>This theory doesn't work very well, because there are lots of places where new construction is entirely uncapped (politicians are desperate for the new property tax growth), and prices still don't fall there

Can you give an example of such a place?

When you have market power, your behavior has to be held to a higher standard. Apple has huge amounts of market power in the US cell phone market. It is totally clear to any reasonable observer that they are using that market power to dissuade people from purchasing Android devices via the green bubble system.

"Making a product that people like and use" is abusing market power?

How does Apple abuse this power in the US but not EU with no differences in the product?

> "Making a product that people like and use" is abusing market power?

This is a very one-sided framing of the situation and leaves out quite a few factors.

People aren’t just buying Apple products because they like them. They’re being forced to buy Apple products to stay in the “in” group. They face exclusion by peers due to Apple’s dominance in the geo and in certain demographics.

As I understand it, iMessage is not dominant in the EU, so the market conditions are quite unlike each other.

> They’re being forced to buy Apple products to stay in the “in” group. They face exclusion by peers due to Apple’s dominance in the geo and in certain demographics

So, uh, factors that have zero to do with Apple are evidence that it is… abusing… the… market…?

Are you auditioning for Apples’ defence team or something?

What's the state of the art in run-it-yourself TTS? I haven't seen anything that even comes close to what ElevenLabs is doing

I converted a book to audiobook a couple of months ago using the tts code here: https://github.com/coqui-ai/TTS

Wasn't as good as eleven labs, but it had enough options that I found a voice that I liked to listen to.

>ALL simulated voices sound like some real person somewhere

By the same logic, all simulated faces look like some real person somewhere, but I wouldn't expect to simulate a face that looks like Brad Pitt and then use it in a TV commercial

> I owe nothing to Morgan Freeman just because I sound like him

What if a company chooses you as a voice artist largely on the basis that you sound like Morgan Freeman?

Is it a case of (a) they like Morgan Freeman's voice as a general preference (and therefore want someone who has a nice-sounding voice such as Morgan Freeman's for features such as how it sounds smart, deep, engaging, I don't know) or (b) they want someone who sound like Morgan Freeman to somehow represent to listeners that it's Morgan Freeman's voice?

what percentage of users would you estimate are interested in choosing or writing a user style sheet?

A surprising amount, actually. Mobile phones rezoom and reflow text and content automatically, and if you click reader mode, take over presentation entirely.

I don't agree with the idea that all CSS should be banned, but the pixel-perfect designs, that seem to come from Photoshop, are definitely annoying because they have rarely been tested on anything but what the designer had lying around. Have a device with a different scale factor? A phone with a non-iPhone screen ratio? Perhaps you dare use a browser that shows scroll bars by default? Good luck getting use out of any of those over-designed marketing websites.

I use tree style tabs so my computer has a 1920x1080 resolution, but not the entire width of the screen is available to websites. I've had to collapse the side panel repeatedly because some websites just couldn't deal with the idea that a desktop browser had a resolution that wasn't full width. I'll take on of those Motherfucking Websites over the marketing nonsense any time.

Except that the mobile browser does all that reflowing and resizing at the direction of CSS (its own fallback CSS in the absence of supplied applicable CSS).

Restricting CSS to any degree is in no way a solution here. What you really want is for people producing websites to bother understanding CSS and how to properly direct the design in a device-independent manner. Because CSS is fully capable of doing so at this point.

Mobile browsers do all kinds of special tricks that you need to manually disable. text-size-adjust is one of those properties that was added long after browsers artificially resized fonts to be larger than specified by CSS (and is still considered experimental from a standards point of view).

I wouldn't trust websites to apply my phone's font size the same way browsers do. Websites that do override the zoom factor often end up with huge fonts on my phone because I have the font size turned down (what's the point of a 6" slab of glass if you scale up the text so you get the same amount of information as on a 3" screen?).

The more power you give to CSS, the more power you give designers like this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/68936634/how-to-ignore-t...

What percentage?

I would estimate a percentage far closer to ZERO than even ONE percent.

Something like 20% of users use adblockers and that takes a fair amount of effort for regular folks. So, right off the bat, we're talking << 20% as a starting point because it's much harder than using an adblocker extension.

To be able to CREATE a user style sheet that can apply to arbitrary websites without making them look like ass would be very difficult. Unless, of course, one WANTS all websites to look like ass.

I guess, somewhere, there's a nice stash of ready-to-go css that folks can apply (using developer tools or an obscure extension) on their browsers? I don't know. I never looked. But that would involving a lot of fussing I can't imagine normal folks doing that at all.

"User agent" is the more important one. Allow the browser to deal with the system it's presenting on (mobile vs desktop, for example).

"top 10 shareholders" is quite a specific class of shareholders

It's similar to the class of shareholders that have disclosure requirements (such as owning more than 10% of the shares).

Perhaps but the standard NFT is a URL encoded in the chain. Yes this is as absurd as it sounds.

It seems to me that cryptocoin adjacent things somehow attract well meaning people who just don't understand what parts of the technology are critical to its functionality. Maybe they understand one use case for a signature but don't really understand what signature is and more importantly what it isn't.

And sadly enough - several cryptocoins themselves are also this way.

I used to think cryptocoins were truly revolutionary. But the tech space is so rife with abuse, theft, scams that it doesn't feel worth it.

People get upset when you do this because storing data on-chain is, possibly, infinitely expensive, since you can never get rid of it.

>since you can never get rid of it

if you're an actual believer in NFTs, isn't that kind of the point?

> The whole point of laptops is portability.

Many people want portability, but also want to use external displays at home or at the office .

I think an important difference, for me, is that at a certain point the chest of drawers is finished.

Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.

I can muster motivation to try really hard on something that has an end point. But the idea of maintaining that kind of motivation and focus on a project that just goes on and on and on is, for me, near-unimaginable. You could pay me a million dollars a year and I think I would still really struggle with it. It's something I think about a lot and struggle with, because I have certainly had colleagues who seem to be able to maintain that level of craft on software projects.

> I think an important difference, for me, is that at a certain point the chest of drawers is finished.

> Software - or at least, the kind of software I have worked on in my career - is never finished. It is a neverending ship of theseus.

Totally agree. I've done several rants on HN about the software industry's inability to declare their products "done" and moving on. Every product that we complain about becoming "enshittified" should have been declared "done" and developers pencils-down years ago.