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But what if I want a faster horse?

rakhim.exotext.com

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Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#421

Post by mattgreenrocks »

bombcar wrote: post #91
FinnLobsien wrote: post #81

I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're not the user being designed for. Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person. And most people on this planet are more or less happy with wha…

There’s a lot of money to be made in letting people order takeout from McDonalds while not feeling like the kind of person who orders takeout from McDonald’s.

This is the idea of premium mediocre: https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/17/the-premium-mediocre-l...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#422

Post by tristor »

cestith wrote: post #335
wlesieutre wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Miata, BRZ, Nissan Z, and GT-R? Toyota's GR86 is BRZ derived but still counts, though their Supra is a BMW. Honda's closest thing is the Civic Type R, but they're bringing back the Prelude soon. Mitsubishi are the odd one out, all they have is an SUV recycling the Eclipse's name. There's no million dollar Japanese supercars competing against Lamborghinis and McLarens, but I wouldn't say they stopped making sports car…

It’s no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It’s also basically a BRZ. It’s a little sad that’s no longer an option. The WRX has a turbocharged Boxer engine, manual gearbox or optional CVT, and all-wheel drive. It’s a sedan, but it does a 13.9 second quarter mile stock off the showroom floor. That’s not bad.

> It’s no Supra, but the FRS is a sporty little car that was marketed in a fairly affordable range. It’s also basically a BRZ. It’s a little sad that’s no longer an option.

The FRS/BRZ/GR86 are identical cars mechanically, Toyota owns Scion, so the FRS was replaced by the GT86 and later GR86 within the Toyota line-up when Toyota killed off the Scion brand in the US, and the FRS never existed outside the North American market, because Scion was a North American exclusive brand.

The BRZ/GR86 has a Subaru Boxer engine, with Toyota D4S Port+Direct Injection, using a Toyota ECU/ECM, Toyota/Aisin transmission, Toyota TCU/TCM, and Toyota infotainment (in some generations), but with a mostly Subaru designed chassis and nearly entirely Subaru suspension and post-transmission driveline, but the wheels and tires off a Prius (in the first generation), and a handful of things that were only created to be jointly used by the BRZ/GR86. Except no matter which part you pick on the car, it'll be marked "Subaru", including ironically the Toyota badge on the front of the GT86.

It's better to think of them as what they are, which is different branding for the same vehicle, that was jointly developed and manufactured.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#423

Post by nradov »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #52
sokoloff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them). My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful…

I would say they're popular because they are expensive. It's bragging rights, conspicuous consumption…

It's not just that they're expensive markers of conspicuous consumption, it's about exclusivity. Exotic car manufacturers like Ferrari intentionally make fewer cars than the market demands. Only "special" customers are even allowed to buy them regardless of price. Ownership, especially of the higher end models, marks a consumer as a member of a high-status exclusive club. (I am not claiming that this is rational or sensible, but it is an effective marketing strategy for luxury goods.)

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#424

Post by tristor »

Suppafly wrote: post #400
red_admiral wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get your point but I think the browser analogy is wrong. IE had something like 90% market share back in the day because it was bundled with the OS and cost $0. Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. They also took out ads, in some countries, on billboards, in newspapers and ev…

>Chrome ate everyone's lunch because everyone was using google to search for stuff, and they could advertise their browser on their home page or together with their search results. That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

> That and it was such a better browsing experience. Firefox was not good compared to Chrome for years. I'm sure they are feature parity now, but for years the Chrome experience was significantly better.

As someone who lived through those days, that is just straight up not true. The only measurable advantage that Chrome had over Firefox was in Javascript performance, because V8 was superior to the JS engine built into Gecko before the SpiderMonkey project started.

Chrome won off mindshare, not off technical superiority. Everyone /assumes/ technical superiority because it's Google, but that's just not accurate. At best, you could count in Chrome's favor their early support for "web standards", because most of those standards were invented at Google, stuck into Chrome, and then only afterwards standardized so that others could make use of them. While the Chrome team at Google has done good work and an immense amount of work, they didn't start from nothing, Blink is a derivative of WebKit and didn't even diverge with the fork until 2013. Webkit itself didn't exist until 2001, when it was forked by Apple from KHTML (developed by the KDE team as a community project).

The story of Chrome is the story of "embrace, extend, extinguish" from the Microsoft playbook, done by an even more powerful and influential technology giant being played out. It is not the story of technological superiority, nor was there any strong technical reason why Google couldn't have contributed their work into the open without creating their own browser. Even with Chrome, other than the development of V8, they contributed all of their work back to WebKit until 2013 when they forked.

No surprise that Google regularly makes changes in its applications which advantage Chrome, penalize competing browsers, and still advertise Chrome on the front page of google.com, the most valuable ad real estate that exists anywhere.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#425

Post by dsign »

klabb3 wrote: post #225
FinnLobsien wrote: post #81

I also dislike the TikTokification of everything, but I also know that all of us on this platform are wrong in the sense that we're not the user being designed for. Consumer apps at massive scale like TikTok and Netflix don't design for nerds like us, they design for the average person. Actually, they design for the average behavior of the average person. And most people on this planet are more or less happy with wha…

Overwhelmingly, products are designed to maximize total recurring user interaction, aka engagement or attention grabbing. This is the proxy for ad revenue, the most popular business model (even if Netflix is different). Look at Quora, LinkedIn and even SO, which essentially degraded into content farms for these reasons, largely downstream of the Google search funnel. But engagement maximization looks the same everywh…

Coat the carrots in chocolate?

One can always do as in "The good place" show: put a bunch of hotties to talk about and play with moral philosophy. I think the show was somewhat evil in that approach, but at the same time, it was also morally sound...

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#426

Post by tobr »

jedberg wrote: post #401

OPs specific complaints about Netflix and Spotify are mostly a result of their success. Back in 2012 Netflix had a lot of movies because Hollywood didn't value streaming and were willing to sell the streaming right for most of their content for tiny amounts of money. And there were no other streamer. Spotify is in a similar boat. The music companies didn't value streaming and were willing to sell their entire catalog…

Weren’t the big record labels terrified that streaming would cannibalize CD sales? I think it was a pretty huge thing that Spotify got them onboard at all. I’m not sure how much that matters to your overall point but saying they ”didn’t value streaming” doesn’t seem quite right with how I remember the discussion at the time - they were afraid of it because they could see its value, and how that might disrupt their lucrative plastic disc business.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#427

Post by mystifyingpoi »

frereubu wrote: post #304
eadmund wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ideally you'd continue to pay for the subscription but never watch anything. I think that’s Netflix’s actual goal: deliver nothing anyone wants to watch, but keep on promising the possibility of something one might want to watch in the future. Which reminds me, we really need to cancel our subscriptions.

We immediately cancel our subscription as soon as we subscribe for services like Netflix, Disney+ etc, where you keep the service for the month. It's thankfully really easy to susbcribe and unsubscribe these days, so doing it this way means we never unknowingly renew. Must have saved us hundreds of pounds by now.

Same here. I never subscribed to Netflix or Disney+ for the intended purpose of continually paying for it in perpetuity - it was always to watch the one show I want (in <1mo) and then immediately kill it.

Re: But what if I want a faster horse?

#430

Post by nradov »

amrocha wrote: post #74
sokoloff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ferraris, Lamborghinis and Porsches For street usage, I think those cars are popular because they’re beautiful more than because they’re fast (or because enthusiasts like them). My utterly soulless Lexus will drive more than fast enough to get me in serious trouble. No one will look at it and feel stirred by its beauty, whereas the typical Ferrari or Porsche coupe will look at least appealing to most and beautiful…

That doesn’t explain why japanese manufacturers who used to make sports cars in the 90s don’t anymore. It’s a mixture of enthusiasm and conspicuous consumption. Most enthusiasts love 90s japanese cars, but the average person sees an old mazda and recoils. But put an old ferrari in front of anyone and they have a completely different reaction.

Back in the 90s a Japanese sports car actually offered a noticeable performance advantage relative to regular passenger cars. The regular passenger cars generally had weak engines, terrible suspensions, slow shifting automatic transmissions, and little in the way of driver assistance features. Now any generic modern crossover SUV can be driven well beyond the legal speed limit on any public road without really approaching the vehicle's limits, so except for hard core enthusiasts who intend on tracking their cars there's just not much advantage to buying a sports car any more.
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