also expensive
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You think consumers can afford an Apple headset? I'd argue one of the reasons it failed is that it was completely unaffordable.
wrote last edited by [email protected]It was on the verge of affordability. Definitely not something average consumer would buy but achievable for the upper-middle class. I was also aimed at professionals and if a device can you help do your work faster it's a great investment. The problem was it didn't let people work faster because despite all the tech it still sucked.
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Getting open source and fair use products gets me fairly excited nowadays.
I got my new Fairphone 6 with e/os yesterday and it made me giddy to finally degoogle.
Its £500 though. If they made one for like £50 I might be interested in actually buying a new phone but at that price not a chance.
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This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
This is neat!
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It was on the verge of affordability. Definitely not something average consumer would buy but achievable for the upper-middle class. I was also aimed at professionals and if a device can you help do your work faster it's a great investment. The problem was it didn't let people work faster because despite all the tech it still sucked.
I think it was way over the verge, in fact, a few verges over in another verge entirely.
If a device can help you do your work faster it might be a great investment based on how much faster it can help you do your work. For a $3500 USD investment, the Apple AR headset would have had to make you massively more productive to justify that up-front cost, or it would have to be something you could expect to last for decades while you paid off that up-front cost with increased productivity.
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This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
Relatively Affordable? Maybe.
Absolutely Affordable? Hell no. -
A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more "companies that will grow" not "companies that are doing something cool". But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.
Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:
- Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
- Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
- Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven't done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they're going to crash hard
- Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last "innovation" they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
- Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was "the metaverse", an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
- Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don't care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they're part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they'll keep making money. I can't remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They're also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
- Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they're getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don't see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
- Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they're not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won't crash too hard in the future either, although they're a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they'll take some damage too.
It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn't in the first 10 links, it probably didn't exist on the Internet.. Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn't crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple's iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn't seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they're trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I'm forgetting, I hope!
Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
Late stage Capitalism in action.
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Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
Late stage Capitalism in action.
It also feels like they’re trying to be like Steve but without any creativity.
I don’t think he’d ever have thought VR was a big deal, for example.
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This thing is pretty wild. Relatively affordable too.
When you need something more esoteric than the Oculus Rift and even less user-friendly.
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Apple died with Steve Jobs. They went from being a company whose success was based on making things that people wanted to becoming a company that only cares about “maximizing value for shareholders.” Having customers is now just an inconvenience.
Late stage Capitalism in action.
Apple died with Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs was a psychopath. He had maybe two good ideas (both of which Microsoft did first) and a ruthless drive to hustle those ideas into the public consciousness. But Apple was, at its heart, an advertising company that made some useful technology. It was so much of an advertising company that Jobs ended up dying from his own kool-aid, convinced he could outsmart the nation's leading oncologists when he was diagnosed with an easily treatable form of cancer.
I only hope Musk and Zuck suffer the same fate.
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It also feels like they’re trying to be like Steve but without any creativity.
I don’t think he’d ever have thought VR was a big deal, for example.
We know that Steve considered AR to be the next major leap in personal technology, but that vision has almost nothing in common with Vision Pro. AR should be able to change and enhance your environment, not separate you from it. Even if you consider Vision Pro a demonstration of the concept owing to the fact that the technology to make it properly doesn’t exist, it fails at even that. It fails at every meaningful use case of AR. AR is not “phone apps floating in space”, it’s about recognizing and augmenting the world around you, the objects around you, and the actual physical space that we inhabit. I’ve given up on ever seeing proper AR in my lifetime, even as a bulky, ugly, expensive proof of concept.
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I can't remember [Alphabet] having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded.
Oh come on, they made Google Wave, that was pretty neat! And... Um... That's it I guess?
wrote last edited by [email protected]There are so many good ideas in the Google back catalog, it feels criminal not to just link to the graveyard.
From AngularJS to Google Cardboard to Project Ara, really can't express how many genuinely cool ideas they floated and then smothered over the last 20 years.
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We know that Steve considered AR to be the next major leap in personal technology, but that vision has almost nothing in common with Vision Pro. AR should be able to change and enhance your environment, not separate you from it. Even if you consider Vision Pro a demonstration of the concept owing to the fact that the technology to make it properly doesn’t exist, it fails at even that. It fails at every meaningful use case of AR. AR is not “phone apps floating in space”, it’s about recognizing and augmenting the world around you, the objects around you, and the actual physical space that we inhabit. I’ve given up on ever seeing proper AR in my lifetime, even as a bulky, ugly, expensive proof of concept.
Yeah, and I think Steve would have thrown any VR headset prototype across the room and fired everyone involved.
I agree with you on AR. The power requirements of computing have gone way down, but making a display bright enough to see in daylight needs a lot of power, and making them light enough to last all day would require massive improvements in battery tech.
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A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more "companies that will grow" not "companies that are doing something cool". But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.
Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:
- Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
- Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
- Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven't done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they're going to crash hard
- Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last "innovation" they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
- Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was "the metaverse", an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
- Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don't care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they're part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they'll keep making money. I can't remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They're also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
- Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they're getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don't see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
- Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they're not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won't crash too hard in the future either, although they're a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they'll take some damage too.
It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn't in the first 10 links, it probably didn't exist on the Internet.. Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn't crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple's iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn't seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they're trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I'm forgetting, I hope!
I really had to dig through my cynicism to the buried tech optimist in me. But here is some tech I think is really cool.
Framework: obviously
Cloudflare: the features like cloudflare workers and anti ai stuff is pretty cool. Ddos mitigation they do is impressive.
Nvidia: their GPU tech is insane. They are going full stack with their own networking and GPU on the motherboard like a CPU. Their dlss as much as I hate it is very impressive.
Perplexity browser is interesting to me I can't wait to see what it turns out to be. The idea of having a new way to browse the web is cool.
Ar glasses are getting really good x real air 2s i want a pair so bad.
Self driving cars: waymo and Tesla self driving is incredible.
Boston dynamics robots are sick. Warehouse logistic robots are sick I really like what Amazon is doing on that front.
Bluesky is cool tech as much as I hate that it copied the fediverse and usurped it with vc funding
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I really had to dig through my cynicism to the buried tech optimist in me. But here is some tech I think is really cool.
Framework: obviously
Cloudflare: the features like cloudflare workers and anti ai stuff is pretty cool. Ddos mitigation they do is impressive.
Nvidia: their GPU tech is insane. They are going full stack with their own networking and GPU on the motherboard like a CPU. Their dlss as much as I hate it is very impressive.
Perplexity browser is interesting to me I can't wait to see what it turns out to be. The idea of having a new way to browse the web is cool.
Ar glasses are getting really good x real air 2s i want a pair so bad.
Self driving cars: waymo and Tesla self driving is incredible.
Boston dynamics robots are sick. Warehouse logistic robots are sick I really like what Amazon is doing on that front.
Bluesky is cool tech as much as I hate that it copied the fediverse and usurped it with vc funding
Yeah, Cloudflare is doing some interesting things. But, for the most part those aren't consumer-focused services.
Perplexity is one of the worst of the AI offenders. Their crawlers don't respect "robots.txt" or other things that say that LLM crawling isn't allowed.
For self-driving cars, I'll give Google credit there. Their Waymo division is really making progress in self-driving cars. They didn't come up with the concept, but they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
OTOH, Tesla's self-driving is a joke. In fact, by calling their bullshit "full self-driving", they've forced the legitimate self driving car companies to use a different term. Tesla's self driving is so bad that it's hurting the rest of the industry and setting back the possibility of actual self-driving vehicles by years.
Boston Dynamics humanoid robots are cool, I'm not as impressed with their robodog though. But, from what I saw from Beijing last week, they're already way ahead of Boston Dynamics. Even when some of their bots were failing, the kinds of movement they were making before they failed seemed more advanced (and natural) than the Boston Dynamics bots.
I disagree with some of your choices, but you've got some good ideas too.
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Literally all these people going back to 1960s with satellites instead of cell towers. Trying to make it a new technology.
I just revived my old iPod XD
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Yeah, Cloudflare is doing some interesting things. But, for the most part those aren't consumer-focused services.
Perplexity is one of the worst of the AI offenders. Their crawlers don't respect "robots.txt" or other things that say that LLM crawling isn't allowed.
For self-driving cars, I'll give Google credit there. Their Waymo division is really making progress in self-driving cars. They didn't come up with the concept, but they're pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
OTOH, Tesla's self-driving is a joke. In fact, by calling their bullshit "full self-driving", they've forced the legitimate self driving car companies to use a different term. Tesla's self driving is so bad that it's hurting the rest of the industry and setting back the possibility of actual self-driving vehicles by years.
Boston Dynamics humanoid robots are cool, I'm not as impressed with their robodog though. But, from what I saw from Beijing last week, they're already way ahead of Boston Dynamics. Even when some of their bots were failing, the kinds of movement they were making before they failed seemed more advanced (and natural) than the Boston Dynamics bots.
I disagree with some of your choices, but you've got some good ideas too.
Perplexitys methods are bad but the concept of a natural language web browser is a completely unique thing and thats interesting to me. Its like when google enabled people to search "how to change a tire" instead of before where people searched with keywords.
Idk how you can say self driving tech is not cool. Even the worst self driving which is Tesla's is still very impressive. Telsa can drive autonomously through the street using only cameras. Is it perfect no but its still very good and its only a joke because of how good the competition is. That gives me a lot of hope for self driving cars.
As for that Chinese robot dog yeah I see the video that got put out, I dont think it blows away Boston dynamics version in anything but manufacturing costs. All the falling and all terrain movement the Chinese dog can do has been done by Boston dynamics for almost 5 years at this point.
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Perplexitys methods are bad but the concept of a natural language web browser is a completely unique thing and thats interesting to me. Its like when google enabled people to search "how to change a tire" instead of before where people searched with keywords.
Idk how you can say self driving tech is not cool. Even the worst self driving which is Tesla's is still very impressive. Telsa can drive autonomously through the street using only cameras. Is it perfect no but its still very good and its only a joke because of how good the competition is. That gives me a lot of hope for self driving cars.
As for that Chinese robot dog yeah I see the video that got put out, I dont think it blows away Boston dynamics version in anything but manufacturing costs. All the falling and all terrain movement the Chinese dog can do has been done by Boston dynamics for almost 5 years at this point.
Self driving tech is cool. Tesla's take on Self Driving is not cool because it's not effective.
Telsa can drive autonomously through the street using only cameras.
Sorta... a bit... in a way that will lead to an accident sooner or later. If they put LIDAR on their cars it would be far more effective, but Musk wants to be different. He insists on only using cameras even though you can't safely do self-driving with only cameras. Typical Musk, cutting corners and lying.
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Self driving tech is cool. Tesla's take on Self Driving is not cool because it's not effective.
Telsa can drive autonomously through the street using only cameras.
Sorta... a bit... in a way that will lead to an accident sooner or later. If they put LIDAR on their cars it would be far more effective, but Musk wants to be different. He insists on only using cameras even though you can't safely do self-driving with only cameras. Typical Musk, cutting corners and lying.
Yeah its dumb to not use lidar and elon musk sucks but the cars can self drive without a doubt. That self driving is impressive even if waymo is already doing taxi services with near perfect driving for the past few years.
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didn't find the post link again, so here is the account https://infosec.exchange/@Em0nM4stodon
There's plenty of p2p, decentralized and mesh radio tech to get excited about.
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A friend of mine asked me today if there were tech companies I was excited about. The context was more "companies that will grow" not "companies that are doing something cool". But, I was stumped because I had trouble thinking of anything in either category.
Looking at the MANA MANA (do dooo do do do) group:
- Microsoft: Always shitty assholes, but their stock price will probably keep going up until the AI bubble pops
- Apple: Nothing innovative since the iPhone, but their stock will probably keep doing well because of their duopoly status and the 30% rake on the App Store
- Nvidia: I used to like their video cards, but they haven't done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing, and even that is barely used. When the AI bubble pops they're going to crash hard
- Amazon: Assholes who screw over anybody who sells things through them, abuses their employees, and the last "innovation" they had was their patent on one-click ordering. Since AWS is most of their revenue, when the AI bubble pops their revenue will crater.
- Meta: Renamed from Facebook because their thundercunt of a CEO thought the future was "the metaverse", an obviously bad idea from the start. The company only continues to be relevant because network effects cause FOMO and they have an advertising duopoly with GOOG, heavily betting on AI now, and will crash when it crashes.
- Alphabet: Their flagship service is terrible now, but they don't care because they have such an overwhelming monopoly on search. More importantly, they're part of a massive ad duopoly with Meta, so as long as they can keep you coming back, they'll keep making money. I can't remember them having any innovative ideas since PageRank back when they were founded. They're also all in on AI and will crash when it crashes.
- Netflix: It used to be that you only needed 1 streaming service, and it was Netflix. Now the Netflix catalogue is mediocre, and they're getting rid of things that actually made people like them, like allowing a family to share a password, and a truly ad-free experience. I don't see Netflix growing much in the future, and with how bad streaming is becoming, I expect more people to pirate instead.
- Adobe: You used to be able to own photoshop, and it was a good product. Now you have to rent it, and they're not even fair and honest about how the rental works. Acrobat Reader used to be a useful free utility. Now they keep enshittifying it. Will they keep making money, probably. Probably won't crash too hard in the future either, although they're a tech stock so when the AI crash happens they'll take some damage too.
It genuinely used to feel like many of the big tech companies were trying to solve problems for end users. Sure, they wanted to make money at the same time, but they actually did provide good services. Google search used to be unbelievably good. It would find the one page on the whole Internet that was the best one for your search. If what you wanted wasn't in the first 10 links, it probably didn't exist on the Internet.. Even when it had ads, the ads were small, clearly marked, and didn't crowd out the actual search results. Netflix had a great catalogue and a great UI and zero ads so it was worth paying a bit and not pirating. Paying a Netflix subscription used to feel like sending a message to the Old Media companies that they were dinosaurs who were on their way out. Apple's iPod and iPhone were really game changers. These days it doesn't seem like any of them really want to make your life better. Instead they want to act as a rent-seeking middleman between you and whatever you want.
After thinking about it for a few minutes, the only for-profit company I could think of that was doing innovative things that made life better for its end-users was Framework. I love that they're trying to make modular laptop, and now an innovative desktop. But, there have got to be others out there I'm forgetting, I hope!
they haven’t done anything innovative for gamers since ray tracing
Unreal Engine's Lumen (and equivalents in other engines like Cryengine) made 'full' RTX obsolete. I can look at random lighting in Satisfactory that looks like modded Cyberpunk 2077 now. Even full path tracing in 2077 (which runs at a slideshow for me, but I tested experimentally) is just... not really worth it, with everything the performance budget GI saves could be used for instead.
So there's that, and that's a pretty cool software innovation.
Honestly that's where the neat stuff is now; outside the huge companies. Especially in software.
