All cities have the exact same shopping street somewhere.
Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..:
Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..
You know, I always felt it but struggled to describe. This is exactly how it feels. Commoditization is inevitable, but the loss of identity that comes with leaves the impression that every city is one of those old-west movie prop ghost towns.
When buying fridge, washing machine, oven etc, when I moved, I told the sales person, I like quality, am not price sensitive, but any device that requires an app or has a camera/mic built in is out of question. Some didn't know how to handle that, being used to sell it as a "good thing".
fridge, washing machine, oven etc, [...] Some didn't know how to handle that
I am surprised, all the European brands like Miele, Siemens, Bosch, etc. household appliances work fine without an app. Most that we have now do have an option to connect to WiFi, we never connected them and they all work fine with good old buttons like it's 1985.
There is a dishwasher from Bosch, that misses some features if you are not using the App - cost-cutting measures. Jeff Geerling made a video about that:
Sad. I will check the next time before buying a Bosch product.
Though my main point is, that it is not hard to find products that work fine without an app. E.g. I just checked the Bosch site and could find many models that support delayed start, etc. with on-device buttons. In fact, the one that I picked somewhat randomly, the primary feature the app adds is that you can start the dishwasher remotely, which is the only feature I'd expect to need an app for.
(I completely believe that some of these manufacturers will also have models where they save on on-device buttons/displays by requiring an app.)
It's hard to figure out if a device will work to spec offline.
For instance, our home HVAC shipped with blatant firmware bugs that eat blower fans, lock up compressors, etc, but take a few years to do it and access to the hidden service menu to diagnose.
Eventually, I broke down and put it online to get the firmware update (after a $500-1000 fix "in warranty").
Ugh, we have BSH [Bosch Siemens Group] appliances with wifi, but ours add actual features and don't artificially lock any. Both dryer and washing machine: Remote start, start when energy is cheap, notifications when done or on issues. The dryer can automatically select the program based on the last washing machine program. For the washing machine program I can use the phone to select what I put in there, and it picks a program for me.
However, I can also use the dials much like I did with our old appliances. There is nothing locked out and we actually used them offline for a few weeks (tbh I didn't try setting the finish time using the appliances' controls).
In Jeff's case that's obviously not the case, but there are still options from BSH. As with everything, one has to be careful in what they buy these days. Don't interpret this as victim blaming: I hate that we have to be careful with these traps.
Edit: There are of course alternative manufacturers, but BSH ist a known quantity regarding quality. And when it comes to cloud stuff I trust them a little bit more than other manufacturers; they're actually the only smart thing we own that's not blocked in my OpnSense.
Dishwashers have been a solved problem for years. Maybe I am weird but at this point I prefer them to have LESS options and just clean the dishes lol. But capitalism needs to keep inventing things to sell.
I have a Bosch dishwasher that predates the app days. The only setting I use on it is the Extra Dry setting, so that actually requires a button press prior to pressing Start. Otherwise, it's pretty much always on Auto mode.
There are at least a dozen combos I have never used.
This has been a problem for a while, Xfinity has the high-speed fiber but the only routers they supply were emerging apptrash for a while, then recently got even worse with none or almost none of the features accessible without a phone any more.
Your best option is to purchase your own cable modem/router and quit renting that garbage hardware from Comcast.
Or kick them to the curb and go cableless using Verizon with a router that's worth paying for.
Same but in my parents case it was even worse -- there is a web portal but it's locked unless you use the app to unlock it. Tried contacting support and they could do nothing. Completely arbitrary requirement. Ended up buying a replacement on Amazon.
I'm not familiar with Comcast's specific hardware, but it also possible that the router is always broadcasting a hidden SSID, or is using Bluetooth for setup and configuration. Both of which are also potentially problematic.
The home appliance market is a scam fractal. It goes deeper than just ewaste.
Nobody wants to admit it, but they are more home decor and geewhiz BS than practical appliance for several decades now. You'll be perfectly fine buying cheap barebones models if you are repair savvy. Choosing colors and materials like black or white and stainless steel is "boring", but only if the surrounding space is already ugly.
I've had the same no name amazon special washer and dryer for almost 15 years now. Reviews were 3/5 stars at the time. People complained about belts slipping and hinges breaking. I just fixed them with parts on ebay. They still look and run like new.
Companies are beginning to gate previously existing features behind the requirement to connect their devices to the cloud and/or install an app on your phone.
Dishwashers, refrigerators, even (and perhaps especially) cars.
"Just don't connect it to the Internet," is sadly less viable option as time goes on.
>"Just don't connect it to the Internet," is sadly less viable option as time goes on.
I feel compelled to quibble with your word choice here. Not connecting appliances to the Internet remains a viable option. It is simply one that is increasingly not common or not readily available.
This may just be me being idiosyncratic with vocabulary.
To me, "less viable" implies there some outside factor or internal failure preventing it from working. But non-internet appliances will continue to work just fine, if you can get one. I.e. it's a viable choice, just one with less and less availability.
> I haven't signed in to HP, haven't connected the printer to cloud.
HP fixed a remote exploit a few years back. Theoretically someone could use your local wifi printer to install a persistent backdoor on your network.
In practice HP uses updates to patch leaks in their cartridge protection (the most complicated tech in the printers). And accidentally sometimes bricks printers...
Nothing, they just work as intended. I bought a Fujitsu A/C that supposedly required registering through some app. Never connected it, and I removed the wifi kit at installation. Works like a charm no problem whatsoever.
> I like quality, am not price sensitive but any device that requires an app or has a camera/mic built in is out of question
You probably meant "I want no frills product because of its simplicity, not because its cheap" but when that feedback reaches a PM, they'll only hear "I will pay more to not have a camera or a mic".
I said that about cars on here and got called all kinds of an idiot for not wanting electrically-operated door handles, an always-on phone connection, and screens bigger than the telly in my living room.
I am totally a linux user. But even on the high end, the build quality of laptops more expensive than apple is often worse than apple.
Or it's hit and miss and you need to hope to get the good one. I want a lightweight, non-plastic laptop with good keyboard, solid battery life, and no hinge problems. Apple is consistently delivering it. Good luck finding that outside apple.
I think this is the main point. Most articles conflate consciousness with intelligence or awareness. Without clarifying their definition of it.
To quote wikipedia:
> It has been the topic of extensive explanations, analyses, and debate among philosophers, scientists, and theologians for millennia. There is no consensus on what exactly needs to be studied, or whether consciousness can be considered a scientific concept.
The major error made by most people in this thread is thinking it is possible to give a single definition of consciousness that is coherent and matches common usage. The folk concept of "consciousness" couldn't be a more clear definition of a family resemblance category, so discussions using the folk concept are an utter waste of time.
Move to the different aspects / parts / things involved when we talk about consciousness (experience / phenomenal consciousness, self-modeling, intelligence, agency, embodiment, wakefulness/alertness, attention, etc) and you can have very clear, meaningful, and unambiguous discussions on almost every point, but there is no coherent unified "consciousness" as normal people use it, and the folk concept can't be salvaged.
This article is bad because it just keeps trying to make the folk concept do work that the concept is simply too messy to handle usefully. But in fact if you avoid trying to find some mysterious essence or all-capturing definition, there is huge progress and lots of interesting stuff to say (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/).
Same opinion. Opus is best for coding, but Qwen 3.6 27b Q8 is next, before Sonnet.
Sonnet might have more knowledge and is maybe good for making excel sheets, but it does not write good code and does not follow instructions well.
But 27b Q8 needs a very beefy PC (48GB VRAM or more), so it is not an option many people can use and DS4F is so cheap right now, if you are open to externally hosted models.
A similar thing is happening in video games. Big studios rarely have interesting games. Just GameTitle2026. Reboot of game from the 90s and no one is left of the original staff.
Still a lot of people buy those, so studios continue to make them.
Also indie games are too cheap. I noticed the need to correct my own thinking: Why should the boring game of a big publisher cost more than the great game made by a single guy? And allowed myself to use more money when I want to support smaller studios.
I wonder how they are positioned now in the market.
During covid I wanted a small low power always on server. I thought about Raspi, but at the time it was expensive and I went with an intel nuc, for a similar price.
Now if I wanted to do hobby electronics, I heard I should look into esp32 or stm32..
I use a Pi 4B as a 24/7 home server in a country where domestic electricity is expensive (and worsening).
Each Pi release is more powerful, but uses more energy. I found the Pi 4B to be the sweet spot for me, because it is the earliest model to support USB booting, gigabit Ethernet, and offer > 1GB RAM.
Perhaps a used one would fit your purposes and budget?
I currently use it to run PiHole, serve media via SMB, host Postgres & Redis, and run some custom written Dockerized apps. Home Assistant to possibly follow, too. The current load seems reasonable in htop, but I haven’t looked into burst scenarios.
The things that keeps stopping me from using one for my server is the IO. the PCIe lane on the Pi 5 was a great addition, but it isn't quite sufficient.
It might be overcompensation. I think UI, UX and GUIs got better up until the 90s, and early 2000s, but then somewhere GUIs suddenly got a lot worse. So a modern CLI is better and more standardized than a modern GUI.
Electron is the reason, and the elusive dream of "write once, run anywhere" that got us cross platform UIs that are bespoke and don't follow native OS conventions (or keyboard navigation), plus once marketing got involved and GUIs started needing to be branded instead of just fitting in with every other native app on that OS.
I see arguments like this particularly against Electron and the web development sphere in general and I think it's more nuanced than either programmers or "marketing" (read: anyone not a programmer) gives credit towards.
The "elusive dream" of 'write once, run anywhere' is realistically just people wanting to write software with direct product or service use in mind. Native OS conventions are subject to the middlemen of OS vendors, whereas the web (while basically subject to the same vendors) makes a substantial attempt at bridging the gap of writing software for your own purposes without native OS problems. This is a symptom of OSes catering/selling to developers as a platform and hooking them in the 1990s and 2000s.
This attitude that wanting to just make useful code for people and not worry about a windows 11 update breaking everything because they are irresponsible - to think that is not a valid desire is IMO a big problem.
On the other hand, you have a point that it quickly gets out of hand in terms of standards and accessibility and performance bottlenecks. WebAssembly and the WASI are so slow to come out and will by design always be slower than native performance. This doesn't and shouldn't stop us from having decently performant and decently usable program experiences, but it is a prerequisite to care about those things, and the other inheritors of the web development sphere clearly do not want to develop things properly if they take longer than the next fiscal quarter.
There is 100% good Electron code out there, just as 100% there is bad native OS code. The problem isn't inherently the goals of the 'write once, run anywhere' idea; it's more the casualty of other interests pulling away from what developers actually want.
I once had a talk with one of (the?) world's best bonsai gardener in Edogawa, Tokyo. Trees cut by him are worth millions and he has pictures of himself with FANG leaders. This guy wakes up every morning at 5 and works until it's dark outside even though he clearly does not need to work for money, but because he loves it.
I think some people just aren't wired to love doing something over and over, especially something so monotonous. Basket weaving or bonsai gardening is much more monotonous than solving difficult crimes or difficult science problems or difficult tech problems. There are people who absolutely love solving difficult problems but get tired of it after a few years and switch to another field. For those people doing weaving or gardening would get boring very quickly. I think it may come to whether people like the idea of things or the things themselves. If I was a basket weaver, I'd quickly realize there aren't that many groundbreaking weaving ideas I'll have in my lifetime, that most baskets are very similar in how they're made. I'll say to myself "I could make these 50 amazing baskets but they'll all fall under these 5 types of baskets with these 10 skills required to make them. So why do it if I can imagine doing it and if I know I'll be able to do it?". I may even envision a mega basket that incorporates every trick in the trade, like a skyscraper compared to a hut. I'll know that I'm capable of making it. That will satisfy my love for the idea of baskets but if I don't love the thing itself, why do it at all? The idea is 90% of the mega basket. The execution could be automated in a few years, why bother doing it for 5000 hours?
Tokyo (Ginza), NYC (5th), Paris, London, Berlin, Sao Paulo..: Starbucks, Gucci, Addidas, Louis Vuitton, Levis, Ferragamo, Apple Store, a little further from there a McDonald's..
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