I'm curious if he's also in favor of banning biology books.

There has been more pushback on car screens over the past couple of years, and the optimist in me hopes this leads to change. With enough pushback, manufacturers will have to listen to the market, cost savings be damned.

A concrete step I take to push this along: I mention physical buttons as a dealbreaker to car dealerships when I shop. Of course, I'm only speaking to dealer reps and not the decision makers at $CAR_CO, but if enough people do this, it does get back to the them and will make a difference.

I could not imagine having to go back to buttons for anything I actually want to control. Once you get used to a well-designed touchscreen, buttons are just so clunky and unintuitive for most functions. Dials are probably my most favorite physical control, but other than volume there's not much it's useful for in a well-designed, modern car anymore. It was great for radio stations, but is terrible for Spotify.

Setting temperature manually by dial doesn't make sense anymore either- most cars have too many things to change and an expanding menu is great. There's hot cold, faster fan lower fan, feet vs head-height (we're already looking at more than three separate controls). Now there's seat heating and cooling (with varying power), steering wheel, defrost, controls of vent direction, etc.

I'll admit the touchscreen might be daunting if it's a rental but it takes like one week to get everything mapped out mentally (and going back to physical controls on rentals sucks).

I cannot relate to this at all. Controlling the AC with three knobs is not a challenge. Did you grow up using an iPad perhaps?

Not exactly, I got my first iPad in college. It's not so much that it's a challenge as it's totally unnecessary effort. I'm sure when the controls came out they were great, then they turned into some weird sprawl that was just designed to look complicated so the car looked like it had lots of features. Now, minimalism reigns king in tech and the one screen is the newest, (imo best) form factor, along with the steering wheel controls, etc.

That works as long as you actually stick to your guns and keep them as deal-breakers. If you accept them with some grumbling, that's still a sale and that provides no backpressure to the manufacturer.

I agree. It also works if you mention it as a dealbreaker, leave without buying, and then buy at another shop. Yes, I realize this can be more work and may not be feasible for everyone.

Their source is "a Swedish motoring magazine in 2022". Europe sure does love regulation- no desire or call for finding the best way to implement vehicular controls, just a desire to lock in old functionality with a flimsy excuse.

LOL. Go do more research if you have issues with their approach. HN really likes to assume that everyone except themselves are idiots.

I preordered a 13 Pro with Ryzen, which I'm already very excited about. Reading between the lines of your video announcement, though, it seems like the Intel experience might be more optimal (you pointed out Intel's new low power efficiency cores and Dolby sound being tested with Intel).

If I want the best battery life and sound possible with Linux, should I switch my preorder to Intel?

I'm also curious about these.

What I am also curious is around memory management. On the Intel, I can get at most 64Gb RAM for now, 96Gb in the future. On AMD I can get 128Gb right now. Do they differ in how they can share RAM with the GPU? Do either need me to specify how much is vRAM and how much is available to the CPU, or are them both unified, similar to how Apple Silicon does it?

for the current moment, Intel seems to be ahead of AMD for both power efficiency and iGPU performance. Panther Lake is really, really good.

For me, this was an immediate buy.

Everything about this is what I've been looking for in a Linux laptop. (Also, how refreshing is it to not have to think hard about how much RAM you might need over the next few years because you know you can always upgrade it later?)

Or, another way to think about this: "buy more ram when it becomes more affordable"

Apple’s music has mostly been DRM-free since 2009!

I love this about Apple and give them as much of my business I can to show that there is still a healthy market outside streaming. (7digital is another good source, although more expensive than Apple. They offer FLAC and 320kbps.)

Makes me wish e-book stores would get onboard…

>> This is not a reflection of their talent, their effort, or their belief in what we were building. It's a reflection of the brutal reality of finding product-market fit in an environment that has fundamentally changed.

> Ironic, they use AI in their shutdown post that blames AI.

This… seems like regular prose to me. What makes you say so confidently it was written by AI?

There are more tells. Rule of three, short cliche sentences.

> We know how frustrating this is, and we hope you'll give us another look once we have something to show, we’ll save your usernames!

I think it's partly human. But ex:

> Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall.

isn't a natural sentence.

I think you're spot on. It feels like parts were edited with AI and parts were left alone.

> This isn't just a Digg problem. It's an internet problem. But it hit us harder because trust is the product.

The statement this is making is presumably the crux of the problem (Digg cannot survive without trust!) but it's worded so poorly that it's hard to imagine someone sat down and figured these three sentences were the best way to make the point.

So no evidence at all, and just your need to point out possible LLM where ever you imagine it. You could be an LLM agent.

I think anything with the “it’s not X it’s Y” is suspect these days. I cringe when I catch myself doing it.

That sounds like a you problem unconnected with reality.

Here's the context:

"We underestimated the gravitational pull of existing platforms. Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall."

It's a mixed metaphor which doesn't make any sense. There are really very few ways in which this can be considered good writing - I guess the grammar is ok even if it is nonsense.

So let's break it down - underestimated the gravitational effects - ok, this is nice, like where it's going talking about these big competitors sucking in users, but then we have the metaphor extended to breaking point:

Network effects are a moat, but not just a moat, they're a wall (which is really not anything like a moat). So which of these 3 things are they, and why are we mixing the metaphors of gravity (pulling in customers), moats (competitive moat) and walls (walled gardens).

It's just all a bit nonsensical and the kind of fuzzy prose that seems superficially impressive without actually saying anything meaningful in which LLMs excel. Go try generating an article from just the heads in this article, and see how similarly it reads.

If you want your gradation to work, the items need to be similar and progressively stronger. That's why it doesn't work. A wall is not "stronger" than a moat. "Not a fence, a rampart" would work.

Compare to the canonical example from Cyrano de Bergerac: ''Tis a rock! ... a peak! ... a cape! -- A cape, forsooth! 'Tis a peninsular!'

Yes I think that’s another reason this sentence doesn’t work well.

That’s the entire point - network effects are commonly discussed as being a moat (people can’t cross without difficulty) but are actually a wall - people can’t cross and can’t view the other side. Seems simple and straightforward to me.

Walls are crossed just like moats, they were also used in tandem, they are not natural opposites.

Also the problems here stem from mixing metaphors between things that attract and repel, and mixing up attracting customers and repelling competitors without clear explanation.

That’s what makes this bad writing and a classic example of LLM slop which people are willing to make post-hoc excuses to try to make sense of. It doesn’t make sense because sense was not involved in the making of it.

Isnt a moat and a wall pretty similar in function? They both keep people in or out of an area.

Also werent all "moats" commonly paired with a wall in real life? As in a moat around a castle wall?

In a castle for defence, yes similar in function but not form and often used together not one or the other.

In business metaphors no they are used for different things and also when you create a metaphor you should stick with it, that’s what makes this jarring and weird.

"Network effects aren't just a moat, they're a wall." is a VERY ChatGPT way to write. It's not proof, but the parent is right that this smells a bit of AI writing.

It's also a VERY HUMAN way to write.

I don't care so much about Digg, but the endless "haha, I caught you!" comments annoy me more than the rare actual AI-written content they label.

Not to the same extent at all. If you use ChatGPT for a while, you'll see it writes like that very frequently. Humans do write like that sometimes, but not with anywhere the frequency that ChatGPT does it. That's weak evidence for it being ChatGPT.

Suppose ChatGPT uses a semicolon more often than an individual person. On a pageful of comments from many random people, someone using a semicolon doesn't mean they're a bot even if 100% of their comments on that page includes one.

It behooves you to not write like that if you don’t want people dehumanizing you.

Screw them. I was writing like that before AI came along, and I won’t change just because it offends their delicate sensibilities.

If stupid people choose to dehumanize based on stupid rules, that is not my problem.

> It behooves you to not write like that if you don’t want people dehumanizing you.

I have to strongly disagree with you on this. It behooves us (as a species) not to degrade our own manner of speaking and writing simply because of a (possibly temporary) technical anomaly.

In my view, it would be really, really sad to lose expressive punctuation or ways of constructing sentences simply because they're overused by AI.

I, for one, won't be a part of that, and I hope you won't, either.

Your prose is poor so it is no wonder. Half the words you use are superfluous, some are nonsensical, and you beg the question.

Please consider reading the Hacker News community guidelines before you post again: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Would now be a good time to point out that I said that "It's not proof" and "weak evidence"? Because that is what I said.

Your next sentence then immediately took it as proof and evidence, so no.

Wasn't asking you, and that isn't what my next sentence said at all. Your reading comprehension could use some work.

So based on your one example, you immediately went ChatGPT! because…?

I think a human would have split the "it's not this, it's that" type of sentence into two separate sentences that could be more descriptive. This is a blog post, not a tweet, so there's no length constraint.

If they wanted to keep it to a single sentence, they could have used a a word like "rather" to act as a separator between moat and wall.

I think we'll have to disagree on that. Humans write that way, too, and they've written that way for far longer than AI.

(Where do you think AI picked up its writing habits from?)

There isn't any "this is" in that sentence.

This has been the first year in a very long time that I’ve thought about leaving macOS. They seem to have lost the plot on software and documentation.

It might be nice for someone to crowd source a reasonable list of features they need to improve or document. Could get traction.

This is, without hyperbole, the most exciting tech announcement I've read this year. I really hope something comes of it.

Motorola: Please double down on this and make mobile tech consumer-friendly again.

This is the way. In 2025, I don't think you can expect quality when the incentives aren't aligned (in this case, that you are a customer).

I would say that using a lot of em-dashes was always bad writing. You want to use them sparingly if you want them to have impact.

That said, yes, keep using them (and using them well!).

This is true. I actually originally started using em-dashes because a high school english teacher called out my overuse of regular dashes (where they technically should have been em-dashes, but he didn’t know that) in the place of other types of transitions… which prompted me to research the punctuation properly and consider other ways to transition thoughts too.