I disagree — photography has always been ripe with significant digital alteration of photos.
The main issue is that Adobe has been a long time player in the market and they have historically segmented into 4 distinct types of tools: RAW editing (Lightroom), raster editing (Photoshop), vector (Illustrator), and video editing (Premiere). Adobe still dominates in the first 3 categories.
Achieving the effects you listed would just happen in Photoshop, and Adobe never cross contaminates their product lines with the same features. You’d need to buy both Lightroom ($12/mo) and Photoshop to do what you want ($20/mo). Want vector editing? $40/mo now. Creative subscriptions are good money to them.
You’ll see other companies try to break this segmentation — for example, Affinity combined several categories of tools into one, but when they first released their suite, they actually followed Adobe’s model.
I do not think mural understanding works. It just allows you to merely accept someone, but it doesn’t mean that you want to work with them.
What America pushed after the WW2 was the “American world order” which was primarily “if we can trade, let’s forget about war and make money.” America would sit in the middle, protect shipping routes, provide a stable currency to ease trade, and encourage trade pacts.
Surprisingly, unlike beliefs, religion, language, or almost anything else, wanting to make money is… somewhat universal. It breaks down barriers. Countries wanted to work together and make money from trade. It exploited human materialistic tendencies.
i live in the largest city on the west coast of the USA and the only stores i've found where i can press keyboards is Office Depot and the like, and at least in the stores that i have visited, they have not had mechanicals.
even when Frys was around, i don't remember them having keyboards out and about.
Microcenter is probably the most consistent place. Not a huge selection, but some of the maintstream ones, to get a feel for switches on Keychron and some of the other big brands. Depending on where exactly you are, it's likely +/- 30min of an hour drive, which is only sorta "far" in US terms.
Frys predated the "mainstream" mechanical keyboard boom. If they were still around I'm sure they'd have even more (they were always larger stores).
wow, i had no idea at all there was a Microcenter in Socal! not too far, i'll be visiting, thank you. i went to a Microcenter in Dallas decades ago and was blown away.
My pet opinion is that Steve Jobs was an asshole but an asshole that used his own products and used his powers of complaining to steer the whole ship to fix major "this annoys me everyday" bugs.
From my experience, "annoying but not blockers" bugs are often very neglected compared to (1) bugs that actually break things and (2) feature work. Neglecting quality of life issues leads to the "do you even use your product??" kinds of experiences.
Soo many things either work buggy, laggy, inconsistent, or don’t work at all
Filling bugs doesn’t help. And I don’t think anyone is inventive to fix bugs. Resolving sure. But closing WONTFIX or NEEDSINFO is also a resolution.
Most of what I do is chrome +Linux terminals and vscode anyway
And the only reason I’m on Mac is because of hardware, encryption, and ease of backup/restore/wipe, and the power struggle of Linux distros. freeBSD is not really an option
There's a windowing bug that was introduced in 2009 that I'm confident will persist until MacOS has another MacOSX-style transition to something entirely new. They need someone who cares about fit&finish more than features driving the ship. That's not what gets promoted to the top, unfortunately.
I have not been impressed with Cook in the slightest. He came from Compaq, if I am not mistaken, and in many ways, I feel like Apple has become more Compaq-like during his tenure.
Steve Jobs knew what he wanted and was willing to put his foot down in order to get it. Yea, I’m sure he was difficult to work with and drove people insane, but he was the plumb line that kept Apple driving in (mostly) the right direction. Now, it seems like they have bored designers trying to make a name for themselves with a “new” and “revolutionary” interface in Liquid Glass, which nobody likes and is less usable than its predecessor. But nobody ever got promoted for maintaining the status quo, so they are going to push forward. Steve’s advantage was that he never needed to be promoted.
Well, the UI leader behind Liquid Glass is no longer with the company, replaced by a long time Apple employee known for his eye for detail.
I do t think Liquid Glass is going to go away soon, Apple doesn’t seem to reverse itself ever, but I do expect Liquid Glass to become better over time. We’ll see what WWDC brings on that front I guess.
My take on it is that in my own work I really like transparency effects but it is always a chore to tune up the foregrounds, backgrounds and alpha blending to keep everything legible. If you control all the content it is one thing, but for a general-purpose OS where the content is supplied by the user and applications you have to dial the intensity way back.
When I first saw the prototype images I thought they were really cool and it was a bold idea though people on this site were complaining about it already for the predictable reasons.
When it came out I was thinking that they dealt with the legibility of the content by dialing down the legibility of the design -- like it looks like "anti-anti-aliasing" more than it looks like "bold transparent vision"
One reason I don't think I read it as "refraction" is that one of my tells for refraction is chromatic aberration and without that it doesn't seem real to me. I think it would triple the texture lookup rate (at least) and make content legibility worse and I think you would see a lot of people say it is was an ugly gimmick.
Technically, I’m awed by it. Very cool visually. It’s just when you go to use it that it all falls apart. As you say, they can’t control the content it’s flying over, and thus sometimes it does bad things. But also they rearranged navigation and some other things. I try to keep from rejecting new things just because they are new, but there were some serious usability gaffes in both iOS and iPadOS. Interestingly, macOS doesn’t have the same issues and I’m actually somewhat ambivalent about it.
I agree, but also they broke that rule very recently when they lowered the price of a display and issued refunds one month after intro. The VESA price dropped $400. I learned about it from Accidental Tech Podcast.
Interesting. I have worked with a CEO that did exactly that.
The product quality was just insane.
I have also worked with people in power who believed they were doing the same, but actually just had weird taste in interfaces and ended up screwing up the product.
The thing / issue at this point is though: how much is Jobs still responsible for Apple's ongoing success? He died 15 years ago, two years after Apple introduced "flat design" (to much criticism at the time but people got used to it). But after his passing, Apple's market value went from ~500 billion to ~4 trillion today, more than an 8-fold multiplication.
I find it hard to believe that his influence was so strong that it had an inertia that lasted for 15 years. Ive left his mark on it for longer.
Apple had a few near death experiences and might not have survived.
One of those early near death experiences might have been Jobs fault (going at the Apple /// and the Mac when, in retrospect, the Apple ][ could have been evolved more aggressively) but he helped bring it back from the brink later on.
Android deserves a lot of credit for the success of iOS in that a zombie mobile OS that doesn't have to be profitable has displaced a competitive mobile OS. A similar kind of fragmentation has bedeviled the Windows (and Linux) PC as well as (from the viewpoint of Windows) distractions such as Azure (good business) and XBOX (bad business.)
Intel deserves a lot of credit for the success of Apple too because for 15 years Intel has had no strategy to translate architectural improvements to experienced performance for client PCs. The way they've gone about SIMD is an absolute disaster, like by the time we can use AVX-512 in mainstream software everybody will have moved on to ARM. Charlie Demerjian would talk your ear off about how the tech press has been uncritical about their hyperscaler/HPC patter, never reminding you that client PCs are still the bread and butter of their business -- pander to the likes of Amazon and they will use any cost savings they get to invest in ARM. It's suicide.
I guess that depends on what you put into the word "success". I dont believe that great design work or great products and high market cap has ever been that related to each other.
With that said I dont think Steve built Apple alone either. And i think they have done some great things after his death as well.
Because it wasn’t planned that far. The administration probably thought it would go like Venezuela. A Middle East historian would have told you Iran has building for all our war for decades because it trusts none of its neighbors.
A second problem is that the US knew for a while that we were weak at asymmetric warfare but we didn’t fix it. There was a war game in 2002 (the Millennium Challenge, which was actually set in the Strait of Hormuz) that, though the red team did very much cheat, it did hint at a major weakness that wasn’t resolved.
There are US defense companies today that actually specialize in that but they weren’t given the same attention (but boy are they now).
My Army buddy once said "If you're not cheating you're not trying."
What did they expect? That's the whole point of a red team.
Reminds me of Admiral Ching Lee. He used to run red team exercises against US facilities. He once walked into a maximum security facility with a badge bearing the name and photograph of Adolf Hitler.
Anduril is the biggest one. They are based in Costa Mesa, CA and are building a bigger R&D facility in "Space Beach" (Long Beach, CA) and a manufacturing facility near Columbus, Ohio.
Afterwards, you have smaller companies like Shield AI (San Diego, CA), Saronic Technologies (Austin, TX) and some other smaller ones.
The issue isn’t the splitting. There is no fiber to even split in most places. A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.
We got >5 gig fiber fast. We have 700Mbps 5G. I literally watched them string the fiber on the poles.
It’s still not shared, but it’s fast because it’s new. Shared would be preferred, but you need destroy + “new” first, and most people are fine with what copper gives them. Shared may even be cheaper but most people don’t think we need to rebuild anything.
I'ts almost certainly shared. 99% of FTTH is (X)G(S)-PON which shares the fibre over a few properties. Usually something like 32 max.
The Swiss use point to point fibre (there are a few small pockets of this elsewhere). But in reality it is very hard to saturate. XGSPON has 10G/10G shared between the node. GPON has 2.4gbit down/1.2gbit up shared across the node.
In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).
And if it is a problem there is now 50G-PON which can run side by side, so you just add more bandwidth that way.
I had 600mbps down/200 up (I could have upgraded to 1GB) and I downgraded to 175 down/50 up (to switch to a more reliable provider) and didn’t notice any difference (family of 4).
XGSPON is actually 40Gbps down, 10Gbps up. The 40Gbps is actually four separate 10Gbps downlinks on different frequencies. Filters are used so that each customer only sees one of those downlinks. Just a little note.
> In reality point to point is not really a benefit in 99.99% of scenarios, residential internet use cannot saturate 10G/10G for long, even with many 'heavy' internet users (most users can't really get more than >1gig internally over WiFi to start with).
This is so true! The whole thing about Netflix is such a canard. A 4K stream from Netflix tops out at 16Mbps. Other streaming services use 25Mbps, or speeds in between. 40Gbps is 1600 individual 4K streams, but XGSPON can only be split to a maximum of 128 customers. I guess if all of those customers have more than 12 televisions going at once…
You’re more likely to see congestion from many customers all hitting a speed test server at once just to see how shiny the numbers are.
You're confusing XGS-PON with NG-PON2. NG-PON2 isn't really used anywhere AFIAK, the "real" upgrade path is 50G-PON (50G/50G shared). NG-PON2's tunable lasers are expensive so didn't get traction.
Sweden doesn't use much PON either. If a countries fiber build out started before gpon was released or got popular you likely continue a lot with point to point. There's a small drawback, TDM/A for the uplink, introduces some jitter but guessing it's not as bad as cable.
Well a GPON frame is 0.125ms. So the best jitter is ~0.125ms, but even if the entire upstream segment was saturated you'd be looking at probably 1-2ms at absolute worse case. The OLT will not allow one user to hammer the upstream badly like you get with DOCSIS.
So it's really a non issue (XGS-PON is even better as more data per frame means heavy upstream 'clears' the frames quicker), IME consumer routers add more jitter themselves even with ethernet on the LAN side (and WiFi is a lot worse).
Interestingly enough, most providers still run PON, but all their equipment, including splitters, is at the telco's end of the P2P connection. Apparently it is slightly cheaper to build out a PoP like that.
Yep, exactly! I live in Switzerland. The article is misleading. Switzerland doesn't have 25 Gbit consumer internet, quite obviously, as nowhere does. It has a state-owned telco that advertises 10 Gbit to ordinary consumers without making it obvious to the buyer that they won't be able to use anything above 1Gbit without exotic and expensive equipment they are near-guaranteed to not have (unless they're literally a high speed networking hobbyist).
I noticed this years ago and thought it was an extremely sharp and therefore unSwiss practice, that in a more free market with better regulation and a more feral press would have already attracted a rap on the knuckles from the truth-in-advertising people. But Swisscom is government owned and has fingers in a thousand pies, so they're allowed to get away with it.
Unfortunately because regular consumers just compare numbers and assume higher is always better, this practice has dragged fully private ISPs into offering it now too. So the entire market is just engaged in systemic consumer fraud by this point. God knows how many people are overpaying for bandwidth their machines literally can't use without realizing it.
That said, the basic point Schüller is making is sound that the fiber cables themselves are more like roads than internet. They aren't a natural monopoly but the cost of overbuild is so high that it makes sense to treat it like one. It's just a pity that in the end this doesn't make a difference as big as the article seems to be advertising in its title.
> A lot of places in America had their “network” infra built 50-100 years ago on copper
That's no different to Switzerland so far…
> and no one wants to pay to basically rebuild all of it.
…but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the investment.
> I happen to live in an area where there are still above ground utilities.
If anything, that can make things cheaper. You don't need to bury everything, and in some places (e.g. earthquake prone Japan) it's really counterproductive. But even if it isn't, it's certainly more expensive.
Sent from a 25G internet connection. My laptop only has 10G via TB though.
> …but the Swiss seem to have decided it's worth the investment.
West Virginia is 1.5x the size of the entire country of Switzerland. Let that sink in.
Texas is 16x times bigger.
The idea that it should be doable in a country that is 100x bigger, with 50 separate states, god knows how many individual counties because it could be done in vastly smaller one is where your problem is.
Yet somehow the US did manage to get power to most places...
The thing with fiber is that it can go so much longer than copper without any active components. It is also very future proof, you won't be pulling it out of the ground/off the pole for at least 50 years if not longer.
> Yet somehow the US did manage to get power to most places...
You're not conflating 2 different infrastructure processes and ignoring the one took decades, are you? This is like saying "The US has built a road infrastructure why can't it do all light rails?"
The irony in your comment is that it government intervention, which is the opposite of a free market.
Who said free market? Swisscom is 51% government. A government-ish entity is IMHO the most efficient way to do this.
You can't have 2 road networks, highway systems, or railway networks. You can have, but it is pointless to, 2 water systems or 2 electric grids. Or fire brigades, or police. (criminal, not mall cops) Same applies for fibre in the ground. "Free market" doesn't work when you can't effectively compete.
I'm sorry, but your stance is completely fing ridiculous. First of all, nobody is saying you need to do the entire US in one go by one approach and one provider. Second, the US has about 30× the GDP of Switzerland. Third, have you looked at Swiss geography? They're pulling fiber up the alps to the damn huts. Fourth, they're burying pretty much everything, as I said you don't really have to do that. Fifth, 26 cantons can squabble almost as well as 50 states can. Sixth, you're somehow assuming Switzerland is the only country successfully doing this. Sure, not everyone is doing it to that level, but take a look at Brazil.
If you're looking for reasons to fail, you will fail. The only thing your argument really excuses is that it will take longer. But the US doesn't have the political will to even start.
26 cantons with a functioning federal regulatory mandate isn't remotely comparable to 50 states where broadband regulation has been in a decade long battle over jurisdiction.
> Third, have you looked at Swiss geography? They're pulling fiber up the alps to the damn huts.
This is apples and oranges. The US is vastly more sparse. I think what is "f'ing ridiculous" is continuing to compare the 2 countries in ways they aren't comparable.
> 50 states where broadband regulation has been in a decade long battle over jurisdiction
Thanks for making my point, all I'm arguing is that Switzerland had the political will while the US doesn't (yet?) You're essentially arguing the problem exists because the problem exists.
It's a political problem, but a solvable one. Pretending that it isn't solvable really doesn't help.
I don't have to refute all your points to prove it's impossible.
> It's a political problem, but a solvable one. Pretending that it isn't solvable really doesn't help.
Pretending like you hvae any clue how the US works doesn't help either. There are over 3,000 different counties in the US all with different rules around right-away (which could be one of like 6 different jurisdictions). There are quite literally hundreds of ISPs in the US. And even if one did want to build in NYC for instance, it would be have to interact with dozens of jurisdictions that don't magically go away with a strengthened FCC.
And again, you're totally ignoring the physical geography of the land. So how exactly does that work at a legislative level? Forcing ISP in which communities specifically? Then, it not only becomes a political, but fiscal issue as well.
Which is why saying "it's a political problem" is grossly over-simplifying the situation.
You’re not seeing better engines because there aren’t any. We are reaching the limits of physics.
That’s why we are working on alternatives like refueling in space or reusable ships.
The Artemis missions are testing things that we still have a lot of area to improve upon — materials (a huge one), international standards for things like docking ports, computing, radiation safety, and a lot more.
Artemis II doesn’t have any docking hardware since it won’t have anything to dock with. And Artemis in general is just using the IDSS used on the ISS and by Dragon and Starliner, nothing new being discovered or tested there.
NASA's Artemis II Live Views from Orion, 04 - Day 1-2 - 03-04-2026 - 1645-Transcript-EN.txt: "03/04/2026 - 18:57:27 (-3 TMZ) | 01:23:22:27 (Artemis Clock) "No joy seeing the device in the list of available devices when I attempt to re-pair it after doing the Bluetooth forget."
The reality is that nothing in life can be trusted but everything can be modeled.
For example, you never know what a driver going 60 miles/hr will do, but you do know that the laws of physics say that the driver can’t suddenly go backwards.
Once you figure this out, you realize you can work through absolute chaos because you can work with black boxes.
It doesn’t matter if the media is lying. For example, the source might say there’s this magic pill that has cured cancer, but if that were actually true, we wouldn’t have chemotherapy still. Therefore, without ever having to grapple with the question of the trust, the actual truth is bounded between “fake news” and “there maybe be potential new developments.” If you still care, you can still look into it, but 3 seconds of modeling already gave you a good black box answer.
What people mistakenly do is try to determine if the statement is true or not, but that’s a waste of time in most cases. It’s better to model the system enough to work within it and then move on.
Sure, but I think the media mostly misleads through omission and shifting the focus.
It seems trivial, but on a national or global scale, so many things happen that it becomes a powerful force.
Every day, the media ignores millions of events that happened in the country. It only reports on a few hundreds. The way it chooses what is important give it massive power.
Every day, some politicians somewhere act in a corrupt manner. The media covers a tiny fraction of those. Instead the media might fill the space with celebrity gossip. This creates a false impression that things are alright when they are not.
Unfortunately it's hard for us to get a general sense for how people in our society are doing because our perception is badly distorted.
My sense is that our current society is terrible and many people are harmed and left behind but the suffering is covered up and nobody is held accountable. This is based on what I've observed of people who I used to go to school with (for example).
Sure but I think it’s more a deeper structural problem.
When in human society have we had access to information at this rate? Yes there are bad people but there were have always and will be bad people (like people selling crock medicines 200 years ago).
We’re in this situation because it’s a brand new problem (information density) and we are still looking for a solution. I mean we now have a way to ensure medicines you buy are reasonably vetted, but it took us a while to figure that one out.
It just sucks that we have to live during the times where we haven’t figured it out, but there’s always going to some new problem grappling human society.
Hyundai now owns Boston Dynamics and is pushing to get the robots into their factories.
reply