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It's the “hardware”, stupid

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Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#101

Post by estimator7292 »

brendoelfrendo wrote: post #83
supportengineer wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An "AI Hardware" device that needs a network connection, and makes API calls to the mother ship, in order to accomplish anything, is not interesting . It's a Raspberry Pi. On the other hand, a device that could work offline is interesting. One that could work in a zombie apocalypse is even more interesting. Especially if it was solar powered and contained the knowledge needed to rebuild society.

> An "AI Hardware" device that needs a network connection, and makes API calls to the mother ship, in order to accomplish anything, is not interesting. It's a Raspberry Pi. Kind of an unnecessary dig at the Raspberry Pi, no? Modern Pis and SBCs in general are good at lots of things. I use mine for self-hosting some apps I use, and I've definitely seen them used in little compute clusters for AI inference. > On the ot…

RPis just aren't interesting. It's a full fat computer on a small board that does everything a normal computer does, just small.

PCs just aren't interesting because they're all fundamentally the same thing and are capable of the same set of tasks.

RPis aren't interesting because 99.9999% of projects they're put in are better served by a microcontroller and not an entire linux system. If not just a 555. It's boring to throw an entire linux computer into a project. You've utterly given up on the hardware and have assumed you can do everything with software.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#102

Post by estimator7292 »

numpad0 wrote: post #81
goalieca wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Jobs first announced the iPhone, he really sold the idea that it was running a real web browser like on a desktop. Up to that point, there was a special mobile internet that really sucked.

The problem wasn't the special mobile internet but the operating systems. Most phone OS before iOS just couldn't run full Gecko/Trident/WebKit/what-have-you. The phones could reach any external IPv4 addresses, but there weren't much to do with neither browser nor an app store. You could run things like IRC clients, dedicated text chat apps, and server rendered browsers on live Internet. But downloading full webpages…

Yeah, everybody dropped WAP like a cobalt-60 source the very moment phones became capable of rendering usual HTML

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#103

Post by marcosdumay »

altcognito wrote: post #57
mrandish wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Who was the exact individual that had the vision for glass multi-touch screens and sick gesture like effects (scroll). Like almost all new products later thought of as 'visionary' innovations, the first iPhone built on pre-existing ideas but integrated them particularly well and added some excellent new refinements. It's easy to forget that the prior five years had been a crucible of in-market experimentation betwe…

The iPhone was the first really well done general purpose computing phone. It had a real web browser, a real music player, apps that didn't suck. Adoption was huge because the design was great, but we would have just seen the same thing transpire over a number of years if iPhone hadn't been created. I know a lot of people basically who were basically saying "finally"

Nokia had a touch-screen based phone, with a real browser and a real music player in 2005. They didn't make an effort to sell it around here, though, but I don't think it's that either.

I remember the first application that people were hyped about was Google Maps. The Nokia phone couldn't run that, and any map available there was much harder to use. But the iPhone only really took off after people could install any kind of application there.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#104

Post by culi »

estimator7292 wrote: post #102
numpad0 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem wasn't the special mobile internet but the operating systems. Most phone OS before iOS just couldn't run full Gecko/Trident/WebKit/what-have-you. The phones could reach any external IPv4 addresses, but there weren't much to do with neither browser nor an app store. You could run things like IRC clients, dedicated text chat apps, and server rendered browsers on live Internet. But downloading full webpages…

Yeah, everybody dropped WAP like a cobalt-60 source the very moment phones became capable of rendering usual HTML

For anyone else who is unfamiliar with Wireless Markup Language:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

> Building on Openwave's HDML, Nokia's "Tagged Text Markup Language" (TTML) and Ericsson's proprietary markup language for mobile content, the WAP Forum created the WML 1.1 standard in 1998. WML 2.0 was specified in 2001, but has not been widely adopted. It was an attempt at bridging WML and XHTML Basic before the WAP 2.0 spec was finalized. In the end, XHTML Mobile Profile became the markup language used in WAP 2.0.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#105

Post by saltcured »

fwip wrote: post #84
ElijahLynn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I wouldn't put it past that. It could literally feed Android into an llm context window and probably redesign it to be even better and it already is. Android still has weird laggy jumps and just is not that smooth. Even on the new pixel devices.

Is this... a joke?

Just wait until we can just feed a serialization of our "coworker's" mind into the context and get an improved coworker who has more practical skill in applying LLMs!

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#106

Post by simulator5g »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #93
jimbokun wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jobs and Ive were at the core of all the product design. There were multiple articles about Jobs spending most of his day with Jony looking at prototypes Jony's team had devised and giving critiques and feedback. Then they would iterate on what Jobs said. Of course the engineering team had to figure out how to make Jobs suggestions real within the physical and technological constraints they were working with. > I thi…

Maybe Altman will serve that taste savant role, and they will be a good combo. I'm optimistic they will produce something that: * doesn't have ads, (we are the customer, not the product) * makes our lives more fluid and easy * delivers on the vision for what computers always could be Jarvis, please make me a sandwich.

Its too late for that, they're already working on putting ads in ChatGPT. https://www.seo.com/blog/chatgpt-advertising/

This won't only be in the free tier. Altman says they don't even break even on the paid tiers. They will use whatever money is available to fill that gap, and advertising money is available. https://x.com/sama/status/1876104315296968813

Soon we will live in a world where people don't make purchasing decisions for themselves, they ask an AI which will suggest the product that pays the most for ads. Payola World.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#107

Post by fwip »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #96
fwip wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this... a joke?

Which part are you referring to? Creating a new OS from an LLM or that Android still isn't smooth in 2025?

Feeding the 250M lines of Android source code into an LLM's context window. From your response, though, I'm guessing you were serious about that.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#108

Post by squeaky-clean »

rocketvole wrote: post #21
worthless-trash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was mostly the marketing.

I've seen this argument thrown around but I'm not sure I understand how it holds up. Why didn't android just completely copy apple's marketing, then? What did apple do differently,marketing wise, that android couldn't emulate?

Their whole marketing campaign was basically "You've never seen anything like this before, no one has made a phone capable of all this". You can't really copy that marketing if you're the second company making such a product unless you want to be laughed at.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#109

Post by rjsw »

mrandish wrote: post #95
jimbokun wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It advanced the "premium pocket phone" bar up to a new level but I didn't see it as unusually visionary. Have you ever encountered a product you saw as "unusually visionary"?

I'm not comfortable with the word 'visionary' because it's ill-defined and unscoped. So I don't use that word because I don't think in those terms. This may be because most of my later career was spent leading teams conceiving and shipping cutting-edge tech products in new categories - sometimes launching those categories - occasionally with historically notable success, usually with middling success and sometimes wi…

I had been working with similar hardware and software at the time.

The visionary bit for me was Jobs getting a US phone company to agree to a data plan that made financial sense to potential users.

Re: It's the “hardware”, stupid

#110

Post by IcyWindows »

rocketvole wrote: post #21
worthless-trash wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it was mostly the marketing.

I've seen this argument thrown around but I'm not sure I understand how it holds up. Why didn't android just completely copy apple's marketing, then? What did apple do differently,marketing wise, that android couldn't emulate?

They had a deal with AT&T with a data plan that no one else could get. It made every other what phone useless in comparison.
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