131–140 of 349 posts
> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use Literally the only time I've heard of anyone using these in the wild was some guy being an absolute creep and using them to secretly film women to create social media content[1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go
As other people have pointed out, the trend towards "retro" tech is like vinyl being popular - it's a nostalgia throwback, not a massive wave of consumer preference. There's a small but profitable niche of enthusiasts who want old electonics. Call me when a major consumer electronics company is making it a selling point that their devices are "dumb". The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? T…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s I could see how many people would assume this, but it’s actually false. There’s actually a big selection of dedicated audio players that do the job very well now. The battery life and audio quality are extremely good because there’s a niche market for them with a lot of competition. If you th…
I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS specific to only playing songs and podcasts, and maybe movies, which I can sync with my computer (maybe with rsync or whatever else). No apps. The only option that I could find was an iPod cl…
As other people have pointed out, the trend towards "retro" tech is like vinyl being popular - it's a nostalgia throwback, not a massive wave of consumer preference. There's a small but profitable niche of enthusiasts who want old electonics. Call me when a major consumer electronics company is making it a selling point that their devices are "dumb". The Rayban-Meta partnership is such a funny thing to shoehorn in? T…
Are we really concerned about an Essilor-Luxottica monopoly? Is there lock-in, shady dealings, etc? Can't you just buy sunglasses from other brands (or brandless glasses)?
Regarding Meta, they are playing a role in shifting us from monoculture (or two player markets) to three or more players.
Meta may be ahead of the pack, but they'll be joined by Google and Apple soon. Apple's poor treatment of their partners through the App Store really damaged the Apple Vision Pro launch, which is a good thing.
One does not need to love Meta to see the value in bringing more players into a given market. We deserve more than Apple vs. Google across all of our decisions.
The surveillance is unfortunately inevitable at this point. Cameras are cheap and are everywhere. You're never more than a few feet from a multi-camera cellphone. I don't see any way around this short to national legislation restricting their use.
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Not sure why you want to have purpose-built OS as the hill to die on since many of those Android-based mp3 players absolutely outclass the old iPod classics in snappiness and compatibility and output quality. Plenty of choices that meet your other criteria once you're OK with it being Android powered. Like a SnowSky is very obviously stripped down Android that can only run the music app it's shipped with, but it's ot…
Only speaking for myself, but the problem with Android is that it and the hardware needed to make it run acceptably are absurd overkill for the use case, which drives up cost, cuts down on battery life, and adds a layer of unnecessary complexity (suddenly you need to think about what player app to use, for example). Basically part of the charm of a single-purpose device is that it can be built to serve it purpose rid…
The battery life is fine on modern DAPs. Excellent, even.
I understand why an engineer would want a completely application specific, built-from-scratch OS that does one thing perfectly, but that's a pipe dream for a niche market.
A powerful and efficient SoC that runs Android is ultra-cheap these days. Less than $1. Hiring an engineering team to write and maintain a custom OS for a niche product would incur so much R&D cost that it would wipe out any money you'd save by using a smaller microcontroller and drive the final cost up.
Just think: How much salary would you have to pay a team of engineers to write the custom OS and maintain it? If you could optimistically sell 500,000 of these devices (good luck) then how much would you have to save in order to pay for the R&D?
Call me a pessimist, but I don't agree with this blog post at all. The author's views seems a bit biased and narrow based on their social circle perhaps. > VR is no longer experimental Till it has practical everyday uses and is at least semi affordable, I would categorize it as experimental still > Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use, thanks to a clever Ray-Ban partnership (and associated equity s…
> * iPhone and Android being the only 2 choice when it comes to phones Not exactly true. Sent from my Librem 5.
1) non tech people should have heard about it and
2) when institutions like banks force users to use their app, they actually make an app for this platform.
> Meta shipped a wearable that normal people actually use Literally the only time I've heard of anyone using these in the wild was some guy being an absolute creep and using them to secretly film women to create social media content[1]. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx23ke7rm7go
To the first point, they've sold at least 2M pairs, and are reported scaling production to handle up to 10M units per year.
To the second point, do you believe that all or most of those 2M people using it for those purposes? Or to take videos of travel, music festivals, etc.
Lots of companies are rushing into this space, so you kind of have to legislate, or choose to view competition in this space, even amongst 3 major players, as as slightly preferable to competition amongst just 2.
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> Their standards forever dropping And yet their standards still haven’t dropped low enough for Linux to be an acceptable replacement. I don’t think that’s a knock on the Windows user, but an indication that Linux desktop (and its replacement applications) still isn’t user-friendly enough for most people.
I hope Linux is never suitable for windows users, who's tolerance for abuse is matched in magnitude only by their lack of taste. You have no idea just how over I am with the very premise of Linux evangelism. I will go as far as find reasons or even just flimsy pretexts to oppose and criticize any change to Linux calculated to win over Windows users, because being co-users with such people is plainly against my own in…
Then I started reading the Arch wiki on this task. It forced me to learn things like MBR vs GPT. Then it said Windows by default makes an EFI partition way too small so I have to re-create a new partition by temporarily mounting EFI, saving the files, deleting the EFI partition, and recreating a new one.
This seems like a horribly complex task and I can envision about a million unwritten things that can go wrong that the answer would be "well duh, that's obvious if you had any experience with linux disk partitioning. I myself bricked a dozen PCs."
Deleting the EFI partition, if it goes wrong, by definition my system would be bricked until I could figure things out.
Also, everything must be typed into terminal exactly with no error and one chance. (If the typo causes the command to error, phew. if the typo causes something else to happen, beware)
So yes, I have a lack of taste.
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> You cannot buy a dedicated MP3 player today with the software polish and quality of life that an iPod had in the early 2000s I could see how many people would assume this, but it’s actually false. There’s actually a big selection of dedicated audio players that do the job very well now. The battery life and audio quality are extremely good because there’s a niche market for them with a lot of competition. If you th…
I looked pretty hard - I specifically don’t want an android OS called an mp3 player. I want a dedicated media player that has physical button controls (not touch screen), is very snappy, has a good UI, and has a purpose-built OS specific to only playing songs and podcasts, and maybe movies, which I can sync with my computer (maybe with rsync or whatever else). No apps. The only option that I could find was an iPod cl…
There are a lot of DAPs in this style. They're just not popular because the Android-based units are perfectly fine and don't feel like Android phones with an MP3 player app installed. Most buyers don't have arbitrary OS requirements, they just want a device that works well.
I'd start by looking at the Rockbox compatible devices list: https://www.rockbox.org/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It can never be user-friendly enough if how windows does things is the yardstick. Windows users bemoan about how terrible Macs are all the time just because things are done differently, and they don't even try to figure it out. If it doesn't work like windows it's not good enough.
Why can't we make Linux work like Windows? Modifiability is supposed to be a benefit of open-source.
I have a feeling modern Linux on this machine wouldn't be worse than what it shipped with. The days of fighting for 3 days with audio or printer drivers after an install are mostly behind us.