Yes and we love urban areas. Urban areas like NYC, Boston, SF are extremely expensive, with one bedroom apartments renting for 5K and selling for 1M.
Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)
Yes, NIMBY-ism has done hard things to those specific areas. At least as far as we trust chatgpt, but people are still living in more median sq ft per person today than long ago (think 50-100 yrs ago). Of course rent per person will go up if we're renting 50-100% more space than in the past.
There's no accident. The OS isn't led astray by overzealous product managers or 'out of touch' with users. I think we are projecting our own experiences in our own companies.
I think instead there's a deliberate attempt to transform the entire experience into an agentic-driven UI to replace the organization of the UI elements. In other words, tell the AI you want to open X, you want Y changed in settings, etc. Users don't want this, and it doesn't matter - it turns Windows into a sort of ad-serving, auto-updating, spying operating system that behaves more like an appliance.
I'm looking forward to ditching it as my only reason was gaming on my Nvidia hardware, and now Linux is ready (or so they tell me).
But people raised on this 'new' Windows experience will never have known anything different. People-who-are-not-us, the average people, don't mind ads, being spied on, and being told what to watch.
Isn't popularity of TikTok, the rampant posting of personal stuff on social media, and the like enough evidence?
We're going to all turn into Richard Stallman (although I heard a rumor bathing is as distasteful as Windows to him).
There's nothing "collectively" about it. I don't know what industry you work in, but in mine it's a top down mandate to use AI everywhere, tracked with KPIs, from the CEO down, and supported and pressured by companies like Amazon and MS.
We're the dummies that have to run around picking up dookies like a new puppy in the house.
Bro, I played KCD2 on Ubuntu the day it launched last year. The games themselves are basically a solved problem and have been for a while now. Multiplayer games with anti cheat are the sticking point now, with only a little bit of progress there.
- work is still ongoing to get performance of direct x 12 games on NVIDIA closer to that of windows.
The video takes this one step further, and it has nothing to do with being 'out of touch' or something. The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to. Then it can track, tune and control everything we do, thanks to all the telemetry back and forth.
I wish people would engage with the content a bit. It's a huge claim (and scary).
> The speaker is arguing there is a macro trend of pushing us towards agentic interactions instead of the UI components we're used to.
This trend is not even limited to Windows.
We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
I don't know, I think a simpler explanation for Google's behavior is that monopolies act like monopolies. Combating spam and SEO junk is hard and expensive. Once they became synonymous with web search for most people they gradually cared less and less about product quality. If people will keep using the product no matter how bad the results get and how many ads get jammed in it's hard for a corporation like that to care.
Possibly, but it makes more sense when viewed through the lens of "Google is an advertising company" rather than a search company.
Also, it's not like Google went on autopilot and pursued nothing in recent years. Clearly they've dedicated resources to AI, so it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired, all the while making it appear as a choice the user was making.
Google famously solved the search problem and the spam problem, and technology has only gotten more capable since then. Suggesting that blogspam etc are too difficult to defeat is a tough sell imo.
> it's not hard to believe they foresaw potential resistance to selling the concept of AI to users and took measures to funnel them into the behavior Google desired
I find that very hard to believe because it implies a level of foresight that we have not observed from Google. The notion that they degraded their own search on purpose for years to funnel people to AI seems very implausible, especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI, and that level of foresight would also imply that they should have beaten OpenAI to the punch instead of reacting to ChatGPT.
> especially since they don’t have a good model yet for replacing that ad revenue within AI
This would be a calculated financial bet on their part. This kind of risk taking is not limited to SV startups.
I realize companies under late stage capitalism aren't typically known for having foresight past one quarter, but that doesn't mean some of them can't have somebody optimizing for the long-term in a financial sense.
It's seems premature to rule this possibility out entirely.
Occam‘s razor says prefer the simpler explanation.
It is possible that Google as an organization had enough foresight to see that search would eventually be eaten by AI chat bots and so intentionally degraded the experience of search to encourage movement in that direction. And also that Google was too dumb to actually ship their chat bot first and capitalized on their choice to sabotage search.
It seems a lot more likely that the the decline in the quality of search is due to a combination of hyper-optimization for revenue and difficulty combating large scale spam farms.
> We saw it begin years ago with Google etc gradually reducing the quality of search results. Then ChatGPT etc arrive shortly thereafter, and people are led to conclude "it works so much better than traditional search." Hard to believe these two events are unrelated.
So Google ruined search so they could give their market share to ChatGPT. 4D chess. Maybe 5D even.
If you have some explanation for how doing this makes any sense at all, please share. But I think you’re basically engaging in conspiracy theory by claiming Google intentionally reduced the quality of search to drive AI adoption.
It's not that hard to synthesize how business leadership would both optimize for the present of the pre-AI era while also continually refining their strategy as AI became clearer on the horizon.
You're jumping through hoops when this really isn't that complicated or far fetched in a business sense.
It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It is extremely farfetched because it would provide no present or future advantage to Google to do so. If they hypothetically wanted to intentionally degrade their search, they could always do that when they are ready for the switch to AI.
> It makes no sense that Google would intentionally degrade their search quality now (and even years ago) for some hypothetical future where they have replaced it with AI.
It literally does though.
Furthermore, even if you reject that, in practice it could be as simple as Google funneling resources from maintaining search (which is obviously a never ending game of cat-and-mouse between forces of SEO, etc) to AI prospects, which would have the same outcome: neglect leads to degradation and dysfunction, and it makes their new venture more appealing. They obviously have enough capital to play such a game in the short-term and eat whatever loss necessary during the transition.
Google is well known by now for abandoning their products in favor of what they deem to be the Next Thing.
Brave + shields
With nasty popups + block scripts will sometimes work without breaking the site.
Chrome forces you to see ads and all the rest of it, Firefox is tolerable but I struggled a bit with enough settings and plugins, it's not as seamless.
Anyone ever drive around Austin, its highways and its endless new construction of new superhighways, to the point that Google Maps is confused?
As annoying as NYC (and driving) are, there are downsides to unlimited housing and lack of zoning - as it turns out, the same states that do this sort of thing we all praise, are the same laissez-faire philosophies that oppose communal public transportation and walkable urban communities.
Personally, I don't understand why people go to see films with a bunch of strangers and a nod to the HN crowd: with potentially disruptive or reactive people that distract the enjoyment. Unless it's some sort of film festival or a premiere where the director is there, movies are for teenagers and parents with children.
I'm not talking about the 1990s Times Square theaters with a whole other 'type' of audience, eh, member.
Your contracting business is done because of AI competition, because money is drying, or because you're finding permanent alternatives due to being sick of it? There's more than one way to interpret your message, and I'm curious.
I can only work so many hours in a day on a contract, but with a product, I can work 3 hours and sell it 200 times, or license it and make money forever.
My customers have said to me point blank "I hate SaaS" and paid me anyway. They've said everything is "so easy with GPT and all now", and paid me anyway.
I think I have a chance.
Maybe I'll be proven wrong and my AI-using competitors will eat my lunch.
Or maybe, I'll drown them and Claude in complexity and attention-to-detail.
Side point, but you'll find plenty of anti semitism on HN in the Israel articles that have many comments - it comes in the form of conspiracy comments that people reply with, that use mossad, pedophilia, Netanyahu and the US in the same sentence. Any replies calling it out become greyed from downvotes.
It's just not viewed as anti-Semitism, probably in the same way that the posts on X aren't viewed as far-right or extremist.
Extremists usually don't experience their views as extreme, but as rational and important.
Not everyone wants a 1 hr long commute, and since we took away remote work we're stuffing everyone into expensive cities where people spend the remainder of their 50 percent not taken by taxes on housing (and health too in some cases)
It's a disaster.
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