Seriously though, I'm in the same boat. I think the curse of big products is you wind up paying for 100% of the features when you only want 10% of them.
I agree, but also, it gets kinda messy here because Musk's "free speech" purchase if twitter was based on his understanding that Twitter not publishing content they deemed inflammatory or misinform was a violation of free speech, which I also don't think is true?
So I guess we're several layers of misunderstanding deep at this stage, and X's lockdown is ironic if its not free speech according to the flawed understanding of free speech it advocates? I dunno.
The accusation was that Twitter was working with the US government to censor speech on the government's behalf. Which would be a first amendment violation. The FBI's defense is that they technically never ordered Twitter to take down anything, but merely "flagged" posts and sent those flags to Twitter execs.
This type of loophole was (likely) closed after the ruling of Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" executive order.
Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?
It’s a private company. Free speech doesn’t mean I’m entitled to use your property to post and amplify my speech.
I also find the context of the whole thing suspect since Trump in his second administration has openly used the FCC and other federal pressures to attack speech he doesn’t like and Musk’s X has not been “free speech absolutist.”
I always thought it was just the far right being mad their side wasn’t in charge, and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated.
>Is that a first amendment violation though if they voluntarily complied?
The entire point of the case was to determine exactly that. Read the judgement. If it were an open and shut case, it never would have made it to the supreme court.
>and that when they got in power they would be even worse. That seems vindicated
How in the world did you get to that conclusion from Murthy v. Missouri and the "Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship" order?
From the open use of the FCC to threaten television networks for saying things the president doesn't like? Among many other examples? That's just a particularly overt one.
I'm just saying overall behavior -- outside this specific case -- is not consistent with a regime (or a larger political movement) that believes in free speech. It's consistent with "we want to be the ones in charge determining speech," with opposition to Twitter's previous moderation being motivated by that rather than principled belief in free speech.
The net effect of the Twitter takeover was not to make it a free speech absolutist platform but to shift the pattern of selective boosting and selective de-boosting and moderation to one that favors the far right's message.
> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.
Boy this would be nice! X have obviously decided that using the law to take down people fixing its issues is more profitable than fixing them. I'm really curious though, are they right? (Ignoring ethics etc)
I used to glance at Twitter when it was less hostile, now I don't bother since it tries to force you to sign in before viewing content and I don't have an account. But now my interaction is 0, nothing is going to get me to make an account. If other people are like me, X will just continue to lose users without gaining any. Which the limited available data on use suggest is in fact happening.
Yeah, that's a really good point that I hadn't really considered. Although, maybe the same argument stands? If X's lockdown leads to less users, then doesn't that translate to less control over the information landscape too?
Well, if one of the big social media platforms is now a far-right playground, that changes the political landscape.
Elon Musk is using twitter to create a global far-right platform that right-wing politicians can use to experiment with talking points before watering them down and bringing them to the public.
Yep precisely it. Worth it to control the narrative, even if it's for his own vanity. When you have that much money what else do you spend it on. X is a toy.
There's the dichotomy of the walled garden, how to minimize scraping/bots/inauthentic amplification etc. Is a town square a town square if you can't hear what's going on from the public lawn on the edge of the square? I feel like HN does a better job, and the ecosystem of external views, LLM/human summary, HN search etc. Is quite exciting! but the scale between the two is one factor and the moderation we accept here also comes with a constraint on topics discussed and restrictions on speech (tradeoffs that I feel are worth it in our context here) So worlds apart and yet adjacent!
Reddit seems to have reversed course with making users sign in as well (or my adblock has updated and removed the forced login modal or something.) but my thought was simply: "Well, I guess I just won't view Reddit content anymore, big whoop."
> "Reddit seems to have reversed course with making users sign in as well (or my adblock has updated and removed the forced login modal or something.)"
I don't know if Reddit are doing it less now or not, but it's worth noting that it's always been somewhat hit and miss.
I suspect a mix of very data-driven testing (to try to show it to people who will login, and not show it to those who'll just bounce), and technical debt confusing things. But often it will vary not only from one person to another, but even for the same person between two different web browsers, or connected through two different IPs, or whatever.
Last week I was getting hit with the login requirement constantly, not at first but after scrolling a little bit or clicking on a link. This week, haven't seen that once.
Well, Twitter/X is also a service with very large network effects. So many people I knew at some level tuned out that it became a very optional thing to glance at--and none of the replacements really took off in my estimation. The bottom line is that I just stopped using that whole category of social media.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not, but it's worth pointing out that most businesses outside of tech don't operate a "build a monopoly then bleed it dry" model, and are a lot nicer for it, while still making money.
Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
(I do get that tech VC doesn't work under this principle and it's not simpld to just change a sectors funding model, but it is worth pointing out that making money does not normally equal making a bad product)
> Shops, cinemas, B2B consultancies etc generally make money by selling something people want.
There are plenty of dark patterns and enshittification in all of these as well. Tech is just way ahead of the curve but the rest isn't innocent either.
A lot of stuff showing its folding allowing you to "use it as a bedtime clock" - have apple done any kind if battery use trickery to make this a non-battery-draining thing to do? Or maybe I'm overestimating how much battery a screen uses? (I'd have thought a lot)
iPhone Pros have sported an always-on display for years now. It uses the OLED display at low brightness and refresh rates to preserve battery life while showing you the time etc. So I'm guessing this is using that same tech.
Out of all my time in HN I wouldn’t expect to reply with this, but I would most definitely 100 percent use this as a bed time clock, especially with my current room set up
> I'm not sure how to translate this to the smartphone market though. Fairphone and LaJolla seem to do well in this regard though so back to brand reputation for a lot of this.
I'm not here with a silver bullet or anything, but I'd say the EU's energy efficiency labeling works well and has a fairly low level of being gamed/falsified.
I don't think there's any big reason why the EU couldn't enforce labeling of a similar kind to IFixit's repair-ability scoring[0] for set devices.
On a separate note, the article mentions the lousy attempts some smart phone makers are guilty of with regards to repair instructions:
> Some records even refer customers to Temu or AliExpress for spare parts and repair instructions.
There are at least a lot less smart phone manufacturers than restaurants and cafes (comparing to scores on the doors) - if the EU really wanted to, it wouldn't be a huge resource to produce clear guidance on what expectations are for smart phone spare part provision, and issue fines whenever they're violated (you might think is a bad idea, and too much regulation, but my point is just that it's at least feasible)
>> labeling of a similar kind to IFixit's repair-ability
Because the public generally does not care one iota about repairability. Phones are more robust these days than ever. A fatal flaw like a screen break occures on the order of years. People just assume that, if something bad does happen, the phone will be out of date and/or no longer getting updates anyway. Many also get thier phones as part of a service plan and so dont even view them as an expense.
Look at desktop PCs. Infinitely repairable. But 90% of people will just buy a new one the moment anything significant fails.
They are certainly not more robust than ever. The trend of screen glass extending all the way to the edge of the phone and around it has ensured that most people need a case. Back in the 2010s I never used one and my phone would survive many drops.
> There's no way SQL is more unreadable than polars. IMO it's the other way around.
I think on basic queries, SQL is really nice, but when stuff gets more complex, with a bunch of CTEs, let alone functions requiring loops, it becomes pretty obtuse.
> We don’t aim to make a big feature release of Polars 2.0. In fact we hope it to be a boring experience for you. The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater audience
I know this take reveals me as a very dull person, but I love seeing projects take semver seriously like this! Version bumps should really be about removing deprecated cruft rather than shiny new features.
I've used polars for a while now, and their focus on stability was a big part if convincing me to make the jump initially!
>The reason we bump this major version is that we can get rid of design decisions made in the past that currently block us and then we want to change defaults to more sensible settings that will benefit a greater audience
I don't know how to read this sentence other than "there are breaking changes we want to make"
The migration guide does say there are breaking changes, but the interpretation I have is "this won't have new features but allows us to develop new features".
That being said Polars is one of the few Python libraries from the hundreds I use that I need to read the notes of every minor release (eg 1.44 -> 1.45), because they tend to frequently deprecate, remove or change features.
A library is a collection of features, and any of them could have breaking changes. That's why semver is insufficient. It would be good to have a standardized way to indicate breaking changes in components, like changesets.
There's also always a "strictness" curve. Rust has specific rules where you could write something which doesn't break those rules but does break people who've done something very specific
At some point you reach the Hyrum's Law / Spacebar Heating edge where sure, there's no reasonable technical definition which concludes your change "broke" people but somebody's solution used to work and now it doesn't and they're angry about that.
To give an example that's only slightly less ridiculous than spacebar heating, maybe somebody depended on being able to parse a file from your library, you re-designed the library, there are no API changes but they're parsing your source code and now their approach doesn't work.
Generally, libraries with fewer and lighter users tend to be more lax, maybe they forgot to make a structure opaque, that's a break but none of their users notice, or they forgot to make an error type non-exhaustive, but everybody using their type had a default clause so no harm done when they add a new value.
Hyrum means that as you get bigger and more important, some day, the spacebar heating problem happens and too bad. A language (like Rust) can help you forestall that day somewhat, and reduce the blast radius when it does, but it is inevitable, Hyrum's law wasn't something you can outright prevent from happening, it's a factor for engineers to consider when designing systems, like misuse resistance.
> Borrowing Disesdi's logic in their arithmetic (which is hard to argue against), after four years of open source LLMs, we should have three AirBnBs,1 two Stripes,2 and three Dropboxes3 thanks to the power of AI.
>
> So. Where the fuck are they?
I think this is a great question, and I have a completely unqualified theory.
I work in a fairly specialised field, I've notice when I use AI to try to generate code in fields where I'm very experienced, it produces a worse output at a slower rate than I can produce manually[0].
When I use it in fields I'm not an expert in by any stretch, like webdev, genAI massively improves my output by a huge factor.
I think this makes the productivity gains a little fuzzy. Claude code makes me 10x faster at webdev, but I'd be a very slow webdev. Ultimately, the next innovation in a field, will probably be from an expert in that field, and they therefore won't see the kind of "10x productivity boost" that non-experts do.
[0] I still find AI helpful for exploring code etc, just not so much producing output.
Linux I guess?
Seriously though, I'm in the same boat. I think the curse of big products is you wind up paying for 100% of the features when you only want 10% of them.
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