I have no problem with the frontier labs releasing their own harnesses. But locking the subscriptions to those harnesses is frustrating. Much like the other tools I use in my job I have a lot of reasons to use my own tooling. I would like to use my own harness with a subscription so it can be more useful to me. I'm sure I'm not the only one. I understand why they don't from a business perspective but it still makes their product less useful to me.
Been using these Gemini models through cursor at work, I think it's API cost for the business. I've been loving these models but you're very right that I won't use them at home or with a better harness than cursor (which is extremely basic) because it's not possible.
Or to restate another way, most modern programming languages are a highly specialized and specific dialect of english. Perhaps it's possible that with AI we will find a new but equally specialized and specific enough dialect of english for interacting with it when generating code. But then you just re-invented a new programming language for people to learn.
I mean, among real coffee snobs the status symbol is mostly not using a Keurig or Lavazza machine at all. Pour overs, Espresso machines, most status symbol coffee equipment is pretty light on the plastic already.
I think it's less about status or quality and more about a convenient cup of complimentary coffee in a waiting room that doesn't come with two ounces of environmental guilt.
Yeah, my normal morning coffee for my wife and I is from a Kalita Wave glass brewer. No plastic touches the coffee. Costs $40. Ceramic or stainless steel also available.
This. Anyone serious about coffee who is not going with one of these machines purely for convenience and speed would not otherwise consider them in a million years.
Why? Apple devices have the best battery life in the market right now to my knowledge. It's an important part of the evaluation for a laptop which is the opposite of cringe.
Actually, they don’t! Intel Core Ultra Series 3 beats Apple laptops as of the M5 on battery life.
IIRC the Framework 13 Pro beats the MacBook Pro at both video streaming tests and office productivity with 300 bits brightness tests. (Framework live-streamed the video playback test, and the office provided productivity tests I referred to were done by Just Josh Tech)
Perhaps the M6 has leapfrogged but that remains to be seen.
In usual developer type tasks, among my friend group what I hear is that panther lake laptops are competitive with M4 laptops. But, M4s do that with a 55Wh battery, whereas most panther lake laptops come with a 70Wh battery. So if you're discussing chip performance per watt then it's probably an edge to apple silicon.
I did. I am seeing single core geekbench scores of 2700 compared to my MacBook Air at 3500. This, for a laptop that is thicker and heavier than my air.
1. It’s Geekbench, not a real experience of using the system. A geekbench number being xx% slower doesn’t mean that the system is xx% slower at doing tasks. It’s a synthetic benchmark.
2. The Intel chips beat out the M5 in multi-core and GPU.
3. These Geekbench scores are close enough that they are in the same performance class. We aren’t talking about 1,000 versus 3,500. The end user isn’t noticing a performance difference between 2700 and 3500, especially since that number is single core only (most workloads can take advantage of multiple threads these days).
Even if we concede that the Intel chip is slower for single core tasks only we can’t just lie and say it’s not in the same performance class. It’s very clearly comparable by objective data.
What we can say definitively by objective measures is that Intel is behind by a year at most, which essentially doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of “which laptop to I buy?” It’s close enough that the processor shouldn’t be part of the buying consideration for the majority of consumers. Intel is not years and years behind what Apple is putting out there, this is not the M1 where Apple was beating Intel in performance and getting double the battery life. We are looking at much more incremental differences where the buyer will not notice a difference over the lifespan of the product.
multi core scores? So you'll happily accept a 100,000-core pentium one class CPU to replace your laptop? it will have higher multicore score. No? Really? Oh? why not?
It was the logical conclusion of your claim that multicore score matters more. Lots of tasks are serial not parallel, that is why single core score matters.
in my original post, i said "perf", i am not sure what you imagined, but i am not moving anything, geekbench single core score is a perfectly reasonable thing to measure under the name "perf"
I recall seeing some crazy stats like 41+ hours maybe on a snapdragon processor w/windows. I imagine your screen brightness would have to be like 99% dark and not playing videos is my guess.
I think this is probably a good way to think about it. Breadth is going to be important if you want to reasonably navigate the new world. In an emergency even if you are using an agent you will be much quicker if you know what questions to ask the agent and how to guide it.
I would argue that recognizing if the agent is an adversary also requires breadth and a willingness to dive deep when you need to. Both things that the article highlights.
Before agents that is what every high performing person I've ever worked with was like. It was the kind of person I wanted to hire when I was in charge of that sort of thing. Enough breadth to know where to dive deep and enough willingness and curiosity to dive deep.
You sound like you are projecting a bunch of motivations and assumptions about character onto other people. But you projecting such things onto another person is a terrible way to begin to understand something.
There are genuinely people who enjoy learning how something works by doing smaller scale versions of it themselves. This site happens to have a much higher average percentage of them than most other places.
I'm blind. Apple has explicitly said they wouldn't consider the "bloody ROI" of accessibility (will fund it no matter what). This is important to me. Software freedom is also important to me. What am I to do?
Pick your priorities. There will never exist enough products to check all of the boxes that all of the people say is important to them. There is someone out there who would much rather have a product cost some amount less at the cost of accessibility features but they think a device that 'just works' is important so they buy the iPhone anyway.
The point is that your conclusion here is both the correct/obvious one, and that it ensures one explicitly cannot vote with their wallet. They have priorities too significant to be able to take part in the protest. They are invisible to the company they WANT to vote for.
Perhaps what allows Apple is to be better at certain things like that or security for average consumer is indeed at odds with some aspirations? At least in practice, not utopian dreams, that seems to be the case.
So you vote with your wallet for accessibility despite freedom and the rest of hacker news do the opposite and it all works itself out.
You grab an Android phone anyways because Android accessibility is very much on par or even better than whatever slop Apple is putting out with VoiceOver these days, and developers also somewhat care about it more on Android.
You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Even this long is too long. Apple devices don’t just provide better accessibility, they make lives easier by providing better accessibility, Android lagging behind is not just a matter of feature-parity, it’s an entire ecosystem making it harder for people to engage with itself.
- Apple's own UI is widely non accessible and noncompliant. Their toggles are an accessibility nightmare, for example.
- VoiceOver is notoriously non-customizable. It's good enough for blind users, and catastrophic for any motor issues. All of Apple's accessibility is entirely focused over on blind users. Your grandma with the shakes can go fuck herself however.
- VoiceOver is catastrophically unaware of context. I can't count the times it read "Walk fifteen em" instead of Walk 15 meters.
- Apple's solution to accessibility is to not care about their apps and to just make an "accessible" copy.
- Implementing accessibility properly in UIKit/SwiftUI is a kludgey piece of shit where it's extremely common to see people entirely modifying how text is being read, which in an accessibility nightmare and only considers basically blind users.
Source: the software I work on has to be 80%+ accessible, with regular accessibility audits and a panel of various users.
> You're also going to benefit from European mandates to have accessible mobile apps anyways, it's coming for free to you.
Not true, the EU tried to become a regulatory superpower and largely failed to export its rules to the rest of the world. Instead, Apple and Google just aren't bringing new features to the EU anymore.
That was the UK because it was Apple complying with a specific UK law that says the government must be able to access everyone's phones at all times.
The more common one is GDPR. Things like AI features come to Europe late, or don't come at all, because it's illegal to just record everyone all the time and transmit that information back to the mothership, which is what the feature does.
If you know of any company that would bother to spend days making accessibility improvements, yet for some reason decide to not bring those to the US release, they're the dumbest fucking company in existence.
The EU accessibility mandates will be followed by apps, not by platforms. I don't care if Apple Music wants to keep being trash, Spotify, Deezer and Tidal will improve and lift everyone with it.
What banking business? Use a web browser, or just bank in person like everyone did not long ago. Carry a credit card instead of Apple/Google Pay. That's what degoogled Android users do and it's a very minor inconvenience anyone with a little bit of maturity should be able to accept. Also, cash is much better for your privacy.
And if you require a one-time SMS code for purchase (which can be adjusted via their website, most likely), then you still have an option that is not Apple and Google. I use a dumbphone for "banking" (SMS)... and a credit card, and the website. Those are really all the 3 things I need to do banking, as you have said so correctly.
Choose a different bank, then. I've gradually stopped using the phone apps, not really by design but just because I don't often feel like that works better than the real web site. Both USAA and my local credit union have perfectly good desktop web sites.
More info on this is going to come out, but banks are going through hell right now with AI agents accessing user accounts and even firing off transfers and other accounts activity, and their legal teams are losing their minds.
So a bank shutting down a website right now and the "forcing" some Google/Apple "verification" makes a lot of sense in that context.
Belfius for example of you have ever used itsme with them. Also Digi (a mobile phone company in Belgium) since it uses itsme for authentication. Itsme is strictly an Android and iOS app.
Somebody downvoted you but I agree: I must use a banking app to either enter a code or use my fingerprint to authorize operations, login included. No bank is using SMSes anymore here (Italy.)
SMS are an American thing. Only credit card companies are using them and they are American.
The country I live in (VN) recently banned online banking without using a mobile app and biometric verification via selfie. The sites had to withdraw access.
If an entity has a product that has a trillion people choosing it, the marginal benefit to society to build an entirely new product for 1000 people or so isn't worth it. The people whose time would be required to produce that second product for a very, very small 1,000 person market would better serve society by working on other goals.
Nor should those 1,000 people get to try to use the government to tell the other trillion what product they should have to buy.
Nobody is trying to bar anyone from anything. We are talking about options. We need ways out, otherwise it's an unfair market and all we get is enshittification.
Yes, I can vote with my wallet, but no, it doesn't make a difference. I've been voting with my wallet since day 1 by never buying an iPhone because of how closed it is, and unsurprisingly, this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
You and I have very different definitions of "take away".
I also think you might benefit from rereading the context here; someone said that government regulation is needed to make the iPhone ecosystem open, and someone else disagreed on the basis that voting with one's wallet is a viable alternative. I disagreed with that disagreement, arguing that voting with one's wallet doesn't produce the change that the original commenter said regulation was needed for; telling me "that's not what voting with your wallet does" is redundant, because that's literally what I was already saying. You're certainly entitled to disagree with my opinion that making the ecosystem more open is a desirable goal, but that's not a premise I introduced here, so if disagreeing with that is your intention, it's unclear to me why you picked out my comment as the one to express that when the original statement of that goal was several parent comments up from mine.
It's not redundant and he isn't disagreeing with your opinion about openness. He's saying that it's immoral to want to force your personal preferences about phone design on other people.
Buying a phone you like? Moral.
Trying to force every phone to be one you like? Immoral.
That's all it's about. Not a difference in definitions or confusing on his part, he's just saying you've got morality all wrong and need to reconsider your position.
Again, my comment that he responded to literally was just making a claim that the iPhone ecosystem is not going to become more open due to voting with one's wallet. Yes, I obviously also think it should be more open, and that's an opinion that someone can strongly disagree with, but that's not what I was saying in the comment he responded to, because whether an action is moral or not is irrelevant to the question of whether it would produce a certain effect.
My point in the comment you responded to is that if person A says "we need to eat more vegetables to be healthy", person B says "no, you will be healthy if you only eat meat", and person C says "I tried only eating meat and I was unhealthy, so I think that's evidence that meat alone might not make you healthy", it's a non-sequitur to respond to person C by saying "it's immoral for you to say someone else should eat vegetables". If you responded to person A saying that, it wouldn't be as weird, but to remain silent when person A and B are debating the health effects of vegetables but then suddenly take issue with person C trying to provide evidence about whether the claims for A and B are correct or when they didn't introduce the topic that you have moral opinions on is very weird.
That is like saying prosecuting murder is immoral because it is taking away the murderer and victims rights.
For a society to function there needs to be balance. ‘You can do whatever you want as long as enough people pay you to cover your bills’ gets bleak fast.
It's not like that because nothing to do with iPhone security is comparable to murder.
There's a whole set of philosophies on this topic, for example the non-aggression principle. You can't just make an arbitrary comparison and then use it to argue for your position.
> Especially when you look at the malware and viruses that don't exist, because it's so protected.
There are fewer viruses on Linux than on Windows, despite being far more open. I imagine your response will be that there are a lot more iPhone users than Linux ones, but my point is that there are a lot more factors than treating "open or closed" as a binary, and at best you can make a principled hypothesis about why something doesn't exist. For all you know, maybe making it more open would allow security researchers to find and report more potential attack vectors; extra attention from being more widely used cuts both ways.
If you did that then you probably made clear your reasons which probably created mindshare with others which probably has helped the EU open up the iPhone. Don’t be so defeatist because the outcome isn’t immediately apparent.
I'm not being defeatist; I'm pretty much arguing for what you're saying, which is that I think government intervention is needed. The parent comment I was responding to said that regulation isn't needed because voting with our wallets is sufficient, and I was disagreeing.
Convincing people to vote with their wallets is much easier than convincing them to write their pols to make laws. The latter is much harder while the former allows a message to be spread. Should people do both? Yes.
Sure, I just don't see how you read my comments as inconsistent with that viewpoint though. Literally the only point I was trying to make was that when a parent comment said regulation is necessary, and someone responded "No it's not. You can vote with your wallet right now.", I thought that was a very weak counterargument to the idea that we needed regulation.
The responses to my rebuttal are honestly confusing to me; one person seems to think that I'm arguing against voting with your wallet (which seems bizarre, given that my comment was literally saying that's something I actively do), one person seems to think I introduced the idea that Apple should have a more open ecosystem to the conversation rather than inheriting it as a premise from the grandparent comment, and one person upvoted my comment. I have absolutely no clue how three different people managed to read something completely different from my comment when the context and content seems clear to me, but I guess I'm missing something here because the point that I thought would be apparent is not consistently being understood.
> this has done absolutely nothing to change how open the iPhone is.
And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
I can only speak for my replies but you were too concise on your opinion that it spawned multiple interpretations. Brevity breeds misinterpretations or something or other.
> And tell me how that doesn’t sound defeatist or come off as giving up on voting with your wallet.
"This" has done nothing doesn't imply "nothing will do anything". From my perspective, it sounds like you basically were assuming that anything I didn't explicitly repeat from the parent comments was no longer relevant, whereas I would have assumed that it would be noisy and annoying for me to repeat it directly.
Pal, I’m not going to keep discussing this because I have nothing left to add. I don’t know why your comment was interpreted 3 different ways, but it looks like you are resistant to taking any blame for authoring the comment. So what is there left to discuss? We’re all here to annoy you I guess is what you’ve concluded.
No, I'm honestly more confused about you to a degree much more than how my comment was interpreted. Over time, the responses to my comment seem to have stabilized closer to what I'd expect, but as far as I can tell you seem to be saying one thing and doing another, so it's hard for me to feel like I'm understanding where you're coming from on any level.
vote with your wallet here is to make a new phone company that uses only these user owned devices.
its not particularly feasible to do for the end customer, similar to trying to buy EVs in the US when the upstream dealer decides whata available for you.
vote with your wallet is for the ultra-wealthy.
the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
> the rest of us can vote with our votes instead, and get much better results
Not sure where you live or what votes you are making, but "much better results" is hardly what I've seen or expect from US politics, politicians, and the uber wealthy that run the corporations that dominate many of the most important aspects of our daily lives.
Yeah, I don't understand the parent comment, buying EV's in the US is even easier than ICE vehicles in most states. Now if they are talking about BYD being blocked in the US, so access to extremely cheap EVs, much of Europe is doing the same thing.
Pixel phones have an unlocked bootloader. One can load GrapheneOS onto those phones without needing to jailbreak them.
Even without flashing a new OS, one can install third party app stores (e.g. F-Droid) with open source apps and/or side-load modified versions of those apps.
There is no "viable third platform" because people don't vote against the two existing ones with their wallets.
Can you name an example where a government succeeded in breaking up a monopoly, and the result was better for consumers? AT&T, IBM, and Microsoft were all "broken up", but it didn't make a difference for consumers. In every case, a competitor forced them to change their ways.
I mean, breaking up Standard Oil wasn't exactly great for consumers either. And those companies eventually re-merged anyways. But ole Rockefeller sure did make out well due to the breakup.
True. But so long as only 1% of people care enough to do this, and they can make >1% more profit per customer with their crap - then it's more profitable for them to continue the crap.
Wake up. These mega corporations are too big to care now. Most people are uninformed or unaffected. America has been brainwashed into a FU I got mine mindset.
The tiny fraction of people willing to vote with their wallet has effectively a 0% chance of pushing big corporate to act right.
Not that many. The differences are trivial and 99%+ of people don't care, not even on forums like HN. But... how is that relevant? If you have very niche tastes then it'll be harder for you to satisfy them, whether that be in art, music or tech. Go more mainstream and you'll have plenty of options. The free market can deliver, you just may not like the level of effort the size of your market justifies.
Well, last time I checked the number was 0 and I am still lurking in some pine chat groups, so I doubt that changed. So the free market does not deliver something working here.
Since part of what I'm purposely purchasing from Google or Apple is a more secure by default system I'm probably the wrong person to ask. My wallet vote is effectively for something different than yours.
Yesno. Not fully because a functionality is not enabled yet.
It wouldn't be advised to buy the latest pixel now anyway, either get the previous one or wait a few months for Motorola Signature 27, where GrapheneOS will be first party OS, and not hated-by-the-vendor bolt-on.
If you insist on the latest pixel, go check the GrapheneOS discussion forum for all the details.
If only the Motorola Signature 27 had a headphone jack, so that I could listen to high quality music with my quality headphones.
Instead I have to buy the shitiest locked full of crapware android phone and hack it with an LLM to make it usable because apparently that's what I deserve for wanting a headphone jack.
DAC have been more than good enough since the maturation of mp3 players in the early 2000s. The smartphone has a DAC and amplifier for its various speakers already. Heck the computer inside usb-pd power converter in the phone is many times more hardware and work and EMI constraints to respect than a DAC + amplifier for a headphone output.
The DACs/amps you linked are bigger than the Sony mp3 player I had in 2004. It had two jacks and a user replaceable battery. And it was water resistant.
The DAC I specifically linked is the size of my index finger, but since you seem to be casually suggesting that the "shitiest locked full of crapware android phone" and PCs dac are comparable with the dedicated hires dac, maybe you don't really need a phone jack and your audiophile headphones :D
Many things are stopping you. I see this response all the time as a counter to inappropriate behavior by monopolistic giant entities.
It's the wrong way of thinking about the problem. The whole point is that they've gained too much market power for any individual to be able to stop them meaningfully, and that collective action using the power of government is the only way.
Any argument that tries to talk people out of that is on the same side as the tech oligarchs, in my opinion.
I don't personally want them to stop. I like what they produce and how they produce it. As long as there are enough people like me there will be a market for this.
Voting with your wallet doesn’t mean stopping them. That isn’t what it is about. You shouldn’t get to choose to stop them because you don’t like their actions any more than I should be able to choose banning you from carriers because I don’t like your choices.
Yes, some of us simply don't give a damn. I'll continue buying Apple products because they work and I don't have to do much of anything to keep them working. Just because I like tinkering or customizing other computers/devices, doesn't mean I want to be a sysadmin to my phone lol
We did not take the black pearl and continuously evolve it directly into the USS Iowa. That is the analogy the article is making. You are objecting to something that isn't in the article.
And I was not talking about individual ships, rather classes of ships. Nor was the article talking about literal buildings, rather systems. Naval architects have in fact piecemealed warship designs, swapping out one part/concept at a time. There haven't been any significant jumps. Every step was an incremental swap of one part for another.
Look up why submarines have 21" torpedo tubes. That goes back a hundred years. Every other part of the warship has been redesigned and swapped out. The 21" tube has remained. That is a ship of theseus situation.
Accusing an article of having a bad metaphor by grossly misunderstanding the article's intent must be a new low point. It's not like he only presented the idea using ship building. He literally showed a picture of rats nest plumbing, where random people keep working on the same house's plumbing each adding their own twist to the existing piping.
Your point is that humanity has had a history of green field designs in ship building rather than replacing parts in the same ship. Humanity arrived at coherence by reusing working parts of old designs that turned into defacto standards. This is no different from e.g. a well designed software library working tirelessly for decades.
But how exactly does that prove that the metaphor is bad? It doesn't, it validates it!
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