scarabic @ scarabic @lemmy.world

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2,766

Joined

2 yr. ago

Honestly I think they suffer a little from early-mover disadvantage.

“Cheap Chinese” and all the associations that come with that is a little reductive in this case. Roborock vacuums are not actually cheap - they are extraordinarily well-made, featureful, and a good value compared to iRobot.

Decades ago, iRobot probably spent millions in R&D just to arrive at navigation algorithms that were worse than what you can get with open-source libraries today. They also spent the marketing dollars to convince people these robots were safe and effective. They weren’t always, so there were some ups and downs in that.

Nowadays the supporting technologies are all much more advanced (and cheaper) and the market for these robots has been created already and is very robust. Companies like Roborock just have to come in and build a good product and they’ll see much faster returns than iRobot did for all those years. They can go straight to lidar, which was probably prohibitive for iRobot for many years, leading iRobot to invest heavily in other technologies which are now a generation behind.

So in addition to their decades of tech legacy. iRobot is burdened with the expectations of longtime investors who want a big cashout, just as they are getting eaten alive by all this new competition. They pinned their hopes on a big exit and are now holding the bag. It’s not surprising that this all left them in trouble.

setting up companies just to be bought by mega corps

iRobot was originally founded all the way back in 1990 and have sold quite a lot of Roomba vacuums, advancing innovation in home automation along the way. I don’t think anyone can ever say that they set up this company for a quick flip corpo pump and dump.

I can’t argue with the notion that we’re worse at finding information through other means. I’d just say that’s the way times change, though.

I’m reading Henry Huggins to my son right now and in it, a boy needs to find out how to take care of a fish he’s bought. He waits for his dad to come home in order to ask him, and when dad doesn’t know, they go on a trip to the library. The librarian has a little trouble figuring out where the right book might be, and ultimately can only find him one that he needs adult help to read.

And that’s a success story for those times.

While we’re certainly worse at things like that these days, we’re better off in other ways that more than compensate IMO. It’s still good to know how to resort to books, but I think it’s romantic to bemoan the options for learning nowadays (not that you are doing that).

Good points.

I do think It’s been a longer road to where we are than most people realize. Conservative talk radio and Christian AM radio had been peddling disinformation, outrage, and conspiracies for decades prior to the Internet. That really paved the way for today’s bullshit, and the prevalence of podcasts in the conservative media wackosphere helps show that.

I think his point is that the more people conflate their social media algorithms with the internet, the less able they become to do some basic research.

I guess that didn’t come through very clearly for me. Does using Instagram actually harm people’s Googling skills? This is a bold claim, and while interesting, was not founded on any evidence. I could tell he’s concerned this might be the case but he didn’t have any particular knowledge of this to present. Which is odd, because he typically has extensive knowledge about what he’s presenting.

It was a bit of an odd video for him. That’s fine. He’s more than earned the right to the occasional weird editorial.

I genuinely do love this guy.

When I watched this though, I had to think: back in the days of television, wasn’t it even worse? There was nothing you could do to influence what was on. We literally called what was on programming ffs.

I was also a little unimpressed by the radio parts shopping example. Is he really saying that instead of engaging in some feed scrolling while you’re waiting to be called in the doctor’s waiting room, that you should go on a mission to repair some electronics? There’s project time and there’s entertainment time and they ain’t the same.

I only experience this at Costco and my theory is that they just check that it’s a receipt from today, and that it is about the right length for your size of cart. On top of just making sure you have a receipt at all, this would make it harder to walk out with a pirate cart. Plus there’s just an overall deterrence because you don’t really know how much they are checking. Maybe every 10th person gets a real look-over.

He’d have to first remove Trump’s cock.

I take this as a sign that it genuinely still works to block ads and hasn’t sold out and become malware like those others that used to be popular.

Remarkably pedestrian photo for a scam. And 29yo seems old for a fantasy girl too.

I guess they understand that it’s older guys who have the money, and even those guys know they’ll never make it with an 18yo.

I forget who said this recently but maybe we should dial up food aid around the world so that no one has to eat fucking bats and cause the next pandemic.

This is why Darmok is peak sci-fi. It discusses what happens when species can’t communicate with one another. It even works within the in-show explanation of the universal translator: the Tamarians don’t just use different vocabulary and syntax. They have an entirely different language model.

Thoughts? Frankly, none.

I don't mean to argue but... where does that link show that 50% of spending is government spending?

What I see there is: Medicare 21% and Medicaid 18%, which sum to 39%.

If we apply that 39% to this country comparison chart, the US goes to the bottom of the list.

The real point here is that the US spends more for less. I just wouldn't phrase it as "the US government" next time because, even if what you just said were correct, you'd be undercutting your point by half if you focused on the government.

That was genuinely pulled out of my ass. Not a benchmark comparison. It's just my perception that cards only get incrementally better each year, but "this year's card" is always proportionally much more expensive for what you get. Few games actually demand the very latest and greatest, so I don't know why people would ever pay the premium for the latest and greatest.

You’re saying that all backlit LCDs are projectors?

Sometimes a product winds up in late-stage enshittification before its sector is fully developed. Just as the thing it does is beginning to fully explode, it begins to aggressively harvest its brand value. They miss the big wave, and everyone asks what happened. That’s one disadvantage in moving early. You also hit enshittification early.

Yeah I tried a lot of different clients and landed on this one for the long haul. It has held up well in the months since then.

Fuck him for taking anything from Tolkien’s legacy for his evil fucking purposes.

For years now the prices on this year’s latest cards are so high that I don’t know who buys them. I can afford to spend $1000 but I never would when I can probably get 85% of the performance for $250.

I’m wondering if he spent days unconscious after some cardiac event, before finally dying.