On the Apple TV you get ‘ads’ for the apps you have in your top row, with different levels of interactivity. Some are just logos of that streaming service, some show recently watched. The Apple TV app has full-blown ads for Apple TV+ originals.

They won’t actually let you delete the Apple TV app, but if you move it out of the top row you will never see the ads.

My parents have an Amazon Fire TV and when I go to their house and have to use it it drives me insane. Carousels of adds large at the top, banner ads as you scroll, full rows of sponsored apps. Full screen ads for random Amazon products when you pause any show you are watching. Everything you watch on Amazon’s streaming service has minute long unskippable ads. Sometimes when you turn it on Alexa will just verbally read you ads.

It’s truly a dystopian piece of tech.

Idk how popular it is but I know at least one person that does that. I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets more normal in the coming years.

This thread seems to have a lot of people that love the iPhone mini (me included - I still use my 12 mini).

But from all reports that you can find with a quick search it seems clear that it did not sell well by Apple standards.

I would love them to bring it back and I’m not sure what it is about the Hacker News crowd that makes this phone over-represented. Maybe the tech crowd also uses laptops more, so we think of phones as our “small device” and use other devices more as appropriate?

> by Apple standards

Yeah. The question I'm trying to answer is not "does it make sense for Apple to make a small phone?", but rather "does it make sense for anyone to make a small phone?" I'm using the 13 Mini's sales data as evidence, because it is the one and only small phone made in the past decade or so.

I understand why you'd reach for that data, not a ton of other alternatives... But I'm not convinced that an arbitrarily chosen brand could achieve those sales figures. Especially if it was a new or no-name brand that didn't have a proven track record with software updates and hardware build quality.

Maybe I'm just incredibly naive but I have this small hope that we'll see a return to smaller phones that are trifolds for when you need the real estate.

I tend to like smaller phones as well, but even comparing the Pixel 9 Pro vs Pixel 9 Pro XL used markets, it seems really hard to find non-XL versions. I would totally believe that the XL is a far more popular model, unfortunately for the rest of us.

It is interesting seeing the difference in model perception between “normal” people and the Hacker News crowd.

My perception is that a huge percentage of the mass market just like OpenAI because they were the first to market and still have the most name recognition. Even my coworker who works in DevOps says “Gemini sucks, Claude sucks” even though he has never once tried either of them and has never looked at a single benchmark comparison.

This is a great comment.

I’ve noticed a new genre of AI-hype posts that don’t attempt to build anything novel, just talk about how nice and easy building novel things has become with AI.

The obvious contradiction being that if it was really so easy their posts would actually be about the cool things they built instead of just saying what they “can” do.

I wouldn’t classify this article as one since the author does actually create something of this, but LinkedIn is absolutely full of that genre of post right now.

> their posts would actually be about the cool things they built

Presumably, they are all startups in stealth mode. But in a few months, prepare to be blown away.

> My theory is that Apple specifically wanted an effect that can’t be replicated in webviews

This makes a lot of sense to me. I was also under the impression that all these lighting effects would be rather computationally expensive. This could encourage people to upgrade devices and make it hard to replicate this design on other brands’ less powerful hardware.

That's where they're mistaken. This stuff can definitely be done. It's gonna be clunky and messy but it can be done.

I typically get AppleCare on my phone and then get a new screen and battery right before the window is up. AppleCare is cheaper than the cost of those repairs plus I have the added peace of mind that if something bad does happen I have AppleCare. I don’t renew it as part of the monthly plan though.

I also don’t use a case or screen protector on my phone fwiw

That last point (compliance gaps in fintech) sounds fascinating. Is there a place that I could read more about this?

Compliance gaps / legal analysis is a pretty common theme in my community (meaning - it was mentioned 3-4 times by different teams). Here is how the approach usually looks like:

0. (the most painful step) Carefully parse all relevant documents into a structural representation that could be walked like a graph.

1. Extract relevant regulatory requirements using ontology-based classification and hybrid searches.

2. Break regulatory requirements into actionable analytical steps (turning a requirement into checklist/mini-pipeline)

3. Dynamically fetch and filter relevant company documents for each analytical step.

4. Analyze documents to generate intermediate compliance conclusions.

5. Iteratively validate and adjust analysis approach as needed.

6. Summarize findings clearly, embedding key references and preserving detailed reasoning separately.

7. Perform gap analysis, prioritizing compliance issues by urgency.

I’m looking forward to checking this out when I have time tonight or tomorrow.

I was actually just looking at different open source tools I could run locally that would allow agents to write and execute their own Python code. Seems like this might be able to do so in 2 steps, with a file write, and then a command?

Interesting to see what I feel like is a big disconnect between the article and the comments.

In my interpretation the author of the article is doing this almost more out of respect for those around him than himself. As a photographer he was always preoccupied with looking for a good shot rather than enjoying the company he was with.

Even when he talks about the pictures of his child’s birth he looks at it through the lens of a professional photographer - it’s not about the memories attached to the photos, it’s about the composition being ‘generic’ vs the photo saying something interesting.

I feel like this article is really more about work/life balance than taking out your phone to grab a snapshot. That’s just how I read it. Also what a sad ending.