My wife is a free lance sign language interpreter. Her ring tone for agencies that give her work is the first 30 seconds of Pink Floyd's "Money".

It is reasonable to mock people who don't know something, but clearly think they do, enough that they install security systems with flaws that are obvious to knowledgeable non-experts.

I would mock someone who pretended to read a CT scan, especially if they made an important decision based on their "reading".

Not useful yet, then.

Doctrow says as much in the article:

It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost.

That is exactly how a LOT of tech middleman companies got started - offer a service below cost, funded by VC money, with the assumption that profits from the service will go up with volume and customer lock-in. Uber, Lyft, all the food delivery services started out like that.

What happens is that consumers get subsidized initially, and get a false idea of the real cost of new services. When prices inevitably go up, that's seen as enshitification when it's more like the law of gravity - what goes down must eventually go up.

This will continue to happen even if we rein in predatory acquisition by big firms.

The main problem is having N Vision Pro headsets, where N is greater than 1.

N=1 is pricey enough as it is.

Not the sky-is-falling one - this one from The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth.

Shareable link.

Opening line:

Huge news: God spoke! And the first thing God said was, “Use other people’s money to pay for your home remodel, Colorado pastor Eli Regalado!”

They would offer stock to mods and users.

It's another reason why most mainstream languages suck. You can't install a new version of Python without it breaking half your code. Constantly changing versions of widely used libraries because "worse is better" and the developers couldn't be bothered to get the thing right the first time. Oddly enough, there are languages that try to avoid this. Common Lisp hasn't changed since the 1980's. Clojure avoid breaking changes like the plague. There are also languages outside the Lisp family that make stability a priority. My recommendation is that people who value their code avoid non-stable languages. It may be easier for lazy language developers who deliver half-assed features, but it makes life hell for people using the language.

... in 1996.

I remember thinking at the time all we needed was a standard format for real estate listing HTML pages.
Google could index them, and the Multiple Listing Service would go away.

Instead, we eventually got Zillow - real estate listings, gameified.

The article explains this:

* You have to shoot spatial video holding the iPhone horizontally to get the two cameras side-by-side
* The spatial video is limited to 1K 30fps because of the limitations of the wide angle camera

It's a crappy system for sure. Cities have to figure out why it's a losing game and stop doing it. Maybe a Federal law against local bribery of businesses would work.

It's also an indirect argument why MLB needs salary caps (and in the cases of quite a few owners, salary minimums).

To be fair, the guy who suggested this did have a device that gave him useful output.

For a long time, the 27" iMac was priced comparably to displays of similar size and quality - you could buy it with minimal factory RAM and disk, slot the RAM yourself, use external drives, and not break the bank.
If you were feeling brave, once the warranty lapsed you could open it up and add an SSD - cutting and replacing the adhesive strips holding it shut was not for the faint of heart.

With Apple Silicon most of those cheaper routes are closed off - no RAM or SSD upgrades at non-Apple prices.

I'm still waiting for an x86 system with slotted RAM and SSD that has the performance of Apple Silicon, though...

Sure, Reddit knows what I read.
They aren't showing me ads, though, and without that it's very difficult for them to monetize that knowledge by selling it.

It's like what Apple does. They know a lot about me because of Apple Pay, but they don't show me ads based on that info. They say explicitly that they do not save that info long-term, too - they keep it just long enough to enable the transaction.

This is different from what Google Pay does, BTW - Google Pay is run through a Google-owned bank, which can see all the info on your transactions, and they definitely add that info to their advertising profile on you.