Pretty neat but as someone who commutes every day on the New York subway I hope it’s never “cracked” here. Phone usage without headphones is already annoying enough and I greatly appreciate the various people trying to take calls eventually lose service.
It’s a tough choice, is it worse to hear their phone calls, or hear 2 seconds of every bit of TikTok/Instagram feed trash. Either way, no cellular access seems a plus.
Who still calls anyway? Literally all my friends exclusively message now (on WhatsApp).
It would be really annoying if I were out of touch for the whole duration of subway trips. But in my city it works great. Here the 3 main providers pooled together and shared the installation.
The worst is not calls, it is the thousands of zombies hooked up on tiktok 24/7, of course with headphones, so completely unaware and indifferent to their environment, who block tunnels, escalators, turnstiles, etc.
In the 90s we read the paper and dumbed with our magnetic tickets. In the 00s we listened to MP3s while playing snake on an oyster. In the 10s we played Andy birds and listened to iTunes with a credit card at the turnstile. In the 20s we doom scroll and listen to Spotify while tapping out with our phone.
All of that that they did while they sit. I don’t remember people reading the newspapers while slow walking in the middle of a corridor. And the problem with headphones is that they make people unaware of their surrounding, alone in the world, and therefore for instance unaware that there is someone on their left that they will cut the way to. Small incivilities, but repeat several times a day every day and it gets seriously annoying.
Certainly people would do that. And sending text messages in the 00s. People have been wearing headphones while commuting for a generation, and (not on the underground but certainly on trains) people in the 80s and 90s were far more obnoxious - get stuck on a busy train between people having conversations about inane stuff while smoking.
Public transport is far better today than it was 30 years ago, annoyances are far less than they were.
The only benefit was the ability to jump on and off away from bus stops. If you had any kind of mobility issue they were awful, and even if you didn’t they were still far more camped than a modern bus.
This behaviour is so bad on London (above ground) trains, if they ever do 'crack it' and roll out mobile signal to the Underground, those tiny carriages will be unbearable.
London, increasingly common. I’d say a third of the time when I take the tube. Combine that with people making loud calls, 100% of the time. But I find people imposing their music or tiktok videos more obnoxious than a builder discussing his next job a bit loudly.
I think it will depend on your route and the time of your commute. I see fairly distinct behaviour at different times on the tube & Elizabeth Line: come in or leave late and it's full of people who are much less considerate, go in with the majority and there's a bit more social pressure against being inconsiderate.
I also never see this behaviour, but I pretty much only use the tube for commuting at peak times. I think commuters are generally better behaved. The sheer density of people means that anti social behaviour will get angrily shut down very quickly.
It may also be highly dependent on which direction you travel. When you travel east from the city, you get totally different demographics than when you travel west.
I've not noticed that correlation at all. I just wanted to see who was brave enough to actually speak their racism or whether they'd just suggest it in a cowardly way.
That's true. I made several complaints about that to TFL before capitulating and just settling for noise-cancelling headphones.
Never been happier.
The clincher was noticing that the drivers themselves had access to ear defenders ... TFL said that that's because they're down there for extended periods of time. Sounds reasonable but I'm not buying that as a way out of not fixing the issue and exposing my ears to the worst bits of the tube.
Also has the ancillary benefits of blocking out those rare times (for me) when people do have their phone on speaker or are having a chat I'm uninterested in.
There's literally already signal on half the Underground, has been for six months to a year, and as someone who gets the tube twice a day I've literally never seen someone do voice call. Literally ever.
What is the thing with people using phones without headphones? And making calls on public transport? When did that become a thing? It’s the most obnoxious selfish behaviour and it shocks me every time.
It’s not just Gen Z either, I’ve seen a few boomers do it and even a couple of millennials.
Ten of so years ago I was on a train and the women opposite me gave all her credit card details to someone over the phone — anyone close by could have had fun with them
Not to excuse other people's behavior but buying a decent pair of noise canceling headphones or earbuds will make putting up with it a whole lot easier. You don't even have to listen to anything, or you can put rain noises and thunderstorms. It's as much better soundscape than public transport.
That also creates a problem that people then can not hear important announcements or be aware of dangers (such as knife wielding attackers, as happened on an LNER train just late last year)
You can still hear those things, just not obnoxiously loudly. NC works best against static sounds. Speech still makes it through. Just not as loud.
If you're in a busy car enough people will hear it to be aware, and if you're on your own you will hear the announcement clearly.
Besides it's really a one in 10 million chance you'll get stabbed on the metro, not worth worrying about. The chance of getting hit by a car in traffic is much higher. That feeling of always being in some kind of danger seems to be very American, I never really see that in people here in Europe. I think it's the sensationalism in the press there, every little incident is blown up to massive "BREAKING NEWS!" proportions.
Don't lecture me in a condescending manner. I'm British, I've taken the train all my life, and for years have worn NC headphones to counter the incessant announcements and anti social behaviour. I also have to my play my own music to drown it out
Also: generalising about Europeans is quite ignorant. As is ignoring recent data and recent risks and just citing long term data to insinuate people are being hysterical
Because silence is a common good, like clean air. It's everyone's. When people fill it with their noise they effectively privatize it for the duration. When they shout on speakerphone or play their music or blare sound from their apps it's especially selfish.
I know, it's pathetic. It's partly because they don't want to pay for the staff to do the enforcement and partly probably some other reasons.
In classic British style they just try to influence and nudge people with campaigns and posters. That way the organisation doesn't have to deal with awkward accusations of racism etc
You do understand that one of those “needs”affects others around you, and one of them leaves them in peace, right?
Also I’m sure parent wasn’t referring to emergency calls
If I recall correctly, a prior interview about claude plays pokemon stated they purposely chose pokemon as a use case that was not meant to be trained/finetuned on. That's what makes it an interesting problem, so hopefully they aren't.
I believe the testing itself is done in very good faith.
But I believe the team at Antrophic looks for popular use cases like this one to improve their datasets. Same for every other big player in the LLM game.
Not wanting to use Vercel is honestly a good enough reason. If you’re a heavy Vercel user you probably aren’t their target market since they’re aiming at enterprise types from what it looks like.
What were the problems? I've been trying it out and haven't hit issues yet, but not using it at scale yet so I'm curious what to watch out for. I figure it's open source (MIT) so I can make changes as needed if there was anything particulary annoying.
Woz is awesome and as an engineer I understand the urge to say he’s the main one who should be honored but we have to be realistic. Jobs ushered in 2 eras, only 1 with Woz. The personal computer and the computer in everyone’s pocket.
That’s not touching any of the other areas like helping to drive Pixar. Woz did not have a second act, which is perfectly fine and I deeply respect him but he doesn’t have quite the same cultural impact.
Woz is a genius who invented the personal computer as we know it.
Jobs was a celebrity who was good at branding himself as a genius.
I don't consider a clever UI idea like a touch screen to be a work of brilliance, especially since he did zero engineering work, both for early and later Apple devices. Touch screen handheld devices would've come around with or without him, just maybe a few years later.
Woz was one of many people who designed microprocessor based computers in the 1970s (I recently started reading back issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_01_201710, and the variety is astounding), and far from the first one, though he was very good at what he did.
What really set apart the Apple II from many of its peers is that it came preassembled, in a neatly designed case (though the Commodore PET and TRS-80 were pretty much released at the same time), and those esthetics were due more to Jobs than Wozniak.
Jobs did not write product code, or design boards, but he had a constant presence in the design of Apple's products and many (though by no means all) of his inputs changed the products for the better.
This is much more true than the parent comment, but nobody invented the concept of an integrated system in a case with keyboard and screen. That's because said concept is called a "video terminal" and had existed for at least a decade prior to the mid-70s. In fact one of the prime target markets for the first generation 8-bit CPUs was...video terminals. A late-70s personal computer is really just a video terminal that has been made programmable by the user. The hardware is pretty much identical.
> Woz is a genius who invented the personal computer as we know it.
History being written by the victors here, I believe.
He designed some clever things for example bit-banging the floppy interface which allowed the Apple 2 to have floppies at a lower price point than competitors. Another innovation of the Apple 2 at the time was its use of a switched-mode PSU. It was almost certainly the first personal computer to have that, but designed by Rod Holt not Woz. He didn't invent the switching PSU -- they were commonly used in portable test equipment at the time.
Having been alive at the time and paying attention, I disagree that Woz invented anything very significant. Definitely an important figure, and a clever guy though.
After looking more closely at the release dates of the earliest home computers, I found you're right. Three major home computers, all preassembled, with keyboard and video display and BASIC launched in 1977. Seems Apple II was not the first, only the most forward-looking of the three.
I still don't credit Steve Jobs with starting any computing revolutions, in 1977 or 2008.
At the time it seemed that the advantage Apple had over the Pet and TRS-80 was the lower price-point for floppies and color, and over time much more software becoming available. Obviously those advantages weren't entirely due to luck -- Woz designed the low-cost floppy interface and someone specified the color modulator and enough memory for color graphics. Someone decided to use a switched mode PSU which made the Apple much lighter and therefore easier to lug around than a Pet. The general idea of "having a computer at home" had existed since the 1960s so I wouldn't credit Jobs with any amazing breakthrough in that regard.
Also worth noting that the Apple 2 was really a US/North America phenomenon. For example although they were sold in the UK (my school, unusually, had one), they were not popular and pretty much nobody had one in their home. So you might as well say that the person at the BBC who decided to commission the BBC Micro was the pioneer of personal computing. Or Clive Sinclair.
On the side, custom coloring books for kids using nano banana, started with a project for my son, and its a little janky for some photos but have had some interest already: https://bespokebooks.io. I think it needs to be a phone app to really work for most people though, so that's next on my to do list besides some prompt tweaking.
I think there are a lot of really fun projects possible now in the child book creation space, particularly as you build tools that they can use themselves (like adding voice interfaces to building a book or story).
This is outside my 996 job of AI Agent/Assistant infra + ops :)
Currently using Lulu because they have a developer api and allow printing a single book programmatically, many places I found either didn’t have an api or required a min order of books that isn’t needed for a one off custom design. https://developers.lulu.com/home
My hope for this project is to get enough demand that I have an excuse to figure out a printing option myself and buy some new equipment :)
This is truely awesome and reminds me of the project that was making a litle one story book with the child as the main character. It was at least a couple of years ago I think.
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