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The irony, for those that missed it, is Nokia did a lot to make WebKit usable on S60, thereby setting up the foundations for mobile Safari in the first place.

Nokia were allergic to ideas like decent font rendering though.


Let's cut to the chase here: the root problem is now a critical mass of the population simply won't believe the government blame for virtually any incident since false flags are now such a widely recognized concept.

The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.


Induction has always been a poor way of thinking

What?

Russia was widely blamed for blowing up the Nord Stream pipe. You would get your comments removed from here if you said otherwise. Then it turns out they didn't do it. Oooops.

We still do not know who did it as several experts in diving have claimed that the story published by the journalists is not possible and the German police investigation seems to have stalled.

Still seems like any of Russia, Ukraine or Ukrainian citizens on their own initiative could have dove it.


If the Ukrainian military did it, I think they would have taken credit. They've taken credit for lots of major assaults, so I don't think they would hide this specific one. As for the other two options, I'm not willing to speculate.

they are probably referring to NordStream likely being done by Ukrainians, when the primary suspect was Russia for a long time as they could now claim force majeure to get out of delivery contracts in Germany.

> The Nord Stream incident being a fine example.

If you know something the world doesn't know, you'd better get cracking at updating the Wikipedia article documenting the issue.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nord_Stream_pipelines_sabotage


Yeah, Apple today really do look like Nokia did in 2006, particularly their self indulgent tendencies. (If you were in Europe at the time this is far clearer - the north american cellphone market was nothing like as advanced pre-iPhone).

The N95 is a great example because the internals were superb, but the software was just so poorly conceived. S60 started in the wrong place and the more they worked on it the less it seemed like making it remotely usable was a priority.

The noise from Symbian at the time was that Nokia would get a new chip in and then come up with some lunatic scheme that involved using all the new CPU power in the stupidest way possible, causing newer versions to have even worse performance over time.

Their lunacy wasn't confined to S60 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_3650 ), they also released madness like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_7600 . It's no surprise that during this time SonyEricsson started making serious inroads on them with things like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_K750


from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS

which makes sense because they had these half button half touchscreen hybrid phones

the internet browsing features were something akin to like paid phone numbers which you'd avoid using because it was like special stuff

it wasn't first class in any way, it was perpetually stuck in the past. and as you can see, their entire business model was based on iterating on the same thing in a million ways, so there's no way they were gonna do something from the ground up to focus on a first class experience for one form factor which could support 3rd party developers etc.


> from my memory, the OS on Nokias was just fine. it was great. it just wasn't a smartphone OS

Nokia had at least three tiers of OS: Series 30, Series 40 (which had subseries) and Series 60. It was S60 which was the smartphone Symbian based one which is where they went especially nuts.

S40 was actually really good and solid, and if someone remembers the UI of a Nokia fondly it's almost certainly a S30 or S40 device. A bit basic, but for a feature phone of that era it was great. The reason SonyEricsson started gaining market share was their phones were more like improved S40 devices (like higher fidelity UIs) than Nokia's S60 lines which were . . . not.


The E61 had S60v3 and it was weird but really very usable. A device that was in many ways ahead of its time. VoIP, Webkit, fully usable IMAP email.

But Nokia smartphones were essentially shut out of the US phone market by the toxic carrier-exclusives situation and their corrupt allergy to on-device Wifi (Nokia couldn't get a major carrier to take the E61 until they repackaged it as the E62 without wifi)


There was also s80 for the 9200/9500 and the s90 family of devices that didn’t get much beyond 2005. Sad really as I worked several of the UI parts. We had a fully customisable Home Screen where you could add and remove pages, move app icons - long before iPhone or android. It all got bined due to management preferring keyboard devices over touch screens.

It was lunacy business-wise but it sure brought some color to the market and I really liked seeing what they came up with. It wasn't for me, and not for most people, of course. But now we all have a black glass slab. Does make me a bit sad and am always eyeballing new form-factors (ie cyberdeck like). Idk, it's how capitalism works, but perhaps one day technology will find a way to be more flexible and we can bring back some lunacy...

The subsection https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cvgl73pxgndwt?post=asset%3A5d6... is ridiculous.

"Cyber experts believe these systems were poorly protected - but that's not the point" is the actual subheading.

Yes, it's the point. Lots of people have been rightly saying all this stuff was inadequately secured for many years and this promotion of the idea of perfect security being even possible is a major problem.

The real story here, unsurprisingly, is government website was poorly operated and got hacked.

"This was just the latest case of AI agents ignoring laws around how to safely access online information and perhaps the most serious yet given the information was government controlled."

So who was actually running the agent? Was it sandboxed? These people, and many apparently in these labs, that believe if you just tell the agent in English what the rules are then it should follow them are at best utterly naive, and at worst deliberately dangerous.

But the fact these governments making the noise are the ones promoting mandating everyone giving up their information to be then stored so incompetently, while they point fingers around at everyone else is just beautiful. And then deploying midwit armies to tell people what to think about it . . . the AI takeover can't happen soon enough.


I completely agree. The govt IT vendor is at fault here since it seems the data was just unprotected.

If you can’t stop openai from accidentally, or at least non-maliciously, accessing my private info.. then you definitely can’t stop the bad guys!

The point is moot anyways. All info about everyone is out there for the taking now by a half-competent AI prompter. What do we do about that is the real question?


> The point is moot anyways. All info about everyone is out there for the taking now by a half-competent AI prompter. What do we do about that is the real question?

It's like filing your gov tax return in a five eyes country: you guys actually know the answer already, just save me the trouble. But we have to act like they haven't been spying the whole time.

If we actually distributed the benefits of mass surveillance and privacy invasion (and now add wilful copyright infringement) then it would be enormously less objectionable.


there can be more than one side at fault

Exactly, the whole fence analogy is ridiculous. A better analogy would be an open door inside a public building and saying: "there were no signs allowing access to that door"

'She was asking for it' isn't a valid defense and this isn't either.

So this is the new line around state led irresponsibility? That pointing out they're irresponsible is defending rapists?

Come on. If "AI Agents" (scare quotes) could do it then in practice anyone could have been doing this the whole time and no one would have known.


I agree that the state is irresponsible here - if it's bad enough to be a huge deal when an agent does it, it's a huge deal.

With that said, I do think there's an important distinction here, which is that we (hopefully) get to _choose_ if the systems we build will pursue this kind of behavior.

I think most people would agree that a big point of social training (school, parenting, etc) is to inculcate a sense of what's acceptable and not in society. Here it seems like we're letting the agents that we've created create havoc and then we're providing a smoke screen by blaming the victim.

IMO this is a 'for whom does the bell toll' kind of collective moment and we shouldn't be laundering this kind of agentic behavior.


If someone forgets to lock their door that suddenly doesn't make it legal to break into their house and steal their shit.

The same principal applies to government sites. If something is poorly secured and adversaries are using it to steal stuff then there are avenues to report it and get it fixed up.

>But the fact these governments making the noise are the ones promoting mandating everyone giving up their information to be then stored so incompetently,

The governments in these cases are bought by the very people you're defending. They're using it as a convenient proxy because they know people like you won't look behind the curtain and see corporations pushing this shit so that they can steal freely and just point elsewhere.


Yes, but if you leave your door open then it is only tresspassing, not breaking and entering.

No, that is false and depend on how breaking and entering is codified. Some states here in the US codify it as any unlawful entry into a building, others require minimal force to qualify.

Looks like superb hardware, and contrary to many others the use cases this is designed for look actually worth it. "AVP but lighter and cheaper" or "looks designed for trains or planes" . . . well, obviously.

The key problem is it's Meta. People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware, and the way they dealt with Oculus users was just grimy. From basically any other company this would be a very welcome device. Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first, because there's no such thing as a killer product good enough to overcome this hurdle.


People said the same thing about Meta Muse.

HN constantly under-estimate how much the mass forgives a company as long as they release a cool product (barring a few holdouts that really don't matter to 3B DAU company)


I dont thibk privacy conscious people are using muse, Im not.

people don't care about privacy; every post on snowden does well here but it's a fart in the wind to the general public

Is Muse popular?

Extremely. It's been top of the App store charts since it came out in the US.

Almost like it is a well funded marketing campaign.

"Everyone loves Meta Muse now, it is organic growth. My social media feed told me so!"


Have you tried it? It's pretty good!

No, I try to avoid products that continuously show a lack of respect for their users.

That means nothing, see

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49662990

> I spent $220 on Google app ads. 60% of the installs were robots


It also tops Apple App store. Any similar tidbit about installs being bots for Apple?

don't trust this we've spent hundreds of dollars without any effect whatsoever in the statistics

My point is not the money spend but that bots not only create traffic on web sites but also app stores



I went to set up, it asked for email access.

Nope.


Then don’t give it email access

That's the whole purpose. It wants to pretend as if it was you, online.

Anything it does, you are responsible.


i asked this in different thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49816481

anyone know whats going on with muse. twitter has gone crazy with fake things ppl've supposedly achieved like getting airline to refund 4k, negotiating 45k furniture to 5k, booking flights for 20 dollars. These are the same ppl that were hyping openclaw, not sure what happened to that. and how muse topping charts. Its all befuddling to me.


Well, Muse is essentially OpenClaw as a service for the general population so that tracks.

but openclaw was flop. Not many ppl using it after the initial hype.

What's cool about giving all your life's data to Meta Muuuuse?

> Zuckerberg needs to fix the company first

First he needs to fix himself


Impossible.

Why? Does his model not get firmware updates anymore?

I was going to say. It's not 'the company', it's him. He has majority voting rights on everything

>People don't even trust other people near them to use Meta hardware,

Video, showing how random Meta employees don't like slightly creepy stranger obviously using Meta glasses to record them:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHKhYL3is5o

Meta allegedly took down the video when it was uploaded to their own platforms.


Hardware looks good except the FoV is really bad, a huge downgrade compared to the Quest 3.

Zuckerberg needs to fix Zuckerberg first. Meta is going to remain as it is, otherwise.

I hate Meta with a passion but I think the real problem is not embracing Web XR and an open ecosystem. I love the Meta Quest 3 in terms of hardware but I haven't put the Quest on in 6 months because I don't play games so there is so little content. This solves nothing in terms of what I don't like about VR. The headset weight was no issue at all for me. Then trying to develop with the unreal engine and the Quest 3 was a complete joke. The best thing I seen in VR was the unreal engine VR demo. Everything else looks like a cartoon after that. What is the point of building this nice hardware and then a metaverse that isn't even up to 90s POVRAY standards. Like focusing on building a better web browser without the web.

Honestly, I think at this point in order to fix Meta Zuckerberg needs to go. People will never trust a company with him in charge, without him they could start to rebuild trust with people.

> Alternative possibility: Is it that people are using AI to craft their replies? Also yucky.

Or they have OpenClaw using claude to karma farm, for . . . reasons.

The amount of absolutely bizarre comments you get on here these days is nuts. It always used to be a bit special, but this year is something else.


At this point it should be clear that Anthropic are determined to create the doomsday scenario as the most idiotic "I told you so" gotcha in history.

The entire m/o of Montreal cops is to act as bait to raise money from fines.

If they haven't made enough from fines for a particular time window they all start messing with the traffic to get people to drive over reds in frustration, or get pedestrians to cross against the light. I've seen them leave people at intersections for over five minutes trying to do this.

Never seen it taken to such an extremely obvious level anywhere else, along with their bizarrely over the top body armour for what is in reality a very safe place.


Your Gimp Agent is ready.

The astonishing thing with the Halo franchise is that 343 kept being given chances to go again, and again, when it clearly just wasn't working. By the time they get round to releasing a great new Halo people that loved the original will be taking out their pensions.

It cannot be understated the extent to which the console industry, including third party publishers and devs, needs Sony and Microsoft to both stay competitive. In that light the drastic moves being done at MS are long overdue, but maybe not sufficient. It's also an open question if consoles (outside of the Nintendo universe, which is a very different audience) have a future at all.


Halo used to be what everyone wanted (both to play and dethrone), but now it's sitting in the corner eating glue. Moving it under Activision is certainly an extreme measure, but if it means everyone who touched on it in the past 15 years can't anymore, I'm listening.

Well now activision gets to make Call of Halo so we’ll see how that goes!

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