Some of the pessimists are absolutely perma-bears who hate any thing to do with Elon to the point of madness, but still doesn't change the fact that this IPO makes no financial sense no matter how reasonably you try to look at it.
I listened to all 3 hours of the Dwarkesh interview with Elon. I would really really love to see mass drivers on the moon, but all the facts were obviously made up on the spot. This wasn't just the usual Elon exaggerating. It was pure fantasy stuff. All the hard engineering questions were just being hand-waved away along with reasons of why the data centers couldn't be here on earth.
Combine that with the fact that Elon will retain complete control of SpaceX. Yeah no. I wouldn't be crazy enough to short the stock but I really don't want any of my money in it either.
I see nothing wrong here. You cannot fight several teams of customer retention (no idea how it’s called) when you are already deep in their hands. Sometimes the best way is to remove or limit their products.
I suppose you're referring to engagement maximization algorithms (my words) of socials?
> already deep in their hands
If a person observes they're sensitive to these, do they really need an additional device to disrupt their reactive behavior and be a little bit more deliberate in what they do?
> remove or limit their products
Is deleting the apps or using them in moderation[1] really so hard?
[1] One form of moderation I've found is to disable notifications for those (if not all) apps. Again, seizing control instead of being reactive to whatever some platform/app/device decides to shove down your throat at any given time.
All the comfort of the hemisphere least likely to suffer nuclear fallout coupled with the familiar warm embracing hug of the five eyes security panopticon.
Unfortunately, I remember reading that Australia now has weak privacy laws:
> The Telecommunications Assistance and Access Bill (TAAB or AssAccess) require technology companies like FastMail, Google, Apple, Cisco to provide Australian law enforcement and security agencies with access to all communications without any judicial oversight, transparency, or reason. The only restrictions offered to protect people’s privacy is the vague terms “reasonable and proportionate.”
macOS mail app is a special type of terrible especially if you deal with multiple email accounts. Every os upgrade causes various bugs such as search index all of the sudden not working and you have to reset and reimport all your mailboxes
I agree. Mail.app is one of the buggiest pieces of software I have ever used. It has some nice features as well, especially the editor. But some of the bugs I have experienced were catastrophic, such as silently failing exports that appeared to have completed successfully (this was recently fixed after years).
I've used Mail.app since 2004 and have not had any of those problems except searching using Spotlight have occasionally been broken over the years, but never searching within the app.
And I've had both multiple accounts various servers both private and work. And dozens of work-related role aliases which Mail.app correctly always used when replying. No problems there. Neither I have had to rebuild sqlite mail folder db, but did have some quirks first when work emails were transferred to Office365 which wanted to rename folders etc. nuisance, 2FA worked also worked fine since IIRC Mojave. I've had some addons MacGPG, sorting and maintenance scripts too. MacGPG does need some attention when upgrading though besides paying for subscription it moved time ago.
I've used also Thunderbird, mostly with linux. And used and tested whole lot of various clients since Elm was a thing -80's, then Pine, mutt etc.
The macOS Mail.app is fast reliable in my opinion, but sure there are things in its UX it could be yet improved. But still it's been long time among best and never broken or let me down over 20 years, both work and private use.
“Great” isn’t how I would describe it. Searching for “delivery” from my inbox, when the third email in my inbox has a literal subject line of “delivery notification”? Zero results.
It used to break the search index sometimes, but I experienced it twice at most, and it searches instantly for me, never failed to find an e-mail I was looking for...
...from 5 accounts with at least a decade of history each, incl. my office e-mail.
The problem is the actual architecture Apple uses for search in iOS and macOS. Spotlight powers all of it, and it applications like Mail that need search, do so by donating data to spotlight for indexing.
But that means any spotlight bug is a mail search bug, and a settings search bug, and a “just launch this app” search bug, etc etc etc.
It also means that any bugs caused by one of these applications end up affecting them all. So if Contacts causes an indexer crash, none of your searches anywhere work any more. It’s a super fragile architecture. They did some work to split some of the plugins into separate processes but somehow it always ends up being insufficient.
At least on macOS there are some commands to blow away your spotlight index when it goes bad. On iOS you’re basically screwed unless you wipe and restore the OS.
There’s another nasty one I encountered where power loss on a mac mini with 4 external drives connected made one drive refuse to mount on that machine. All recommendations online were to nuke the OS and/or drive to get it to mount there again. It would mount on other machines fine. There’s some cache/index file buried (I think related to spotlight) that got corrupted. Nuked that file, drive mounted instantly again.
These types of things should stand as big massive red flashing warnings with all these locked down systems - as you point out, in certain situations on iOS you’re just stuffed.
The worst is that if you look at Console.app and stream error logs from the system processes, there's hundreds of error logs per minute being dumped out on a brand new system with nothing installed on it yet, including and especially from spotlight. There's bugs all over the place that some engineer at Apple thought enough to emit a log for, and the result is they just ship with the errors anyway. They only seem to care about 100% reproducible bugs, and even then they sometimes ship with them anyway. They don't seem to care about all these little unobservable issues that "only" log errors, even though 9 times out of 10, when a bug does become a reproducible/observable issue, there was an error log that was warning you about it the whole time.
If I took over Apple's software engineering, I would tell every engineer "None of you are working on features until a stock OS install has zero error/warning logs. No exceptions. Contribute to fixes or use your vacation time, but nobody touches anything until we get it all fixed. Then once that's done, nobody's allowed to work on features while there are open bugs in their backlog. No exceptions."
Totally agree. I hit another crazy iOS bug this morning I hadn't hit for a few months - search for an old email - specifically my old Ableton licence from 2022... Return to my inbox 20-30 mins later on that device and it's now full with every email returned from my earlier Ableton search. Open my email on any other machine (MacBook, iPad, etc.) and it shows correctly, but iOS will keep showing all those old emails until I manually move each one back to its original folder. Pretty annoying if they come from different folders, and deleting them deletes the original in the email account. Persists across reboots, so again clearly spotlight search borks out and wrecks the local mail index. It needs a "rebuild" button, like Mac Mail has to "solve" this.
A friend showed this to me yesterday and I was impressed that Shortcuts are able to intervene like this. The whole premise of a third party app introducing these 'launch pauses' seemed very unlikely on iOS.
Based on this I'm now using Shortcuts to mute the phone before opening any offending auto-play-videos-with-sound apps (such as Instagram).
Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous) to begin with:
> But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. [...] the law is not deterministic. You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.
> [...] it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law. That’s why prosecutors end up working as defense attorneys and why our regulators tend to end up working for big corporations.
IMO, as with most domains, AI _tools_ will save a huge amount of time, but it's the human specialist making judgment calls based on real world context.
You can apply this same argument to everything. Code is deterministic but what is being made is often not because people don't know what they want to make. Society can choose just to make everything boring and deterministic so that computers can do everything.
It’s not just that law is ambiguous. That’s something that can be worked around. It’s that lawyering deals with human disputes and everything that comes with that. Imagine asking a couple that’s getting divorced “why are you getting divorced?” You’ll get two completely different stories with different recollections of the facts. Business disputes aren’t really any different. People have selective recollection, they don’t remember things, they shade the truth or hide things or just lie.
Oftentimes, the law is reasonably clear. The hard part is getting the facts out of the witnesses to figure out what really happened, so you have facts to apply to the law.
This isn't really true though. This is how the law used to work, until people did the research and discovered it let to absolutely loads of mad variation in outcomes, with people with similar offences getting totally different sentences based on random luck. Hence most countries not have pretty strict sentencing guidelines, with a bit of space for judgement on top (despite a lot of protesting from judges).
“most countries now have pretty strict sentencing guidelines”
That’s a vast, vast overstatement.
“You should be able to predict the outcome of a court case if you have all the facts available. That's what fairness means.”
Too much of a simplification. The role of a jury is to interpret the evidence, every jury is unique. Evidence is not an absolute, there are no “facts”. A judge can include/exclude evidence that would sway a jury one way or the other. Sentencing, even without guidelines, is the least variable part of the criminal justice system in the western world.
Non-grey-area cases are common, and never reach court.
If a case reaches court then that means that either the evidence or the law isn't clear enough for the person to simply plead guilty (or the case to be dropped).
Something like 90% of both criminal and business cases in the US never get to trial - the rules are deterministic enough the vast majority of the time to avoid trial. The stuff we hear about on TV are the edge cases.
> Nilay Patel argues that law is undeterministic (and its application ambiguous)
I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.
I've always thought that we (as a country) should maintain one single ordered list of specific crimes and punishments. Every new case that wants to set a punishment must insert it into this ordered list and explain convincingly why it fits into the list at the proposed position.
This would prevent the outrageous differences we see today where someone gets a few days of house arrest for murder and another guy gets a decade of solitary confinment for stealing a pen.
> I argue that of all things, law should be as deterministic as possible.
It is (probably) impossible to write down a complete list of rules for how to judge even petty crimes. Someone who steals a loaf of bread because their child is starving should not be punished the same way as someone who steals a loaf of bread because they're a kleptomaniac.
No two situations are identical, and the problems start when you try to come up with a one-size-fits-all approach.
A human with sound judgement (and, arguably, some empathy) should be in control.
Someone with psychopathic characteristics would lie in their favour. So someone would need to fact check, a doctor would have to check if the children are actually starving?
And on the other side, someone who contribute greatly to community and society, should that person get a lower sentence because of that?
Counter argument - even stone age Chat GPT 3 was great at making reasonably convincing sounding arguments and newer models are great at aligning those arguments to souces (laws or cases). Chat is IMO better at ambiguous nonsense than objective analysis.
You may want to take a look at the "AI hallucination Cases" database which tracks cases when someone used AI and ended up presenting made-up sources in a legal case.
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