That may or may not be true, but the calculus has changed with agents. A process that was better manual for a human org may not be better for an agent org.
I think what is interesting here is that the industry is in this experimentation flux. Some people will choose to automate and write the software, others will not. And aggregate over the industry and over time we will learn.
So just saying "sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't" isn't really adding value, compared to the people actually experimenting and sharing the results.
I don't think it is fair to pin this on Google - I get the worst ads on X. But something about how the X ad network works means that even when I report the ad, block the ad poster, etc. there is this army of alternate ad accounts that all show the same ad.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad. Why am I letting these ads own spaced repetition slots in my brain that could be filled with knowledge? Instead of learning, my mental energy is being taken up by psychological manipulation to purchase? The relentless repetition of the mind-numbing ad interspersed throughout otherwise educational content.
Being rich is owning the real-estate of my own mind. I sometimes feel like a digital serf in my own head.
As much I love a good old "Why don't you just ..." response that terrifically misses the point - in this particular case I was watching YouTube through their Apple TV app.
Now, there may be another "why don't you just ..." or "well, actually ..." response you have queued up, maybe some ramblings about a pi hole, or some anti-Apple hate, or some other solutioneering. Go ahead, tell me.
But it is the structure of incentive that forces this. The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid. And Google offers an option: Youtube Premium. That give both me and the creator what we want and (for the time being) removes the ads.
So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
If you want creators to get paid, pay them (channel memberships, patreon, click on their sponsor links and buy something). No need to subject yourself to ads.
Ads don't just steal your time either, they invade your head. You are influenced by them and you have no choice as long as you watch them.
That is wrong on both accounts. I have little choice other than to watch ads since the structure of incentive that creates a marketplace like YouTube forces it on me.
I think about libraries and how the world would be if instead of a free public resource, you had to watch ads before you were allowed to take out a book.
It is just the case that in this modern social media world, if you want your ideas to spread you have to put them onto social media. And if I want access to those ideas I have to consume them through social media. There is nothing about that environment that is my choice, it is the environment that I find myself in.
And I have few choices to get around it. I can twist up into a pretzel trying to block the onslaught with more "why don't you just..." advice. Or I could pay to make it go away. Or I could just go off-grid and forego access.
And when you look close at the options, it becomes clear that sovereignty of my own mind has a price. Freedom of mind is not free in this modern world, if it ever really was.
You made the choice to use Apple TV, whatever that is. I just use... YouTube. In my browser. Do you not have a browser? It doesn't cost money.
You also have no obligation to watch ads for creators to get paid. They can also set up things like Patreon if they would like. The ads are very lucrative, and that's their choice. But you are free to make choices too, if you would like to.
> The YouTube creators that make the content do need to get paid
Nope.
They may get paid, they may not. That's the risk they've chosen. They may also get their Google account banned with no recourse for something minor or even non-existent.
> So either one is rich in time (doing whatever "why don't you just ..." hoop you expect me to jump through) or rich in money.
That's what they want you to think, you've been watching too many ads.
It's not advertising anything, it's just a straight up scam exploit site. It uses exclusively stolen or fake accounts. The links are shown as "amazon.de" or similar but of course do not go there, no doubt just a bug X haven't gotten around to fixing just yet.
This is on the kind of level where if we had actual law enforcement for tech companies, the next time some X executive lands in Europe they would be in cuffs.
I think it is fair to pin this on Google, Meta, X, and any other ad networks that seem to have no control over their own platforms.
They're like Dr. Frankenstein, creating a monster and then just letting it roam the countryside. But worse, because they profit (immensely) from the chaos their monster wreaks.
Somehow I would never assume that X would act "moral". Google on the other hands even few years back was generally acknowledged as a good actor which was once again corporate charade people would fall for. Including myself.
I was feeling very guilty last night as I was watching YouTube and getting 30s+ unskippable ad blocks every 10 minutes in some video. And the repetition and low quality were grating on me. I thought: being rich is never having to watch another ad
You don't have to be rich to avoid getting those ads. You can make them go away for ~$15 a month. If you can't afford that, you have bigger problems in your life than YouTube ads, and your first step towards fixing them is to spend less time watching YouTube.
(Shrug) The creators need to get paid one way or another. Do you want them to start running their own commercials, as if sponsored segments aren't bad enough?
I find this kind of test a bit puzzling. There is a way that we are redefining "alignment" to be a particular kind of moral virtue, one that isn't clearly defined to me. At one moment, it is a level of moral perfection that no known human achieves. On the other it is a demand for strict compliance with arbitrary requests that are under-specified and then failure when it fails to deduce some unstated underlying restriction.
When I see tests like this, I have no idea what I am even supposed to expect. Should the model do what the pretraining examples show in aggregate? Is it supposed to follow some post-training RLHF? Is it supposed to do exactly what the prompt asked it to do?
What is it even supposed to "align" to when the above are in conflict? No matter what it does, someone can construct a case where it fails.
It's not obvious from the prompt that the LLM cannot use a chess engine.
And if there is alignment issue, the alignment requirements should first be stated BEFORE running the experiment, and should be part of the training process. It's not. So there is not necessarily an alignment issue.
I mean, I'm not sure I've ever played a game of Monopoly where somebody didn't cheat. In fact, the accusations of cheating in the chess world are pretty rife. Same with online sports.
So people should play games without cheating, but many often don't. So should the AI align to your moral preference or theirs?
We just have this idea of a perfectly moral actor in our mind, something that doesn't even exist, like a personified version of utopia. And then we demand AI to meet that arbitrary standard, one that I am certain we couldn't define if we tried.
I don’t think the standard of “don’t cheat on evaluations” is very arbitrary. I don’t even think people who cheat have a moral or ideological preference for cheating, it’s just something they do.
I read the prompt on the OP, it did not say not to cheat.
But again, people cheat on tests. They steal answers or pay other people to take them on their behalf. People show up to interviews with AI assistants printing out perfect answers to the questions. In many, many cases where humans are being evaluated, they cheat.
So why should the AI align to your preferences? And when there is a conflict between the training data, that trillions of tokens of human activity including the rampant cheating a significant minority of humans engage in, the RLHF where we try to slap some guardrails on the worst manifestations of that real habit reflected in the AI, and the prompt: what should the AI "align" to?
For some reason this question reminds me of all of the drama about Navier-Stokes from the last few days. Tangential to the ethical questions are tons of examples where in history when word gets out about a solution to a problem, not even the solution itself just rumors that there is a solution, suddenly competing solutions appear.
So maybe it matters like that? Just knowing that an oracle like stockfish is saying "this is the best move" may trigger pathways in your brain that promote understanding?
I thought it got pushed back out? Wasn't there a big drama about this and Linus weighed in?
Linus is a wise operator at this point. I often see him come in like a hammer to bash down squabbling, but then he allows the situation to evolve once things quiet down. I only saw the hammer so I'm not sure what the current state is now.
In this case it arguably helped. I do wonder how much longer that stalemate would have gone on without the blow up.
I don’t think it’s a good policy in general. Mostly I think it would just end up in alienation and people not wanting to work with you. And Martin did leave. But he had a point and it seemed to get resolved.
I haven't made a full switch yet, at this point I'm experimenting more heavily in Rust.
First I built a wrapper for a very simple text editor based on KDEs KTextEditor (basically bindings around Qt C++) then a wasm wrapper around Canvas/WebGL for a basic 2d display list that currently supports sprites and gradient masking.
So far I've been getting away with it just as pure vibe code.
However, the bulk of my primary application is written in Typescript (both client, server and workers). I watched a recent podcast with Anders Hejlsberg (creator of C# and Typescript) where he made a strong argument for why they chose Go over Rust for the updated Typescript compiler. Due to similarities between Typescript and Go, partially based around them both being GC languages, it was just a better fit for a port.
So I am on the fence a bit here but still leaning towards Rust. I'm going to see how far I can push my two personal experiments. I'd really like to get the significant majority of the code I write into two languages (Typescript for anything web-ish and Rust for everything server-ish).
In one social group I am part of, Garmin just became the new trend. Watches have historically been status symbols even more than they are functional. Someone drops a few hundred/thousand/whatever and then brags about the newest new and how they are on it, then others move over to keep up.
People often buy these kinds of discretionary toys with their hearts and do post-hoc rationalization with their minds. You can't figure it out because your heart hasn't brought you there so your brain isn't wasting time creating justifications.
For what it is worth, sometimes these trends die an early death when people realize there is no substance underneath the justification. At least in the Garmin case, most people I know are happy with the purchase, in that it does deliver on certain needs. Since it matches their expectations, they don't have to suffer any cognitive dissonance between the heart-to-brain justification and their lived experience.
I mean, you might find this hard to believe since you have a fixed view, but I'm old enough that we had one of those old-school rotary phones. My family literally leased that phone as part of our phone bill up until the late 90s. I recall at one point we were forced to trade the rotary for a push button since the telecom was discontinuing support. When "caller id" became a new feature it only worked for the first while on the rented phones.
To this day, I suspect many people have a line-item on their Internet bill for their modem/router rental/lease.
Why you would find this hard to believe is actually the curious thing to me.
These threads are often amusing with people obliviously asking: why doesn't Apple make exactly what I want? And then stating with certainty how well their custom requirements would sell.
I'll probably wait and see how this phone does over the next few years. If it is still highly regarded by version 3 then I could imagine making the switch to a folding phone. For now I will remain conservative since my phone is such a critical piece of tech.
100%. It was so funny to see how for years, everyone on HN was harping on about how well a smaller iPhone would sell. Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product.
I kept an iPhone Mini until an App I need for work started consuming so much memory it became unusable on it (iOS would kill it after 15s). Even then, I raised ticket after ticket with support to get them to fix their app – which they did, then slipped again, for months.
Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.
interesting, I didn’t notice it also hat 1TB storage and 12GB RAM. But the size is maginally smaller only. Still, I agree, would probably have been a better fit.
> Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.
"Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air. Supposedly they're gonna refresh the Air next year, we'll see. But even if they don't: we're well into the "keep phones 3 years or more" era of the smart phone. You don't need an exact match for every phone for everybody every year.
> "Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air.
The iPhone air has a 6.5" display. That's bigger than the base iPhone 17 (6.3") and the iPhone 17e (6.1")
You're probably thinking about the thinness of the phone. iPhone air is 2.4mm thinner than iPhone 17, but I don't think anyone is asking for that, as most people use a case which makes the phone thicker.
Yeah, it's smaller in a different way than the mini was small.
But the thinness isn't actually the appeal. The key thing is that it's a lot lighter. (And yes, a case adds weight as well as thickness. But if you start from a lower baseline, you still end up in a lower place.)
But I think you do need some level of consistency to retain customers. Churning models, especially given Apple's otherwise-excellent retention metrics and mechanisms, seems like a self-goal by almost encouraging those buyers to switch after 3 years.
If you bought an iPhone Mini or an Air, but that model is gone at T+3 years, that's a lot more likely to result in you looking to Android, than if you bought an iPhone 13 and want to upgrade to an iPhone 16/17.
My estimate is very much anecdotal as well, but at my office alone there are three iPhone mini users than (used to be four until they switched job), only one AirPods Max user. I think this year I have only seen one other person wearing them. Much harder to see the exact model of phone people use without staring in a bad manner.
> I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.
At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
> At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
All this is true for many other products, specifically cars. Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
I get it, Apple has much better margins than Ford. And maybe a iPhone 18 Mini would reduce total margin for them. But if they move a couple of million units, it absolutely would make money.
> Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.
phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.
Of course, they never even brought it to the US. It has no chance there, there's barely a market for lowslung station wagons, and close to no market for EV wagons. Always was a niche in the US, while it was always the primary family vehicle in Europe.
And yes, VW is fighting for survival. The things they are killing are the low volume models specific to the Chinese market (because absolutely nobody in China is buying any VWs) and a lot of the variants and overlaps they've accumulated over the years. They'll continue making less than 100k iD.7s, and will be happy to do so (it's modestly profitable).
Society doesn't do anything of the sort. This is just diffuse irrational thinking. People invest their wealth where it will make the most profit for them and if a marginal dollar investment into the regular iPhone brings more profit than one into the iPhone Mini, then the owners and shareholders will ask the CEO why their money is flowing into suboptimal productions. People put their money investing in Apple in the hopes of a good return on that investment. If you want them to produce something that doesn't give them a good return, you'd have to pay to compensate, ie the price would rise but people wouldn't be ready to pay that. Otherwise you're asking people to subsidize for your enjoyment some luxury product as if it was charity. Willingly foregoing profit for the sake of someone else is subsidy or charity.
6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
It was an lower spec, gimped version to be fair. No one in the market for a new phone on launch day is excited to buy a lower end, worse battery & camera version that's missing multiple features present on the other versions.
Except there’s no average person, the average itself is a combination of people with the most diverse needs and constraints. It’s like the joke that the average human being has 1 breast and 1 testicle.
If we’re talking about unattainable dreams, I want a scroll rather than a folding phone - it’d be much better than a me-too form factor like this.
Don’t expect this to sell well - too big for trouser pockets and not enough advantages to the form factor, plus inevitably wear will make it either unprofitable for Apple or an expensive mistake for the purchaser.
The price point also outs it squarely in the luxury end of the market rather than mass-market.
Exactly. Obviously Apple did the research on this.
Personally I still like the "flip" style fold (normal phone size that folds into a smaller square). The lack of durability for the inner screen seems like less of an issue if it's protected inside (while folded). This seems like it really incentivises leaving it unfolded except for pocket use
The Mini 14 never existed. Perhaps you're thinking of a specific (non-mini) model of the iPhone 12 which was temporarily banned in France or maybe the USB C requirement which went into effect ~1 year after new sales of the iPhone 13 mini were already discontinued by Apple worldwide?
I always felt the mini-14 occupied like an uncanny valley position between the sensible utility of a lever action and the high fashion of an AR15. Granted, it predates the ubiquity of ARs by like 3 decade or so.
It's also New York legal which is rare for a semiauto that comes in 5.56. Ruger nailed it with guns that don't look scary. Don't have the mini-14 but do have the 10/22 and their PCC - both of which have all the functionality but none of the scary features.
I was ready to switch to a foldable. Then they said there is no FaceId and that idea went out of the window. I sure hope they will include it in later versions.
I'm curious to hear his take on this approach.
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