I hear you, but if one maker makes you pay the real price of including the externalities, most consumers will by the equally good but much cheaper alternative.
In fact, at equal price, they will choose the most convenient form factor with beautiful and practical packaging.
The solution, of course, is to not permit any maker to foist their negative externalities upon the commons to unfairly undercut competitors. If you're going to blame a consumer for the producer's pollution, why not instead blame their landlord for charging them the rent that forced them to drive to work and so buy tires? Why not instead blame the landlord's bank for demanding repayment of the mortgage or the bank's shareholders for demanding profit instead of benevolent loan forgiveness?
Nor are we at fault. Corporate consolidation has been happening for decades. They have psychologists on staff or contracted out to design products that sell based on inherent human bias and autonomic responses. We’re sold to at the subconscious level now.
I agree given only two choices the average consumer will spend the least, but doesn’t that suggest trying to make aware or change human behavior is the wrong approach to solving the problem?
I wouldn’t bother with land fills for a while. First on my list is standardizing electrical power at docks for container ships. They run the most polluting fuel on idle 24 hours per day while docked. The amount of carbon release is something like in the millions of automobiles per day. If they could plug into every port they can shut their engines off. They might not even need to carry the dirtiest fuel anymore.
> I wouldn’t bother with land fills for a while. First on my list is standardizing electrical power at docks for container ships.
There is some sort of effort going on, but IIRC it stalled as a consequence of covid [1]. Biggest problems are frequency differences (the entire world but the Americas runs at 50 Hz, but maritime+America runs at 60 Hz), and the fact that for the many megawatts a ship can use you need extremely high voltages to get that transferred at reasonable currents, which is a safety challenge on its own [2].
Surely the consumption is reduced when they are sitting in port idling? And do ships really need a higher voltage than common industrial power? (480v, 3 phase) I realize 480v is dangerous but not unmanageable.
Yes, we are. The vast majority of our (first world) consumption is not something we are forced to do. We (again, first world, but particularly here, in tech world) have comparatively massive disposable incomes and wide discretion about what we spend it on.
"I can't avoid plastics because it's what my sushi comes packaged in"
You’re the delight of every B.S. oil company distraction campaign. You were precisely what the people who invented the term “carbon footprint” had in mind—an eager sucker.
Oil company revenues derive from the aggregate of consumer demand and behavior. Big Oil’s villainy in demand-generation campaigns and climate change denial is inexcusable, but this is a relatively small aspect of their nature. The majority of their activities are done because we consumers collectively ask them to do it.
Pretending that there’s a small number of bad-guy oil bosses is attractive because it makes the problem seem tractable. The inconvenient truth is that the collective action we seek amounts to collective change in our own lives.
Yeah I agree, it's the best place to target it: the producers have the means, motive and opportunity to cut their pollution.
The real problem comes when considering imports. How to assess the emissions of overseas producers, and then track the "embodied pollution" in each product? Becomes very messy without solid international cooperation. So it probably then becomes necessary to tax certain things when they're either imported or at the point of sale.
…and it’s not like we don’t produce similar regulation all the time.
The conversation here makes it sound like this is unprecedented, whereas it seems to me completely normal. There are no CFCs in my deodorant any more, or lead in my paint, or whatever.
Once regulation is in place, producers have motivation to innovate and drive the cost of disposal and reuse down, which is a great application of market mechanisms.
It's very cool, but the guy answer sounds so corporaty that the only thing I hear is: patent, proprietary platforms, restricted use cases, we'll make lots of money and sue anybody even drawing it. Have fun! We mandate it!
This feels shortsighted. The patent holder gets exclusive rights for a limited amount of time in exchange for publishing how the thing works. Eventually, and not long from now, everyone can make use of it without restriction. And maybe after reading how they do it someone has a better idea.
While I'm not a fan of patents in general, it's more about how you manage your IP that matters.
And honestly, this videos feels like they show it off because they have to, but have so many restrictions to do so that they must weight every single word.
It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it.
It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.
If I enter a restaurant, I know they want to sell me food, but I want to think about the food, not the bill. And I appreciate a passionate chef.
> It doesn't look like they want us to have fun with it. It looks like it's something they hope to sell us.
Well, yeah; they (Disney Research) are a tech company, not a product company, and this is — essentially — a B2B presentation for those big partner companies of theirs who might want to license this technology. They're not talking to consumers; they're talking to businesses who could build this thing into a product of theirs that is then sold to consumers.
When this is in an actual product, they won't be talking about the tech of it at all. Disney Imagineering (the department that builds Disney's theme park rides) tries to make the tech as invisible to the experience as possible. A PR piece about a new Disney ride that used this system, likely wouldn't even mention the floor. It'd just mention that they have "high-fidelity VR immersion" or something like that — and would let guests explain what that entails in their reviews of it.
They won't sell very many of them if people are not having fun with it. That's such a twisted bit of logic on your part. They don't have an actual retail type product, so it's just a tech demo for now. But it's Disney, so once there is a reatail product, you think their PR department will be showing people not having fun with it?
Do you also buy phones with this mantra? Or anything for that matter? Because this is just a bit of electronics, nothing more.
Sometimes I just want to buy half a kilo of butter, and not caring much about the craftsmanship of Swiss diary producers and whole chain of experts and distributors and their skills and tricks a bit.
Especially with Disney. They'll figure out how to redraw it and extend the patents for another 75 years. (of course I understand the diff between copyright & patent)
You feel like you are part of the family while watching this.
It's a completely different vibe.
Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.
> You feel like you are part of the family while watching this.
Fair enough! I'd just note that Walt was pioneer of content marketing, and I'm sure that was the goal. (This segment was broadcast in the television series Disneyland (1954–1959) in the episode, "Tricks of Our Trade".)
> Honestly, I feel vaguely threatened by the HoloTile Floor demo tone. The way he answers the question about what's it's going to be used for feels like a parent that doesn't want to reveal something to a child.
This one? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=68YMEmaF0rs Agreed, it's terrible — overscripted, artificial, inauthentic — and a failed simulacrum of what Walt's Disney did above. The only honest part is 2:15-3:00, marred only by the terrible reading of the pretend guest.
I think the problems with IP rights startend when the law allowed companies to be treated as persons, from there on it was just downhill. Instead of protecting the inventor we started weaponising IP rights.
You know the latin root for the word 'corporation' is 'corpus' meaning 'body'. A corporation in English common law is literally a fictitious person created for the purpose of performing business activities independent of its shareholders.
The fact that corporations inherit many of the legal abilities of people in our system (including property rights like intellectual property) is a good thing.
They are nice for a reason, though. They're a temporary monopoly in exchange for open access to the patented mechanism. They're far better than copyright, basically.
I don't claim that I have an easy solution for this problem (at best, I have some fragmentary ideas). I just claim that patents (and copyright) are actually quite the opposite of free markets.
Are we speaking of patents or the product made from those patents? Are we speaking of how capitalism enforces permanent growth and profit requirements upon us so that most anything that can be monetised will be monetised.
Even feeding the homeless is monetised by the state[1] - in the form of fines.
I for one can no longer distinguish between capitalistic greed and profiteering via patents, food, housing, warmth, freedoms, user data, ....
Capitalism is literally defined by the ability to exercise capital to accumulate more of it, which is literally the only way for a monopoly to exist. By definition, capitalism has nothing to do with so-called "free markets".
It is worthwhile to distinguish between capitalism and a free market. A free market engenders capitalism, which (with sufficient accumulation of wealth and creeping market and regulatory capture) creates forces that oppose the free market.
I just have the reflex of clinching my butthole now every time I hear that kind of speech.
It's not the speech of the people that invented the machines, it's a speech written by the lawyers, sellers and executives.
Even Nintendo, which is one of the worst offender in obsessive legal actions manage to actually have creators sharing their vision in their voices about their games.
Yeah what a piece of shit for inventing something completely new and novel and wanting to make money off of it. He should create a bullshit AI startup instead.
Well, perhaps you'll thank the EU for it. I personally hate the cookie banners (that don’t do anything to stop ad tech) and the annoyance of needing new (expensive) cables for no real reason. I had very nice cables which worked great for years, that was fun to explain to the wife. And now the car stereo doesn't work through a wire to my phone any longer.
The last thing I want is another App Store. I enjoy the privacy and security of its payment disintermediation. An App Store from Facebook or Amazon is just going to be 'yet another spying apparatus.' No doubt employers and schools will be demanding their use soon.
1. Cookie banners allow for informed consent. I like to see which companies are abusing my data, and take the extra couple of clicks to stop them from doing that.
2. USB-C cables are ludicrously cheap and massively preferable to needing to hunt for the Apple-specific proprietary cable. Not sure why you had to explain the purchase of a $2 cable to your wife.
3. Freedom of choice means you are free to continue using the walled garden, should you wish, but others are also free to explore alternatives which is currently impossible.
Shitty USB-C cables are ludicrously cheap. Quality cables are merely not expensive, and when you have to replace them in quantity [1], it leads to a decent amount of money having to be spent to replace otherwise perfectly fine non-USB-C cables and a whole bunch of electronic waste as those now-obsolete cables make their way to the trash bin.
—
[1] I easily have over a dozen and a half Lightning cables between the ones in my bedroom, my living room, my laptop bag, and my home desk. At ~$10-12 for a pair of braided Anker USB-C replacements, I’m looking at nearly a hundred dollars to replace them all.
Certainly the Apple cables aren’t quality. Or perhaps the better word is durable. The jacketing on the cables is a joke and gets worn through by a swift breeze.
Third-party cables, for whatever connector, you get what you pay for. Is it a shame I have a good number of lightning cables that I will have no use for in the near future? Yes.
I also have countless other cables that I longer have use for. I still haven’t been able to fully remove micro-usb from my life but we’re getting close and I’m glad for it. It would be much nicer to only have one type of cable in my bag, that’s for sure.
And presumably you only have to replace them if you replace your phone? It's not like the change came in and you had to rush down the shops straight away for new cables.
I’m not sure how you got 10 from “a dozen and a half”; 18/212 = $108.
Also, to your second point, because of the EU, everybody* who currently uses Lightning will be replacing all of their cables eventually. That’s money out of pocket sooner or later. Maybe it’s easier to swallow when it’s $12 every three months instead of $100 all in one go, but the sum doesn’t change.
I got 15 from a dozen and a half because I'm stupid and halved half a dozen. 10 was the lower bounds price. Anyway, $108 on cables. We're not breaking the bank here. You'll probably get to keep those cables for quite a few years. The waste bothers me more. I'm still stoked to have a single charging cable standard though.
3.) that’s not exactly true. Currently, you can choose for an open system or a walled garden in which you can’t be de facto blackmailed in to leaving the walled garden. With this so called freedom of choice you mention, I am no longer able to choose for a true walled garden. If I rely on certain apps that are moved to their own store, I am forced to go there and break the walled garden. Ergo: my choice is taken away from me. For completely arbitrary reasons.
As it was you had choices as a consumer; open, closed - whatever you want. But the thing I deliberately want to choose for is now taken away from me through one of the worst and most unfair business laws I’ve ever seen, that only does harm to the majority of consumers whose choice is taken away and whose privacy and safety is being weakened to destroyed. But “they have a choice to stay in their walled garden” (they just can’t use their phone the way they want and were always used to anymore if they do, but we don’t mention that part and we don’t care those millions of people are getting royally screwed over).
You know, true choice could’ve been achieved if the EU had made a fair law. They didn’t and now we as consumers are going to pay a very heavy price.
Mandatory USB-C charger is awesome. With one power adapter I can charge everything! Laptop, phone, power bank, Bluetooth speaker, ever car seat for my child (yes, car seat nowadays have a battery).
I hope everything will be with USB-C, all home appliances as well.
My kettle is a boiler wired under the sink. But a normal 2400w kettle in countries with 240v outlets plugs into the wall. It's not really the kind of appliance you want battery operated either.
My toothbrush is already USB charged. I think for those small / battery charged applications you mentioned we'll get there pretty soon.
- There is no cookie banner law, only an informed tracking consent law. Companies could follow the DNT header. They don't. They chose to inflict the banner on you, the worst way to comply to the law they could find, and managed to make you blame a pro privacy text for their choice.
- Apple changed cable without the EU once and would have changed again (remember the 30 pins?). They even didn't bother providing one at a point. At least this way we all get a uniform version that is cheap and can charge non phone devices.
- "yet another spying apparatus". Apple is one of the biggest advertiser in the world, and was part of the PRISM program. Their genius is to make you believe they don't spy on you. And noone force you to use the alternative store. That's called choice. Something I know Apple users are not big on.
If only people spent 10% of the energy they use to defend billion dollar bullies on caring about freedom.
>> And now the car stereo doesn't work through a wire to my phone any longer.
> Remember 30 pin?
I’ll do you one better: The first 30pin was widely deployed to all sorts of cars, and the majority of those hardwired the end that plugged in to the car. Then Apple changed the 30pin wiring while keeping the actual connector the same. The 30pin still plugged in, but it no longer charged the device nor passed audio through to the stereo.
i didn't "defend bullies." i just expressed my annoyance at the second order effects of the EU's diktats, which are a bunch of annoyances to me personally. i guess i should be glad i have the "freedom" to see useless cookie banners all over the net, and the "freedom" to not use my perfectly functional cables.
in my view, you’re the one defending bullies. wielding the power of the state to control free enterprise is like pointing a gun at somebody to get your way. "do what i say, or else" is what a bully does.
> noone force you to use the alternative store
i get the strong feeling you didn't really read what i wrote
Agreed. Postfix is hard. Best to avoid the issues in the first place. USB-C remains a thorny subject because it’s probably a net win, but there’s a lot to dislike still. No I don’r want a high speed cable just to charge my damn phone.
the car has USB-A ports, but none of the half dozen USB-C cables I tried could handle the connection. I guess I'll have to continue buying more USB A-to-C cables until i find one that works, or give up the feature i had before. It's just a silly inconvenience with a smattering of e-waste.
Clearly a couple of people disliked this line of inquiry, but FWIW, I've never had any issues connecting our honda's USB-A to USB-C on android phones. But I might not be trying advanced functions - I've just used it as a media player. The jack works well to, as well as bluetooth, so those are what I usually use.
At least in android, depending on your device, you might have to change settings related to file sharing over USB.
In theory I think people would thank the EU for this, but in practice people generally dislike the new cookie banner status quo.
We can quibble about whether the legislation necessarily dictates the shitty scenario we find ourselves in, but its the scenario it did lead to nonetheless.
I thought there's a fix incomming. But I can't find a link right now. Something about exactly the issue with "big green accept button", "small half hidden reject button".
The cookie banner status quo is malicious compliance by the tracking industry that the EU should come down hard on. In many cases they violate the GDPR by not giving accept and reject equal billing.
Many of those popups are clearly engineered to make it painful to "reject all" and easy to "accept all". This is malicious compliance, and it should be fined big time.
They could follow the DNT header. Non intrusive. Automatic.
They could also... not track you?
It's crazy that we have to explain that every time a thread about the cookie banner comes in.
Isn't HN supposed to be a forum full of tech saavy people?
What kind of blind spot people have to not be able to reach this conclusion themself and instead blame a protective law for what clearly is an abusive move from companies that have a long track record of abuses?
Or do they just repeat what the PR of those companies tell them?
I mean in what world have you been living in the past 30 years with companies lying, trying to escape all possible constraining laws, spying on users and generally bullying at every occasion they could? And your first conclusion is that they did the annoying banners because they are the good guys and took the best solution possible because they like you?
GDPR supposedly came into effect six years ago and they haven't fixed low-hanging fruit like cookie banners. Now imagine how long it will take them to fix Apple's bullshit.
bureaucrats don’t understand second order effects. it's in their interest not to. indeed, a lot of people seem to struggle with the concept based on the comments here.
Generally agree, but unfortunately the EU screwed up informed tracking consent. By giving control of the consent UI to the website owner, it's as painful as possible to use (incentives!). Make the requirement an API so the browser controls the UI and there's a competition to make users happy.
There's just one unintended benefit: when I'm looking for in-depth information on a subject, I've found that the presence of a cookie popup seems to correlate with a site containing only superficial information; it's an indicator that the site's primary purpose is harvesting eyeballs rather than imparting knowledge, so I should keep looking.
By effect, i can quick judge a website by its cookie banner. When i'm looking for quality content (most of the time), i know immediately if i've been clickbaited by my google search.
Quite the contrary - they have all the power, they are just choosing not to use it in this case. If the court ordered a ceasefire all weapon shipments to Israel would have to stop the same day.
What does "have to" mean in this context? If the US were to sell another batch of weapons would other countries try to shoot the plane out of the air? Would they try to unilaterally sanction 30% of the world economy?
They did. But how do you think I got interested in software in the first place? How do you think I practiced my skills ? How do you think I created my toolbox, met my peers, solved problems beyond my reach, and eventually created a company, while feeling good about it?
A lot of us did all that before FOSS was a big thing. Yes I did have to get my wallet out to buy a copy of Turbo C but it wasn't much of a barrier (at least compared to the hardware costs).
Cosine similarity suffers from a curse of dimensionality, just as distance does (it’s just one dimension less). The angle between two random vectors in N dimensions approaches zero with a power of N. The main reason this metric is useful in practice is because it better relates to how certain neural networks use/train their embeddings internally.
Exactly. Some other context implied here, these vectors were ML embeddings. In that case, like 100 dimensions that vaguely represented our input data in compact form. There was probably a better solution out there, this was just the most readily available for us.
> geeks think they are rational beings, while they are completely influenced by buzz, marketing, and their emotions. Even more so than the average person, because they believe they are less susceptible to it than normies, so they have a blind spot.
Articles readable and mails are well taken care of.
But code blocks are aweful:
https://www.bitecode.dev/p/analyzing-sorting-a-million-32-bi...
So when they reach a certain size I link to github instead.
And eventually I will have to code a platform because of course I itch to do so no latter what.