Not OP, but I have a Hey account and I really enjoy it. The screener feature is worth the price alone IMO. The biggest challenge for me was having to re-conceptualize email after switching over since Hey doesn't use traditional email terminology (i.e. "paper trail" vs "archive").
The amount of inbound email I get has dropped immensely due to the screener and my inbox ("imbox") is so much easier to manage with Hey, IMO.
It's important to point out that while these trials appear promising, there has never been a vaccine developed for any coronavirus before that eradicated the illness in humans[0]. Influenza vaccines, for example, work to fortify the immune system from various strains of influenza, but they do not prevent illness. There's a lot of political and commercial pressure to make this happen, but the reality is that this is an incredibly hard problem to solve and we may be dealing with COVID-19 in some form for the foreseeable future.
> which org does exist purely to make the world a better place?
I think the idea that one organization existing to make the entire world a better place is utopian, but governments are much better equipped to bring positive change than private companies are because citizens are the direct beneficiaries of government resources. For example, a municipal government’s purpose is to administer public services, and a municipal government answers to its citizens. A private company, on the other hand, has a fiscal duty to its shareholders.
I’m not arguing that any organization is perfect because such an organization does not exist, and that’s true for companies and governments.
> how are those orgs doing in terms of impact and scale?
Let’s use various governments response to the coronavirus outbreak as an example. The US government opted to defer much of it’s responsibility to private companies and state governments, which has resulted in less testing, less access to PPE, and more reported deaths than any other country. Testing hasn’t scaled, and there have been numerous reports of corruption and interference in the medical community, some of which was alleged to have come directly from the White House.
Contrast that response with countries like Taiwan, who moved quickly to provide necessary resources and communicate effectively to mitigate the transmission of the virus.
The US has operated one of the most private-industry focused responses to this outbreak, and we’re likely to see 3k deaths per day by June. That’s a 9/11 death toll every single day.
How much have you read on the exploitative history of company towns[0]? There are some really good reasons why people are skeptical of a private company coming in and trying to reshape the foundation of a community, particularly when that company happens to be Google.
Sure, there's something idyllic about the vision of a community driven by technology as a first-class citizen, but let's be real here: Google doesn't exist to make the world a better place, it exists to make money. Full stop. Some of what Google does may happen to improve quality of life for some, but they're also happy to do things like permanently lock people out of their accounts for TOS violations with no recourse, causing major disruptions some of for their users.
And then when they've decided that a project is no longer worth pursuing, they just kill it. How would you resolve the scenario where Google builds this smart city and then decides to bail on it? What happens to the people living there? Does the city of Toronto pick up the tab to keep it going? Google's mentality is fundamentally inconsistent with projects that require long-term stability, because not everything makes the kind of money that search ads do.
You really want that company dictating how the community should operate? I'll pass.
I felt the same way the first time I used go, but I came to realize that languages like go really force developers to think about details that languages like ruby don’t care as much about, like handling nil.
Sure, you can’t move quite as fast in go as you can in ruby, but you also get the benefit of not having to deal with errors like “undefined method foo for nil:NilClass” in production, which is nice.
Nintendo is a well-established company with a solid platform for its Switch that sells millions of units. They've been doing this for a little while longer tbf.
I get the sense that "shifting focus" means that Magic Leap were so focused on the hardware that they didn't really think concretely about bringing a viable platform to market, or something like that. I just don't understand how a company raises that kind of money and gets totally exposed during a financial crisis like this. Did they really raise that much money without a concrete go-to-market strategy?
I have a conspiracy theory that Apple redesigns the form factor every few years so that the "gotta have it" people are forced to upgrade to the latest and greatest device, and those with last gen's model feel that they need to keep up with the Joneses.
edit: I think this is a very real, but subconscious aspect of Apple culture and it exists across all of the product lines. Phones just happen to be one of their biggest products.
There’s typically a large outdoor projection screen a few stories tall, and each car usually gets a set of speakers that rests on their front side windows. Although these days I bet more are moving to Bluetooth or something like that.
Agreed, this looks like a classic example of "correlation != causation".
It seems like this argument taken to it's final conclusion would be that startups gravitate towards cities with better transit than those that don't, which isn't the case given the Austin and San Jose examples.
This isn’t true. Numerous countries have public healthcare systems that service the public successfully, like Singapore.
Sure, you can pay to access the private system, which is a nominal amount compared to what we pay in the US.
The US ranks among the worst of the first world nations in terms of access to and quality of healthcare[0]. Just look at our hospital borne MRSA infection rates.
The idea that the US delivers consistent, quality care across the nation is laughably false.
I can’t honestly give you that comparison because I’ve never used a thinkpad long enough to get to know it. I’ve been Mac-only for 8 years now, but I’m looking around to see if the community decides on a solid MBP replacement of my old MBP dies.
IMO The current MacBook design iteration has mostly been a disappointment. The hardware quality has materially worsened over the previous generation, with numerous reports of keyboard, screen, and speaker issues. They sacrificed far too much in order to achieve the thin form factor. The touchbar is also a terrible joke.
I’ve had two current-gen MBPs through work and both of them have completely convinced me against buying my own. They’re both so inferior to the design of the previous generation.
The amount of inbound email I get has dropped immensely due to the screener and my inbox ("imbox") is so much easier to manage with Hey, IMO.