Ternus and Cue are full bore on increasing the number of ads shown in apps and otherwise scattered through their devices. This is explicitly the opposite of Apple’s philosophy until recently and Schiller is stepping back reputedly due to his opposition to this approach.
The idea appears to be to sell the devices as a vehicle for showing ads (incremental ARR) over selling them for their intrinsic customer value. You expect this kind of thing from shitty industries like cars or Google or Facebook. But this used to be an explicit “no go” for Apple.
where do you get info that Ternus is about increasing number of ads? i've missed that evidently, I was at Apple engineering for several years, so for Cue i believe it just from observation, but no sense of such for Ternus.
That is too bad - how do you get the reins of a company that size with something antithesis to their product and identity? I hope he doesn't start trying to monetize privacy.
To be a bit critical, haven’t Apple software and hardware quality been getting worse for years even before the new CEO?
Apple Silicon was the exception, that was truly transformative. But other things, like how polished and snappy the OS feels, seems to have been getting steadily worse.
I think the hardware has improved a lot over the past decade, not always in visible ways. I think this is true even if you disregard the replacement of the butterfly keyboard.
Hardware has been improving a lot since the low point of butterfly keyboards and no ports. Jony Ive went out the door and things improved. Then on the software side they course corrected recently after Alan Dye left. I have hope the software improvements will start to accellerate.
The ads show they are out of ideas and with everything enshitifying, and a duopoly, they don't need to serve customers. just be slightly less shitty than google.
This puts them at existential risk of disruption, because it will build huge unseen pressure for customers to flee.
We saw this with Opus 4.7 - 5, losing folks to Sol when it came out. But Anthropic delivered with 5.5
Honestly I don't think lack of new ideas is the problem, it's the bad execution/design of their existing products. Like look at Time Machine on macOS. The basic idea (backups) is almost not an idea at all, but the first implementation was amazing for its time, and the current implementation is a total mess and basically unusable. The idea is not the issue.
Or look at Spotlight. Same deal really, the idea is trivial but they've let it languish and slowly rot. With macOS 27 they've gone back and rebuilt it. That's what we want to see. Go back to the basics and make it work great not just work mostly.
When I switched to Mac in ~2020, the Mac users I knew all told me to avoid Time Machine – at least two had issues where they needed their backups, only to find that the entirety of their backups had been silently corrupted. (I used Arq then based on online recommendations, now I use Vorta on my Mac just because that’s what I use on Linux.)
Spotlight was near-unusable when I switched as well. Often 5+ sec delays from pressing Cmd-Space to the thing actually popping up, and it would sometimes reorder entries right before I clicked Enter, causing me to open the wrong thing. Alfred uses the same Spotlight index AFAIK, but lightning fast.
Those are both things that I agree should… Just work.
I wouldn't say it's coordinated. This is an old article, published in June. A lot of people came to the land economics blog from the ACX article that ran today, someone likely saw this one and then posted it to HN.
It's more like the cost of living crisis in Australia means that despite a likely oversupply of tutors working second jobs, people can't actually afford to pay tutors.
AI tutors will absolutely be worse, not better, but they may also be only a fraction of the price.
If your trying to argue that 417 operating reactors and 377 GW of operating nuclear capacity at end-2024, producing roughly 2,600–2,700 TWh/year, about 9% of global electricity isn't profitable at all and that somehow all that money is just lit on fire not generating profit/value? Bold claim -- the ecosystem is about $300-500 B/year globally per isn't profitable?
How can the scientific progress of developing nuclear power + medical isotopes and the entire value chain associated with that development, incredibly long lived assets, nuclear fuel development not have been profitable? The fact that you have baseload generation that supports the entire grid?
What part of the equation are you talking about - at what part of the project life cycle? Are you trying to say they were built and weren't profitable the minute the switch turned on?
Still same problem all VR has -- no killer use case. Outside of the problem that it is Meta doing this, the product in and of itself isn't that great. Ask all Quest users if they still use it all the time.... most of the oculus's are just collecting dust.
Some future date we will get there, but this isn't it.
I’d really like to use it as an extended monitor for work. The problem with previous versions has been inability for me to see my own keyboard or even inability to easily mirror laptop screens. This looks like it could do that.
Depends on how the device gets data from your computer and how it connects. My Xreal Ones present themselves as a monitor via DP Alt mode when I plug them into my work laptop, switch to ultrwide mode (32:9 is my fav), and I'm done.
To use most VR headsets that are also standalone devices, I would start by fighting with IT on getting some kind of security exception to use the necessary software on my laptop, then get started with streaming/connecting/sharing screens with it. Hopefully.
"nearly all said if given a Time Machine they wouldn’t do it all over again. That was a real wake up call."
And do they have experience working any other job as a comparables? The question you ask is the equivalent of saying do you think there are better jobs out there? Being a doctor is about the lowest risk job you can get if you are smart and capable. You get high status in society, excellent paycheck and on net are helping people.
Also, people are not aware of their skill sets. A lot of doctors I know think, just because they were "smart" in school, that if they had gone into, for example, tech or finance, they would have become a CEO. But you can tell they don't have the skill set for business. I mean, they can't even run a medical office with 8 employees well, and they think they could run a business with 100K people. The office is a mess, the records are sloppy, the appointments are 2 hrs. behind, they don't pay the staff well, the receptionist is rude, the photocopied forms are barely readable. Yet they think they would be inovating like Jeff Bezos.
The dropout rate and the suicide rate are not, however.
I know a doctor and a couple PAs and RNs who have left the profession. The US medical industry is horrible to everyone involved, except the hospital and insurance profits.
Many of the largest health systems and insurance companies are non-profit. There are literally no profits, no shareholder returns in those organizations. But the facilities are beautiful and some employees very well paid.
NONE of the functioning health systems and insurance companies in the US are non-profit.
Non-profit is a common misnomer, more correctly (in the US) called "Not for Profit", a legal term that doesn't forbid profits at all. It only prevents owners from taking profit-based payouts. AFAIK, it doesn't even prevent threshold-based bonuses for C-Suite employees.
Basically, it prevents shareholders in the corporation.
At 1-2% savings of water thats roughly $20M–$40M/year on 2M AF of throughput using the 2024 SWP as base reference for volumes + 1000$/AF.
Though I think saving water in drought years has a massive value that isn't properly measured in this calculation. Likewise in boom years saving water almost doesn't matter.
See what the proposals come in as. See if the politicians turn it into a jobs project for the interior...
I notice there's no surface area in your calculations. Solar panels alone, without labor or infrastructure, cost $5/sqft. What percentage of exposed canals would be covered at what cost?
People are determined to waste our public capacity on projects that make no economic sense. Is it any wonder the electorate doesn't have any faith that government will spend effectively?
I really like the idea of using this as a jobs program to keep the capacity to build, "muscle memory," strong in the workers in this community: metalworking, electrical, etc. There is much left to be built over the next 20-50 years.
The Hoover Dam was also a sort of jobs program similarly.
I mean the industrial policy of America is a jobs program. I think the governments en masse are trying to correct their assumptions from the 90s. Update their priors if you would.
So thats a pilot project - and the benefits aren't supposed to be your 1$/W its comparing the collective of all the goals for the project. So include the water savings and the cleaning costs - then comparing the two of them.
Its also not comparing against utility projects because it isn't utility scale.
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