gyomu

The original iPad had a 9.7" screen; it was later bumped to 10.2", and today the smallest iPad/iPad Air screen is 11".

The iPad Mini started with a 7.9" screen, bumped today to 8.5".

The iPhone Duo inner display is 7.6", there are already rumors saying a gen 2 or gen 3 might be 7.9".

It's interesting how smooth the iPhone/iPad continuum is becoming.

> After 3 hours I was just exhausted from watching these peoples' tortuous attempts to avoid giving a direct answer to any question.

I’ve been around a lot of bullshitters my whole life, and my immediate reaction is to go “this person is full of shit, not worthy of my attention, kthxbye”

But I’ve noticed that most people when faced with the same person can’t help but try and figure out what makes them tick, or their redeeming qualities, or if even anything can be redeemed. It seems to be a social equivalent of “nerd sniping”; most people just have a very hard time declaring “this person is worth 0 additional seconds of my time” and actually following through.

See also ppl in toxic relationships, who will complain to their friends incessantly about how bad the other person is and how they know they need to get out of it, only to rarely get out of it.

Well, this is Hacker News, and you can’t even make apps for the device - there’s nothing to hack on. Of course this audience isn’t excited about it. It’s a Facebook Portal, with better privacy (at least).

I suspect this might be the beginning of a new turn for Apple strategy under Ternus: more satellite hardware that’s cheap(ish) compared to the flagship devices & locked down, reliant on your iPhone to do anything useful, pushing you to use exclusively Apple services rather than 3rd party ones. The App Store strategy is a thing of the past.

So weird. A brand new product category, and it gets dropped with the HomePod Mini/Apple TV, aka Apple’s most neglected products (besides the zombified Vision Pro). Apple has a history of being so proud of their new form factors, of wanting to show them with pomp and highlighting every little detail. Not so much here.

Also completely locked out for 3rd party developers, needs your iPhone to do anything while offering very little reason to do things on it rather than on your phone… (the teenage girl texting on it rather than her phone in the intro video is totally unbelievable)

Hmm, really hard to figure out what they’re thinking on this besides “throw it on the wall and see if it sticks”, aka the HomePod & Apple TV strategy, which is not reassuring. I bought a couple HomePods early on, excited by the potential given how reliable my AirPods were, and they’ve been one of my most hated tech purchases. Super buggy, completely lagging behind in terms of basic features, and of course no fallback to use them as “dumb” wired speakers.

> if you take away the LLM, all of a sudden you can't do any of the things you "learned"

What? That is absolutely not true. I've been using LLMs for language learning, math/physics, clarify home improvement best practices that I now regularly think about, etc. and that knowledge is not LLM-bound at all. Instead of acquiring from a regular textbook, I acquired it from a model.

If China is to the 21st century what the US were to the 20th century - economically, scientifically, industrially - what should I do as a US citizen working in tech, besides signing up my kids and myself for Chinese classes?

You can prove to me we’re just a video game running on the underpowered Game Boy of an interdimensional teenager, as long as I can make things with my hands, go out in nature, experience beautiful art, and have tasty food with people I care about, there’s no way I would “lose all the purpose and meaning of life”.

> Odd bokeh was one of the risks of adding a mechanical aperture, and bokeh is very often weirdest at the first or second down from open.

Why? Where can I read/learn more about this?

> "DXOMARK’s objective measurements and perceptual analyses"

Where are the measurements? All I see are vague generalities like "well-rendered images with improved contrast and natural-looking skin tones". I guess those are the "perceptual analyses"? Is there a "See full measurements" button I'm missing? How do they come up with numbers like "157 Portrait", "172 Outdoors"?

> The alternative is WordArt, or just black on white Comic Sans with some bolding and font size variations with bad ClipArt

??

The alternative is people just taking some markers & a sheet of paper, or chalk and a blackboard.

If you travel around east Asia you’ll be delighted by the variety and creativity of these handmade signs. Way better than anything produced digitally.

But of course their relationship to handwriting is completely different there compared to the west.

Apps that support iPad are 95% fine unless you do crazy custom things (which Apple has been telling developers for decades now that they shouldn’t do), and apps that are phone only are letterboxed, but still entirely usable.

How many customers do you expect to be running on Duo for the first year of its existence?

I’d be surprised if it was >0.01% for anyone. Apple wants you to drop everything to support all the bells and whistles for their new device, but even if you take 3 months to fix minor layout bugs, I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.

I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro, and I don’t think any of them felt like it was worth it in retrospect. Even the ones that got featured by Apple as a result didn’t see more than a few thousand downloads.

De facto it is in the US, but it is the only country in the world where that is the case.

I believe the App Store has switched to automated reviews, at least for updates. I've had my app updates approved in <1h on a regular basis starting this summer.