I didn't get my first real phone until after high school, while everyone else had one.
I graduated salutatorian. I was able to focus on my homework after school for hours without distractions. I had a computer at home, but it was pretty crappy.
I didn't get a phone until after high school and everyone else had one.
I didn't graduate salutatorian, I was miserable and lonely because I got left out of anything outside of school by my friends because I didn't have a phone.
I still don't have many friends to this day and I sometimes wonder if my lack of a social experience in high school crippled my ability to develop friendships.
So I mean.. maybe there's different outcomes. Not having a phone doesn't automatically make you productive.
Sure you're able to complete school work without a phone. You're not able to have a normal social life though and for many parents that is more important than academic success.
Continents can rise and fall without changes in the quantity of liquid water on the surface. One must also consider the fact that the world was much warmer then, so things like Greenland, the Antarctic ice sheet, and glaciers did not exist. If all the ice covering Antarctica , Greenland, and in mountain glaciers around the world of today were to melt, sea level would rise about 70 meters (230 feet). The answer to your question is that a portion of this water turned into ice. Ice that is now turning back to liquid form thanks to climate change. Another factor is that water is also slowly disappearing into the Earth's crust. When the Russians dug 12 kilometers into the crust, they discovered that rocks at that depth were saturated with water: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole?useski...
- Confusing naming conventions. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. Compare to Sony's Playstations 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Names matter enormously. There's a reason why FAANG and FAANG-tier tech firms all have very simple names. While that may be far from the only reason why these companies are so successful, it matters more than one thinks.
- Lack of AAA exclusives. Halo is the main one, but Sony has God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, all the Spider Men, The Last of Us, Gran Turismo, and others.
- Price. The PS4 was cheaper than the Xbox One by $100, and this mattered to parents who could afford to gift their children a $400-$500 console, but not a $1,500+ gaming PC. This matters less in the North American market, where people have more disposable income, but East Asian and European markets are safely in Sony's pocket.
- Controllers? There is a meme that Xbox controllers are designed for large, "American" hands. Regardless of the truth, memes and perceptions shape decisions.
- Sony has the Japanese market locked up. Xbox is the dominant console in the US, but its dominance is weak: 53.3% vs. 46.65% for the Playstation.[1] Which begs the question: why hasn't Microsoft crushed the competition in its prime domestic market, but Sony crushed theirs in Japan?
> FAANG and FAANG-tier tech firms all have very simple names
Erm... really? Let's just take that one at a time, shall we?
F - Facebook. Or should we say Meta? Home of the Oculus Rift and the Oculus Quest, if you can remember which of those is which. Sorry, that's now the Meta Quest.
A - Amazon. Such clarity of naming. Everyone knows they have a product called 'Alexa', right? And of course, to get that, you need to buy an... Echo. Or an Echo Dot. Or an Echo Studio, or an Echo Show?. Obviously it's clear what a Kindle Oasis is, compared to a Kindle. And then beyond that of course we've got the wonder that is AWS product naming. Aurora, Kinesis, Fargate, InfiniDash, Athena, Elastic Beanstalk, Route53... Clearly a model of clarity.
A - Apple. Absolutely, the home of the iPhone 14, the iPhone 14 Pro, the iPhone 14 Plus, the iPhone 14 Pro Max, and the iPhone SE, or the Apple Watches Ultra, SE, Nike and Hermés could never be accused of confusing product naming.
N - Netflix. Sure. You know the difference between Netflix Basic, Netflix Standard with Ads, and Netflix Standard, right?
G - Google. Right. Google Workspace, Google Docs, G Suite... or Youtube Premium vs Youtube TV...
You're right. Not a one of these companies would name product tiers confusingly.
> Controllers? There is a meme that Xbox controllers are designed for large, "American" hands. Regardless of the truth, memes and perceptions shape decisions.
A bit out of date, but this was the Penny Arcade about the original XBox controller:
I despise all things Microsoft but the 360 and later controllers are excellent designs and are possibly the best standard-issue console controllers ever. I will die on this hill.
Sony's stubborn refusal to modify their basic controller shape/layout in the last 28 years isn't admirable and is not endearing them to people with good taste (i.e., me).
And yes, I am aware that I just declared myself willing to die on a hill while simultaneously criticizing Sony for dying on a hill.
Looking at the current generation is already too late, MSFT had shot themselves in the foot with previous generation. The Xbox One was a disaster and squandered all the inroads they had made with the 360. They spent an entire generation trying to win their own fanbase back after the missteps with Kinect and always-online. The PS4, on the other hand, won a lot of momentum that had lost during the PS3 era.
> They spent an entire generation trying to win their own fanbase back after the missteps with Kinect and always-online.
Another thing that really wrecked the Xbox One was their original intentions of locking discs to consoles to prevent game resale. It was a PR disaster of the highest order that they never recovered from, even after backtracking relatively quickly.
> Confusing naming conventions. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox Series X. Compare to Sony's Playstations 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. Names matter enormously.
It all goes back to Microsoft not naming the 360 "Xbox 3" with some lame excuse for why it did so. Yes, everyone would have laughed, but no one would remember or care today that the "Xbox 5" isn't actually the fifth Xbox.
> When Adobe finally got around to sprucing up the Macintosh version of Illustrator, they cleverly called the new version Illustrator 88, because it appeared in 1988. You could still buy Illustrator 88 in 1989, though. And in 1990. And even into 1991, when it was finally replaced by Illustrator 3.0. Adobe is not a marketing company.
They had a good excuse for skipping 9: lots of old code did something like if verson.startwith("9") to cover 98 and 98. Because Microsoft, they wanted to keep 20-year-old apps working.
Calling it the Xbox 3 would have been super confusing given it was the follow up to the original Xbox. 360 wasn’t a bad name — at least not compared to the One (which _was_ the 3rd Xbox iteration) and One X followed by the terrible Series S/X nomenclature of the current generation console.
That’s deeply surprising for me - the Xbox series X is admittedly a weird shape, but the PS5 is way bigger overall. Though the PS5 certainly is a more traditional shape. When you say thick, I assume you were thinking of placing the consoles horizontally?
The available height of the space underneath is 14.8cm. The xbox series x is a square with a side of 15.1cm. The PS5 is only 10cm thick and fits without a problem.
The fact that the minimum wage has remained unchanged for so long has an interesting economic consequence: it has effectively abolished the concept of a minimum wage. Nordic countries like Germany don't have a minimum wage. Rather, labor unions negotiate pay rates for various industries, and businesses are free to set their own rates. Left-wing people in the US think that abolishing the minimum wage would be a disaster, as businesses would be free to pay their workers peanuts. But this is not what's actually happening in other industrialized countries without a mandated minimum wage. Sure, a business could offer $4/hour, but because it would not be a liveable wage, no one would take those jobs, even people who are desperate. Likewise, $7.25/hour, the mandated minimum wage in the US, is now so low compared to the cost of living that no business is paying that anymore, even the penny-pinching ones. So the labor market situation in the US at the moment resembles more that of Nordic European countries.
It may be that the lack of a minimum wage in a situation of labor scarcity empowers workers. When there is a mandated minimum wage, a business can pay that, because it's an easy decision. But when there is no minimum wage, businesses have to work harder to determine an appropriate pay level. They have to conduct market research, hire consultants, study their competitors, and make a decision.
That employers pay more than the minimum wage is purely a function of labor power. Should unemployment hit >20% again like it did in April 2020, there would be no shortage of people willing to work $4/hour jobs if it was literally the only option to keep food in their mouths. There are plenty of states that forbid able-bodied adults without children from accessing SNAP, without any exemption for high unemployment rates or negative GDP growth.
I imagine their shareholders wouldn't be very happy about it. And not sure what the "edge of technology" part means. Do you think Apple will somehow do a better job than DARPA, Northop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Blackwater/Academi etc. at killing people?
I would say not, but not because shareholders. More like they wold not be able to have the same talent pool available as now.
Most of software devs wouldn’t like to work on military tech. Not saying there are no smart people at Lockheed or Raytheon but I would argue there is less smart people willing to work for this types of companies.
Even if devs hate ads most would rather work on ad-tech than mil-tech.
None of those companies attempt to operate any autonomous military bodies, they are purely suppliers or contractors. They are ineffective in the sense that they are simply following orders yes.
So, should we expect the AI equivalent of Hiroshima in a couple months? An awe inspiring demonstration of raw power to silence any detractors? What would that look like?
These guys in this meeting all know that the technology is here to make machines with superhuman cognitive abilities and they are discussing what to do about it.
> should we expect the AI equivalent of Hiroshima in a couple months? An awe inspiring demonstration of raw power to silence any detractors
Hiroshima wasn't a demonstration of power to silence critics of nuclear physics. If we're launching a Manhattan Project in AI, it would be in a fine-targeting propaganda machine or self-learning killer robots.
That person will naturally impose himself or herself through the strength of their achievements and sheer willpower in such a way that there will be not a shred of doubt in the mind of the public that this individual is worthy of deference and reverence.
No one decided Einstein was the greatest scientist of the 20th century. Einstein did his thing and let the results speak for themselves.
There are countless programmers, from self taught amateurs to professional SWEs, white hats, grey hats and black hats, who would immediately jump at the opportunity to create stronger VPNs, mirror sites, Tor nodes, and other tools to allow the public to bypass these restrictions. Trying to control the Internet in America is a losing proposition, for better or worse.
China is a poor example if you're trying to say that people can circumvent political technology decisions. The firewall works for 90%+ of their population and allows them to present versions of events that don't align with the rest of the world. That can happen in the US as well, and we already know there's organizations that are willing to do it.
You don’t need a firewall to present versions of events that don’t align with the rest of the world. We’ve managed to do that with a completely unfiltered internet for years now.
I’ll show you: The next logical step would be to make it a crime of some sort to as a user attempt to evade the law. Maybe it’s even a felony to persuade folks to not to try. But the reality is they made the law just for political points and it never gets enforced it’s just there sitting on the books. Now years go on and you have been using vpn’s to evade the restrictions. Now 10 years later you decide to run for President and. a whole bunch of establishment politicians hate you for whatever reason. Now all of a sudden this phrase is really relevant: Show me a man and I’ll show you a crime.
A block doesn't need to be completely effective as to prevent violations - all it needs is to provide enough data to authorities so they can make sure you don't do it too often.
Or let people violate the law so that you can selectively enforce it on the people that you want to. "For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law" - Oscar Benavides
Yeah. I lock my front door at night, despite it being perfect.
This is such a blindspot for ‘24/7 engineer mindset’ people. And, in a professional context, things like this serve as a great litmus test for if someone is capable and geared to look at things at a bigger-picture level instead of just ‘computer problems’.
…not to equate looking at porn with getting burglarised. This is obviously BS.
> How exactly it doesn't work? Not even China has been able to make their Great Firewall resilient to stuff like VPNs.
I don't have any inside information, but my uninformed guess is that this is by design or at least tolerated to some extent. You don't want a watertight VPN because it stifles commerce.
China PR could pull a Singapore and impose the kind of punishment for using VPN that Singapore does for hard drugs. I have a friend from Texas who lives in China PR and regularly uploads to YouTube. Nothing political, he is talking about living and working as a teacher, so he isn't doing anything controversial but in theory what he is doing is unlawful by China PR laws, right?
Securitized regions like XinJiang will occasionally lock phones (including foreigners) with VPN installed, need to goto police station to unlock phone after uninstalling VPN apps. That's basically hardcore VPN/GFW enforcement mode.
Broadly PRC GFW is functionally VPN paywall for foreign content so most PRC nationals default to consuming media/narratives within the wall. TBH, apart from dissidents, researchers etc, in my experience, very few VPN users jump wall for foreign news, like exposure might be incidental due to being shared on timeline, but most PRC nationals jump wall for porn, business and lols. Plenty of foreign news gets filtered to domestic PRC net via diasphora who reverse VPN and post content back into PRC net - lots of foreign/western "propaganda" makes it's way in PRC, it's just rate limited to point where influence is limited, or censored if it ever gets legs.
In terms of regulations: VPN allowed for commerce, enforcement mostly against businesses who don't register/get approval using sanctioned VPNs. Individuals _generally_ free to use - there aren't clear laws yet against individual use, currently regulations target operators. 99% of VPN enforcement is at this level. Few individuals (outside XinJiang/Tibet) and no foreigners as far as I'm aware of have gotten in shit for VPN. For nationals who got in shit, it's what they do with VPN (coordinating with foreign forces etc), not use itself.
If only 0.01% of the population has the technical saviness to bypass the Great Firewall, then they've succeed beyond their wildest optimism. No one cares about the few exceptions. If those people speak out to anyone about how they're able to get around it... then guess what happens? And if they just shut up and keep it to themselves, that's a good outcome too.
You're chuckling "but it's not 100%" when they might have been satisfied with 85%. Joke's on you.
China doesn't need 100% impermeability. As long as it circumvents most people from going outside the firewall, the job is done.
Think of it in terms of adblocking. You and I know all the tricks, but Google's bottom line suggests most people do not, and don't seem to mind. Similarly, the Great Firewall is tolerated because it doesn't block the things that are necessary for living life in China.
A rubber hose firewall doesn't need to be completely resilient to VPNs, in fact I imagine they would like a steady supply of people to make an example of.
This is a huge problem, because it's another example of turning a wide swath of humanity into criminals for doing relatively normal things that should be allowed.
Of course they won't be able to enforce this most of the time. But if you end up in their sights for any reason, they may then notice you using a VPN and use that information to legally blackmail you.
Usually this goes with making the punishment very harsh: A stolen MP3 on your hard drive? 20-to-life unless you take a plea bargain down to 2 years and turn in 3 friends as well. Same deal now with VPNs.
I would have agreed with you 20 years ago. But I think today, large scale internet censorship would be feasible. My wife and I marvel at her (much younger) Gen Z siblings’ computer illiteracy. These kids are the iPad/walled garden generation. These laws would be effective to keep Internet porn out of the hands of a large majority of younger people. That’s especially true because so many kids rely on phones and iPads, so governments can easily control VPN apps and things like that by leaning on Apple and Google.
It obviously won’t keep information from getting out. But that’s not the purpose of things like anti-porn laws. Dramatically curtailing prevalence and access is sufficient.
Good point. The new generation that came online this past decade never had to deal with popups, Limewire viruses and other things that forced us to learn to some basic level how a computer works and how it can be compromised.
It reminds me of this 2021 Verge article quoting a college engineering professor who had to revamp teaching material as many of their students did not understand folder structures and computer file systems. Why would they? For them, everything is on Youtube, Netflix and Spotify.
Yep, when I was a teenager, computers were tools that provided access to things previously inaccessible. They were tools that empowered users. Enter a command, the computer performed the command and returned the results. Access to anything simply involved knowing the magic spell, and I spent my entire teens learning every incantation I could. My dad, who was totally computer illiterate, would not have had a chance in hell at enforcing content blockers.
My daughter today lives in a world where users no longer issue commands to computers. 99% of computer users limit themselves to typing into a search box and clicking links they are fed. I don't even need to set up content blockers, because the idea of telling her computer what to do is foreign to her. Despite my attempts to get her curious about how they work and about hacking, she doesn't even care enough about it to venture outside of the pre-screened bookmarked sites I set up for her. If it's not reachable via her toolbar's Roblox and YouTube buttons, she doesn't even have a remote chance of finding it, and I know because I've seen the access logs.
Anecdotally I can tell you that once Internet censorship in Russia (coming both from the state itself, and from foreign websites blocking access) ramped up enough, suddenly many very non-technical people have figured out how to use VPNs.
And with something as popular as porn? Why, that just might end up being one of the largest VPN awareness campaigns. ~
That is a consolation, but only a small one when the state violence apparatus is standing by to punish those who use them. It must never be illegal in the first place.
