It’s not that insincere if all the other attendees are just meeting-taking robots the end result of which will be an automated “summary of the meeting I attended for you” :)
How many people join meetings these days just to zone out and wait for the AI-produced summary at the end?
The Hobbit was specifically written to be read out loud, if I remember correctly.
Would you also suggest to the families in the 30s & 40s that listening to the popular radio shows while sitting in the living room could have been a better experience if they had just read the transcript, instead? Or that they should have been multitasking during the shows, else it was a waste of their time?
Some people just prefer to listen. I read well and I read quite quickly -- I don't know how many books I've physically read, but it's gotta be in the high hundreds at least -- but over the past ~10 years I've switched primarily to audiobooks. Rather than being something that I enjoy while I'm doing something else, I typically do something mindless with my hands (weave chainmail, cross stitch, sew) in order to give my full attention to the book.
Some audiobooks also seem to gain over the book; for instance, IMO, James Saxon's narration of "Blandings Castle" is truly excellent and gets out the most of Wodehouse.
hi loloquwowndueo, i was thinking the same thing, but then I thought why you would prefer reading a book while sitting instead of listening - is it about efficiency and that if you CAN read one should (you use the imperative) read?
I also have this view, but when I was young and an avid reader I also enjoyed radio stories immensely as my imagination was also activated. As in the past we were an species with a predominantly oral cultural transmission, arguably more 'embodied', there could be something to say for attending a theatre version in preference of a book. On the other hand, reading often is faster, but it's indirect, you translate the symbols into your imagination yourself, on the upside you perhaps train your mind more. So both have their advantages, one is not necessarily better. I notice I am often looking through a lense of efficiency and then make choices where I loose a certain experience - sitting in the dark listening to someone telling a story instead of reading can be equally wonderful.
Reading is faster - a reason not to do it! There’s a reason that rituals across time and space have had readings from time immemorial- and not just because of the cost of printing.
Especially with a work like LotR it can be very tempting to skim parts; the audiobook will just continue on, which can help you encounter passages you’d normally have skipped over.
Absolutely! I'd read LotR many times before I first read it aloud as a bedtime story season and was abashed to find how much I'd been skipping over, mostly parenthetical details of geography and world-building, while hastening in pursuit of the plot, like the holder of a big box of bonbons gorging target than savouring.
Honestly, you probably don't even take reading seriously if you're reading the book. If you're sitting on an armchair not really doing anything else, you should be reading from clay tablets, as Tolkien would have wanted.
To be fair, Tolkien probably have more in common with audiobooks and reading of works than reading them from printed pages - given his scholarly pursuits were of oral traditions.
> why is the Gmail app almost 80x the size of the native Mail app?
Apple Mail leverages libraries and frameworks already present on the device.
Google uses libraries and frameworks very likely already present on say Android, but on iOS they have to ship a gigantic runtime that implements those things the app depends on; this way they only have to write the app once for several supported platforms.
I’m just speculating by the way but it sounds like the likely reason.
You’ll notice Google Docs or sheets are equally gigantic because each also ships a copy of those enormous runtimes.
There's actually a bit more to it than that. A lot of what Apple apps actually do is hidden in frameworks made for that one specific app, which, unlike with 3rd-party applications, are part of the system, not of the app itself.
Compare the size of Safari.app versus Safari Technology Preview.app (which actually ships all the frameworks it needs).
'90s Microsoft was like early christians: harshly persecuted, only for everyone else to eventually adopt their ways. In this metaphor, emperor Constantine is probably Steve Jobs.
Harshly persecuted how, exactly? They got a slap on the wrist, still continued to ship IE as the default browser and stayed dominant browser vendor until another monopoly started to abuse its position.
The verdict significantly hamstrung their internal developer processes. Yes, IE didn't go anywhere, but the path of tight integration of web and OS was effectively abandoned for several years, and they generally toned down integration features between their products.
Which brings up another point: the total used disk space of a Windows install with Internet Explorer and Outlook Express used to be way smaller than Gmail alone is now.
I don't think that Safari should be used for comparison here since web views have a special place in the OS. Which of the other stock apps have a similar architecture?
To add to the comparisons. Protonmail is showing as 180 MB on GrapheneOS. Add in user data and cache and it's 495 MB. I don't consider myself a big email user so I am a bit appalled.
> Product Requirement: Even if the user deletes the Chrome app, the Gmail app must work to display HTML emails, the authentication screen including 2FA options, etc. Can’t rely on WebViews for security reasons.
It doesn't, that's Android Webview which is distributed separately. It may however bundle its own instance of the Chrome networking library which is a few MB itself.
For apps like Gmail and a handful of others, they are big enough that they need multiple layers of fallback. e.g. they can't just use a networking layer, they need a fallback separate implementation in case that breaks, so that they can recover. They might have 2 or even 3 options for some of the critical parts, all so that if stuff goes wrong they can as close to guarantee recovery as they can get.
Mobile is quite specific in this regard, because you don't have hardware access, network is heavily restricted, battery reduces the amount you can do, etc.
Windows 98 and Office 97 in their entirety are less than 700MB combined. How have things gotten so out of hand that a single email client needs more than an entire OS and office suite used to?
I’m sorry but ~700MB of compiled code, text, and vector graphics is a lot of assets, almost a truck load. It doesn’t look like they care about how much space they take in users’ devices at all.
I saw a butterfly get stuck to a web once. It immediately started hurling itself violently away, trying to shake itself free. The spider was not immediately in evidence.
I managed to take the web off it, but not without tearing off the part of the wing that made contact. I assume that in the butterfly's best-case scenario, that would have happened anyway. It was able to fly afterwards.
This violates Hacker News guidelines. HN explicitly asks users to be respectful and avoid personal attacks or insults. Responding with “You can’t read?” is a direct insult, adds no substantive discussion, and detracts from the conversation.
I think it might be unnecessary! Probably fine to just give more context in a comment (it’s what I did heheh).
It being 1971, it might be missing commentary on the Iran-Contras thing and the Panama invasion among others but by then the pattern the book describes was well-established.
Um. I don’t understand how Hugo is not a tool to create “ static sites generated before deployment”. I run Hugo to build all static content, check it locally, then push it via rsync.
+1, I bought YNAB back when you could - old Windows version that I would run under WINE. I used that until 2025 when I migrated to self-hosted Actual Budget (I run it on fly.io). It does everything I need.
How many people join meetings these days just to zone out and wait for the AI-produced summary at the end?
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