12.4% of the world is illiterate and I'd guess more like 20% would have trouble quickly taking text and turning that into instructions faster than a video could do the same thing.
To me it's more about the funders staying engaged. For the people working in the startup as long as it's exciting and you're getting paid enough it seems really fun to get that much runway - why would you leave unless there are personality/direction conflicts??
rms (Stallman) used to (still does?) do that where he would download the web requests and emails on a daily basis and then work offline the rest of the day and then sync overnight. At least that's what I remember reading.
I remember thinking about how different that workflow is but it must be incredibly productive. Everything would be lightning fast (even stable Internet isn't always snappy and sometimes it's a chore) and there would basically be zero inline ads or any context switches.
> "I generally do not connect to web sites from my own machine, aside from a few sites I have some special relationship with. I usually fetch web pages from other sites by sending mail to a program (see https://git.savannah.gnu.org/git/womb/hacks.git) that fetches them, much like wget, and then mails them back to me. Then I look at them using a web browser, unless it is easy to see the text in the HTML page directly. I usually try lynx first, then a graphical browser if the page needs it."
Yeah it was so much more accessible to play around with configs and pricing and then all you needed was a credit card.
Even now I think enterprise companies should be more open about what's possible and what the price and delivery date would be without having to talk/chat/email anybody. Even for something like a Juniper $100k+ device it would be kind of cool to configure it.
Funny enough you're doing an Italian/Brooklyn accent but the example I was thinking of is birds that mimicked the car alarms in Brooklyn in the 90s/00s and I'm wondering if they still do that now that alarms aren't as common.
Is it possible that after the JFK speech and exposure to English this mode of using 'ein' actually became more acceptable? If not I wonder what drove this story.
I think it's much more likely this story was spread by native English speakers who learned German as a second language in school. It has all the hallmarks of a teacher's pedantry to me.
That said, blunders do occasionally happen even at this level. During Bill Clinton's visit in Romania (the first time a US president visited the country after the Revolution), he said in a huge public speech that the American people stands shoulder to shoulder with the Romanians - which the translator for the public broadcast translated as "șold la șold", which sounds similar, but means "hip to hip" (the correct translation, which is also a literal translation as the expression exists in Romanian as well, is "umăr la umăr").
Twitter is definitely not more successful now than before. So many people left and are gone forever.
I would read a deep dive though into the history of Twitter (with the financials) to understand better and I do get that for a single product company there really is a point at which you give up on finding the next big thing and just optimize on your main thing and you really just need a few dozen awesome people and a rotation of new hires to keep things rolling but not thousands of engineers.
Maybe I’m overstating “massively more successful” but to my understanding “X” has roughly twice the active use count that Twitter did, although that includes Grok.
That said, do you remember these kinds of articles?
> Musk summons engineers to Twitter HQ as millions await platform’s collapse
> “Former Twitter employees fear the platform might only last weeks.” Melissa Ingle: “I don’t see how it lasts the month.” “All signs point to some catastrophic failure of the system, and very soon.”
Elon was firing people left and right and literally physically destroying Twitter’s data centers. I remember hundreds of these hysterical articles and tweets that very clearly did not come to pass. He obviously did something more clever than the authors of these articles expected… is all I’m claiming.
I haven't posted anything on this HN submission yet, but all I'm claiming is that Twitter was so successful under Elon's management that he thought it was better to roll it into SpaceX than to keep it independent. Kind of like solar city was merged into Tesla to bail it out and then it winded down after the acquisition while nobody is looking.
Yes, and Tesla and SpaceX are both ridiculously overvalued by any fair measure.
But we can separate the financial inanity of his empire from the question, which is whether Elon is a capable engineering mind or simply an ‘Isaacson puff piece recipient’.
> I have friends who dropped everything to support the Vision Pro, and I don’t think any of them felt like it was worth it in retrospect. Even the ones that got featured by Apple as a result didn’t see more than a few thousand downloads.
They should remember that they got quite a bit of social capital within Apple by doing that and hopefully they're keeping those relationships warm. But yeah Vision Pro hasn't turned out to be a big ecosystem so far.
Because Apple has always treated its developers so well!
Vision Pro will be cancelled at some point, it’s just nowhere near popular enough and never will be - the air has gone out of that VR bubble.
I wouldn’t be surprised if duo is also cancelled because it is another copycat move which is not central to Apples business and will not be mass market.
I believe there is a large market of consumers in the US who can afford a $2000 premium phone compared to the $1300 iPhone Pro Max.
In China, reportedly JD.com's Apple store received more than 1.13 million registrations of interest for the Duo, at a starting price of ~$2400.
I could be wrong also, but I wouldn't be surprised if the iPhone Duo sells like hot cakes.
I could imagine that premium smartphone buyers, instead of upgrading their phones for minor camera and battery improvements, go for the device that unfolds into a tablet.
Yeah I think East Asia will drive alot here. That's where the large screen phone trend started as well. I'm also suspect of a $2k phone that also has had to make a number of compromises to support the new format. But the market will tell us who's right and it was worth it for Apple to try. If they fail it's really not the end of the world and they can pivot back to traditional form factors or find another.
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