noelrock

A refreshing read. While not in the same lane as the author re maths/physics/SWE, I empathise.

I think on one hand, things are simply less novel as we get older and more expert in a given lane. That’s age old.

But the dopamine hit/attention deficit issue is altogether new, and it’s troubling from a societal perspective. I suspect it’s fairly universal that adults in 2026 aren’t reading nearly as much as they aspire to, or claim to be.

I very much enjoy Eric's commitment to new and novel and imaginative hardware.

Bought and am loving my Pebble 2 Duo etc - still yet to charge it once in fact!

This device doesn't quite hit the mark for me, but I love the commitment to thinking about what's novel and useful, and putting a prototype out into the world. To use an Irish phrase, "more luck to them" - and hope we see many more projects from them!

So odd - was listening to an account of this in an Audiobook just yesterday - "Why Nothing Works" by Marc Dunkelman. Was essentially making the point that this sort of thing would be several magnitudes of difficulty harder to pull off today, and certainly wouldn't happen within that timeframe.

Just a brief note to say: loved original Pebble, always a regret that my younger poorer self didn't buy one way back when, so bit the bullet straight away yesterday and am signed up for the first batch of the black Core 2 Duo in July.

Two features which I think it would be useful to give more prominence to especially as you move from pre-order stage to general sale stage:

Strap is replaceable in both models Both models count steps

Would be high priority things for me! Look forward to seeing how this develops and best of luck.

Yeah, I weighed up the possibility that people would perceive it that way. That also speaks to the negative perception of politics/politicians too of course...

As a former politician, I really don't love this.

It's already difficult enough to get people of the capacities that most of us want to see (good, smart, could be employed elsewhere, empathetic) involved in politics as it's so negative and divisive.

There are, as other comments highlight, loads of legitimate and reasonable reasons why somebody would be using a phone mid-debate: rebuttal research, communicating with colleagues in chamber, communicating with their own office/staff, the list is fairly long and reasonably legitimate.

Too many people seem to be confusing prior product critical commentary being invalid with all product critical commentary being invalid.

Apple Vision Pro won't do much as a product - it'll struggle for even minimal adaption and will be eventually all but withdrawn within 24 months. The patents etc may eventually lead to a compelling product.

But I'd be very confident I could look back at this comment and be proven correct.

iPad commentary on launch always felt wide of the mark - use case was clear. iPhone was limited at launch but you could see the path forward. Vision Pro feels like it could never be 'evolved' into a mass market product - though maybe the patents could be taken and become something useful, albeit different.

Irish company Manna have been doing this in two Irish suburbs for a number of years now. They're worth checking out - their CEO Bobby Healy often tweets interesting stuff around payloads, journeys per day, route maps etc. I've worked with them a little and think they're building something really interesting.

One thing that’s bothering me - the story text says it’s 32 bn kilometres from earth but looking it up it appears to be about 19 bn kilometres. Which is it?

I can definitely see a gap in the market for this now.

The present Twitter alternatives (Mastodon, Bluesky, Spoutible) are just too hobbyist or finicky.

Meta will presumably bring an ease-of-use to this service and, crucially, scale from minute 1. They're the building blocks of Twitter's current incumbency position, and Meta/Threads can replicate them straight out the gate.

That is a huge advantage.

On the other side of the ledger, the utility of Twitter keeps sliding. Not sure how many Hacker News users are Twitter users or what the crossover is, but the whole blue tick 'thing' has reduced the utility in one key surprising way: high quality replies under popular accounts are impossible to find. It's like if you could buy upvotes on Hacker News to get to the top almost. Secondarily to that is the stuff over the last few days with very low rate limits on how many tweets you can view - if you can't use a social network, it tends to stop being useful.

While I wouldn't say Threads is a slam dunk guaranteed success, I would say it's the most probable contender of all the ones out there.

Spurious enough comparison given there were phones, a developed phone market which was 150m+ globally even at that stage, and demonstrated clear use cases for an iphone (an ipod, a phone and an internet browser combined).

Yep it iterated and yep app store really rocket charged it beyond where it was envisaged on day one. But it was also an existing market, albeit one that was at the foothills of its potential.

AR/VR too is at the foothills of its potential. But the fundamental problem is: even when its potential is realised, it'll still just be relatively niche and relatively fringe. This stuff simply is not going to be mainstream in a serious way. And without being mainstream, there is no real revenue stream of utility for a company of Apple's size.

I have no idea why people are doing such backflips to come up with potential use cases but most of them just aren't runners. This will sell to an extent for Apple but it'll be a rounding error on their balance sheet at best - even in future versions - though I imagine a lot of the tech will end up elsewhere, so it won't be a complete lost cause for Apple.

Ha, both the original post and the parent comment made me think of Harry Potter - I wonder if I knew either of you! The world is very small.

Was going to reply along these lines. I was fortunate to live with someone who was working on the James Webb and telling me excitedly about it — back in 2006! Surely even with the various upgrades/spec changes/delays, things have moved sufficiently that whatever is started even today will be a marked upgrade.

In any event, many many areas to aim at, and relatively limited funding unfortunately.

Completely agree - if the projection from Q2 wasn't also so negative, I would say the market has overreacted a little bit.