> You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.
Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).
I really doubt it's that, as opposed to the maintenance cost of an extra flow to a boarding pass. Or perhaps just a perceived complexity/annoyance cost when something breaks in the desktop flow here and there.
I'd think it's only maybe 5-10% of customers at most who both use desktop over mobile to get their boarding pass and use an ad-blocker on desktop. And honestly I don't remember ever seeing an ad (even on Ryanair) when getting my boarding pass on mobile. OTOH I distinctly remember seeing many giant ads on printed boarding passes, most often on printed boarding passes brandished by other customers (usually printed in full color!). I'd think that's hugely more valuable as advertising real estate than the iota of additional data they get to collect on a few adblock users who have been forced to use mobile.
Huh, interesting -- why doesn't California have school buses? I could imagine it might be hard/unsafe in dense urban areas like SF, but otherwise, why?
That's a fair point for kindergarteners, but by 1st or 2nd grade kids in my district walked to the bus stop on the corner all by themselves just fine. Also, my district had elementary school start the earliest (and middle/high school would start later) which for some reason is uncommon but makes a lot of sense for a whole bunch of reasons and would seem to mostly solve this problem for parents who need to walk their kindergartener to the bus stop before work.
> Parents need to drop kids off before they start work.
I see a comment like this in all of these discussions and I'm always confused: did something change in the past ~15 years since I graduated from high school and school buses stopped being a thing? Where I grew up (Texas, which is generally not the most politically enthusiastic place when it comes to school funding) it was required that a school bus be available within a few minutes' walk of every student's home in the school zone. I thought this was a pretty universal part of American life based on every movie/TV show ever.
As a scientist who had to use MATLAB up until about 2013 because that's what everyone else used, it was such a relief to move to Python. It's true that you can implement a linear algebra routine in a couple fewer characters in MATLAB, but unless that's literally all you're doing, Python is much nicer to work with. The data structures in MATLAB are just a nightmare for general purpose programming, which makes things like loading and parsing data -- things that scientists often need to do -- just terrible. The fact that the notion of the "matrix" (i.e. a 2D array rather than a general ND array) is so deeply baked into everything is a huge headache (a scalar is a 1x1 matrix in MATLAB!). I'm also surprised anyone is particularly bothered by the @ operator. The asterisk for matrix multiplication seems roughly equally unheard of in nicely typeset / handwritten math (you would just write e.g. Ab for a matrix-vector multiplication with no inset operator).
Yeah, this is a large part of the reason I don't see myself using it much either -- if I'm at home watching video it's almost always on a TV screen. Also, I don't understand why it's still only supported by a couple streaming video services (none of which I personally use) -- Netflix already has Dolby surround audio in many of their videos, so shouldn't it be pretty easy to enable spatial audio in their iOS app? Well, clearly not, but I don't understand why.
Interesting, thanks -- I hadn't thought about using it for games but I could see how it might be more interesting for interactive stuff. I'm not sure if there are any iOS games that support it yet but presumably it's possible? (Didn't find anything with a quick search.)
I'm surprised spatial audio is a selling point for anyone on a product this expensive. Have you tried it? I have AirPods Pro and I spent £6 on a month of Disney+ just to try out the spatial audio feature when it came out (which already felt fairly ridiculous but what can I say, the HN comments were too enticing). I used it for 5 minutes, rotated my head around a bunch to maximize the effect, thought "hm, that's pretty neat" and then went on with my month never using it again. It really felt like a gimmick to me but I'm wondering if I'm missing something now...
I think I'd mentally adjust to the improved quality as the "new normal" pretty quickly and not get much out of it thereafter, leaving only the frustration when I couldn't have my audiophile quality. Seems like there's very little upside in it for me personally. I don't doubt that some people can genuinely sustain additional enjoyment out of it though.
Comments like this always make me really glad that I've never tried "good" audio equipment. I think music sounds great with my Sony XM3s and even my AirPods, and I don't have to travel with a DAC to experience it. shrug
Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).