For me, dark mode is largely a battery-saving measure. Especially with more OLED screens coming out on mobile devices, you can save a lot of energy by having some of your pixels completely turned off
People worried about robots replacing ALL jobs just need to use a Roomba for a month. Assembly line jobs sure, but ALL jobs no way, not for a while at least.
While I agree with you here, I do think that using Steve Jobs as a consistent counterpoint to new Apple developments isn't always useful. Sometimes we forget that Steve was behind the Lisa and the original Apple TV. And the Magic Mouse original.
I'm not old enough (and certainly wasn't in a household wealthy enough to afford it at the time) to know what's going on with the Lisa, but there was nothing with the Apple Tv, or Magic Mouse. For those products, we're simply not the audience. I know plenty of casual mac users who were doing fine with those things. People in tech circles love to go on about Apple's mouse deficiencies but from my experience around casual computer users, PC users too, is that most people barely know about the second mouse button and the very concept of a "context menu" is alien to them. I keep having to remind my stepfather how to do things like copy and pasting in some apps because he always forgets about the context menu and even remembering something as simple as Ctrl+C + Ctrl+V is something he's not willing to do for a reason I can't even fathom myself, it literally makes no sense to me, it's just how it is.
So, from my point of view, Apple insistence on mostly forgetting about secondary functions on mouses is the right thing. The Magic mouse doesn't have a middle click? Most people don't even know how to right click. The only thing a mouse for casual users needs to do right, is left click and scrolling and the magic mouse has perfect touch scrolling.
For the same reason Apple has hidden functionality like Cut&Paste from the finder. You need to hold the option key to activate the "move item". Apple wants you to drag&drop instead. The "default" in Apple land has always been to serve the need of the common, not the expert. So there's no traditional CTRL+X CTRL+V. Instead you need to do CMD+C as if you were copying, then CMD+OPT+V to "move". Everything advanced tends to be hidden into OPT key. It also changes the behavior of various menus to show things Apple doesn't want to show to the commons.
The touchbar is actually a very, very clever thing, we're just not the audience once again. I firmly believe it will never have much use among professionals who have nothing against learning many keyboard shortcut combinations or who even do things like customizing them (Karabiner to the rescue!). The touchbar is for people who didn't even use the mouse right click, and who don't understand concepts like context menu that change based on, gasp, context. It's actually going to be a boon for these people. Even exposing basic functionality like copy paste is going to help average users be slightly more productive with their devices.
The only issue is the MBP audience having a lot of techies and audio/visual professionals. The touchbar would be more sensible on something like the iMac and Macbook.
A friend of mine got married and realized after about 2 years that he and his wife had known each other when they were kids. They found a picture of each other playing on a playground from 25 years earlier. They weren't friends or anything, but had certainly bumped into each other before.
Being only a few miles from Palantir's headquarters, I can confirm that no war is going on. JK. People here are talking about the issues all the time, and I'm curious to see what happens.
Add this to another reason why traditional GPS "upgrades" for cars are no longer worthwhile. The other reason being that smartphone navigation works just as well if not better than most car companies' custom systems.
It is nice to have if you're an American driving in a different country, though. Maybe not enough to justify the cost, but very helpful to have. American phones are basically crippled within 100ft of the Canadian border.
I had an app featured on Product Hunt and it led to about 100 downloads or so. I don't follow it actively and I think it is slowly fading as time goes on. You can only download so many apps each day before you tap out
The blockchain is slowly going to become a dominant pillar of our transactions. Whether it be information, money, etc., blockchain will probably be a part of it. If we want it to be secure anyway...
Oh God, I'm _really_ hoping you're being sarcastic.
You've read about the dozens on dozens of compromised exchanges?
You heard about the DAO hack?
You realize that the majority of bitcoin is mined by like a dozen people in China?
Maybe someday we'll get our act together, but right now blockchains are a recipe for FUD and centralization.
(I say this as someone who thinks bitcoin is cool. For instance, the traditional financial system makes it unnecessarily hard to send money overseas, a need bitcoin can fill well. But secure? No.)
I'm not sure how the centralization improves the resilience of the implementations. Mining pool centralization is definitely a big downside for security on the blockchain. A lot of research is being done in cryptocurrencies looking for ways to discourage this type of centralization.
centralization doesn't, that wasn't a claim I was making or considering
mining pool centralization has ebbs and flows. I'm not concerned about bitcoin's TODAY for example, but maybe tomorrow and at times in the past. There are a lot of blockchains people don't put under much scrutiny, where it turns out there is massive centralization. But this isn't an inherent problem, Satoshi was 100% of Bitcoin's network for a long time.
It's been looked at (my advisor in grad school was working on it) and it keeps running up against the problem of scaling -- 100 million transactions (800 million if you want to scale up to India) on a single day is going to be hard from a realization standpoint, even if it's theoretically doable.
There's also the interesting psychological side to it: while a blockchain system is in a theoretical sense more transparent than anything else, from a popular standpoint it's incredibly opaque compared to a county registrar counting two different stacks of paper ballots.
Yes, Dash (DashPay) has been up and voting on stuff for a couple years. Because I own 1,000 of the things I get to vote on stuff like sending devs to conferences and different ad campaigns to run, then the winning bids get paid out of the block reward. If we vote no the Dash just gets destroyed and inflation is slightly reduced.
I would suggest that BTC in particular, because it's pseudo-anonymous, has some industry and government forces propelling it which zcash will not share the same benefit of.
