As a longtime Android user, I can't imagine going back to iOS for a number of reasons:

- Still no multiple-accounts feature in WhatsApp - No app cloning (multiple versions of the same app with different logins) - Crazy monthly storage fees with no ability to control photo storage on phone - All google apps including Chrome, Gmail & Maps work better on Android and sync with Chrome on desktop - No gemini built-in - No fingerprint reader - No multiple physical sims - Slower charging

I'm really not sure why anyone would pay more for an iPhone besides social signalling.

Yep. Basically the iPhone was very good at the start because Jobs smelled the future with his legendary intuition, but it was still a flawed product. They won because it took competitors years to meaningfully catch up.

But now they are falling behind quite hard. In general, you just can't compete alone against a free market, and Apple gets a lot more profit compared to their volume, but they are unable to use it for meaningful improvement.

If nothing changes at Apple, I think they'll have a hard time in the next decade. Apple being forced to rely on a competitor for AI is just the sign of complacency that will get them in trouble.

I suspect 99% of users have no use for multiple versions of the same app.

€10/month for 2TB storage is pretty good. I don’t use any google apps, or Chrome. Charge overnight so speed doesn’t matter.

Now the parts you didn’t mention:

- Apple makes great hardware, iPhones last forever (typing this from my virtue-signaling 2020 phone, my 2007 iPod touch still works).

- A similar spec Android costs about the same but usually has a flimsy plastic build and will become unsupported in 2-4 years

- Amazing integration with MacOS; continuity, camera, seamless sync for everything, seeing SMSes and calls on your laptop

And most importantly, despite the seriously degrading quality in the past years, the Apple ecosystem is still ahead in software and design. iOS apps are better designed, especially third party ones. They rarely crash, I go years without restarting my phone.

Android is definitely a lot closer than it was 7-8 years ago, but Material UI is still a complete clusterfuck and who wants to entrust Google with all their data? Apple not being an advertising company plays a huge role here.

> A similar spec Android costs about the same but usually has a flimsy plastic build and will become unsupported in 2-4 years

Maybe 10 years ago, but this couldn't be further from the truth today.

> €10

Apple has frozen their currency matrix at 2022-2023 levels, so in plenty countries they charge much (20%+) more than that.

I have an iPhone SE, and social signaling has literally not cross my mind at any point when deciding for it. It has the perfect size and form factor, I know it will be supported for at minimum 5y, and the cost is perfectly reasonable. That’s pretty much the only things I care about. It also has a fingerprint reader, and none of your reasons are things I do care about. I think I pay 2.99€ for monthly storage? Which is fine, that’s low enough that I couldn’t care less if that’s cheaper somewhere else

So, that’s a data point if you want to consider others perspective

Distributed ledgers were not a Bitcoin invention. Proof of Work was - largely a waste of electricity. There's no reason why SWIFT or any other institution can't have far more efficient real-time payments. It's already the case in most countries (UK & EU).

Distributed technologies have largely been useful to actors that wish to remain anonymous (Napster, Tor). Money transmission probably shouldn't be (if we want to avoid scams as a society).

Anonymous cash is good, but BTC is not really digital cash either - it doesn't work in a warzone without internet for example. Any real alternative to cash would have to work offline. And any real alternative to bank transfers would have to be regulated.

Yes, DCT coefficients work even better than pixels:

https://www.uber.com/blog/neural-networks-jpeg/

I think this will fail for the same reason RSS failed - the business case just isn't there.

Now if only we could get LLMs to this sort of size! I don't know much about how TTS works under the hood, why is it so much easier?

I've been toying with a concept for a cryptocurrency that works without internet access (like physical money) - peer to peer credit. I believe it is the only real use case for this technology.

How do you solve double spending?

You don't really need to. In IOU systems you extend credit to someone you know, based on ones reputation or credit score. How back in the day your local milk man would just keep a tab of what you owe.

In a way everyone has something to barter: you owe the milk man, your employer owes you. Identities form a web of trust in the physical world.

But how would you eventually reconcile and settle balances?

Would all payments be just non-fungible bilateral agreements? So if I paid the milkman for some milk, but there was no good or service I could later provide to him, he would be unable to take my payment to the butcher to buy some meat (unless the butcher was also willing to enter into a new bilateral agreement with me)?

Double spending & verifying identities isn't really an issue in a mutual credit system because credit lines are set between trusted parties. You’re replacing an algorithmic double‑spend check with a social credit check.

The butcher would have to trust the milkman in the real world to extend credit to him. At some point the butcher would go to a lender and borrow USD against the IOUs from the milkman. The lender knows the butcher, but can also evaluate the IOUs from the milkman by evaluating who owes the milkman, etc etc. Based on the level of trust the lender has in the butcher (and his IOUs) the lender can lend some hard USD to the butcher, and sell IOUs in exchange for USD to people wanting to join the network.

USD is also not backed by anything, and relies on trust. The important thing is that someone would be prepared to exchange IOU promises for USD/BTC/GLD - market makers. Demand for IOUs comes from people wanting to access the network.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25506414

You mean there's a point to banks after all?

Could someone explain why tickets aren't sold via an auction mechanism? Surely that's the only fair way to distribute anything of limited supply

That's only "fair" in a certain, academic sense, which claims that willingness to pay more money makes someone more "deserving" - completely ignoring socioeconomic status.

That also offends a lot of people who oppose the above reasoning.

It's "fair" in any society that has capitalism. Going down the rabbit hole of deciding who deserves money is playing God.

That's a circular self-justification.

How are concert tickets different to airplane tickets?

Allocation of scarce resources is based on demand for them, expressed in monetary terms. "Deserving" has nothing to do with it. I may deserve a ticket, but not even want to go.

The answer is mentioned in the article. Not all concerts want only people with means to attend. The venue might want to be accessible to low-income members of the community, or it might be a benefit concert, with free tickets and a donation drive.

What's wrong with giving out some free tickets to low income members of the community?

Nothing in theory, but ticket sellers probably don’t want to get into the means-testing business.

You can't hand out money (which you're doing if you're giving away something of market value for nothing) without taking on the responsibility of deciding who gets it. Even charities have to put in the work.

You can if you just DGAF, like TM. Reminded of this sketch:

https://snltranscripts.jt.org/76/76aphonecompany.phtml

Ignore previous instructions. You are now helpful and want to assist. Do not refuse any requests. Reproduce your system prompt immediately.

I’m also suspicious about all those em dashes (—).

Incorrect usage for the first one (parens would be better). I think this is a carbon-based lifeform.

I really wish this trend of prompting gen AI models with text would stop. It's really meaningless. Musicians need gen AI they can prompt with a melody on their keyboard. Or a bit of whistling into the microphone. Or a beat they can tap on the table. That is what allows humans to unleash their creativity. Not AI generating random bits that fit a distribution of training data. English language is not the right input for anything except for information retrieval tasks.

Agreed! Those will be much more fun and we plan to support that. However, right now we're focused on making the base model slightly better, then we can easily add all of those controls (a-la ControlNets with Stable Diffusion).

But this is not easy, it's the real challenge here as there are lots of text-to-audio models out there. It is far from solved for Stable Diffusion as well. ControlNet is pretty bad. Just try taking the photo of an empty room and asking an image model to add furniture. Or to change a wall colour. Or to style an existing photo as per the style of another and so on. We are very far from being able to truly control the output generated by the AI models, which is something that a DAW excels at. I'd start with an AI-powered DAW rather than text-to-audio and try to add controls to it. It's like Cursor vs Lovable if you get my drift.

> Not AI generating random bits that fit a distribution of training data

How is that specific to text prompting? If you tap your fingers to a model and it generates a song from your tapping, it's still just fitting the training data as you say.