Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued.
Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.
They’re not going to stop until the definition of a company is: A C-suite and robotics+AI to do the actual work. No labor costs. That’s the end goal of all these guys. We shouldn’t forget it.
The pairing has become almost flawless as well. Years ago, it was slow and inconsistent, but now the hotspot feature is almost perfect and automatic. Honestly, I don’t really think about it anymore.
I walk my kids to school every morning. And I walk to pick them up. It's a 10 minute walk to get them, so that's about 40 minutes of walking each day. I could drive and get there in 2 minutes then wait in a line. It would probably cut the time in half, but walking is better for the environment (noise, pollution, safety, wear and tear), me, and my relationship with the kids (we, y'know, talk while we walk).
There's people that live even closer that drive their kids to school. One of them lives literally 19 houses down the street from it.
I also have a rule where if I can go somewhere within 20 minutes on a bike, I'm taking my bike. Most places I go fall under this rule, and I live in what most would call a suburban hellscape.
My wife used to drive to work. Driving took longer than walking. But she still drove.
I think it's less about easy vs hard and more about the culture around driving in the US.
That's great - for me the problem is weather. Where I live it's hot, >80s Fahrenheit, >28 celsius, for 4 months a year. So unless I want to always be sweaty, I can't really walk more then 10 minutes at a time.
I tried biking to work for a while - 13 miles. During summer/fall, it was pretty nice, I'd go early in the morning, shower at the gym, and then bike home. 2 workouts a day when the weather was fair.
The sweaty part, you'll get less sweaty as you get more in shape, both exerting less and retaining heat less efficiently due to lower BMI. But - you'll probably never not be sweaty if the distance is anything significant like, say, 13 miles.
Let's talk about colder climates. I was a consultant for a few years, and got to travel all over. I recall visiting Calgary in the winter, and some maniac dev manager biked to work every day, rain, snow or shine. 6 miles he said (helpfully translating units for me).
In the US a large number of people have moved to suburbs in the south. On a bad year our lows are in the 90F range. Add in asphalt architecture and in the sun temps are commonly 125F+
Monopoly in charge of the world's video content shows users what is most profitable instead of what they want to see. "Content creators" suffer as a result. Brain rot content is real, it's profitable, and it's only going to get "worse".
Does anyone remember the internet before pop-up blockers? Like, right before. It felt like the same thing to me. The internet was infested with pop-ups and becoming borderline unusable, and then comes along the pop-up blocker (and other things, but I'm simplifying here) and there was a "golden age" which is now giving way to a new wave of advertising-based atrophy. Not sure what happens next.
One idea for what happens next, that rhymes with pop-up blocker revolution, is Gates' "disintermediation of everything" via AI, where agents on our behalf will be able to "find me a video I like and don't show me the ads", "renew my electricity contract and don't let them soft-scam me with their tricky pricing structure", "buy groceries online and don't get tricked into buying candy from a promo", etc. Agents make become like popup blockers in that way. Subsequent to that, I reckon we may see some sites adopting TOS forbidding people to have AI agents visit on their behalf.
The analysis in this article shows that revenue and likes didn't actually go down, though. Just views. That's only bad for sponsors overall.
I do wonder how this applies for smaller channels, though. Larger creators may get better revshare to make up for whatever the heck is happening. The little guy always gets screwed.
Issue for me with cars isn't space vs no space, it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies. 20 minutes to work. 20 minutes home. Add another 20 minutes if you do anything else but home to work. That's an hour a day. You've also wasted an hour doing nothing that might have otherwise been spent walking. Now you need to borrow another hour for the gym or some kind of physical activity… and that assumes you don't drive to a gym (one of the the most bizarre things people do). But that's two hours a day that just feels "wasted," and that's a best case scenario. Then there is the cost of the car, insurance, gas, maintenance. The hours that all translates into. Add it all up over the year and you spend like 15-20% of your waking hours dealing with the reality of the car. For some, it's more.
I also feel like a peculiar externality of car-centric society is anger. I get why. You are wasting all your time in the car. You aren't walking. No exercise. Fast food. Parking. I can see why people who are pro-car want space—they are angry all the time. They need space to cool off. There is even a face that I call "car face" which is that kinda pissed off for no reason always in a rush face. People who "love cars" and don't find it "stressful at all" seem to have this face to the max.
Yeah, I didn't even account for that. Drive enough and you get into an accident. Add all the hours and cost to dealing with that. You'll probably get somewhat injured, even if minor. Physical therapy and healing time. Lifelong back pain. Now you DO need to drive to a gym for physical therapy. More car time.
I also think about how my nutrition has declined DRAMATICALLY with a car. Gone are the days of fresh lettuce and berries unless you drive to the grocery store every day. Gas stations should sell ozempic at the pump.
> it's the amount of stress, time and money that is wasted in car-centered societies
Commuting by train also involves a lot of stress: unexplained and indeterminate delays, filth, crime, dependence on multiple stages (walking, bus, train, walking, etc.)
That’s the tough part; it’s self-reinforcing :) both are causes and both are effects, and we’ve got to break the cycle somewhere.
But no, all of them. Low usage causes service cuts, which cause low usage because you can’t rely on transit, causes delays because there isn’t enough service to make up for failures and there isn’t enough investment for grade separation and maintenance, etc
USA says Iran can't have nuclear weapons. Says China can't have modern silicon.
USA only has a limited amount of time left to dictate these things. We are playing with fire before the world order shifts. It is inevitable, and we would all be better off recognizing this and working towards a better future for all of humanity than trying to pretend like the USA is always going to be able to dictate who gets to do what.
> BTW can your neighbor, who keeps saying that he's going to kill you, or maybe your friend, obtain a machine gun?
Definitely. This is America. There is nothing I can do to stop them.
> Would you approve of that?
No, but I don’t really have much of a say in the matter, and that’s kind of the point. I just have to accept it and try to make peace with my neighbor.
Are you suggesting that if your neighbor threatens you that you should just go over and murder them first?
> Am I seeing something different than anybody else?
Maybe. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.
As others have mentioned, the core problem with Meta today is the dark patterns. They move, edit, and remove UI elements specifically to optimize against whatever behavior they want the user to take. I'm always amazed when things end up posted, shared, or alterated in a way I did not intened or can't even remember having taken an action against. Things just seem to happen with Meta products… even for accounts that are idle.
And if you spend enough time with Meta products, you'll start to realize that no two users are guaranteed to have the same experience. There is no standard experience. The experience changes based on region and langauge and honestly who knows what else. They are constantly testing and optimizing for dark patterns in production. Spend an hour with the Meta Business Suite. The entire platform is essentially a dark pattern labyrinth of broken links, broken features, and UI elements that go nowhere or to deprecated functions. One team is trying to get you do X and use feature Y, and another team is trying to get you to do Z and use feature W. Business Suite just mashes it all together. You could freeze the codebase today and study Business Suite for months and you'd find that it's dark patterns all the way down.
No people, no supply chain, and no total lack of environmental regulations mean most manufacturing jobs are not coming back no matter what the tariffs are. It's not just one reason that the manufacturing jobs have left, but a conflation of reasons.
Unless… well, unless you eliminate the EPA, invade Canada and Greenland and take their raw materials, and make people so poor that they take up factory jobs again.
Courier will only pay the tax if it's a DDP solution, and then bill it back to the actual merchant. FedEx, DHL, and UPS provide this as an option. If it goes USPS, or no DDP solution is in place, it's going DDU and it will simply be stuck in a sufferance warehouse or at the local post office until the recipient comes in and pays the bill.
This is an interesting idea, and I am actually curious what Apple is going to do going forward. A "Snow Leopard"-esque release would be nice, but I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release. This has always made some sense to me, as after 4-6 years, you do start to feel it.
I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me. I can't really imagine a change that would happen in the next 2 years that would make this thing feel slow where an M3 would feel sufficient, so I'm curious to see if Apple really does just go hardcore on forced obsolescence going forward. I have a few M series devies now, from M1 to M3, and I honestly cannot tell the difference other than export times for video.
I can imagine some kind of architecture change that might come with an M6 or something that would force an upgrade path, but I can't see any reason other than just forcing upgrades to drop support between M1-M5. Maybe if there is a really hard push next year into 8K video? Never even tried to edit 8K, so I don't know. I'm guessing an M1 might feel sluggish?
Trying to use Wan2.1 to generate AI video or other various LLM or StableDiffusion style stuff is slow compared to other other platforms. I don't know how much of that is because the code is not optimized for M1+ Max (Activity Monitor shows lots of GPU usage) or how much of it is it's just not up to the competition. Friends on 4070 Windows PC are getting results many X faster and 4070 perf iss not even close to 4090
I don't feel like they ever used forced obsolescence with Mac's. When they dropped support for the latest OS on your machine it was usually because it couldn't run it. I recently updated some older Mac's and even a couple of OS's before support was dropped things got really sluggish. I imagine with the Apple Silicon machines the OS support will stretch longer than it has on the Intel ones. Maybe the higher prices are a hint they expect people to keep the machines in use for longer than before.
> I think what would be better is an LTS release. Historically, you get a new Mac and you usually only get 5-6 years before they drop your model from the latest release
In fairness, Apple to do tend to continue to release critical security patches for older versions.
I suspect that it will be AI features that push Apple into deprecating older hardware. But I also hope that the M series hardware will be supported a bit longer than the intel hardware was. Time will tell.
I don't have any Macs or iPhones that can even run the latest software anymore. My absolute newest Mac is stuck on Ventura 13.7. On the other hand, I can get the bleeding edge version of any Linux distribution out there and run it on decades-old hardware.
Unfortunately, “decades old hardware” doesn’t give me the combination of speed, quietness, battery life and the ability to use my laptop on my lap without so much heat that it puts me at risk for never having any little Scarfaces.
Using an x86 laptop in 2025 is like using a flip phone.
> I bought an M1 Max that is now almost 4 years old and it still feels new to me.
How are the keycaps doing? Mine looked awful after about 2 years of relatively light use, developing really obvious ugly shiny patches (particularly bad on the space bar), quite a letdown on an otherwise great machine.
(Realised that you can actually buy replacements and swap them yourself, via the self-service repair store, so have replaced them once, but am starting to notice shiny patches again on the new set)
Still better than the butterfly debacle of 2016-2019. I have one for work that spends 99.9% of its life docked to a real keyboard and it still has keys that only work sporadically. Some of these keys probably have < 10,000 actuations on them.
Not OP but have the same Mac. Every key is shiny. Doesn't really bother me though because I touch type. Also clearly I favor hitting space with my right hand because only the right side is shiny.
If you have AppleCare they will basically rebuild your MacBook for ~$200. I got MBP M1 Max usb ports and top case replaced and a bunch of other stuff I didn’t even ask for but they replaced with new stuff. Felt like a new machine when I got it back.
They need to somehow start marketing effectively to gamers, because the GPU in your M1 Max is shit. Sure, it’s fine for mostly-2D UIs and the occasional WebGL widget, but for AAA gaming it’s just dogshit.
'Gaming laptops' with more powerful GPUs are generally awful, though. Even ignoring the state of Win11.
Yes, they can theoretically perform better, but only when plugged into mains power, and creating so much heat and fan noise that the experience really isn't good.
Don't think there's anything out there that will outperform the GPU of an M-series Mac without consuming way more power and producing problematic levels of heat+noise.
Sure, but this is another avenue to onboard people to the upgrade train. Sure your display is great, your CPU is great, the speakers are great. But the AAA graphics scale up every year and there are often big performance cliffs for new features on old hardware.
Our economy is being propped up by this. From manufacturing to software engineering, this is how the US economy is continuing to "flourish" from a macroeconomic perspective. Margin is being preserved by reducing liabilities and relying on a combination of increased workload and automation that is "good enough" to get to the next step—but assumes there is a next step and we can get there. Sustainable over the short term. Winning strategy if AGI can be achieved. Catastrophic failure if it turns out the technology has plateaued.
Maximum leverage. This is the American way, honestly. We are all kind of screwed if AI doesn't pan out.