Yeah I've also build a Phoniebox a couple of years ago for my kid. It has physical buttons, RFID cards or chips (some hidden in plush toys) and works very much like tonies, but with much easier access to anything you want to put on it. It's all in a wooden box including speakers. I've later extended it with a powerbank.

The article might have some points, but there is also a lot of complaining just for the sake of it.

- One the homescreen seeing the search as a clear button is useful for most users. The swipe down is just not easy to find and remember. The dots shown when swiping through homescreens is actually much clearer if you don't have so many pages.

- Same goes for the pull down search bar. It took me a long time to remember that. And then in the system settings it always took me some time to find it again. That it's the same gesture as reload in other apps made it even more confusing. Now it's right where you thumb is.

- The pulsating buttons - I haven't even seen them. And I switch during the public beta phase. Normally buttons get hidden by your thumb when you press them.

- And then yeah a lot of things look different now. We had that before when we switch to the previous design language and people were just complaining as much.

As long as they keep pushing we have a 80% chance that they haven't succeeded yet.

But of course that's only for things with positive outcomes. If it's negative Alice would start saying "we" and "I" and then come up with a solution that can again give Bob credit because of the positive outcome in fixing something.

I guess the personal vehicle is fine as long as you don't drive in traffic. Maybe you try cycling on your typical route to work to be more immersed in the traffic and all the stress it causes.

All of the presidents are elected. The bodies electing them are always part of a democratic process. Just because it's indirect doesn't make it less democratic. the president of the commission is even covered twice at it gets nominated by the council and the elected by the parliament. The parliament we voted for, the council are the head of states who might also not come from a direct democratic process.

Yeah none of them are working in my corporate network. That's not the way to piss of the IT department.

Biggest problem is with the approach of doing a revolution, while evolution is possible. Reactivity is mentioned in the article and examples are given with frameworks that would need a rewrite of anything you have in react and relearning everything for the team.

But it's really not needed - you can just use signals in react with the preact-signals package (works with preact and react and standalone) which has been created 3 years ago: https://preactjs.com/blog/introducing-signals It can even skip the virtual dom and diffing.

The issue is not React per se. Just look at what the ecosystem has to offer. You can also speed up your loading times by using preact. And if you don't like a compile step use a package like htm and tagged templates for a JSXish syntax. And then move your "store" outside of react with signals etc. There is enough innovation happening, no need to always look at the other side.

It's not like Disney World wasn't sanctioned. In the US that is. Freedom is always limited by what others decide it is.

i recognize freedom (especially as it relates to commerce) is a social construct and therefore has limits defined by society. At the same time, it does seem like in this instance at least the EU wants to have it both ways: ie it wants to be seen as operating on high-minded “principles” yet be allowed to justify fairly transparently self-interested industrial policy actions under the guise of “protection from monopolists”.

Which domestic competitors do you see them favoring with this industrial policy? Sennheiser might be the only European headphone manufacturer of consequence and I doubt they have this kind of pull.

i wasn’t intending to say that the regulations favor a specific current competitor but rather that they are intended to force apple to build in a way that favors a certain kind of potential competitor who can only operate in Europe. from a pure engineering perspective i think it’s fairly well-established that if you design, build, and test for a limited set of deployment conditions you end up with a higher quality product. which bit of wisdom apple has used decade after decade to deliver systems that delight end-users who do not relish the idea of mixing and matching and hoping the interpretation of “standards“ worked out well enough in their particular case.

German is on the list of supported languages. That can't be the reason why it's not available in Germany. Although as an Austria I must admit their German is a bit weird.