Not just modified vehicles or hummers, but a road filled with SUVs, minivans, delivery trucks, crossovers. Even a "standard" Ford F150 is goliath, and an indestructable frame won't save you. To the contrary, a super-rigid frame translates into occupant injury. Crumple zones, energy absorbing materials, deformation of structures = survivability. A 20 mph head-on collision in a 1950s auto with a full frame design is often far more serious than a 40 mph collision in a modern auto. Head-to-head comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPF4fBGNK0U (likely death vs possible foot injury)
Now contemplate a 6' long vehicle with 1' or less of "crumple zone".
Where I live people are on bikes, ebikes, escooters and cargo bikes all over the roads anyway so this fits right in.
I drove through Texas in a small Kia once, indeed, I was always afraid someone would fail to notice me and drive over the car thinking "what was that?"
Yes. It is said the Colonial British used to say The sun never sets in the British Empire.
In today's context with WhatsApp, The sun never rises without a billion GOOD MORNING messages and another billion GOOD MORNING TO YOU TOO replies on WhatsApp in India /s
I am an indian who doesn't use WhatsApp or Facebook. It has never inconvenienced me - only WhatsApp users are inconvenienced when I ask them to SMS or email me. If the government bans WhatsApp today, most indians will simply switch to RCS or other platforms.
> And, that being able to compensate someone for their work is such a complex process that it requires either a bunch of unknown middlemen, or an overengineered ponzi scheme.
Being able to compensate someone for their work is a complex process. Most Youtubers and or media publications would not exist if they asked for a fee upfront.
I'm going to flip this question around. Would we be worse off if fewer people were unable to start businesses out of Youtube channels? I'd think so. A lot of novel art and education has come out of realizing Youtube could be a full-time job. You jump to MrBeast as the junk food of Youtube but I can honestly say I have never seen a MrBeast video but I frequently look at things like FreeCodeCamp or even the more educational end of entertainment like Tom Scott or extensive product review channels like Project Farm. I'm glad they exist and I'd happily watch a sponsor spot for them.
100% agree with you but there are different levels of complexity and the one I'm talking about is truly ridiculous.
Example:
OpenRTB + VAST chain (standards used for targeted advertising) required to display an ad on the site involve dozens of parties the user has no knowledge about. In fact before an ad is displayed on the page, there's no way of knowing who and how will be involved in processing your data. The consent is implied and opt-out is enforced poorly to put it mildly. That's the complexity I'm talking about.
What you are doing and what you are saying don't match. Let's be clear here, I think this project is great and I don't want this to come off as a criticism of the project. It's a really fun idea and novel use of machine learning. That being said, the sponsored Youtube content you are targeting avoids all of the issues you are talking about. There is no fingerprinting, shadow profiles, or tracking. Youtuber says "video sponsored by NordVPN use code xXx360NoScopexXx for 50 cents off" and then the sponsor spot is done.
Correct, it is more simple than the OpenRTB auction chain, but not in terms of the logistics of creating this type of content. See the sibling comment for @falcolas for more details.
I should've used more examples but tried to keep it terse. Thanks for pointing this out.
The complexity here is to have to: 1) write, 2) present, and 3) edit a video segment selling a product you probably wouldn't bother mentioning to people if you had other options. It's not technical.
The alternative (for instance) would be an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT among the creators I watch. That's significantly less complexity for the end-user and the content creator.
> an automatic system distributing the $$ I pay YT
So youtube red instead? They split the creator portion of your subscription between the creators you watch (assuming they've setup the ability to get paid by YT). Worth quite a bit more than ad views too, last I heard.
This still requires you to pay which brings us back to step 1. You are also implying that the content creator does not use the product and would not mention it otherwise which is not always true.
Of course. It being cheaper is why people like it. Same reason that games are free and offer DLC, or Mercedes offers a car that could go faster if you have extra money laying around this month.
I hate the nickel and diming but it does make things more accessible in general.
Just because somebody buys something, that doesn't mean they like it. I don't like my ISP. It's shit service at a ridiculous price. I pay for it because the glorious free market has failed to provide acceptable options. No ISPs provide good service for a reasonable price. Therefore, my choice is to pay for something I don't like, or not have Internet.
Every time a company finds a way to make the product worse but increase profits, they will do it, and all other companies will eventually have to do it in order to remain competitive. It's an inevitable force that is built into the so-called free market. Nearly every product available today is worse and/or more expensive than an otherwise comparable product 10 years ago.
Mark my words, bookmark this comment and come back in 10 years. If these subscriptions turn out to be profitable, then in 2033, every car manufacturer will have functionality locked behind monthly subscriptions. And people will buy them because they have no other choice besides not buying a car. There will be no way to vote with your wallet--you'll just have to abstain with your wallet.
Yeah, it's especially toxic to capitalism when tight oligopolies (like the car industry, telecoms, mobile phone OSs) develop. Barriers to entry are super high, so when one company does a customer-hostile move like this and makes money, the others know everyone else will follow suit too, so rather than advertise how they won't exploit you like the bad guys do, everyone just adopts or "improves on" the d*ck move. Think about it. Some car company was the first to do a Destination Fee. Some ISP invented the bandwidth cap. And somehow these became universal, because who would/could challenge the oligopoly?
A $60/month difference is not what's going to make or break someone buying a Mercedes. Flying economy is cheap enough that many people can do it, there is no right Mercedes subscription model that will get people into one of their cars.
That's exactly right. If they want $6000 dollars more for the car over the lifetime of the car, the $6000 being right there in the sticker price might dissuade some buyers. But if they say it's $60/month, now you're only looking at the sticker price, and the Mercedes is cheaper than the everything-included BMW, so you buy that instead. (Sorry, I don't know enough about cars to know if Mercedes vs. BMW is a comparison that people make. I never even got a driver's license.)
This additionally acts as a nice A/B test; you sell the same car and get data on whether or not people would pay $6000 more for it to be faster.
I reflexively hate this, but it seems so rational to me.
It would maybe make things more accessible if there were caps on corporate profits. As it stands, corporations have 0 obligation to pass those savings on to consumers.
I prefer having the numbers as opposed to globally unique usernames. It destroys the incentive to steal high value usernames through scams and social engineering attacks. I don't get random friend request from people who aren't even in servers I am because they don't know the numbers to send a request. It also gave Discord a reason to sell Nitro because for a fee you could just change the numbers to 1234 or whatever. You will see an increase in scams as people aim to steal high value usernames to resell them as well as an increase in spam. We've seen this behavior on Twitter for years.
Yeah, this happens on literally every other popular platform without discriminators.
It feels like a huge regression in usability. Discriminators are one of the things that make Discord cool. And it seems like the only reasonable solution that scales for hundreds of millions of users.
I disagree that discriminators fix the rare username problem. The way I see it, they just move the problem.
Using discriminators to stop people fighting over "Mike" just makes them fight over "Mike#0001" instead. Discriminators do not fix the problem. Granted you now have "Mike#1337" and "Mike#0420" to contend with, but how is that any different to "Mike1337" or "Mike420"?
If there's scarcity of anything, people will fight over it. No matter how unappealing you make it. You could go all-out and turn the usernames into UUIDs, but then people would fight over the ones ending in lots of zeros.
I don't think preventing username squatting is a valid reason to keep discriminators. Even if it were a valid reason, it's hardly an important one. The issue is innocuous at most, and the only people who care are the ones assigning artificial value to these "rare" usernames in the first place.
I agree. This one, and the one where they indicate how hot an item is, are not dark patterns by themselves. They are signals that proved to increase sales. But that doesn't have to mean that they are also dishonest.
Unreal and Godot seem to be doing a number on Unity from both ends. The higher end of the industry is going Unreal while the indie games and hobbyist are going Godot. I imagine this is also why Epic is a Godot donor.
Have there been any well-known games made in Godot yet? When I started with my first proper game which was released a few months ago I went with Unity because I couldn't find any successful examples and the knowledgebase was lacking in comparison with Unity.
Depends how you define well-known. The Godot showcase lists some of the popular ones: https://godotengine.org/showcase/. I believe Dome Keeper did $1m+ in sales with a 2-person team and I assume Brotato and Cruelty Squad are probably in 7 figures as well. So far, the hits have definitely been on the smaller side, but I expect things will change with Godot 4 being released. Another big factor is that most of the games released so far have been developed by tiny teams.
Apparently it was a remastered version, Sonic Colors: Ultimate - It's interesting this came out on the Switch since I'm pretty sure there is no official Switch support in Godot.
Its great that everything just magically seems to work so well for you, but behind the curtains it took additional effort from the developers of websites you visit to make it so. Same goes for Safari and some of the less popular browsers.
I mean, this is a broad topic and I am more of a backend engineer than frontend these days.
However, I did do a lot of frontend back in the old IE6/IE7/IE8 days when you essentially had to code a whole separate front end for Microsoft's standards-flaunting mess. So this is definitely an issue I care about.
but behind the curtains it took additional effort from
the developers of websites you visit to make it so
This is true, but in my (limited recent) experience often it's because Chrome implements some rando de facto new "standard" thing they cooked up so of course they are out in front of the other browsers.
So yes, you often can't run your Chrome-specific shit elsewhere without workarounds and polyfills, but this doesn't automatically mean everybody except Google is screwing up. In some cases, complaints such as yours sound like folks in 2004 complaining that their ActiveX controls work in IE but not Firefox.
Yes absolutely! Also why I tagged on that call-out of Safari and other browsers.
And not to forget that Google has even shipped several early-days standards track features to production of which the API was still in flux. In a few cases the API later changed in - for Chrome, at least - breaking ways. Fun times.
okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
a lot of that chrome-specific shit is really really nice. like CSS nesting - that would be amazing. firefox has a bug for tracking the implementation, and supported the standardization of it. but there's no sign of any progress towards an implementation. meanwhile safari and chrome have both shipped it.
> okay, but does mozilla have a good reason for not supporting that stuff other than "we have limited resources to implement these things"?
That depends on what you are referring to. No there is not a one size fits all answer. For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API that Mozilla is still debating on because they see it as a security issue. You can agree or disagree but there reason is still something other than "we don't have the resources to do it"
For example, Chrome has implemented Filesystem API
that Mozilla is still debating on
This also highlights the vastly differing goals of the various parties.
Google explicitly wants two major things from Chrome.
One, they obviously want to track as much personal information as they possibly can, because they are an ad company.
Two, they want "the web" to essentially be a full OS replacement, with filesystem access etc. Because Microsoft is one of their primary rivals (or frenemies, if you will) and they can't leave themselves to the whims of others' platforms. They need their own platform.
These goals are... well, let's say divergent (to put it mildly) from what "the web" means to others. HTTP was originally supposed to be a human-readable way to publish and link information, not an OS replacement, and certainly not a PII-siphoning tool.
And yet, some folks still default to simply assuming whatever Google decides for the web is right, simply because they seem to be moving the fastest.
Yeah, they're usually moving the fastest, but people should think about where they're heading and why.
I feel like each feature has it's own story (and it's own party to blame, when some browsers support it but not others)
If FF is lagging behind Safari on a particular CSS feature that certainly points to FF being behind the curve.
Sometimes it's FF or Safari simply being slower than Google. Sometimes it's a matter of the Chrome team creating an implementation of feature XYZ and getting it minted into the standard so of course they have the only implementation for a while.
Sometimes the FF and Safari teams have specific objections to a feature, often because unlike Google they actually consider user privacy a core part of their mission. Although, of course, with CSS features... that's not gonna be a privacy thing.
