This seems to be part of a type of brand marketing where a brand claims it has invented something, but the only thing that ever exists of significant economic value is the attention raised by the promo video / article. Not the thing/service.
I love these types of videos because they create this fiction of how design happens, where people sit around a table with drawings and or come up with beautiful mock-ups (the motion sickness glasses is a good example). Often, a lot of design decisions are super obvious and don't require a lot of sweat and collaboration to come up with, but in videos they're made to appear very difficult as it presents better. And other things are super messy, but you're not going to show that as it's hard to communicate.
Yeah a lot of this is a very very cleaned up, performative version of design process. It's like its own subgenre. Original thinking is wild, feral, messy, often solo tho heavily influenced by the context around you. None of that presents well.
However I bristle at the idea that core design decisions are usually super obvious, even when the end results are. Not sure this is even your point so forgive the tangent if not, but this issue is my particular hill to die on, it's 100% the single biggest gap in understanding that I see between those that regularly engage in original creative work vs those who do not.
People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!" But that's all hindsight, like saying "I could have bought bitcoin in 2010!" It's not even wrong, it's answering an entirely different question of capability, not probability.
The question is would you have come up with that, were you tasked with the problem and put in the same context? I'd estimate for most great-but-simple inventions, it's not many people who could plausibly say that, because so much of what we bring to bear on problems comes from our own histories and unique perspectives & influences, not to mention talents and predilections.
This distinction between could vs would is core to understanding creative output, especially the ideas that are the simplest to use or understand. The delta between understanding vs coming up with there is often vast; simple things are often the hardest things of all to conceive.
I'm in total agreement regarding some designs that seem obvious later but really took several iterations to reach. There's definitely hindsight bias when a design works so well that it feels obvious.
My point was more that I've seen product demos where parts of a product were presented as having been pored over painstakingly when in reality it was decided on day one that it would work that way. However, because it's a prominent feature, it feels cheap to show the reality, so I get that for demos there's a bit of storytelling that goes into it so the audience feels like it was a revelation.
For UX that I've designed myself, I have definitely found that a lot of the great ones required a ton of iteration and almost "courage" to go against my initial bright ideas and look at things from a different perspective. It often required taking away elements that I thought were absolutely required at first but later realized made more sense to go without. If someone were to look at the final result, they would definitely think "Well, obviously that's how it should work." But more likely they'd have go through a similar journey that I did to come up with it if they hadn't seen the solution.
In a way it's like finding out how a magic trick worked. It's only obvious in retrospect.
A magic trick is a good way to put it, especially for laypeople. I see your point and agree, it's always hard to know going in which ideas you're going to one-shot (and be slightly embarrassed about having one-shotted) and which only come from the courage to kill early darlings and continue down the road of uncertainty.
We're fortunate if we even get that latter opportunity, given most want to take the easy path and cargo cult someone else's idea. The thing I've noticed is that the hard path to continue the exploration often gives the cargo cult answer but with a nuance or two for one's context that make all the difference. I'm curious if you have experienced that as well.
> People see something obvious and say "That's simple, I could have come up with that!"
That's the problem with user interface design as a career. It takes a lot of effort to create simple to understand and simple to use design, and then when users see them, they see it is simple and think it must have been easy to do. Most programmers tend to make programs for themselves and other technical people and has horrible design. The classic corollary example I like is when Apple came up with MP3 players and marketed as 'It can hold 1000 songs' instead of the current marketing at the time 'It has has 1GB of storage'. Technical folks would not be satisfied with 1000 songs becuase they would be doing back of the math calculations on how low of a bitrate you have to get, in order to fit 1k songs in a given space... while the other 95% of the population doesn't want to do any math, and if even if they did, they don't know.. or at least back then, didn't know what a GB was, or how many megabytes an MP3 consumed....
Indeed. UI/UX is actually a pretty shitty career unless you are good enough to regularly pull rabbits out of your hat. At the low end it's just drawing boxes and using someone else's tricks in a system that isn't even the codebase. At the mid end you get the codebase and might occasionally solve interesting problems, but you'll rarely get the recognition and influence equal to its value. Only at the high end do you start getting the rewards, but they tend not to last very long because people quickly adapt to seeing your solutions as obvious.
It's why designers, and creatives more generally, try to cultivate a mystique around themselves, even(/especially?) when they're only mid. The truth is creative work is a lot more playful than it is mysterious, but play is not valued, only mystery is. This leaves many creatives stuck in tension between their internal and external identities.
Any innovation benefiting cyclists and coming from the auto industry is a way to move attention away from the fact that cars are the most dangerous thing on the road.
Jokes on them for the wasted resources. If they don’t intend to market, I hope someone will. Where I live cyclists use ANC headphones all the time, and I’m tired of the near misses.
Student cyclists that ignore the rules and wear ANC (or even large headphones) should be fined more often.
Why is significant economic value the metric for success?
Skoda publishes the research and design openly (no patent, no product for sale), to solve a real problem (increase in bike-related accidents from noise cancelling headphones), to ensure that the safety outcome can be spread as quickly and easily as possible.
We should be celebrating companies that open source material findings related to safety, not lambasting them for not exploiting it for maximum value.
it feels disingenuous to lump this in with most of the other items you listed.
i think the slightly less cynical interpretation of this is that it's not marketing, it's an employee morale booster.
some skoda employees got to have fun with this. just like the amazon engineers got to have fun building drones for a while. letting the engineers out to play every now and then is cheaper than just giving raises. the shiny marketing videos gives the people who worked on the project something to show off to their friends.
i can't imagine the actual marketing value here really does anything for the company.
Well there was ZCam, which was a time-of-flight add-on for ENG cameras. It couldn't really handle edges perfectly and existing bluescreen tech was good enough for TV production, so they pivoted into gaming and sold to Microsoft for the Kinect.
Mullvad's focus on privacy has been fantastic so far. But this ad made me reconsider: I want a VPN service that silently does its job in the background, not one that screams "look at me" with silly stunts and attempts at becoming viral.
Not sure Wero will succeed, but European country-specific mobile payment systems like Swish (Sweden), Vipps (rest of Scandinavia), Bizum (Spain), iDeal (Netherlands), Bluecode (Germany and Austria), Twint (Switzerland), BLIK (Poland) etc. are also working on interconnectivity under the EMPSA association. Combined they already have 110+ million users.
Wero is like a monolith, while EMPSA is more like mobile phone roaming. If I would bet, I would bet on EMPSA.
Like sepa, this initiative can be forced by law and made open rather than tanken hostage by large cooperates, which may then exclude parts of the market.
Very European approach: the winner is chosen by law. Is Wero really a success? According to this article, in 2024 it processed over €7.5 billion.
Polish BLIK, which is not even mentioned in the article and which has joined the EuroPA Alliance, processed €83 billion in 2024, with a 30% y/y increase in H1 2025. I understand that BLIK is much older, but it invested significant effort and money in marketing and promotions while delivering a good user experience. BLIK is now trying to expand to Romania and Slovakia, yet Wero is getting all the hype on Hacker News. Maybe this is a case of East, South, and West Europe being treated differently. Is the only “European” solution one that comes from Western Europe?
If BLIK is better then it will prevail over Wero. There is no law mandating Wero.
Just looking at the banks that make up each - 16 for Wero and spread over Germany, Belgium, France and the Netherlands versus 6 Polish banks - it feels like the systemic risk is higher with the latter. But time will tell.
Last year BLIK also signed a letter of intent to join the EuroPA which has Italian, Spanish and Portuguese banks involved.
The EU consists of 27 different countries, with substantial practical barriers between their internal markets (even if it's one single market in theory). Often, only EU intervention can overcome those barriers. Otherwise, you end up with national fragmentation.
What people in Europe do very frequently is buying from online shops of another country, either because they do not find the product in a local shop or because of better prices.
What is needed is a card for online shopping that is valid in all Europe.
But it's not the card. Wero isn't doing anything new. It's just yet one more payment method to implement. Adyen, Stripe, Shopify and many other already support different local payment methods.
One problem I see with some of the EMPSA systems, is that if you're a developer and - if you don't have a company behind you, you're pretty much shit out of luck trying to integrate any of these payment solutions.
That have at least been my experience, trying to integrate Vipps in Scandinavia.
We wouldn't even need these services if instant payments were the norm. I guess we have to thank the Visa and MasterCard lobbies for this to happen at least 10 years too late.
Yeah that's pretty much the only reason people use Wero: transferring money faster than a snail between people. This was filled by the likes of Lydia before, but their shenanigans trying to become a bank pushed people to Wero (which is indeed a rename of something else I don't remember, but I used for less than a year).
The real deal is the card payment networks that your plastic thing can use at a merchant's point of sale. All the rest is moot as we already have SEPA for e.g. online payments (it does have its issue for sure, but it's something).
I thought they were interconnecting all those ideal-like systems from different countries and then rebranding to Wero? So the tech may be different per area but they all interconnect and the UX is the same.
But maybe I misunderstood and other places are actually replacing tech.
Note that the exact date in May has not yet been announced, but there is a hint: in all the videos and screenshots of displays the date and time is shown as "Mon 25 10:10".
Now when Ive was still at Apple, the first screenshots of iPhone showed a time of 9:42 because that was the time they expected when the device was first shown. And that time was placed in all the official PR images well in advance.
Extracting from that, a Monday the 25th could be the time we'll first see the full car. Going through all 25ths of each month this year, May is indeed the only month where it falls on a Monday, so it's probably the 25th of May.
- Kröger, Jacob Leon; Raschke, Philip (2019). "Is My Phone Listening in? On the Feasibility and Detectability of Mobile Eavesdropping". Data and Applications Security and Privacy XXXIII. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 11559. pp. 102–120. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-22479-0_6. ISBN 978-3-030-22478-3. ISSN 0302-9743.
- Schneier, Bruce (5 December 2006). "Remotely Eavesdropping on Cell Phone Microphones". Schneier On Security. Archived from the original on 12 January 2014. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
- McCullagh, Declan; Anne Broache (1 December 2006). "FBI taps cell phone mic as eavesdropping tool". CNet News. Archived from the original on 10 November 2013. Retrieved 14 March 2009.
- Odell, Mark (1 August 2005). "Use of mobile helped police keep tabs on suspect". Financial Times. Retrieved 14 March 2009.
- "Telephones". Western Regional Security Office (NOAA official site). 2001. Archived from the original on 6 November 2013. Retrieved 22 March 2009.
- "Can You Hear Me Now?". ABC News: The Blotter. Archived from the original on 25 August 2011. Retrieved 13 December 2009.
- Lewis Page (26 June 2007). "Cell hack geek stalks pretty blonde shocker". The Register. Archived from the original on 3 November 2013. Retrieved 1 May 2010.
So specific models from before secure operating systems like Android and iOS. Now those operating systems even show an indicator whenever they are recording.
All the references are to old phones before Android and iOS came out. Or they are fake features phones sold to the target. So while this is something that was possible in the early 90's and early 2000's it's not longer a thing.
I still don't get it. The outside is dirty, right? He said in his post "You dip this probe into beer, sewage, or canned food a-stewing". So when you say "when really the window is just dirty" I don't get it - yes it will always be, because that's what it is placed in, no?
A dirty window only ruins the reading if you are measuring the speed of the oxygen passing through it. The three electrode design stopped measuring speed and started measuring balance. Unless the gunk is a total airtight seal (which is rare on the scale of an oxygen molecule), the sensor will eventually reach the right answer, whereas the old version would fail.
The permiability of the membrane would still be reduced by stuff on it, but as long as there is any permiability, the inner compartment will reach equilibrium eventually.
The big gain comes from a change in how you interpret the presence of electrons.
The older approach converted oxygen to electrical current, the magnitude of current flow relating to magnitude of oxygen depletion. The assumption built into that approach is that low oxygen depletion levels meant low oxygen levels, but that wasn't the only potential cause, because it ignored variation in the permiability of the membrane.
The newer approach equates current flow to oxygen concentration, as the system doesn't deplete the concentration any longer. The permiability of the membrane in this setup only contributes to a longer initial delay as the inner chamber comes to equilibrium with the surrounding concentration.
I think maybe one thing you have to consider is that sensors still require maintenance. Software can measure the length of time the sensor requires to reach equilibrium and send a maintenance required alert and someone cleans it (like if the software expects equilibrium in 10 seconds but the reading settles at 60 seconds, it can calculate the sensor is 80% clogged and requires cleaning). There's also all sorts of techniques that can be used to mitigate gunk depending on how the sensor is being used such as physical wipers, air-blast systems, ultrasonic cleaning systems, and chemical coatings. So as long as some oxygen can get in and an equilibrium is made between the fluid outside the sensor and inside the sensor, you'll get a reading that you can trust.
Examples:
- Samsung safety truck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GNGfse9ZK8
- Citroën motion sickness glasses https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco63dlq_WE
- Amazon Prime Air https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2AVVTBmtDdo
- IBM Smart Ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbEMVdzXiCY (implies they created lots of ad posters, but they only made 3 posters for this video)
- Lexus Hoverboard https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFf7Meqkim8
I wonder if there is a term for this. "Vaporware marketing"?
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