RodoBobJon's comments

It’s possible at least some of those people enquiring about the AI strategy are looking to find out if a company is about to ruin itself with bad decisions around AI. And some others are probably saying what they think people want to hear.

And yes, of course some are caught up in the hype; that’s the nature of these hype bubbles.

Sure, in theory Twitter’s website could be very simple and straightforward, built on tried and true web technologies. In practice, they wrote an entirely bespoke web app that is every bit as complex as a native app but shittily executed and with a terrible UX.

But the implication of this argument is that the benefit of PWAs is to the developer rather than the user, right? If PWAs actually benefited users, then creating one instead of an Android app wouldn’t be waste of time even if you had to create a separate iOS native app in either case.

This is the contradiction:

Apples’s defense of its in-app payments rule is that having a single payment system owned by the platform used by every app on that platform provides the best experience for users. According to them, Apple isn't being greedy but rather they are ensuring their users have the best experience on their platform.

But if a single payment system for a platform is such a great user experience, why does Apple not offer that superior experience to their Apple Music customers on Android?

Of course, one could argue that Google's refusal to require apps on their platform to use their in-app purchase system means that superior user experience of a uniform payment system is out of reach regardless of what Apple does with their own apps on Android, so maybe it's not a contradiction after all.

I think they're mad about the "Apps" section on the Summary tab. But I don't really get the complaints or see it as an advertisement; it's at the very bottom and users may genuinely be wondering how they get more data into the Health app, and a curated list of apps that do that is useful.

The idea that minimum wages kills jobs is not as well supported as you might think. People commonly take overly-simplified econ 101 labor market theories as gospel when the empirical evidence about the effects of minimum wage increases is decidedly mixed: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/11/20/20952151/shoul...

This drives me crazy with Slack. In 2019 I can't have two chats open at once? Madness.

Yes, but FaceTime is not attempting to be a camera; it is attempting to simulate a face-to-face conversation. That it uses a camera is an implementation detail. The fact that the distance between the camera and the face on the screen makes it look as though the person you are conversing with isn't quite looking at you is an implementation detail leaking out of the intended abstraction.

FWIW, the Apple developers discussing SwiftUI on Twitter are careful to point out that SwiftUI is not designed to be a wrapper around UIKit. Much of the implementation currently uses UIKit under the hood, but that's an implementation detail that is subject to change and there are already significant parts of SwiftUI that don't use it.

It seems as though they are viewing SwiftUI as a successor to UIKit/AppKit on all their platforms, not just a higher level wrapper.

SwiftUI has state. The idea is that all layout code is defined as a pure function of the state. Basically you can annotate properties with `@State` and each time one of those properties is updated, your view `body` function is re-run to produce an updated view.

SwiftUI tries to do clever stuff under the hood to only update the portions of the view hierarchy affected by the state change for performance.

With the caveat that I also have no particular inside knowledge of this, I think you're on to something. I keep seeing these demos which show virtual video game characters or hyper-realistic objects and I can't help but think that it's complete overkill for a first generation consumer product. From a visual perspective, all I need out of my first gen AR glasses is to project some text annotations next to a real object, or show an arrow where I need to turn left. You don't need to fool me into thinking a virtual object is real. I'm looking for utility, not immersion.

Gruber didn't call it a fraud. He said the demo was not "distinguishable from a fraud," which is true. His actual recommendation is the title of the post, which is that we should have "a little Duplex skepticism."

And yes, Google certainly wouldn't demo a completely non-existent technology, and I'm sure Gruber knows that. But they might very well demo a technology that only works 60% of the time at present. Let's be honest, this wouldn't be the first time we've seen a large tech company demo incredible-seeming too-good-to-be-true tech that turned out to actually be too good to be true and never made it into real world use for one reason or another.

It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present.

For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year at IO, and as far as I can tell it never shipped.

If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.

I mean, Gruber is technically correct that this demo is indistinguishable from a fraud. And yes, Google certainly wouldn't demo a completely non-existent technology, but they might very well demo a technology that only works 60% of the time at present. Let's be honest, this wouldn't be the first time we've seen large tech companies demo incredible-seeming too-good-to-be-true tech that turned out to actually be too good to be true and never made it into real world use for one reason or another.

It is kind of weird that the broad tech punditry has just accepted Google's demo at face value with respect to what the tech is actually capable of at present.

[EDIT]

For example, Google demoed object removal in Google Photos (https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/17/15654476/google-photos-ob...) last year, and as far as I can tell it never shipped.

[EDIT 2]

If a company in any other industry announced an insane-seeming new technology with a completely non-verifiable demo like this, no credible journalist who covers that beat would report it as credulously as tech journalists have covered the Duplex demo. Gruber is absolutely right that the lack of skepticism around Duplex is baffling and journalistically suspect.

The prevailing theory is that Uber currently controls the customer relationship for ride-hailing, and that inertia will carry them forward.

I personally don't see it. Uber has already begun being disintermediated. For example, ride-sharing is already an option in Apple Maps on iOS where Uber sits alongside Lyft and any other ride-hailing apps on your phone, price comparison and all. You can also hail a ride with Siri. As a rider, why would I care whether my ride is dispatched by Uber or Lyft? I only care about availability and price. At some point in the future, I probably won't even need to install a competitor's app on my phone; I'll ask Apple Maps or Siri to get me a ride and it will dispatch a car from whichever service is faster and/or cheaper.

Uber has a plausible route to winner-take-all dominance as long as ride-hailing remains a two-sided market, where competitors have a chicken-and-egg problem in recruiting drivers and riders. But self-driving changes the game.