That was a different era of consumer behavior. Consumers are hyper targeted with personalized organic and paid messages. The algorithmic media ecosystem mitigates or counters complex product offerings. For example, my YouTube feed displays Apple Pro devices reviews over other lines like iPad basic. Also, purchase power acts as a natural filter.
The customer base is also so much bigger. Just before the the iMac was introduced, they were selling under half a million Macs per quarter. And that was divided up among a bunch of different models. That makes it much harder to manage production and inventory, and your development costs get spread across fewer units. With 10x more Mac sales and 100x more iPhone sales, there’s more room for variety.
Cursor is my favorite of the VS forks. Agree that it delivers better plans than others. I prefer using Claude in Cursor over CC CLI when I am heads down going through bugs. I am disappointed in how "little value" in token use Cursor provides compared to others.
On API use, I am noticing verbose output across the board. When I task it with plans it now creates more detailed task counts and tasks descriptions. It is more constrained to its directions than 4.6.
It is the rush of "wow it solved this." I should take a break and work on something else, but in the back of my mind "what else can it solve?" Then I come up with extra work and sometimes lose at the LLM casino.
It feels like every other convenience in modern life. We trade off some value for lack of human ability. Should you drive or walk or bike? In the US, most people drive and sit all day. Now we have fenced off part of our week for dedicated physical exercise to counteract physical atrophy.
> It feels like every other convenience in modern life. We trade off some value for lack of human ability. Should you drive or walk or bike? In the US, most people drive and sit all day. Now we have fenced off part of our week for dedicated physical exercise to counteract physical atrophy.
And arguably, our society has made a lot of bad choices about many "convenience[s] in modern life." For instance, cities should probably be designed to make you walk more by default, so healthy physical activity isn't turned into a chore you then have to have the discipline to do consistently.
Basically, collectively, we're stupid and unwise, picking short term convenience and neglecting the medium and long term, and we need to get better at that.
Funny you should mention that. There was a HN post about the prompt similar to this: "I want to wash my car. The car wash is 100m away. Should I drive or walk?" - Was quite difficult for even frontier models. Surely they now do better, but it was quite entertaining reading the answers.
I agree in principle, although I personally consider mental atrophy to be far more serious than physical atrophy (and I value physical fitness very high already!).
As you suggest, it's clearly to curtail free speech further; but in a way that their supporters can claim isn't fascist because 'it's the companies doing it not the government'.
We do really need non-USA based social media, stat.
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