While I don't really particularly like any of the designs, the F option is absolutely wild and I feel it would really make the Euro notes standout in the world. I don't know that it would make for a good bank note design, but it is visibly distinct.
The birds on J is incredibly beautiful, but that's somewhat offset by the building on the reverse.
That's also my problem. My colleague tells me that it's very easy to setup, but he's a network engineer and knows what things are.
Mikrotik seems to operate in an interesting area between high-end home-labing and the SME market. Without preexisting networking knowledge at a certain level, their documentation isn't all that helpful. I'm sure you can learn from the documentation, YouTube videos and trial and error, but if like me you get a few hours once in a while to take down your home network and get it back up it's going to take a while to gain the required knowledge. I really want an addition internet connection so I can play with this stuff.
On the negative, I'd say it's pretty clear that Mikrotik want you do buy training. It feels like some information is withheld by those with the certifications and Mikrotik and the UI isn't helping you much to figure out stuff on your own.
At least it's WebKit and not just a reskin of Chrome, but I don't exactly get why Kagi feel that they need to develop their own browser. Personally I prefer my search and browser to be developed be separate entities that can focus on doing one thing really well.
I wouldn't say that it collapsed, it's only slightly under its IPO price, $134 vs. $135.
However it's not going up and later this month the first lockup period ends and people who got stock options are allowed to sell some of their stocks. These people don't care if the price is $134 or $135, because they go in much much lower, down to $30, from what I can tell. So starting this month there's going to be new shares available to buy, and the sellers are less critical of the price your offering.
Admittedly I'm a bit salty about LLMs due to they constant attacks on our infrastructure, the damage their doing to peoples minds and the general lack of morals shown by the AI companies, but things like this is rather childish and not really a solution to anything.
If you cared enough, I do wonder if you could win in court, if you pirated a movie that you purchased on the PS5, but Sony removed. It would cost you an ungodly amount of money to defend yourself against Sony, and I don't know the exact words of the "license", but it seems like a reasonable action to take.
Apple was sued for having revoking access to hundreds of movies that a customer purchased. They tried to claim that "No reasonable consumer would believe' that purchased content would remain on the iTunes platform indefinitely".
Not even a defense of Apple here… but I think most everyone does know. We just agree to bury our heads in the sand and not to do anything about it as long as service continues in good faith.
It comes up occasionally ever few years, whenever Amazon claws back an ebook or something like this (particularly egregious) thing happens. But then we just go back to normal.
Blurays are obscenely customer hostile too, but I decided a long time ago that they’re as close as I’m getting to owning a copy.
At least I have way to inoculate myself against this scenario without outright stealing.
But now even Blurays are getting harder to buy. Some of the bigger titles I try to buy aren’t being made… or never were (streamer exclusives).
I think many made the same assumption that I made: A movie can be withdrawn from iTunes or an eBook from Amazon, but if you already bought it you'll retain access, it's just that no new sales can be made.
Regarding BluRays, and to some extend DVDs, I'm in the same boat. I have season one of a TV show, but season two never made it to DVD and now it's locked away in the vaults of some production company, you can't even stream it. There are so many movies and shows that will just be lost in the future.
OnePlus was always a strange proposition to me. I remember debating it with colleagues when the hype started around their first phone. A lot of people and reviewers went crazy over the OnePlus phone, to me it seemed, and still does, as a pretty standard Android phone. The last review I saw was Linus Tech Tips reviewing the latest OnePlus, and Carl Pei commented that maybe Linus issue was that he was used to flagship phones and his expectations was a bit to high.
That really sums it up to me, then OnePlus phones are pretty standard Android phones, they are not really special, at least not to the extend where the brand means all that much to all but a minority of people.
I won't suggest that you can't find situation where having Starlink wouldn't be nice, but as another comment suggests: It's increasingly a niche product. Starlink may not be able to survive on being a product that provides internet access for campers and rural populations. That market might not be large enough to sustain the Starlink satellite fleet. There are entire countries where even to most remote areas have at least 2G cell service and fiber is frequently available even out in the country side.
Defence contracts are more likely than anything to be what keeps the satellites in orbit.
There's going to be more and more use cases, but only in select geographical areas. There's no real reason to pick Starlink over e.g. 5G, when 5G is cheaper and cover 99% of your locations. You can then pick Starlink, microwave, or 2G (if you don't need a lot of data) for those special cases where 5G doesn't have coverage.
Then you have the truly remote areas where you have no choice, it's Starlink or OneWeb, but that's still a niche.
I can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life, at least not without large downsides. There's some embedded stuff, like lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car, that I like, but the package as a whole... not really much of an improvement.
It's not really bad as such that the tech industry want to attempt to make a smart home, or add software to a product, but it's increasingly being done without consideration for the users.
People hate the tech industry, and that includes those who work in it, because it's pretty clear that the industry really doesn't give a shit about it's users, because the users are rarely the customers anymore.
In terms of consumer benefit in tech we've been at stasis for a long time. My computing experience isn't that much different now than it was 15 or 20 years ago. Sure, my computer and connectivity are far faster now, and thanks to Apple Silicon I can go whole days at conferences without plugging my laptop in, but those are incremental improvements not sea changes. We did fine with 4-hour laptops in 1999.
Also a number of "improvements" just aren't, like smart home devices and IoT crap. Virtually none of those things have made good on the marketers' promises, and 100% of them require some tech family member to end up sysadmining the TV or the thermostat or the light switch, and having to do that kind of crap for things that used to Just Work in the most basic sense is insane.
There's been a lot of heavy lifting in the smart speaker space, and it IS true that my 86 year old mother enjoys being able to ask Siri to play any song she wants, but that kind of thing seems picayune compared to what middle-aged nerds thought the second quarter of the 21st century would bring us.
The only area that comes immediately to mind for ME that includes staggering advances is medical care. I had a hip replacement a few years ago that was an OUTPATIENT procedure. A dear friend of mine ignored symptoms and therefore only "caught" his colon cancer well into stage 4 -- and yet still lived 6 years with pretty high quality of life. Time was, a stage 4 diagnosis meant "uh, maybe don't renew your cable this month." Another pal has progressive MS; 15 years ago, there were no therapies AT ALL for it. Now there is one, and it's making a difference for him and his family.
Nothing on that scale has shown up from "the tech industry" in a long time.
It's one of those things were I feel like a frog in boiling water. Drivers need smart assists in cars because I see everybody is checking messages and scrolling on their devices while driving. The tech is solving things but also creating a need for more tech to solve new problems. A lot of things also remain unsolved from the earlier stages of tech. Eg. what happens to our digital lives when we die, can we have legal access so it doesn't rely solely on personal responsibility to share account keys and passwords. How is our digital life secured and backed up without having to come up with home grown solutions and be a sys admin or pay for cloud storage. Why can't we decide on standard protocols for messaging, we had SMS, now we have different messaging apps, people who aren't tech savvy lose years of correspondence when switching devices because they failed to import or transfer data. We still haven't solved data archiving to free us from bit rot and degradation, things like project silica are only in the research phases. All the while, we generate more and more data and make our lives completely dependent on digital services and devices. More and more bank branches are cashless now. We had a massive power grid outage a few years ago and at the convenience store we couldn't buy anything, there was no way to issue a paper receipt or anything like that, the store employees were clueless. I still remember a time when you could buy on tab/credit, they would just write it up, or at least take cache and issue handwritten receipts. And now we're piling AI on top of everything, but operating systems are still crap, software is mostly crap and we have to update our devices every few years because they become slow or stop working. And it feels like younger generations don't mind because it's the new normal, they grew up with smart devices.
Na, drivers have always sucked. When I was growing up the amount of people that drove drunk was just insane. I have no idea how they survived, I guess a lot of them did not.
I worked in car sales. Most of my coworkers drove drunk once a week or more. So basically I've seen 10+ people drive drunk 100+ times, and no doubt they do it more outside my view. No one ever had an accident.
For sure drunk driving increases your odds of an accident. But people make it sound 3-4 beers and you're bound to have an accident. We should be more honest about it.
What a weird straw pile to die one. No one is saying "four beers and you're guaranteed an accident". They're saying "drive drunk and you are a piece of shit, don't do it ever ever ever". There's no room for nuance here because the targets of this advice have lethally impaired judgement. Wiggle room will be exploited by people too drunk to know better, which equals preventable death.
My optometrist told me that when he started clinical practice years ago he was shocked to discover how many people were driving around with severe visual impairments. The usual DMV eye exam is way too easy.
I sold cars for a living so I pay attention to randoms in cars more than most probably. The amount of people (mostly women) sitting WAYYY too low in their car is shocking. I don't know how they can even see most of what's near in front of them.
The way too close to the steering wheel also shocks me, but I guess with that one theyre going to just hurt themselves.
When id sell a car, or even on test drives, I'd try to help them adjust the seat to a sane position but most people that do it wrong seem to be pretty set in their ways and don't want to change it even with some friendly advice and showing them the seat goes way up. It's almost like they don't like looking bigger in their car or something.
>I can't actually think of a single piece of tech made in the past ten years that has improved my life
This is going to be controversial, but I feel that ChatGPT has improved my life.
Also e-bikes, 3D printers, and wireless earbuds really took off in the last ten years. Some of these were invented more than 10 years ago but saw significant improvements that brought them into the mainstream.
Being able to use ChatGPT is useful, but it is significantly offset by how many business interactions are now mediated solely by chatgpt, and I'm not sure on balance my life has been improved.
e-bikes are a terror. Motorized vehicles operating in places where motorized vehicles aren't allowed (so like all modern tech, the benefit is the abuse/loophole they allow a small subset to benefit from). People treating them like toys and riding horribly resulting in lots of accidents. Nah, they aren't a plus.
They are actually pedaling and moving, but they need less strength and stamina to get further. They dont end up stuck downhill unable to climb up. This latter risk is something that really forces old people to put out of normal bikes. For older person, the e-bike is roughly the exercise they need. And it gets you to places, it does not limit them to small area.
The old person alternative to e-bike is not normal bike, it is nothing, because their bodies are just like that - weak and old.
I think the health benefits would be the ability to get out and be involved with the world. When I was living in Chinatown I was amazed by how much healthier the elderly people were simply from going to the park each day and hanging out with their friends or dancing (Chinese people, at least in the US, seem to LOVE ballroom dancing!). The problem is that not everyone can live in a strong community where they can walk to a local park.
Those are real tech IMO. Consumer media type software isn't 'tech', at least not regular useful software sense. That would be like calling addictive drugs and slot machines an innovation or technology.
> lane assist or adaptive cruise control in my car
The hilarious thing is that the EU decided that the assisting must be mandatory, and so now every time you turn on your 2024 or newer car, lane assist and "you're speeding!" warnings are turned on.
At least there's still a way to turn them off/getting in the car means sit down, seat belt, mirrors, turn on the engine, go to settings and switch off the nanny modes...
I could see that being enshittified soon. From what I've seen the deal is often "you lease the car instead of owning it, but you get a much nicer car than you could otherwise afford". I could see it switching to "You get a regular car but you still don't own it."
The voluntary adoption of modern tech products says otherwise. People aren't forced to wear Apple Watches, order food through doordash, look up things on ChatGPT, ride Waymos etc. And yet everything I listed above is very popular.
Population wide revealed preferences speak volumes despite what loud critics who appointed themselves as the people's ambassadors may say.
I think it is important to keep in mind that people's "revealed preferences" are dependent on the society they live in. E.g. are people talking to ChatGPT about their deepest fears because they want to or because society has under invested in counselors like pastors, school guidance counselors, licensed therapist, etc.
The silicon valley tech industry went from being a consumer products industry to being an advertising industry. Consumer products companies see the person buying their stuff as the customer. Advertising companies see them as the product.
I certainly hate that even when working on ecommerce projects, I have indirectly contributed for people to lose their jobs, as chains close their physical stores.
The birds on J is incredibly beautiful, but that's somewhat offset by the building on the reverse.
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