It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
I worked for an SVP at Apple as an “entrepreneur in residence” from 2016-2019.
Apple’s best-of-the-worst products now suck in a million subtle ways; and they’ve become so complex that they suck in different ways for each user so we can’t even band together behind a single complaint.
The root cause is the lack of a “fuck no, fix that shit” product CEO who puts customer experience above all else. Without one, it has become a very typical big company bureaucracy. The engine is still firing on all cylinders but nobody is at the wheel anymore.
It’s hard to diagnose from the outside with Apple because 1. there’s a shroud of mystery/secrecy, 2. boatloads of cash keep smart people on hand and create some very genuine technical supremacy (e.g. M1) and 3. even a broken “new product innovation” clock is right twice a day when it sprays $20b into R&D every year (AirPods, maybe AR someday, etc).
But true, earth-shattering category-defining innovation at today’s Apple is incredibly inefficient at best and structurally impossible at worst – not to mention the hardest type of innovation which consists of simplifying software, slashing the complexity of product lines, and thereby fixing whole categories of bugs with a few powerful swings of the sword. (E.g. fucking fix and unify Apple ID/iTunes/FindMy/etc ... today ... not next year).
And, in my opinion, their monopoly/oligopoly/[whatever] status, cash hoarding, and domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating and competing with them.
We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.
I have to say hard disagree, even though I am one of the ones having the problems with Apple Card.
The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical. The Apple Watch still sux IMO, but the way they quickly pivoted toward health surprised me and makes me think they get it.
I think Apple's products are better than ever, on the whole.
I don't think we should "break up" Big Tech just because they are successful. That being said, I do think we need to #AbolishImaginaryProperty laws (#EndCopyrights and #EndPatents), and that will make things much better for everyone (minus some lazy shareholders). Those laws are atrocious in every domain, from bigtech to big pharma, and need to go.
> The M1's and Airpods lineup are absolutely magical.
Read again, I said as much & agree so much that it’s actually a fundamental part of my characterization of Apple.
> I think Apple’s products are better than ever, on the whole
I had to type this quote because my iPad won’t let me copy and paste anymore on this page for some reason. (I didn’t make this up)
> I don’t think we should...
Well, I’m only speaking from my years of experience as both a product executive at Google and Apple and a successful entrepreneur, which is perhaps the exact skeleton key that fits this particular lock. Your idea would not fix my Apple product issues, because they really don’t rely nearly as much on IP protection as they do trade secrets, security through obscurity, and (legal disclaimer: in my subjective opinion only) anti-competitive practices.
But it would greatly hurt some other big companies (not really Apple, Google, Amazon, ...) and small tech companies alike.
You know, I used to think as you do on that topic, but not once I truly understood the ins and outs via relevant experience. Patent trolls suck, but IP law ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
> ain’t the biggest problem in tech by a country mile.
Well as someone who has worked on this issue for 17+ years, and also a successful entrepreneur and product builder at a few of the big dogs, I'm a hard disagree.
ImaginaryProperty laws are the root of all the biggest evil problems in tech. They corrupt everything at the core and a reckoning is coming.
I really think #EndPatents is a very software oriented view of tech. In the physical engineering space patents are the only thing that allows a small company to actually design, manufacture and sell a product before a larger company can just squash them.
I know that getting investment as a small company in the hardware space would be near impossible without patents, because any investor without a brain would see that the giant in your industry could decide to take your idea, design it faster, manufacture it cheaper and sell it to a wider audience in a fraction of the time.
Very true, but #EndSoftwarePatents can and should be a thing.
I actually take a position that some software maybe should be patentable, but that it's such a tiny percentage of what actually GETS patented that it's likely better to simply prohibit/invalidate all software patents than to allow only certain software patents. The backlog of hundreds of thousands of obviously-bad software patents wouldn't really be able to be individually reviewed by the experts that should be able to invalidate them, and software has copyright and trade secret protections available. That should be good enough for 99.9% of circumstances.
The patent office has clearly proven that they can't be trusted to discern "novelty" in software development, and I don't see that changing any time soon, so time to prohibit the system from applying to software at all. At present it's 100% prohibiting the small inventors from innovating (or allowing a few patent trolls to extorts those who succeed) and 0% allowing small innovators from profiting from their products.
> We should break up any company in the $1T range (inflation adjust by making a rule based on % GDP?) into ten $100B companies, by force of legislation. It won’t fix the problem but it would at least create some sunlight through the canopy for new trees to grow.
Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money. I dont understand this need to invest in user hostile tech then demand it not be user hostile any more. It's like you willingly stuck your foot in a bear trap only to walk around in agony while demanding that the government make bear traps less painful. How about not putting your foot into a bear trap?
I know die hard Mac fans who cry endlessly about Apple "fucking up their platform" yet own a shiny new M1 laptop. I don't get it.
I am actually spending a good chunk of time on the process of extracting myself from the ecosystem, I’m about 50% there. Two problems make your solution a non-solution:
1. Apple is “best of the worst” i.e. the other platforms suck more on a usability basis.
2. It doesn’t matter if only a select few understand the long term impact of trading freedom/competition for shininess – our money is a drop in the bucket compared to regular users who care about usability and have already changed the channel when you talk about anything beyond that.
And so, large companies will roll along with exclusive access to things like TSMC 5nm thanks to capital resources and returns 1000x of any upstart like System76/PinePhone/FairPhone/etc.
Free markets work great, except that monopoly-like things form naturally and suck all of the air out of the room; therefore anti-monopoly laws are one of the very few regulations on capitalism I think we should all support (who wouldn’t benefit? 100 people total?).
There’s probably a way to oust them that isn’t legislation, but it will require coming at them from an angle that doesn’t rely on having access to the world’s largest pile of capital and etc. I.e. entrepreneurs getting real creative and taking huge risks on opportunity cost (it’s easier to build an app and get rich, easier still to pull $500k/year in total comp as a mid level SW engineer at big tech co).
But based on my experience and judgment of the situation, I’d like to see concise and progressive (vs regressive) antitrust/antimonopoly legislation, I think it would be both great for the economy and great for individual citizens.
>Just do what I do which is not give apple any of your money.
That just "solves" the problem of undue influence of a $1T or close company for you (if that) not for the industry / society at large.
They can e.g. still stomp/buy/kill companies you do like, influence standards you do use, etc., and even hold captive your friends and others, even if you, yourself don't use their products.
I'm not against Apple (if anything the opposite), but I'm against huge companies with huge power. I'd prefer their several businesses (Mac, iOS, OS, Pro Apps) where independent companies.
The Pro Apps would e.g. then have to fight for their lives, with features, frequent releases, good customer communication, and so on, as opposed to coasting on the $2T padding of the mother company...
Apple buys a company every month, sometimes two. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56178792 This isn't a case of voting with your wallet because there's no one left to vote for.
I tend to use open platforms so I would likely not notice. Most of the businesses listed in the bbc article are of no consequence to me. Their only real weapon would be to outlaw ip or control access to the internet.
Of course I cant completely avoid behemoths as I use Android with Google services. But my only google "lock in" as of now is photo storage and gmail. I have only a hand full of apps on my phone. I do not use social media. That's really it.
There is a whole beautiful world outside of the digital prison.
I have the same problem, and also often people show up twice but only one bubble works (invariably the second one I try).
I tried to get stuff like that fixed, impossible when there’s 35 people who “share responsibility” and can point fingers instead of doing something. Imagine a code base and organization so complex that even fixing a bug takes political capital and months. Much less re-architecting to kill a whole class of bugs...
Steve Jobs woulda (metaphorically) broken their fingers off and fed ‘em to ‘em. Once the pointing can’t happen, useful stuff can happen!
Also, you’d be surprised how many SVPs and CEOs I’ve met in big tech that use IT support to setup and fix their devices. When I ran Dropcam, I insisted on using and operating our product only as a customer could. It’s a point of pride and a critical last-resort way to catch issues.
interesting to hear -- I had an airdrop failure like you describe the other day, and it was very surprising to me as I'd never seen it happen before. I use airdrop pretty much every single day and it's almost flawless for me.
I experience this almost every time I use airdrop. Last week I was helping my wife airdrop something from her phone to mac. I had to reset both Wifi and bluetooth on both phone and mac before the device showed up.
For the first part I think you're probably right, their all powerful absolute advocate for user experience above all else has gone and isn't about to be replaced. I don't think that's an existential threat to the company, even now who else does any of this stuff better? But it is a problem.
>...domineering attitude over the devices in a billion peoples’ pockets are largely preventing the greater market from innovating...
Where the heck does that come from? Apple coming up with the first 64-bit mobile processor didn't stop anyone else doing it, and the M1 isn't stopping anyone else developing fast efficient ARM processors. In fact it's pretty obvious its pushing their competitors into upping their game.
As for breaking up the company, OMG no, a thousand times no. It would destroy everything good about them. The only people it would benefit are their competitors. The last thing we need is enforced mediocrity. Who else is going to come up with FaceID, M1, Neural Engine, W1, T2 and goodness knows what else. Breaking up the company isn't going to make such tech more ubiquitous.
Well, it might for the existing stuff but it's going to cut off the pipeline cold. It's only their scale and commitment to huge investments and far forward looking technological bets that make these things possible. How is a divided company going to manage the close collaboration and integrated design of hardware and software at every level if they're in separate companies? It would crush out the distinctive features that make Apple what it is.
If you saw, for example, how deals that lock up fabrication resources (and the surrounding global politics) work to prevent competition, you’d see one small example out of many that illustrate how smaller competitors can’t keep up.
As for the rest of your comment, I am actually a HUGE FAN of vertical integration. But your connection is a non sequitur because a $100B company can do everything the way Apple does if and only if there isn’t a $1T company next door locking up every single one of the best chip engineers, industrial designers, worldwide supply of miniature CNC machines, & etc with golden handcuffs, trade deals, capital and etc that only a monopoly could afford.
Our theoretical $100B company would still have some of the greats. But right now, some ridiculous percentage of engineers and infrastructure are controlled by like 5 tech companies. It isn’t healthy for individual citizens, and it misses huge opportunity costs if you compare it to a truly competitive economy with enforced rules against monopolies or oligopolies.
It’s one of the truly rare situations where proper, concise and well-planned government intervention (in other words, laws!) could and should help.
I’m constantly reading that phone technology has hit a plateau, it’s commodified, everyone else will catch up to Apple any day now and their competitive edge will disappear. That’s been the story since the day the iPhone was announced.
Apples competitors actually believe this and have done for over a decade. Were Samsung or Huawei ever going to put that much investment into advanced tech? No because they are constantly being told by analysts that they don’t need to.
All those small tech startups Apple keeps buying with advanced Flash memory controllers, new optics, advanced sensors, AI optimised processing hardware. Nobody else in the consumer space sees the value in that, they’re all chasing the lowest common denominator. The idea that Vivo would be investing in tech startups and pushing technological boundaries if only Apple hadn’t beaten them to it is pure fantasy. The nearest any of those companies get to innovation is stupid gimmicks like built in projectors and edge screens.
Breaking up a company vertically can’t work. You wouldn’t end up with 5 smaller Apples. You’d end up with an OS business, a chip business, an applications business, a Mac business and a mobile device business. Everything good about Apple would die on the butcher’s block when it was carved up.
Wow, “can’t work”. That might be the strongest signs of cognitive dissonance I’ve ever seen.
Trivial logic disproves your statement and in 10-20 years it will be proven empirically through disruption from the market (including mini-Apple splinter groups that do exactly what you say is impossible).
SJ’s (awesome, to be admired) reality distortion field was strong and its effects clearly still linger, as evidenced by your leaps here.
Apple is decidedly less innovative than it was in decades past (make sure you don’t misread that as “not innovative”) and others will take the mantle in due time. It’ll just be faster, better for the economy, and better for individual citizens if Apple isn’t allowed to exert undue influence against competitors via monopoly/oligopoly tactics along the way.
Side note: funny enough, your sort of reverence for the status quo is a huge factor in keeping large companies unaware of looming disruption. But nearly every exec that could act on it has a personal time horizon that preserves their legacy and makes it the next guy's problem. This phenomenon, while frustrating to experience on the inside, is one of the most heartening aspects of the situation for would-be competition to take hold.
While I dont fully agree with breaking them up, I do think your comment pretty much sums up all the comment I had on Apple over the past 4-5 years.
Apple will continue to make technically superior hardware. But the user experience department, what ( Steve Jobs's ) Apple used to stand for is no longer there ( Or at least less of it ). That is everything from Hardware like Touch Bar, Keyboard, Trackpad, USB-C, Software UI complexity and Services like App Store, Apple ID and Payment issues. No one is saying the User Experience is crap lets fix this. Instead in every single case it took some revenue drops in numbers, customer satisfaction drop ( Apple has not reported any Mac user satisfaction number for 2 years now ), or straight bad press before they even begin to look into it.
Which is why the lag time from Mac Pro was so bad. It took them 3-4 years to admit a mistake. Before making changes that has a lead time of another 2 years.
But having said all them, even at their current level of inefficiency, they are still so far ahead of Google and Microsoft from a product level perspective that there is zero chance both of those company could catch up to Apple within this decade.
Processing on local devices is slightly better but ultimately it’s cold comfort when those devices are locked down, closed source, and opaque to anyone but hackers.
From the end customer perspective, the only protection was Apple’s customer-focused business model, which is now slowly tilting from “sell slick technology products” to “monetize the user base.”
Another solution is needed. Since I created Dropcam (Nest cam), I am working on fixing this: send us a message at https://duffy.org if you want to learn more.
No offense, but your thinking here is actually a bigger part of the problem.
There is nothing fundamentally unsustainable about suburbs, single family homes, low density, or cars. 50% of the USA is totally uninhabited, and it is possible today to build a totally off-grid and sustainable single family home / suburb in the majority of it.
You can even capture carbon in concrete. Don't prescribe solutions just because you prefer them, set incentives and goals to favor the right outcomes and let people decide and optimize how to do it.
Your urban utopia is my hellscape, and my suburban utopia is yours. The good news is, this is America, and we can both live here. Good fences make good neighbors.
P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.
Paving our best farmland is not sustainable, nor is deluding yourself that we can capture carbon at anywhere near the rate needed to prevent severe change in our weather patterns.
US suburbs are heavily subsidized with federal dollars[1], this is a huge reason why PGE can't effectively maintain the infrastructure in California. The ratepayers & tax base cannot afford to repipe a suburban neighborhood when the water service lines hit end of design life, let alone repaving, maintaining gas, electrical service, telecom & cable[2]. This is also why Fiber buildouts are so uncommon in suburbs (for-profit companies won't make their money back within a decade).
We have designed an extremely expensive mousetrap of suburbia where you get degrading public services (as maintenance & replacement bills accrue and go unmet), nearly mandatory car ownership, and higher rates of health problems caused by the poor design of these neighborhoods[3].
I'm not counting paving farmland, friend. Also, go look up aeroponics and 3D farming.
We don't need PG&E. The sun gives us free energy, and batteries + thermal energy storage can cover the cloudiest of days.
Well-designed suburbs don't need to be subsidized. And they can also be healthier and happier for you and your family (quiet, safe, better air quality, elbow-room, &etc). Just decentralize large cities by building smaller mixed-use "downtowns" surrounded by layers of variable density housing. Single family homes with yards are a part of that.
I'm moving and will be putting this into practice, instead of sitting back and seeing what happens. My cost of living will go down even though I am self-providing all of my family's utilities.
I might even use the savings to build more than just my own needs... creating opportunities for those with less capital to make the same choice to enjoy a better life at an affordable cost.
P.S. I have done the carbon calculations, and burying it in concrete is a good part of a total solution. "Deluding." Hah. A head not in the sand can more easily look in the mirror!
> P.S. most of the $2 trillion real estate market in the Bay Area where I have lived for 12 years exists precisely because our politicians DON'T promote further development, sustainable or otherwise. Most of what's here is decaying, old, unsustainable, whether it is high or low density, and nobody can afford to improve it because all the tradespeople got priced out and left years ago.
While I think the rest of your response is orthogonal (albeit valid), I think this is the heart of the matter relevant to the article. Californian infrastructure is aging and politicians have only made it more difficult over time to build new anything, whether that's power, water, internet, transport, or housing infrastructure. I just wish I knew what the solution was.
The first part of the response is to the parent comment, not the article.
That said, intelligent legislation to encourage all types of housing and development (with externalities like carbon priced in as taxes, not government prescribed solutions to mitigate them) would go a long way to bringing back affordability.
The solution in the interim is to vote with your dollars and feet, if you can. And really think about it if your answer is "I can't". Most of the time, that's not really true.
I'm leaving next month. Bye California and your awful policies that literally burn us to death at worst, and make us poorer and stingier zero-sum competitors at best. And for those of you who say "don't let the door hit your ass on the way out" ... check in with me in 10 years and let's compare stories! <3
The incentive is already set, city limits are already set, eventually they will fill up and then people will be motivated to build up a bit.
Sure, fundamentally nothing is sustainable because eventually the useful energy gradients where life can thrive will run out as the universe expands into a cold dark empty vacuum.
But before that let's try to spend the already fixed tax income a bit more efficiently. Compact cities can be more efficient than the endless sea of cul-de-sacs and occasional golf/sports fields.
That said, I have no real horse in this race. If the people of those particular cities want to live like that, let them live like that. Self-determination is important. If they feel that they don't want better mass transit and less sitting-in-traffic, no worries.
No the incentives are not there, not when you can vote yourself richer by freezing property taxes and preventing building up or out.
Citation needed on cities being fundamentally more efficient. A suburban home can be powered by pure solar, rainwater/groundwater can be captured and recycled locally, an electric car can carpool, and mass transit (sure, let's build more of that too) can easily reach out to the suburbs. You can even telecommute, and that sipping straw of electrons makes the public transit users look like energy-guzzling planet-killers in comparison (Ooh! We all love some tasty moral superiority!)
Even if that weren't the case, there is such a concept as efficient enough. At some level, sanity factors in, and trying to raise a family while dodging needles and poop in San Francisco is enough to make some people say "enough is enough."
I'm all for spending smarter and more compassionately. San Francisco spends $240 million per year on homeless programs, or $30k/yr per individual. And it doesn't even make a dent; the local living costs are so high that $30k evaporates in the blink of an eye.
We need policies/infrastructure that encourage building up AND out to relieve this pressure and better care for the less fortunate people ... while still allowing for sustainable urban and suburban lifestyles.
Infrastructure maintenance costs are higher the bigger area you want to cover.
Making small things are rarely efficient (transformers, inverters, heating, cooling, insulation).
Moving people one-by-one more distance will always require more energy, EVs also have to carry themselves, and thus the more people you can move per trip the better. (Hurray for electric buses.)
I already telecommute (our company already works full remote).
I mean if you have problems with needles and poop, but we don't, and most cities also don't, then it's probably not because SF is a city.
Anyway. I have no problem is people want more personal/private space, better sound insulation, a garden, a pool and whatever. But those luxuries should be priced in, so it encourages building up and compact, so more people can enjoy living in nice places. (Like next to a forest, lake, on a hill, in a valley, whatever).
If you are advocating for capitalism with externalities priced in using fair (by democratic vote) and absolute/equal valuation methods, that is what I am arguing for as well.
SF doesn’t have that by a long shot. That’s the actual point.
Also, I didn’t say I had a problem with cities, far from it – I have liked living in the city in the past, and I can understand why someone would want to live in a good city. But [citation needed] on cities being fundamentally and meaningfully cheaper under the externality-adjusted capitalism model.
Urbanization can increase total living costs compared to lower-density living, for example through disease spread, crime, power density and transmission requirements, high-speed waste processing requirements vs composting opportunities, food production locality, and etc.
Whether the efficiency scales balance out in favor of a particular density or not is a mystery to me. I am just not as sure as you seem to be.
Let’s find some data that shows a TCO per capita for a well-planned/well-run suburb vs a similar city. Or, do what I’m doing and get out there and mold your local environment into what you need while letting others do the same – there’s enough space and energy for all of us here and probably >10x if we fill the Earth and Mars.
P.S. While I don’t know for sure, I suspect that the answer to efficiency vs density is: it is either a wash or a small enough difference that it doesn’t matter compared to living the life you want as sustainably as possible.
I'm also not sure, and values are always population dependent, but simply the fact that land (and nature on it) is one of the most scarce resource nowadays, it seems straightforward to say that if we price in land use compact wins over sprawl.
I agree that there's enough energy and stuff in theory to be green and live anywhere, but currently in practice there isn't. (For example just now with the PG&E blackouts the very real cost of living spread out shows itself.) At the same time you are correct that if some pandemic strikes it might be better in a log cabin, but ... for how long? Are you ready to hunt? Grow your own wheat, and so on? And HongKong seems to be doing fine, after SARS they are doing a lot of proactive stuff.
Land is not scarce. I know this because I've both surveyed a large part of the world from the air myself, and from data. Please cite data.
PG&E's failure is because of poor capital investment, bad infrastructure decisions, and lack of federal antitrust intervention into a mismanaged California-ordained private energy monopoly.
You don't have to live in a log cabin, I am not talking only of pandemics but also the mental well-being of people who want to spread their elbows a bit using the copious land available on Earth, and you don't have to hunt or grow your own wheat to live in a suburban or semi-rural place and buy food and products locally (although there is nothing wrong or crazy about hunting and growing some of your own food, if you want to... we just also have this thing called "money" that you can trade for goods and services that you don't want to provide yourself).
I'm only responding now in an attempt to get you to reconsider the frankly baseless assumptions that you are asserting as facts – the truth is, and the point is: there are ways for people to live efficiently enough in urban, suburban, and rural settings, and we should stop judging that very personal preference and instead focus our time and investments on improving efficiencies across the spectrum (and fighting always to enforce legislation that engenders more competition in every marketplace).
Former co-founder & CEO of Dropcam (Nest cam) here.
There's no way to say this humbly, but imo stuff like this is the reason that companies lose their way when they lose an empowered "buck stops here" product-oriented CEO with enough engineering chops to modulate product decisions.
I had an endless to-do list of improvements, including security enhancements like the one you suggest (but done in a way that would not impair usability, like anything with QR codes :-)).
The problem is, a string of well-meaning but amazingly risk-averse managers came in and killed the soul of the company by introducing enough bureaucracy that the team and I no longer cared to bang our heads against brick walls anymore.
If the leadership doesn't a) understand product, b) understand business, c) know/respect good engineering, or d) have "fuck you, we're doing this" authority ... it will fail in spectacular ways through a series of seemingly good short-term decisions, it's just a matter of time.
Combine product, business, engineering, and authority to lead, sprinkle in some ethics and respect for your customers/employees, and baby you've got a stew going.
This whole privacy mess in home & so-called "IoT" is a result of people who don't even know what would be required to operate ethically with such powerful technology in the first place. I believe they are mostly good people, they just don't have the mindset or philosophy to know what to do. It kinda makes me misty-eyed. They know where to find me if it sounds like some of this could help... I'd be happy to try and get the band back together again.
Oh man this sounds like my experience at google. The unlimited stream of money on our project meant avoiding risk was too easy. I feel like I could have done a lot of good for way less money but nobody was interested in new ideas from folks in the trenches.
I know what you mean. Product engineering gets weird when you remove all constraints, and you actually end up hobbled instead of empowered by the "resources".
I think if they made projects require independent profitability (after a startup period), a lot of that weirdness would go away and customers would be happier too.
I don't understand. If I were running a project with unlimited money, I'd engineer it so that it would never send data to me (it would work over LAN, VPN, and a cloud service used only to establish a direct link between the camera and the viewing device) and wouldn't be subscription based. That's ethical design. It seems to me the projects were indeed constrained, and most of the weirdness in IoT can be attributed to the core constraint: since the business model of selling crappy hardware as a loss leader to hook people on an Internet service is allowed to exist, it's very hard to compete without doing it.
Every rung you climb between client-server towards fully distributed increases software difficulty non-linearly.
It seems simple at the outset, but once you actually try to build a complex business/product like this one you realize you have to start with something simple just to get the money to fund something more complex/better.
RE: internet service loss leader model, I think it can be beat with a better product and a better model. But someone is still always going to need to pay to maintain and update software, and it seems fair to profit off of that as long as you allow for competition (& that's where I believe the law should e better protect consumers).
> Every rung you climb between client-server towards fully distributed increases software difficulty non-linearly.
That's true. In my mind, fully distributed doesn't have to be the goal. I believe the number one problem for getting people to talk to their smart devices are NATs. I imagine a cloud service responsible only for NAT punching, and all the actual communication between user's smartphone and smart device happening directly (or rather, between the smartphone and home hub). It's probably more complex in practice than I think it is, but I can't think of an obvious show stopper.
> But someone is still always going to need to pay to maintain and update software
I think this is mostly a self-inflicted problem (or rather, a problem created and then used as an additional justification for subscription models). E.g. for a lightbulb, there's only few bytes of data that needs to be transmitted over the control channel. On/off state, color, intensity - setting them in one direction, reporting in another. That + overhead of whatever communication protocol is used. Such a device doesn't need an update. There's nothing to update there. The hub might, but arguably, hubs are designed overcomplicated too. But vendors seem to like to put a whole software stack on the devices, which now creates an attack surface that doesn't need to exist in the first place - and suddenly, security updates are required.
I think I understand where you are coming from, and I've thought similarly before.
But billion-dollar companies have been made almost purely on "NAT punching". I've written the code, and it's more complex than it seems.
And RE: your lightbulb example, I love it, because it I will now use it to illustrate how even seemingly simple devices require ongoing software maintenance. Is it using a wireless protocol compatible with other devices? Does it use encryption/authentication (e.g. to keep the neighborhood hacker kid from controlling my lights)? Does the setup process require interoperation with a changing set of personal devices (phones, etc)? All of these things could require software updates, see e.g. heartbleed. And if you have a software update system, it now needs maintenance as well...
Not to mention if consumers want their hardware investment to continue paying dividends through new software features. That part should definitely be opt-in and open to competition.
But those engineers you hire to maintain your software aren't commodities. They have shifting interests, bills to pay, and boot-up time to re-remember all of the old code. Costs will be lower to keep them employed and making continuous improvements once a product reaches sufficient scale.
Competition would prove out which model is best, though, so no need to think too hard about it, we just need to improve antitrust/competition law.
You've changed my mind a bit about the update capability - I suppose any wireless protocol necessitates a software update capability because it's exploitable remotely (e.g. from outside the house), and you'll never get it bug or vulnerability free the first time.
But this then calls into question the utility of consumer-level IoT as a whole. It's nice to be able to operate devices remotely from wherever you are, but this immediately creates a very large category of problems.
> Competition would prove out which model is best, though, so no need to think too hard about it.
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced of that, for several reasons. Information asymmetry - non-tech consumers can't evaluate these products, so vendors designing bad products have competitive advantage. Thanks to recurring revenue, service-backed devices can be at much lower price points than their service-independent counterparts, and most customers are very price-sensitive. Add in surveillance and data mining, and the price can be lowered even further. User-hostile business models have a distinct competitive advantage, because they offer immediate benefits but the costs are deferred. Therefore, I don't think competition alone is going to solve it.
Being capable of changing one's mind is a great thing. Thanks for the honest conversation – that's what's great about HN these days!
We competed head-on every single day with companies that lied like it was a national pastime, and we beat them handily. I think it is because good people tend to make the best products. There's an efficiency increase from passion, and all it takes is one good leader to unlock a team of hundreds or thousands of good people. I believe it is enough to take to the bank against shady practices.
That said, I do support better antitrust laws, we need to update them for the 21st century tech oligopolies + IP-stealing/currency-manipulating nation-states.
But all it takes is one good motivated person like you or me to Make The World A Better Place (™ HBO Silicon Valley). So let's get to it...!
> In my mind, fully distributed doesn't have to be the goal. I believe the number one problem for getting people to talk to their smart devices are NATs.
Ubiquiti does a good job with this - they provide the interface to get into my equipment remotely with little setup, but don't send the data to their equipment.
I went from a stream of permanently money-scarce small businesses that had to work within tight means, to one that was small but with almost unlimited cash, where bugger all got done because there was no pressure from deadlines - why worry about making money if you're never going to run out?
I remain miffed by their recent decision to force the blue lights to on with my dropcams. I actually was able to gather critical evidence when cleaners (who were swapped out for my regular people without warning by the cleaning service) decided to search my home and commit identity theft instead of their jobs. They actually picked the dropcam up off the shelf and looked at it - getting a great, clear shot of their faces for the police - then decided it was broken and put it back down instead of destroying or unplugging it. Now, that wouldn't happen. They'd just unplug them or point them elsewhere. They even blink if I decide to look and see what's going on - a clear warning to any well-informed thief.
I miss the old Dropcam. You created something great. Sorry to see the buyers screw things up so badly.
I feel you about the lights. Ultimately, I have grown to think that users should have ultimate control over the software running on their devices. If I want a light you can't disable, it should be by designing the hardware that way ... and you're still free to use a sharpie/tape/drill to modify your own hardware.
It's a fine line balancing making things difficult for creeps vs fully empowering a homeowner/caretaker to protect their castle/family how they see fit. But freedom for users to find their balance and law to punish truly bad uses are the only stable solutions... otherwise, creeps can always just use crappy products with no protections instead and you, the regular person, get stuck with crappy restricted products.
Some poignant examples of this are the many art installations that contain Dropcams. Suddenly a bunch of them have ugly blue dots that weren't intended by the artists. Does the artist now have to visit their installations with a sharpie? It's a stupid and limiting rule change that further pushes what was once a generally useful tool into a one-trick home security pony.
I hope you'll forgive me if I suggest that one might have hoped that security wouldn't be an item on your "endless to-do list of improvements" after you've released the product. I mean, what with that whole "good engineering" thing.
That's not a very generous interpretation of what I wrote, and honestly hints at an immature understanding of good engineering and security.
Dropcam v1 was one of the most secure internet products in existence at its inception, by design, full stop.
Making things more secure is a never-ending charge, and we never stopped. Google/Nest continue to try to improve things as well, but they've been slower and more inefficient at doing so than we were in our heyday. That's why these stories never seem to stop coming. The attackers are outpacing the defenders.
Erasmus also said “What is life but a play in which everyone acts a part until the curtain comes down?”
“With all due respect”, which part are you playing right now?
My comments were not meant as logical proofs. But, I am content to say that Dropcam, as designed at launch, could likely be proven “net good” based on several popular moral axiomatic systems. That’s the best I’ve got, chum! The alternative is to convert oneself to a motionless blob, attempting to exert the least possible influence on reality unless intense logical calculation and polling of prevailing subjective moral bases has occurred first.
I choose instead to just try to do the right thing, and build cool/good stuff too. And always try to make things better, as long as you have breath. I highly recommend it over the blob strategy.
Have to admit though, I had forgotten how much fun it is to comment on the Internet!
My non technical parents set up their wyze cams by showing the qr code on their smartphone to it. I think it is just for communicating the wifi password to the camera, but it didn't really seem like a big deal for them.
My quip about QR codes was kind of tongue-in-cheek, but any step that can be eliminated should be and there are just better ways to do it. QR codes can also fail in interesting ways, e.g. bright sunlight or cracked screens.
Most QR code based setups were just transmitting wifi credentials in plain text. That's insecure, and it doesn't solve the pairing problem, only the wifi connection. There's actually a fair bit of 2-way data that needs to be exchanged to provide the best experience. And sure, you could start streaming encrypted setup information through animated QR codes, but there's better ways to do it.
Not to mention that we're talking about Wyze cam, which has been filled with hilarious(ly scary) security flaws since day one. Be careful with those things...
Probably the best UX I've seen in this area is Hue, where to add a device or confirm access to a hub you physically push a clicky button on the hub within a certain time limit.
A close second would be Apple TV, where to add a remote you hold it next to the device (presumably some kind of short-range Bluetooth thing).
Right - just to be clear my point wasn't about the security of wyze cam(security? lol), but about the ux for setup involving a qr code, which could be seamlessly extended to pairing specific devices. I'm sure you could use other means to transmit the relatively small number of bits to pair the device as well which could overcome most device limitations, for example by having a black and white flashing screen held in front of the camera (I had a watch in the 90s that could do this), or encoding messages through an audio channel.
I've got a table of a zillion different methods with myriad categories of benefits and drawbacks. And a weighted scoring system. And ... I may be slightly obsessive about this topic! :)
I think it might be a good way. OS designs are a boon for the free market too, as they separate out concerns and allow independently competitive submarkets to exist.
One potential challenge I faced myself with my DIY attempts at IoT hardware was dealing with power. I'm not an electrical engineer, and I don't trust myself enough to plug anything to mains power - and I don't trust random OH stuff you can order soldered from China either.
I think the risk adverse managers messing everything up and the angry responses in this thread are coming from the same place.
It's a result of the authoritarian lean of our current times.
The concept of freedom IMPLYING responsibility has been completely done away with. The operating concept is: adult consumers are like children, and need to be protected.
The pathology of this can really be felt when it's a CEO of creators.com complaining that he can't be bothered to use different passwords. In other words, he wants to have all the rights and privileges that come with having the highest levels of social power, but none of the responsibility. It seems he doesn't feel it's fair to be given the responsibility I've seen school children master (keeping different passwords)
That seems true. I'm a fan of empowering users, with safeguards in place that they can disable if they opt-out and know what they are doing.
For a product like this, though, you need to make sure everyone who is ever in eye or ear-shot (or will purchase it used) are considered/informed as well.
In my book, once information is equalized, be adults, go nuts.
Is it authoritarian though, in the paternalistic/patronizing sense? I view it more as abusive. Customers are viewed as children in the sense that it's trivial to just steal a lollipop from a kid, or repeatedly exploit their trust to part them with their lunch money.
Can you please specifically say what you want? I mean, how did they fail, what should be done, and how that requirement isn't authoritarian?
To be clear, if they broke criminal laws they should go to jail. If they broke civil laws they should be sued. I'm not some crazy anti-gov person, just someone who believes in personal responsibility and that our blame/victim culture is perverse.
Your post is filled with innuendos and blame. I'd suggest that if you compare a company to 'stealing a lollipop from a kid' you can provide strong and concrete examples of theft. It's a pretty damning accusation.
Also, you are comparing adults making purchasing decisions to someone stealing candy from a kid. To me that sounds like the epitome of authoritarian patronizing. I'm guessing when you say that you don't see yourself as the child, only other adults right?
Well, sure: customers are treated like children in the sense that companies correctly notice that non-tech-savvy users have no clue how to evaluate anything about a tech product (nor should they), and exploit it. Regular people can't in advance tell that a device is insecure. Regular people haven't yet learned that a device tied to an Internet service will be a paperweight in a year or two. Regular people don't understand what a botnet is, why is it a bad thing, and that their service-based IoT device is likely to be one for most of its lifetime.
My point is simple observation: vendors exploit the extreme information and understanding asymmetry on the market to sell insecure, low quality and abusive offerings. If you haven't noticed it yourself yet and need more direct evidence, follow https://twitter.com/internetofshit.
> vendors exploit the extreme information and understanding asymmetry on the market to sell insecure, low quality and abusive offerings
This is true.
Now, please tell me how this applies to the FA we are talking about? The FA is about a nest customer using an insecure and exposed password and then complaining about his nest being taken over by a hacker.
And this isn't some joe shmoe. This is a CEO. He is complaining. RTFA and you will see.
My point: he has not right to complain, his complaint is based on the authoritarian perspective that people need to be protected against themselves.
He has no giant information asymmetry which Nest exploited to hurt him. He messed up. Simple. If he can't understand how to keep passwords, he really shouldn't be a CEO, ESPECIALLY of a tech company. And here's a bigger idea, if you can't keep passwords, maybe don't use systems that need them. Just as if you can't drive drunk... maybe not drive or maybe not drink? Blaming beer companies for being abusive (which they can be) is in no way relevant to the RESPONSIBILITY people have to not drink and drive.
IF a company sells a defective and bad product, they should and will be sued. If they imply you can drink and drive. Sue. If they imply or say their product doesn't need safe passwords, sue. INAL, but this probably doesn't apply here. Which is why the guy who penned the FA is writing it. He wants to shame nest. And those who are authoritarian inclined seem to me to be backing him up. Instead of seeing the article for what I see it: A captain of industry wanting all the rights and rewards of being a captain of industry, but not having to keep the responsibility of maintaining proper passwords.
It is Apple style "we know what's best for you" authoritarianism. Multi-button mice are confusing. USB ports and headphone jacks are ugly. Nobody needs an Escape key. We'll take those away and restrict what you can do with the product to enhance your experience.
> but done in a way that would not impair usability, like anything with QR codes :-)
LOL, there was a whole lot of head scratching when someone came up with the QR-for-pairing idea. Also, wink wink, nudge nudge, when are we grabbing a beer?
The fact that this was on your list of "improvements" rather than being a minimal requirement before being willing to launch, sell, etc, is pretty damning on it's own. No need to get misty-eyed.
Sorry, but that shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem space. We entered the "IP camera" market in 2010, when all the competitor products booted a 7-year old Linux kernel with busybox and UPnP'd a port to the public internet. Admin/admin, no string escaping, buffer overflows, inadvertently indexable by Google, rooted and/or turned into botnets.
Dropcam v1.0 eliminated all of those security problems.
The only gotcha is that we required cloud storage. However, my plan for v2.0 Dropcam was to go with open-source verified builds + kill the cloud-storage requirement (but offer it optionally with e2e crypto).
If I had required that at v1, the company wouldn't exist today, and worse stuff would have taken its place. Good product engineering requires prioritization and stepwise problem-solving, not ivory tower ethics.
> open-source verified builds [...], kill the cloud-storage requirement [...] optionally with e2e crypto
In your opinion, in the current space, do you think there's room for this kind of product now? I bet most of the readers here know why these are good features if you don't like adversarial software running sensors on your home network and uploading stuff, but I also bet we're in a tiny, tiny minority in the market.
1) You get no credit with customers for security features, only blame if they get hacked. You must invest in good security engineering because you believe it is a good thing and a good long term investment, it will only cost you in the short term.
2) Unfair competition from large tech and China-based companies, in terms of pricing and incumbent advantage. (And yes, I helped create this situation by selling Dropcam to Google, and profited from it)
In order to win, you'd have to make something better in every other respect (or find some yet-unknown killer feature that average customers actually care about), sell it for the same price, beat them in price wars, and spend enough on marketing to undo the PR damage they've done to the space AND rise above the noise floor.
Doesn't Apple's HomeKit do this the best? It was designed to be secure (so much that they had to backtrack on requiring hardware encryption chips) and it works locally.
With all respect, just because the state of the market was terrible doesn’t make a more secure insecure product good for the end user. And more than take market share away from less secure cameras, nest created a great ux helping expand use to unsophisticated consumers.
We'll have to let god balance that out on the scales of morality when I reach the pearly gates someday.
There's a lot of good and bad that came out of Dropcam but I think it's been mostly good. Lives saved, murderers in jail, happy moments captured that would otherwise have been lost.
Plus, we had every intention of improving this aspect, and I'm even commenting unpaid on the internet to put as much pressure as I can on Google to follow through on that!
nest created a great ux helping expand use to unsophisticated consumers
Thanks for the compliment though. Maybe god will pardon those who create good UX. :)
> With all respect, just because the state of the market was terrible doesn’t make a more secure insecure product good for the end user.
With all respect, let us know when you (or anyone else) releases a perfect version of a product. Nobody has unlimited money and time in which to polish a product to perfection.
I'm in the throes of this right now, trying to beat a once-miserable codebase into something that that improves our customers' lives, is stable, is secure, etc. on a shoestring budget. It's a hard, wretched slog but we're doing it, one point release at a time.
This is exactly right, and way better than my reply.
Your polish can improve as you scale and get more resources. That doesn't mean there isn't a min-bar of basic security practices and ethics, but if min-bar is perfection on all counts, get ready for a long and fruitless existence...!
Nobody's asking for perfection, just something that doesn't get hacked and play pornography for 3 year olds. Nest had polish. Security took a backseat to UX, and here we are.
It's silly to call that a minimal requirement. There's nothing simple about local pairing especially when you need to be concerned about your entire market, what phones they're using, what devices they're using, and how much funding your call center has. Yours seems like a very naive, hindsight is 20/20, comment.
take your holier than thou attitude out the door. it's so easy to play an arm chair quarter back and not know the struggles people in the tranches have to go through to get features and improvements through management.
On behalf of the team, thank you very much! There was a lot left to do to make Dropcam the product we all knew it could be in the future.
The thermostat was a nice product, and that's part of what's so interesting about the backstory of all of this.
I'm sorry you had to go through the pain as well. I will try to write more at some point, and I only hope it helps somehow, even if just for future entrepreneurs.
No, believe it or not he said it explicitly on the record to Reed when he was interviewed. That's one of the reasons I agreed to respond, and then I decided to follow up with this Medium post to make sure things were ultra clear.
Per month?
https://www.unm.edu/~lkravitz/Article%20folder/metabolismcon...
It’s still helpful: even 50-70 Calories per day is 18k-25k Calories per year. At 3500 Calories per pound of fat that’s 5-7 pounds offset each year, but it’s not a panacea for someone with 100 pounds of body fat.
You can’t out-lift your fork!