Can shops not just embed Schema/JSON-LD in the page if they want their information to be machine readable?
Readit Newsthrowaway_20357 commented on Show HN: CommerceTXT – An open standard for AI shopping context (like llms.txt) commercetxt.org/... · Posted by u/tsazan
throwaway_20357 commented on Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges news.bloomberglaw.com/ban... · Posted by u/nreece
Rather than taking their lead and improving the product, they just sat there with the exact same product for like 10+ years. It was outrageous.
I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
As soon as your product is successful, it will be cloned by dozens of Chinese companies and dumped on the market everywhere. Any update you make from there on out will immediately be folded into all those products selling for 10% what you do. In a couple years, they'll all be better than yours, and still way cheaper.
So you have to do the Roomba thing or the GoPro thing, where you iterate behind the scenes until your thing is amazing, release it with a big Hollywood launch, get it turned into the noun and verb for your product category and the action that it does.
But then you have to do what those companies didn't do: Fire everybody and rake in as much cash as possible before the inevitable flood of clones drowns you.
I have a few really good hardware ideas, but I don't believe I could ever market them fast enough and far enough to make it worth spending the R&D to make them happen.
> I think that this is actually the only viable strategy for a hardware product company in the current world.
Isn't there also the "premium" route? Charge ~3x the price of your Chinese competitor but provide a product that:
* is well designed
* can claim to be (at least partial) domestic manufacturing
* prioritizes repairability, offering a solid warranty, long-term software updates, and spare part availability
* uses high-quality materials to ensure longevity and refuses to compromise customer safety for company profit
If society no longer values these qualities, then we don't deserve better.
What metrics are you using to label it as non-competitive?
Energy prices? Unit labour costs? Pisa Scores? VC Investments as percentage of GDP? Number of IPOs? Taxation of Income? Punctuality of public transport?
> But also their cars can cost too much. They're doing a lot of sharing with Ford. Take for example the T7 platform. Why pay VW prices for a Ford?
Do you have more details? From what I gather as an American from 5 minutes of Googling is that Ford sells a van in Europe that's a re-badged VW T7, but it's not like VW is selling Ford stuff.
As far as I understand, the VW Amarok is based on the Ford Ranger, the VW T7 Transporter (their Commercial vehicle) is based on the Ford Transit Custom. The T7 Multivan and California are still built on their own VW platform.
A story from a german town:
We have an 200 year old bridge, which can't be used anymore.
It's a small bridge only about 100m long and 5m high i would guess.
The state owned railroad wants to replace it. Everybody agrees. Local people are happy. They simple want to build the new one right next to the old one and then take the old one down.
But still in spite of everybody agreeing it took 20 years!! to get the permit.
They have finally started construction 5 years ago and the costs have doubled multiple times and are now in the hundreds of millions.
They say that hopefully in another 5 years from now they might be finished with construction. For all those years the locals have to take a long detour because the bridge can't be used.
I have recently read how in china they finished the tallest bridge of the world in a 3 year construction and the cost was less than our little bridge here. After hearing about this i realized how doomed we are. We have regulated our selfs into a total standstill. I can understand if we are maybe 10-30% slower due to better environmental protection, but if me are slower and more expensive by a factor 10, then we are just not competitive at all. This reads like satire but it is actually happening.
It seems a lot of blame is put on regulation when there is also a lack of a "can do attitude" or a sense or urgency that procedures that might have been okay to take a couple of years in the past have to happen much more quickly nowadays.
throwaway_20357 commented on Creative Technology: The Sound Blaster abortretry.fail/p/the-sto... · Posted by u/BirAdam
One of the major contributors to Soundblaster's decline was DirectX.
Before DirectX, games and multimedia applications were designed to support a handful of cards, such as Soundblaster, Borland, Turtle Beach, and Ultrasound. There were no unified drivers, no standard interface, etc. A few middleware programs, such as Miles Audio, began to appear to manage multiple types of cards, but this was done at the application level.
With DirectX, integrated cards and various SB clones were supported out of the box as long as they had Windows drivers.
Very quickly, users realised that the built-in clones and cards were just enough for most uses.
Especially given the appalling quality of PC speakers at the time (I'll never forgive you Packard Bell).
Borland => Roland
throwaway_20357 commented on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series? · Posted by u/stephenheron
Cinebench points per Watt according to a recent c't CPU comparison [1]:
Apple M1: 23.3
Apple M4: 28.8
Ryzen 9 7950X3D (from 2023, best x86): 10.6
The Apple CPUs also beat most of the respective same-year x86 CPUs in Cinebench single-thread performance.
[1] https://www.heise.de/tests/Ueber-50-Desktop-CPUs-im-Performa... (paywalled, an older version is at https://www.heise.de/select/ct/2023/14/2307513222218136903#&...)
The previous post in this entry is even more impressive!
Very condensed tl;dr: winter games had a DRM that makes the game perform poorly if you enter wrong code; most of the cracks (including an "official" crack from 1996) skip it wrong and therefore you have a broken game; that includes gog.com version.
This person actually released a "patch" for gog.com version of the game.
I really like how well he explains the details and his "Sidebars" describing some core functionality of the underlying architecture. Link to that: https://mrwint.github.io/winter/writeup/writeup.html
I'm glad for any initiative that leads to less crap reaching the markets that is either dangerous or has a shelf life of a few months before breaking down. The EU as a whole will become even less competitive if we don't re-gain some level of quality awareness and place quality at the center of the things we consume and produce.
This should not be understood as anti-China but should apply to all products on the EU market. China has some well-respected quality-conscious consumer brands (e.g. Hifiman, Fenix Lights, DJI, Anker, Govee...) but it seems a lot of smaller companies there put easy revenue over any concerns for quality.
If something is not remotely up to standard, do a return. I know it's bad for the planet, but it is rather painful for them and probably only stick there is.
It is even worse for the planet when scammers keep flooding the market with low-quality products, a majority of people become accustomed to low quality and short replacement cycles, and the minority who cares about quality and product safety has to go through the returns process today but has no high quality options left anymore tomorrow as there is no longer a market for them.