I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this line of thinking but “dessert with every meal” as an example of late capitalist degeneracy seems cartoonishly austere.
The PS Vita is an apt point of comparison - a beautiful piece of hardware that performed fantastically (and in my opinion much more impressive for its time than the steam deck) - that is considered to have been a complete failure.
Steam Deck really is an interesting comparison. It must be frustrating that Valve releases Steam Deck to fanatical reception if you feel like PS Vita was a better product for it's time. Even though PS Vita may have been a great product, it's possibly one that simply was not at the right place or time. I really think that Sony needed to win, not just sell modestly.
A big and weird part of this is simply because Valve is different. Still a corporation, still flawed, but certainly, if nothing else, definitely different. They have an appeal almost reminiscent of how people once regarded Google a long time ago. They've gotten a solid reputation for playing the long game with respect to building their ecosystem, and in that regard, Deck feels like a product many years in the making: the Steam client and games library, Proton and DXVK, the overlay and other middleware libraries, the multiple iterations of SteamOS, and many more endeavors all came into the product that the Deck is today.
Meanwhile, PS Vita did not have the luxury of the depth of consumer goodwill that Valve has, even if Sony has many times the breadth of consumer goodwill; worse, it needed to bootstrap it's ecosystem, whereas Valve has committed to bringing it's entire existing ecosystem to Deck instead. Valve also had the luxury of not being a traditional video game console vendor, and thus I don't think it elicited as strong of a reaction in the "console wars" either: I do not think that people view it the same. And hell, I don't think Valve does either. It has an aggressive starting price, and thus definitely can compete, but it seems probably still profitable. At the higher end, it's priced more like a gaming laptop, and thus the enthusiast gear that you would expect. I think they landed themselves a nearly unloseable situation with Deck. Because it's basically just an extension of their existing Steam ecosystem, it's essentially a value-add at worst. I would bet it acts more complimentary to other consoles, and there are probably few Deck owners without at least one other game console.
As a competitor to Nintendo's gaming handhelds and as a successor to the PSP, it seems like consumers largely rejected the PS Vita. Maybe in an alternate universe where Sony took an entirely different approach to the ecosystem and marketing of the PS Vita, things could've gone very differently.
Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.
> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.
What problem is solved via a public tamper resistant ledger outside of the hypothetical? I routinely make purchases outside of a public tamper resistant ledger without issue.
I’d argue that what you’ve stated is just the mechanism by which decentralisation is achieved (you haven’t identified any additional benefits).
This is making a mountain out of a molehill. There's nothing to suggest any pre-conditions for deleting an account have to be removed, simply that it must be possible to "initiate deletion" from within the app.
Then you're defeating the purpose of the requirement, because the scummy scam service will let you "initiate" deletion but to actually carry it out you still have to call them and wait on hold for sixteen years or come show your ID in person at their offices in Northern Alaska.
Frankly, this would still be a good start compared to the norm today: You can't even find information about account deletion from most mobile apps, let alone initiate the process.
The issue I've always had with Monte Carl simulation in this context is that it takes more knowledge, expertise, time, and care to accurately perform a Monte Carlo Simulation than to prepare an accurate estimate. It's like saying you can avoid building (yet another) barely functional go-kart by instead building a four-wheel drive. Monte Carlo Simulation sometimes cloaks that the assumptions behind the simulation largely determine the output and are just as (if not more) prone to error as the usual assumptions.
If the burden of accurately estimating an average duration for a blog post is too much for your planner, what are the odds they're going to accurately develop a probability distribution for the duration of a blog post?
In simple estimates there's no need to use a stochastic approach at all. For instance, the example in the post - if you know a blog post takes between 1-10 days (uniformly distributed) and that you need to get one out every ~6 days to get 60 out in a year, you already know the probability is ~60%. If you know there's a skew to the higher end and guess a distribution (as in the example), again you can directly work out that the odds of success are ~35%.
There is value when the estimate is not corrupted by other priorities (rare), when the expertise to accurately develop distributions for activities exists (also rare, particularly for work that isn't easy to sample and re-forecast), and when the plan is complex enough that it's hard to directly predict the impact of your statistical assumptions.
"Thanks. I'm legitimately quoting, but also prefer use of more specific terms like "tripled" or "fives times more expensive" etc. than common dramatic headlines words like "crushed", "slammed", "blasted", "surged"."
Doesn't seem to support your claim that these are scare quotes at all.
Apple is not using PhotoDNA, but in any event - this is a good article but they misconstrued the '1 in a trillion' quote, as is canvassed in the comments for the article itself. According to apple there is a 1 in a trillion chance of wrongly flagging an account, not a 1 in a trillion false positive rate for individual images, and we know that step to banning include:
- multiple flagged images; and
- human review
The details for those processes hasn't been fully disclosed, and it isn't possible to say whether 1 in a trillion is a reasonable estimate or otherwise.
"Don't worry, even if the system flags your baby pictures, we'll just hand them to the lowest-bidding subcontractor who will review the pictures of your naked baby (you know, to catch pedophiles!) and then probably not report you to the authorities. If this happens too often we're just going to ban you tho, this process costs money y'know?"
