> ... VHS players rapidly became throw-away items – eventually nobody really cared if they only lasted a year or two.
I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.
> The saddest part is that both the Alexa and Apple walled gardens spent years constraining users from integrating with other ecosystems, but now they are all racing to give data to 3rd-party LLMs like OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini, which can ... integrate with other ecosystems via APIs, MCP servers.
That reminds me of an announcement maybe about a year(?) ago, when people on the internet were making a huge deal out of ChatGPT integrating with Wolfram Alpha like it was this game changer, and I just remember thinking... we already had this with Siri over a decade ago, with no LLM middleman necessary, until Apple decided to kill it and start integrating their "machine learning" into all their products around mid 2010s.
I guess I just don't share the sentiment that giving every child in a classroom unfettered access to content designed to distract them while a teacher is trying to teach the class is a good thing. I'm having difficulty understanding why you'd need to be convinced that it isn't.
I still don't understand why they were ever allowed in the first place. I went to public school in the 00s and if you got caught with your phone out in class, it would be confiscated until the end of the day. Repeat offenders would need their parents to come up to the school to get the phone back.
Can HN get rid of the light gray text on light background please? It is annoying and user-hostile. I shouldn't have to squint to read a comment just because I arrived here later than those who think they deserve a better reading experience than I do.
> STIR/SHAKEN is already required for VOIP providers
I'm not convinced that STIR/SHAKEN even works properly. Recently, I migrated a DID from one VOIP provider to another. I set the outbound caller ID on the new provider, and it was showing up Verified with a checkmark to mobile devices before I had even submitted the port request to the old provider.
> There is no physical or mental disability preventing people using modern technology.
Judging by the amount of insufferable "Got it! Got it! Got it!" modals, pop ups and other bullshit in "modern" technology, the apps themselves are the disability - wasting time and getting in the way of doing the thing the user is actually trying to accomplish.
I don't know if I'm losing my marbles, but I don't ever recall a time growing up when my family (or anyone else I knew) were buying a new VCR every year or two.