have the whole bandwith mostly to yourself.
I agree with this and the fact that 6GHz should still be available for wifi, but this whole bandwidth frenzy over wifi has always seemed like a meme for anyone except power users. A 4K netflix stream caps out around 15mbps, so >95% of typical home users will be just fine using 2.4/5GHz inside their own homes.
You've got to take into account that those bandwidth figures exist on paper only - nobody is getting 5Gbps out of their wifi.
In practice it is all about degraded performance. If you're sitting in another room than the AP, close to your neighbour, do you want to be left with 50Mbps remaining out of the original 5000Mbps, or 2Mbps remaining out of the original 200Mpbs?
Yeah, but that's just because Netflix streams are ridiculiously over compressed -- they use extremely low quality encodes. It's technically a "4K" stream, sure, but at a bitrate only realistically capable of 1080p.
An actual 4K stream (one capable of expected resolution at 4K) is around 30 to 40mbps.
This ~10 to 20 Mbps is enough nonsense is like claiming that 24 fps is enough to play games.
I mean sure, its usable, but its not good. You can notice the differences in buffering / scrubbing speed well into the 100+ mbps range.
Plus being able to download and upload files quickly. Particularly from something like a home NAS, is important. 15 mbps is like using a shitty USB 2 stick for everything!
But your home NAS should be on ethernet? Who would buy a NAS and then not wire it in??
The point here is that only devices like a TV, mobile, tablet or laptop should be on WiFi and it's pretty hard to notice the difference between say 50Mbps and 500Mbps on any of those except maybe if you are moving files around on your laptop.
Family of 4 comes home after a long day out, all plug in their phones at the same time to charge and drop down in the sofa to vegetate in front of Netflix. Why is it buffering so bad?!?
Traffic is bursty. Higher bandwidth connections make the whole internet more efficient - if you can race to idle then servers have fewer concurrent connections to keep track of, routers can more quickly clean up their NAT tables etc etc
For app stores specifically, I don't think people would get apps from other App Stores. Alternative App Stores have been possible on Android, some manufacturers even include their own store (Samsung), but only a tiny subset of users installs apps from another app store or from outside the app store.
For me personally, it is mostly an escape hatch for developers and users. It will keep Apple honest, because if they really mess up the platform, people have the possibility to go elsewhere.
I think the bigger risk for Apple is allowing other payment options within apps that are distributed through the App Store (which I believe is now allowed in the EU among other places)? I think the app store is very sticky, but a lot of people would pick another payment option if is ~30% cheaper.
Apple is also forced to allow alternate payment options in the USA as a result of the Epic lawsuit. The original ruling was fairly permissive about letting Apple set terms and collect fees, but the terms Apple set were so onerous and the fees so high that the judge determined them to be noncompliant and took away Apple's ability to do that.
Because doing so would have generated goodwill, which would have lead to a stronger brand and more money in the long term. Instead, they shot themselves in the foot and put themselves in a situation where the launch of a new product (Vision Pro) was an embarrassing and utter failure with lacklustre support from third-parties.
It is a shame that people want to believe that companies are or will be good. Or that they should even be given "human" expectations. Companies are not people and should not be afforded being treated as such. A companies function, especially if it is a publically-traded company is to continuously provide greater return for investors, so say the majority of prospectus. What we the people, regardless of country, need to start doing is holding the company heads to account, perhaps if the threat of execution (is China right here?) could "make" the company/people good? Something needs to be done before everything we have and "are" as a human will be, is a subscription to life.
> It is a shame that people want to believe that companies are or will be good. Or that they should even be given "human" expectations.
That’s not the argument at all. I don’t understand the point of your response, it has nothing to do with the points made in my comment. I’m not defending Apple, I’m doing the opposite.
Doubt they would have been considered “goodwill”. Investors would complain they are doing their fiscal responsibilities. Customers and companies would complain they didn’t do it soon enough and still didn’t do enough. And if people started having issues with their phones because of side loading they would not blame themselves they would blame Apple for allowing them to do so and potentially hurting the brand. Vision Pro as a test of hardware capabilities seems to be going as one would expect at the current price points. Once they release their first consumer focused glasses as an accessible price point, that will be the real test of the product category.
> Doubt they would have been considered “goodwill”.
Perhaps you haven’t been following Apple for long? There was definitely a period, not that long ago, where they had a lot of goodwill from third-party developers, especially indies, and that has steadily been eroded under Tim Cook.
They also took stances that were (or appeared to be) principled, which again placed them at a high degree of trust and goodwill (deserved or not isn’t the point, they had it) when compared to competitors.
> And if people started having issues with their phones because of side loading
I’m not talking about or suggesting side loading at all. That’s an entirely orthogonal matter.
> Vision Pro as a test of hardware capabilities seems to be going as one would expect at the current price points.
Vision Pro is not a “a test of hardware capabilities”. It’s not an SDK, it’s a product marketed and sold at regular people, it’s described by Apple as a product you can use for enterntainment and work, not an experiment. And it had essentially no adherence from companies and developers, there’s not even an official YouTube app, for a device where one of the major use cases is watching video.
Tim Cook's most important customer is Wall St, granted that is every CEO these days.
The enshittification ceiling is pretty damn high but I get the intuitive sense the profit at all cost model's long term downsides are going to start showing up for dinner soon.
Generating goodwill doesn’t mean that you’re a paragon of virtue, you don’t even have to be good, it just means people perceive you positively. It’s fine to think people shouldn’t view for-profit companies positively, but arguing that doesn’t happen or that the two are incompatible is detached from reality.
Yeah but the reality of the microSD card is weird. E.g. Eufy puts the video on the card but encrypts it so you have to pull it through the camera through the app to your phone.
It's hilariously crazy but we were given the cams as a gift so we stuck with them.
That's always annoyed me about Eufy, but it hasn't been a practical problem given they're mounted in hard-to-reach areas. I think the feature is to avoid a thief being able to view the footage. I like that they support RTSP access for a NAS/live viewing without their bloated app.
My parents bought a camcorder in 1995 and "self-hosted" the video just fine. But you're right it shouldn't even be something consumers should consider, because it should be the default and should be easy. You can get low power SSD-powered NAS devices now so hopefully this will change soon.
I meant more that in the abstract technical sense it's not that hard of a problem, but I agree that given the options available to consumers it is hard.
If UniFi Protect was re-skinned and had a bunch of its security camera complexity removed and optimized for the baby-camera use case it'd be normal consumer level friendly.
The baby monitor could have its own SD card and webserver and then you provide a smartphone app which uses local network discovery to find the server and talk to it.
In that case no parent needs to know about Synology or even IP addresses.
> In that case no parent needs to know about Synology or even IP addresses.
But they need to know about networking enough to be on the same network. I understand that sounds easy, but every time someone gets confused about their cursed setup the company making the device will get a returned product and an angry review. Client isolation, multiple wifi networks, some devices being on wifi some on the mobile network.
Companies are making it harder and harder to use, or at least to understand how to use, your own network for anything other than "get Internet on device"
There is no technical requirement for an easy-to-use baby monitor to be cloud-connected. If there is no easy-to-use baby monitor which is not cloud-connected, that is a market problem, not a technical problem.
> There is no technical requirement for an easy-to-use baby monitor to be cloud-connected.
A common use case for baby monitors is being able to wander short distances away and still listen in: Work in yard, talk to a neighbor, go out to the detached garage.
Having a baby monitor which is not tethered to the WiFi coverage is a selling point. Many cheap monitors are WiFi connected or use their own WiFi network and the range is limited.
A lot of people in this thread are also completely missing the selling points of Nanit which include breathing tracking and sleep tracking features. It’s a product that could technically be implemented locally with enough extra processing power and cloud servers for coordinating out of home access and bouncing notifications, but obviously the number of people who would pay extra for that (instead of trying to roll their own solution HN style) is not large.
It's more that a typical parent has not thought of the need to have a baby monitor, until they have a baby (in which case, they're too busy to build out their own baby monitor stack).
Pay money to solve a problem and time-save as a parent is a valid business idea/strategy. The externalities that the parents might suffer if these businesses do not completely adhere to good security practices don't seem to come back to bite them (and most parents get lucky and not have any bad consequences - yet).
Maybe you want it to be easy to grant a babysitter access to the cameras temporarily and not bother getting them VPN'en into your CCTV network.
Maybe you want to check up on the babysitter (as creepy as that sounds, there might be good reasons). Or you're traveling but your partner is home, and you want to be able to see your sleeping child from half a world away.
I do think we've gone to far in the direction of cloud-only, but I don't think it's a bad option of have. The problem I have is that many of the companies running these services have really terrible security. So for S3 for a nanny cam, I'd assume that each customer have their own bucket, with their own credentials, but I doubt that's the case.
"Human-like decision maker" except it's just as if not more unpredictable than a human, has no understanding of what it's actually outputting or the impact of it, and it isn't concerned with losing their job or facing legal repercussions for their actions.
There are plenty of ways to manage those drawbacks, and a mind-boggling number of use cases where it's "good enough" already.
But it's not my job to convince you, my lived experience working with the tech is enough to convince me, and that's all I care about, to be honest. Everyone else will get there sooner or later.
There's plenty of laws they write that they know the population can't reasonably comply with and give the government discretionary power to screw people. And then there's more laws that just give the government enforcement arm discretionary power to choose whether the law is applicable or exercise unilateral judgement regarding whether compliance is satisfactory.
Your local zoning code is probably chock full of them. And if not there then your local stormwater/runoff rules probably have a bunch of examples too.
Federal stuff is much more highly litigated so you don't see as much of it there. State is a middle ground.
