I feel certain products just dont need apps or 'tech'. Speakers should not be 'smart' anymore than a powertool needs an app. It just turns products that should otherwise be long-lasting become disposable waste once software support evaporates for any reason.
I dont think it was a good product even back when it did 'work'. We received a pair as a house-warming gift and I remember not understanding how or why I should use them. I already had a soundbar that I could stream music to. I now, out of politeness, had to use these new "wireless" speakers that demanded a constant wifi connection but still required their own Very Visible power cables along with its own dedicated app which was nothing but a wrapper for music services that logged me out after every software update. I couldn't even use it as a dumb speaker and operate it as part of my main sound system so now I have a soundbar that is nicely mounted to the wall and additionally these speakers that clutter my living room. Lovely.
I wrote a home automation script that would use a camera as a motion detector and when we weren’t home would play a text to voice message on every Sonos speaker in the house if someone entered our apartment. Mostly for announced maintenance visits so they know that I know they’re there.
Being able to listen to the show on the tv while in the bathroom or shower is nice. Means we don’t have to pause shows if we don’t want to for breaks.
Having music playing across the whole home during dinner parties is a nice vibe.
A whole house alarm would probably be nice for families on the same schedule.
The concept of Sonos is really nice and it mostly works, but yeah the new app was rough. Not sure if I’ll buy anymore sonos gear. For a long time they were the only ones that had the tech required to stream to multiple devices in sync. I’m not sure what the other options are now
Any form of hacking products to be more useful is a win in my books! I can see the multi room play being a nice thing on the odd occasion. Perhaps if I had kids and had to move around the house a bunch more or maybe if it operated as a home system that could also do those additional things I may have had a more positive experience with it. But I maintain my original point that hardware tethered to some software service is basically a random financial-enshitification-quarter away from being bricked and that’s a shame for otherwise excellent hardware
Imagine living in a big house and having the music follow you from room to room, from one floor to another, playing from high def wireless speakers that you can place anywhere you want. I think that is a pretty neat idea.
I don't have a house or Sonos speakers, but I can see how some people would want that experience.
Or neighbourhood. I have neighbours with horror vacui: they just need noise 24x7 and their garden is no exception.
I really do not understand this feature. If I want to listen to music without headphone, I'm going to sit down in front of my stereo where sound is best.
You might know it as "Nature abhors a vacuum". Originally it was a statement of Cartesian physics: the idea was that "action at a distance" was impossible, and since distant objects did clearly interact (through gravity and light), all of space has to be completely filled with particulate matter (assumed to be in vortex motion). From this and "cogito ergo sum" it was possible to build a model of physics which extended to the ethics of how you should treat your dog.
However here it is used as a simple figure of speech rather than literally: the neighbours don't like to lrave anything unfilled with sound.
I have that experience. Like every other experience the novelty wears off and I find myself keeping the vibe to a room because it’s distracting; lizard brain stays connected to music and I forget why I went across the house.
In the end I use it so sparingly (social gatherings) owners of detached homes without shared walls, could save the money and time and just turn up the volume.
When I bought my house 13 years ago I asked the electrician to run speaker cable from the living room into the adjoining kitchen. I wired up two pairs of extremely competent car speakers in series (because 4ohms) in the kitchen ceiling, one over each corner of the dining table. I have two amps in the living room, one is an ancient 5.1ch Yamaha that runs a very decent set of speakers and sub, and a nice little Denon stereo amp that's hooked into the kitchen speakers. A single 7.1ch usb sound card runs both, and that's connected to a MeLe Quieter (tiny little N100 device attached to my TV). The entire setup is dirty cheap and let's me fill the downstairs of my home with glorious music, and it never fails. I can swap out any of the bits easily (in fact I replaced my main floorstanders with a lovely pair of DALI a year ago). I've never wanted to extend that upstairs. In the bedrooms, some really nice Edifier Bluetooth speakers are more than adequate, and in our offices we mainly use headphones (in my case I still use my old wired Senheisser HD700 because they're the most comfortable things ever)
I love my tech stuff, and I've got home assistant doing the lights, but it never once crossed my mind to mess with the sound system, except for occasional hifi upgrades. Eg next up: run a subwoofer cable from the stereo amp to the kitchen, but I'm in no rush.
I have the same experience - my home runs seven Logitech (formerly Slim Devices) “squeezebox” players from a home server with a ripped collection and options for Spotify. The networked players either have their own speaker, or are connected to amp/speakers. In practice almost all of our music plays through these devices. It’s great.
The only time we connect multiple players to sync up is at larger parties, like once a year. It’s just one button press to do it, so not using this capability isn’t that it’s too complex, it just turns out not to be that useful to us.
The main use case for multi zone audio is handled by the A/B/A+B speaker setting on one particular amp.
I don't mind devices that have "smarts" added (e.g. wireless audio can be convenience even if I have to have a wire for power) but I despise devices which don't check the "dumb" boxes before trying to be "smart". Sonos speakers are like you say, there are even plenty of Sonos models with line in but you still need to set them up in app. Getting smart devices without that kind of functionality is like getting a TV without an HDMI input - even if you don't think you'd need it day 1 you'll likely one day regret it.
"Heavier vehicles are safer for their occupants.."
Only if the other vehicle is smaller/lighter. SUVs were relatively uncommon when this perception of safety was established. Its now just something people like to tell themselves as justification for buying an even bigger car.
What a crap business model these companies have if they rely on haggling over legal loopholes to operate. The business case, at best, is the status quo remains with material threats to their operations if these laws change. This is a lose-lose for everyone. Ignore the morality arguments, why risk your money on something with almost zero upside and all this downside? Suing the government is not a sign of strength
There’s a competitor in India called BluSmart right now that’s running all electric, fully owned fleets. The drivers are paid fair hourly wages and thus have no incentive to refuse rides or not wait. The cars are simply parked at earmarked charging spots in the city. Their own vetted drivers can unlock the cars at any point and start picking up passengers before dropping it off at a charging station.
The rides are somehow cheaper, have no surge pricing, and from some insider reports, has profitable unit economics.
Their app isn’t quite as snappy, but it works fine.
They’re eating Uber’s lunch in my city and makes me wonder how Uber is screwing this up so badly.
> ...fully owned fleets. The drivers are paid fair hourly wages...
> The rides are somehow cheaper, have no surge pricing, and from some insider reports, has profitable unit economics.
So a fleet of depreciating assets with a major infrastructure dependency, lower implied gross margins, and word from insiders of a positive bottom line without publicly disclosed financials to sanity check claims against. Curious to see what their balance sheet looks like.
The entire Asia Pacific geographic region, including India, accounted for 10.9% of Uber's FY22 revenue[1; p. 94]. It's likely more of an incidental snack than full lunch, but it would be funny if Uber lost out to what sounds like an upstart taxi company.
And electric, while it might not be as meaningful right now due to starting costs, the reduction in maintenance and operating costs might make the model more viable. And it certainly adds some appeal to environmentally conscious investors for them to be reducing the emissions in India which we know has many areas of poor air quality
> makes me wonder how Uber is screwing this up so badly
This is just guesswork. May it be related to the VC funding that holds them afload, where at every turn they need to think about the future (and quick-as-possible) 10x return on investment that is in the fine-print of the VC contracts?
Or they may be so imbibed by startup-culture "Greed is good" mentality from the very start, that it is unthinkable to consider not squeezing it, and shaving off for every penny.
People on the Y Combinator tech news site should know better than to think "raising money" is the same thing as "being profitable". (If anything, the two are often anti-correlated - funding rounds often happen before any profit has been shown)
That may be, but are they equal or more profitable than the Uber, et al model? I'm willing to bet if it were that they would be doing that instead. These companies are in the U.S. where maxing profits/shareholder value vs. taking care of employee needs (or any other need) is generally the name of the game for a major majority of companies.
India is not some unicorn where employee needs are prioritised particularly highly; there’s plenty of egregious labour violations that happen in India.
It’s just that Uber and co are overwrought beasts that never had a successful plan in mind.
> consumers and delivery drivers who will mostly pay for it
The players: restaurants, drivers (current and former), platforms and consumers. Former drivers, those who don’t make the new cut, will lose. Drivers who stay on will gain. Looking at leverage, consumers are less likely to bear the burden than restaurants. Given the new fixed cost of operating a delivery platform, the incumbents’ threat of competition from new entrants is reduced; that will help them.
If I were to make predictions, I’d expect to see some consolidation among the platforms with the winners squeezing restaurants and consumers waiting longer more than paying a higher price. (It is notable restaurants have virtually no representation in this debate.) The pie will be smaller. But the platforms’ role in it will be more stable and secure.
That seems more like an interim step to me. I imagine what will follow is one of three things:
1. An affected restaurant increases costs for online purchases to compensate.
2. An affected restaurant stops offering delivery. If it's not worth the money, why offer it?
3. An affected restaurant gets its own drivers. That's how delivery used to operate before the gig economy, and it allows them to control costs and fees.
I've already seen restaurants start putting on delivery charges, and often significant ones (a $6 delivery charge doesn't seem unusual where I am).
> But the platforms’ role in it will be more stable and secure.
I don't think it will be. The platforms currently offer discoverability and drivers. If platforms aren't willing to bear the costs of the drivers, restaurants will stop using their driver services. And if the platforms are reduced to just discoverability, it becomes much easier for competitors to enter the market.
I fully agree that these "blitzscale" business have a horrible business model that is not sound, both economically (depends on free funding) and morally (the goal is to corner the market or at least get an oligopoly and then exploit your position).
That said I don't think a win here would help the current workers. Like all minimum wage laws this will reduce demand (obviously people don't want to pay a 12$ delivery fee for an order of $20), push business towards even shadier employment practices and medium term towards automation / "self-service".
As much as I would want it not to be true, the low-skill end of the employment market will always be easily replaceable and consumers won't be willing to pay unlimited amounts for something they could easily do themselves. As such it would help people a lot more if there was an easy path towards acquiring skills, guaranteeing that these bottom-rung jobs will be only temporary.
> obviously people don't want to pay a 12$ delivery fee for an order of $20
I realize there's psychology at play here but to an extent aren't we already doing that through essentially obligatory tips?
> As such it would help people a lot more if there was an easy path towards acquiring skills, guaranteeing that these bottom-rung jobs will be only temporary
When the service industry worker has to spend all their time working in order to make even a marginally livable wage the path is to pay them more money, directly or indirectly. The problem is exacerbated in high COL areas, and sure you can say "ok well just move", but broadly speaking you still need someone to do these tasks and that pool is dwindling.
There are lot of think could be done not to pay $12 delivery fee over a $20 order. For example, the cost of delivering a $100 order is pretty close to a cost of a $10 dollar order. This could be used for subsidizing the cheaper delivery cost by the more expensive ones, like saying delivery fee is 25% of the order and no tip, but minimum $5 (or something). So you pay $5 for a $10, $5 for a $20, and $25 for a $100 delivery, which is way easier to swallow. But this is just one of the most primitive ideas to handle that, the point is the make companies to figure out what is feasible, instead of letting them run rampant with whatever shady sh*t they can come up with.
How about when SpaceX sued the US government because they were awarding launch contracts to Boeing without competing? SpaceX largely won that and they had a good point.
> why risk your money on something with almost zero upside and all this downside? Suing the government is not a sign of strength
Can’t say I agree with this logic. (Conclusion fine.) Apple didn’t sue the FBI from a position of weakness [1]. DoorDash et al, understandably, don’t want to be disadvantaged in their grocery business [2]. Reading between the leaves, I think that’s what they’re pushing for. They also don’t want to change the status quo, which is less reasonable, but not a sign of strength or weakness per se.
In any case, most small businesses in America operate on single-digit margins. Almost every restaurant would be wiped out by what, from a tech perspective, is a meaningless change in margins. There is nothing meaningful to conclude simply from the fact DoorDash is challenging the rule.
> what does apple have to do with this conversation?
It also sued the government. My point is “suing the government is not a sign of strength” or weakness. It’s a non-signal. I think DoorDash is wrong here, though they have a kernel of a point in why grocery delivery is not covered by the rule. But their suing the government says nothing about their strength or weakness.
Yea but Apple didnt sue the government because of some issues affecting the profitability of their main business model. This comparison makes no sense.
Companies that have made similar moves are Uber, Airbnb for example, but not Apple.
While I generally agree that suing the government isn't in and of itself and indicator of desperation, I also feel like there's a distinction between the lawsuits that are always immediately thrown around contesting government contract awards compared to lawsuits filed against legislation.
In the former, companies sue because it doesn't really cost them much to try and see if something works out in their favor, while in the latter they're suing because the legislation would have some negative effect on their existing business.
The BT46B being banned after a single race is a bit of an urban legend. It was not banned and was perfectly legal to run for the remainder of the year.
The background to why Gordon Murray (designer) decided to go with the fan design was the flat-12 engine used by Brabham didn't allow venturi tunnels along the side of the car (flat-12s being too wide) so he had to find another way to respond to the then-new ground-effect others were exploiting.
A neat legal trick was discovered: a fan could be installed on the car as long as its primary purpose was to cool the motor. Primary purpose in this case meant, and GM got a lawyer's opinion on this, at least 51% of the volume of air went to cool the engine. Brabham was very clear this fan sucked the car to the ground but also proved to the governing body that most of the air went to cooling, so it was deemed legal for the rest of the year but the loophole was to be closed for the following year. Stories by Andretti about the BT46 throwing stones and being dangerous to other drivers was complete rubbish made up by Colin Chapman to get the car banned as he saw Brabham would walk away with the championship. In effect the tips of the fans never moved particularly fast (ballpark 50mph along the edges) so it was never dangerous to other drivers.
The actual story as to why it was withdrawn is Bernie Ecclestone, then owner of the Brabham team was also the head of the Formula One Constructors Association and the other manufacturers threatened to leave the association if he didn't withdraw the car. Seeing the bigger picture of securing TV and advertising rights to F1, Bernie withdrew the car after a single race.
These sorts of articles dont reflect how the US gov funds itself:
1. Gov spends $100 and taxes $90
2. Commercial banks then have $10 (100-90) in reserves at the Fed
3. Treasury is required to sell $10 of bonds to keep its account at the Fed at zero balance. (This collective tally of 'debt' is what everyone loses their minds over)
4. Commercial banks buy these bonds up immediately as long as the interest earned on the bond is greater than the interest earned on the reserves at the Fed.
Important things to remember:
- The $10 'borrowing' done by the government is funded by the deficit it created.
- The treasury doesn't have to issue bonds to fund itself it can simply deficit spend as its done in every major war or during Covid.
- When the treasury does choose to issue bonds the coupons dont need to match market interest rates (this is what the Bank of Japan is doing this very minute). The bonds will always be purchased so long as there is a positive interest rate differential between the bond and the Fed's reserve interest rate.
- Bonds have secondary uses but funding the government is not one of them.
- Government debt = private sector savings. Collectively it represents the excess of money paid into the pvt sector vs whats been taken out via taxation.
- US gov bonds are extremely useful financial instruments used in all sorts of repo operations providing liquidity in the banking sector. They are better than gold!
- Dont stress about government debt. It has never, and will never, be repaid and thats a good thing because it effectively translates to a massive destruction of pvt sector savings.
Thats really impressive students are doing this. These tools are non-trivial to use and it shows great initiative from them. I could see these tools being used proactively as part of a creative writing class or helping people improve their language skills. Top stuff!
I am certain I'm in the wrong here but I'm struggling to understand Arrow's USP. I (originally) assumed it meant python/R users would be able to get around memory limitations when model-fitting but all the examples I've come across are just data manipulation and none of the main modeling packages support it. Those who are using it, what am I missing?
Arrow eliminates ser/der, and if all actors in the workflow use the format you could see drastic performance improvements for a wide variety of workloads. I've seen ser/der for multi-GB+ processes take up half of the total clock time of the task.
Arrow is a language-independent memory layout. It’s designed so that you could stream memory from (for example) a Rust data source to a spark/DataFusion/Python/whatever else/etc with faster throughout and support for zero-copy reads, and no serialisation/deserialisation overhead. Having the same memory model ensures better type and layout consistency as well, and means that query engines can get on with optimising and running queries rather than also having to worry about IO optimisations as well.
I’m using DataFusion (via Rust) and it’s pretty fantastic. Would love to swap out some Spark stuff for DataFusion/Ballista stuff at some point as well.
As a data data scientist, I also found this pretty confusing so I spent some time trying to understanding it better. I wrote it up as a blog post:
Demystifying Apache Arrow
https://www.robinlinacre.com/demystifying_arrow/
My use case is that since Arrow keeps all data types and dumps the in memory table to disk, this allows me to backup my work and later reload the data and keep going. Loading and writing the data to disk is very fast It’s much better than using hdf5 for me in that regard.
And in most cases, if you memory map (mmap on Linux/BSD, MapViewOfFile on windows) it’s way faster than reading the file - because you only ever read what’s needed on one hand, and it stays in cache between invocations.
Ownership is overrated. It's not a universally good thing. In many cases it's a huge liability. The things you own end up owning you.
Would you want to own the stretch of road outside your house? What benefit would you get from it? You'd now be responsible for maintaining it and presumably you'd take out an insurance policy in case of freak events damaging it. You'd pray for a mild winter and hope your neighbours don't buy heavy vehicles that will start tearing it up. Much better to let the government own it, I think.
What benefit do you get from car ownership? Do you modify your car? Do you enjoy doing your own maintenance? For many people, the answer to both is a resounding no. For almost everyone, doing maintenance and repairs is totally impractical even if they were inclined to do so. Do you really own something if you are forced to take to the dealers regularly for maintenance and when things go wrong?
So what does the ownership get you? The sole responsibility if something goes wrong. The sole responsibility of keeping it maintained and roadworthy or disposing of it if you decide to write it off. And remember you can't really just write it off because you need it to get to work every day, plus it's a huge asset that you can't afford to replace outright.
For a very large number of people, "car ownership" really means the car owns them.
Ownership is great for many things, but each thing needs to be considered on its own merits. For most people, car ownership really doesn't make much sense.
I'm largely with you on this, philosophically, rationally, economically. But we're probably a tiny majority, most people seem to react on emotion on this.
Amateur psychology time: I think a large component of the desire to own is insecurity about future availability and prices. In my personal case, I find that as I got older and moved up the income ladder, I seem to increasingly loose the desire to own. Partly because I can easily absorb much more price volatility now. Partly because of increased self-knowledge / life experience, that in practice there are almost no material possessions that I really want to own for very long times.
This is more about fighting the powers that be and them taking away the ability to own anything at a reasonable price, period. Great example is the WSJ story yesterday about asset managers and foreign investors snatching up every house on the market. Don't you want the ability to own something if you feel the desire to do so, or would you rather corporations buy it from out under you/rent it back to you and there be no other option?
> Don't you want the ability to own something if you feel the desire to do so
Well... that's not really how things work, is it? Already there are things that you will never be able to own and a lot of it depends on the circumstances of your birth.
Since you mention houses it touches upon another point which you may have been suggesting. Should ownership of certain basic things be a right? What should be included in that? A basic house of some standard? A car? It doesn't seem obvious what should and shouldn't be included.
Well, 60 years ago those were attainable relatively quickly for someone without a high school degree. Now they aren't (unless you want to live in the middle of nowhere) for someone even with a college degree. So something went awry in the meantime.
Just because something was possible doesn't mean it should always be possible. I'm not saying whether it should or shouldn't be in this case; I really don't know. But it should be obvious that in the past ~100 years people have been taking far too much from the Earth without any thought to sustainability or the future. What was common 60 years ago was not necessarily right.
I try to follow the url in that thread but it gives me a "Sorry, but we can’t find the page you were looking for", is it just me? Here's an archive link https://web.archive.org/web/20201113005029/https://www.wefor... It was an interesting ready but a bad way to start the day.
>> Have a handful of executives who can't wait to get back into their comfort zone - the office - and that office spending budget will find a way to get spent
you could have just said this. everything else you wrote is superfluous justification
I dont think it was a good product even back when it did 'work'. We received a pair as a house-warming gift and I remember not understanding how or why I should use them. I already had a soundbar that I could stream music to. I now, out of politeness, had to use these new "wireless" speakers that demanded a constant wifi connection but still required their own Very Visible power cables along with its own dedicated app which was nothing but a wrapper for music services that logged me out after every software update. I couldn't even use it as a dumb speaker and operate it as part of my main sound system so now I have a soundbar that is nicely mounted to the wall and additionally these speakers that clutter my living room. Lovely.