Whilst I think there’s some truth to this, America’s elite would have brought us to this point anyway. Trump is a symptom of unfettered neoliberalism exporting jobs and destroying communities rather than a cause. Bin Laden drew America into forever wars and solidified their enemies in some dimensions. But America’s great downfall has been the ruthless pursuit of self-interest by its elite. They smashed the social compact and destroyed its institutions in the pursuit of profit.
I think Bin Laden will get a chapter in the book on the fall of America, but Reagan will be on the front cover.
Yep, a lot of people saw this coming. It was so obvious - new powers are always abused in the end. Same for the UK.
Perhaps the politicians knew that and didn’t care. Not sure how deep their cynicism / malice goes. More power to us, they said.
The UK however had pre-existing authoritarianism due to the Troubles. Acceding to ECHR in Northern Ireland and rolling back the authoritarianism there in favor of an external human rights court was a critical part of ending the cycle of violence there.
In the UK there is a big element of sheer incompetence. Politicians who have not experience of life outside politics are really will-equipped to understand the consequences of what they do, and defer overly to expert opinion. Of course the police or intelligence services say they need more powers, it takes judgement to balance this against other considerations.
The term 'expert' here actually means well-funded lobbyists who pay to have access to the politicians. They are able to present decision-makers with convincing arguments to pass laws that are favorable to the ones funding the lobbyists. They are smart and they are experts, but they are also laser focused on using that expertise to get what the funders want. This is almost always an outcome that is bad for regular people.
it is bad because experts are narrow. Consider my example, The police will (correctly) tell you that giving them more powers will reduce crime. The problem is that reducing crime is not the only considering in what powers the police should have.
its also not true, if we listened to expert opinion more often we wouldnt have had numerous extreme economic and policy failures in my rather short life. Austerity, Brexit, Covid, Public Order Act 2023, every moment of those last Tory years.
The politicians did defer to expert and business opinion over Brexit. The referendum was only called because they thought they would win it. I personally think it was a good thing, but the politicians definitely did not - the point was a referendum win would fatally weaken the leave movement. An interesting irony is that polls before the referendum in the 70s suggested people did not want to remain, the ones before 2016 suggested they did.
Lots of experts favour austerity. The trick with economics (and many other things) is to find the experts who agree with out.
The government did listen to experts over covid. Whose idea was lockdown? Who advised them that a rapid vaccine rollout was required. The government did get confused by experts having different opinions (as one would expect with a novel disease) but once convinced which experts they listened to they did follow them. The main fault was not balancing advice from experts in different areas (e.g. balancing physical health, mental health and economic impacts of lockdown correctly) which is exactly what I was complaining politicians fail to do
> I would guess most Roku users aren't using a box these days.
Sure I guess. But those devices objectively suck. the CPU and storage in "smart TVs" are so underpowered that using streaming apps on them is painfully sluggish.
For comparison, I've used the "Chromecast with Google TV" (a $50ish at its release 4k streaming stick that uses the 'Google TV', fka 'Android TV' platform) and a Sony TV on the same platform, released the same year. The Sony UI is a lot more sluggish than the Google stick device. Also tested running an SNES emulator. The Google device can easily do it, the Sony TV can't keep up even on a basic game like Super Mario World.
And then of course, on the other end of the spectrum, the Apple TV exists, which specs-wise can easily play 3D racing games at a fine framerate.
Agreed. I currently have a “Roku TV” that is hooked up to another Roku device, because the one built into it is so slow and outdated as to be almost unusable. The $29 (on sale) Roku stick I hooked up to it works fine. Getting a built-in Roku IMHO is a false economy, the built-in thing will almost certainly go to crap before the TV itself does.
Maybe it is just the devices I have, but I've had the higher end 4K-capable Roku boxes before I eventually got all Roku TVs. I would say the experience with my Roku TVs (TCL, Phillips, and Sharp) has been the best. Nothing slow about them.
I don't try to do anything like run a console emulator on them though. Just watching streaming channels and YouTube TV.
I wish I could come back and ask you how they perform after a couple more years of "software updates" from the app providers. Considering, too, that they will also be vibe-coding them from here on out.
IDK about the specs on yours, but even things like bloated sizes of apps themselves on disk can become a problem. What happens when the OS and the apps inevitably go up in size such that the 8GB or whatever TCL has decided to give you cannot hold the OS, Netflix, Disney+, and HBO at the same time? They don't just let you stay on old versions anymore, either.
I have a 10 year old 4k Roku TV that works a good as new. The Roku app API is severely limited. The upside of that is that it discourages webdev bloat.
Interesting. Honestly I had never considered that angle. Given that they really ought not to need anything but simple navigation of lists and grids to build a streaming app that is actually usable and fast, not whatever the Youtube App (330MB) and Netflix (183MB) are wasting my phone's space on... now I'm wondering if this forced parsimony imposed on the developers could be a reason to give Roku a try again. I admit it's been over a decade since I used a Roku regularly.
With Roku built in as well as whatever ad pipeline(s) the TV manufacturer wants. These days my AppleTV is allowed to talk to the internet. My television is not.
I have a Samsung TV that I intentionally didn’t connect to the Internet for that reason. I occasionally get an annoying pop-up randomly, encouraging me to connect it to Wi-Fi.
> Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.
Except in that case don't you have to give the TVs themselves Internet access? Do you trust any TV with such access nowadays given all the tomfoolery with surveillance that most OEMs do?
Especially because you can get TVs with Roku built-in.
I believe there are TVs that come with AppleTV built-in. I'm not in the market, so I haven't looked, but I suspect they're not the bargain basement Wal-Mart sets.
Eh those TVs are a dubious value proposition. I grabbed one and wound up returning it because it won't even let you use the TV as a damned TV without connecting it to the internet and creating a roku account so they can track you.
My Roku TV (that hasn't been turned on in years, but was left plugged in for years...) literally tries to reach out every minute to home servers. Before u plugging it, I had blocked it's DNS, and was blown away at how frequently it tries to phone home. Easily the noisiest device on my home network.
We're talking about how to get (not earn) a billion dollars so yes, they're good examples of that. It seems like if you break the law and make life worse for everyone, you can get a billion dollars.
I think we’ve already seen that export controls help your competitor in the long term. First europe would turn to Chinese models, then if china was daft enough to stop that (why would they? It would bring the end of American hegemony) then europe will just develop their own.
The difference between America and europe isn’t technical ability. It’s access to funding and ambition. Export controls would fix that. In fact, I think the trump administration is already driving a boom in London.
The popularity of SaaS was never derived from the products themselves, but rather business' weird aversion to doing in-house development. Most companies not in tech view software as literal magic, and act as if hiring some engineers could risk opening Pandora's box or something. Banks are particularly notorious for this; despite basically their entire business being done digitally, they treat software as a necessary evil, not as their underlying value.
But, the cost of in-house development just went down significantly. SaaS has always had a lot of broken promises. The thing is the software is never tailored to your use case, and you often have to integrate into your other tools anyway. And, you don't get to control the requirements, features, velocity, or bug fixes. Jira as a bug? Too bad I guess, hopefully it gets fixed eventually.
But the dirty secret is that companies are filled to the brim with bright-eyed aspirational employees, who want nothing more than to make their job easier and their company more efficient. The thing is they're doing it using cursed Excel workbooks on share drives. I think, in the near future, they'll be doing it with hand-rolled applications.
In comparison to some absurdist baseline maybe, actual software NEVER stops working under you, so in comparison something like an works 80% "most of the time" is godawful. Though I would argue that with SaaS the trend is toward 100% likelyhood to fuck your shit up given enough time, and it has borne out this way in the real world time and time again. SaaS is popular because it allows companies to more effectively extort you for your dollars.
Yep, you’re correct. I got to that bit and thought that can’t be right. It’s obviously wrong. If you rotate a semantic vector, you change the semantics of it. You don’t want that.
I want someone to resolve the contradiction you have highlighted. Why don’t we now have an AI built web browser that is much better faster than chrome?
To that mind, why hasn’t chrome itself become 1000x better?
There is a disconnect between the narrative and reality.
I think Bin Laden will get a chapter in the book on the fall of America, but Reagan will be on the front cover.