> If you’re doing this type of accusation [...] odds are you’re never coming back. [...] Crashing out and waging war on the board will lead to that outcome.
...one exception comes to my mind, and it's Steve Jobs. Probably a total outlier case, but, still.
It Jobs a long time to come back, though, and it looks like he had to prove himself (as a businessman) in other ways while he was in exile. The board seems to have been filled with different people at the time it came back. It's probably much harder to come back under the same board with the same people, and it doesn't sound like Jobs was an exception to that aspect.
If the outer screen has dimensions X by Y, then you unfold it to have the inner screen with dimensions 2X by Y, which cleanly permits side by side apps at the original dimensions of X by Y. This is true for any ratio between X and Y.
If the user isn't going to be multitasking, then the app needs to additionally support the widescreen dimensions of 2X by Y, and the portrait orientation of Y by 2X. Both of these are so drastically larger overall that aspect ratio is a barely-relevant part of the UI layout problem, because nobody wants every button and text label to be double the size (which would mostly defeat the benefits of having the larger screen for anything other than multitasking).
The inside screen, when divided in two vertically, along the fold line, is exactly the same dimensions as the outer screen. Pretty much by definition. Any folding phone, of any aspect ratio, can run two apps on the interior display side by side.
The issue of the internal screen being the same aspect ratio as the external when rotated is completely separate.
which they have to be anyway, to support normal iphones and maybe ipads and in many cases a cackle of Android phones too. (but I still think this is brilliant design)
Good list. And if you support both portrait and landscape, you need to support twice that, and you need to be able to switch on the fly.
But for the apps that don't currently support both orientations, it's possible they don't have support for switching aspect ratio on the fly. This design might help with those apps not completely breaking when folding/unfolding.
Yeah to be fair I'm all for the 1/sqrt(2) aspect ratio, I just think it's funny that it's treated as some kind of holy design constraint when they're all over the map on phone sizing :)
And the extra irony is I'm currently shipping an app that doesn't deal well with different size phones (just pads the edges), heh, so do as I say, not as I do.
I think 1,000 years maybe doesn't matter that much. However, these predictions are imperfect. If they're aiming for 1,000 years, that makes me more confident the disc will be readable in 100 years, which may matter more.
> I’m trying to avoid screens at least one day out of the week, and this is my way of encouraging others to consider doing the same.
Sorry but I find this incredibly paternalistic.
What if I am avoiding screens one day out of the week—on Saturday? Heck, maybe I avoid screens Monday—Saturday and Sunday is my only screen day?
It's great that you're avoiding screens on Sunday! Really! Blocking pages for everyone else just makes the world a very slightly worse place for no benefit.
I don't think it's good to make myself less informed. I have no intention of chatting on Twitter casually or browsing it for fun, but if a major announcement is posted only on Twitter—and I don't know why people keep doing that, but they do—I want to read the original source.
I haven't used that platform in years and I am still well enough informed. Don't be scared of not knowing everything. The important info will probably reach you. It's not like other platforms don't have people taking about interesting and important things.
A good example would be Supertram - the Sheffield tram service. It's only ever provided service disruption notices on twitter. The stations have digital signs which they installed years ago and have always been completely flawed in that they cant actually update them remotely, nor can they say if a tram is running late. They just play a fixed playlist on a loop.
As an anecdote from the States: During July 4th our city had some poor weather and the best way to check the status of any celebrations going on was their Twitter page.
I never assumed the data on how people lived ten thousand years ago was 100% accurate. Of course it's not. I had assumed it came from real research and the citation links were accurate.
When you see a picture of a dinosaur (in an educational context, not in the Flintstones), the implied assumption is that the picture is based on an educated guess of what we currently think the dinosaurs looked like. And if the picture is accompanied by a citation, that citation should contain the information used to produce the picture.
I don't think a human would have made these mistakes, because in the process of actually typing out the data most people would stop and think about where they were pulling the data from. And if they didn't—if they literally just pulled numbers out of thin air because they felt right—I would think poorly of that too!
The website is quite clear that the stories are made up based on statistical likelihood, so that part didn't bother me at all. It's a cool way to explore the statistics.
What bothers me is that the statistics themselves are bad.
Until I read the comments here, I did not notice the stats were bad. I was just skimming the facts I thought were interesting, not looking for contradictions.
The site itself is a really cool concept! I just wish the information was accurate. Now that I know it's not, I feel cheated.
I suspect a lot of people don't read the comments.
Not that I'm in favor of spending money unnecessarily, but I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20, given this was a website for her professional money-making business.
Wow, it’s fascinating after waking up to see all this conjecture here on why she didn’t pay for the subscription.
The short version, wasn’t for wanting to save money, but simply a matter of it not being worth the hassle to any of us to subscribe and then later cancel for such a small scope of work. If it was too frustrating I would have let her use my Claude sub.
Also, she’d been meaning to have it updated for years, a few extra days was nothing.
She did short sessions in spare time between other things, the wait between was maybe a little frustrating, but also gave the benefit that she would have had better clarity develop between sessions.
Website is not key to her business where it’s mostly word of mouth at this point (she’s been practicing for >20 years). Goals of website were:
- Findable in Google by “psychologist/therapist <area name>” (she also has a Google. Business profile so is findable on Google Maps).
- Minimal copy. A comforting sentence or two to state philosophy, qualifications, therapy types offered, where located, how to contact.
- Doesn’t feel dated.
Essentially it’s meant to complement the word of mouth aspect and maybe bring in the occasional completely new patient.
Not that it matters for anything—she got the work done on the free plan and was happy—but my strategy in this situation is always to subscribe and immediately cancel. The cancellation does not actually take effect until the end of your billing period. (Otherwise they'd have to refund you.)
In my head, I'm not really buying a subscription, I'm just buying one month of access. I can always decide to buy another month if I want to, but it will never be automatic.
> I find it kind of surprising she didn't just spend the $20
If it because the poster's mother dislikes the idea of subscriptions, then I totally get it. (Though I admit I have no idea if this has anything to do with the poster's mother's decision.)
I'll go out of my way as much as I can to avoid signing up for anything that is a subscription because of how horrible the entire corporate world has abused subscription dark patterns over the past couple of decades.
These days just the packaging of anything into a subscription makes me assume there is intent to screw people out of money.
While signing up for LLM usage is fairly low risk as far as subscription lock-in goes, someone non-technical might not be aware of that fact.
See my more detailed sibling comment, but was more that the scope and urgency were so small that it wasn’t worth the hassle to set up the subscription and have to cancel it after.
Personally though? I’ve made peace with the fact that I might have a 20/month subscription indefinitely. It’s slowly working its way towards being like a cell phone or Internet bill, although there’s reason to hope that the amount might decrease over time eventually.
> Presumably a nicer website could lead to more customers.
It depends what "nicer" means. Paying a web designer/developer to create a bespoke website doesn't guarantee that said website will have a better UI/UX and, most importantly, "convert" at a higher rate. Not every web designer/developer understands IA, content, performance optimization, etc.
The popular AI tools produce websites that are clearly AI-produced if you know the patterns, but that doesn't mean they can't be usable and quite effective at converting. And if you have a bit of skill with prompting, AI can be really good at working through performance bottlenecks, etc.
> but old website was minor liability in its datedness potentially putting off prospective patients.
Anecdata: I’d be more likely to use the services of a company with a good, old-style site than a bad, new style site. Things like pop-overs, text that animates in as you scroll, banner images that take up most of the “abive the fold” are all red flags for me.
Oh, and the most common one: “Read more”.
A modern site that avoids all those can be great. But those are rare, IMO.
The new web page (since it's a single page website now) is also mobile friendly and intentionally not "flashy".
Another goal with the website I didn't note before is that its "quality" or "style" should generally not be consciously noticed, it shouldn't stand out for any bad reasons, people see it, get a good impression, do what they were looking to do with ease, success.
I got this philosophy from my interior designer (not to be confused with decorator) brother who told me how when he's done a good job, no one notices, but when he's done a bad job then people either almost instantly notice or simply feel uncomfortable without necessarily being able to exactly identify why, e.g. first impression of your hotel room should instantly be "feels nice" (and same with a public space in a building) and then you remain feeling comfortable throughout because the space is actually big enough for its purpose and laid out practically.
so. if website does not lead to customers - why do any of that? actually why have website? Once you say yes to website you imply having one is somehow valuable, so in that case why not spend 20 dollars.
Arguably, if the website does not have a positive value and only negative, the logical thing is to shut it down and keep the Google Business profile imo. I assume she has been paying for the domain name all this years too or is it a subdomain?
I think the new version is a net positive value as creates a better "vibe" to prospective patients than just a Google Business listing would, and I expect will age well.
The domain's used for email anyway and is on a very cheap local hosting plan, probably all-in-all like ZAR 84 per month and ZAR 200 per year for the domain, so ZAR ~1200 (USD ~75) per year.
Old website was built in a different era, Google Business didn't exist, "HTML5" wouldn't be a thing for another 5 years, web design styles were completely different and was before iPhone meaning that modern day "mobile friendly" was not even a thought.
When my father started running guest suites over 10 years-ago I made a single page website with essentially the same goals but using a Hugo template. The website still feels "modern" today, so I expect this new one of my mother's will age well too.
Just because websites can exist. Sometimes things are done for fun, or just for the sake of it.
This perspective declares all the personal websites of people worthless, however, they are priceless.
Because people's curiosity and creativity is priceless as well.
Similarly, why create art and share it around if it doesn't bring in customers? Why make music, take photos, dance? Do we live to serve customers, or do customers' existence serve us to live a better life?
Of course, those are all great reasons to make a website. But this website was for a woman's psychology practice. I don't imagine she made it for fun or to express her creativity. The purpose of a psychology practice's website is to tell people about your psychology practice, so they will either sign up ($) or find information they need more easily (higher satisfaction → $).
If OP's mother runs a donation-funded pro-bono psychology practice then you can translate the dollar signs to units of happiness or whatever (which I would imagine is her real goal regardless).
This person is spending her time to create the website (with ChatGPT's help). How much is that time worth? Of course when it's your business hourly pay is tricky, but I imagine she values her time highly enough that $20 is not worth very much of it.
I know an accountant, who has a respectable amount of customers and enough income to live comfortably. Their company has a website which only provides a logo, address and contact information, in a 23 line HTML file, complete with all the white space.
If their company can do well with this website, her psychology practice can do as well.
Some of the best services I got was from professionals with no or mundane online presence. Instead, their abilities and expertise moved them to the top in their respective fields, and the whole community knows how and when to reach them.
So, maybe a shiny website is not a hard-requirement for a good psychology practice, IDK.
So, the thing is, maybe this was her way to explore new things and decompress while doing some mundane thing from her perspective for free. Sometimes it's not that $20 which you can pay without any negative side-effects, but the desire to see how far the thing goes without the token, or just because you don't feel any urgency to do the task, so that $20 looks like an unnecessary waste.
Yes, presumably that's why she did not update the website for 20 years!
If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point? Otherwise, she probably shouldn't be spending any time on it herself either, given the opportunity cost.
Obviously she decided otherwise, I just find it kind of surprising.
Like, in general, I'm always kind of surprised at what people are and aren't willing to pay for. People will suffer through horrible full screen ads in mobile games instead of paying $5 one time to turn them off. And they'll do this on a phone that costs $1,000+. I don't know their financial situation, but I would buy a cheaper phone and get rid of the ads...
From what I have seen, people's perspective on value lies on a very wide spectrum. My mom won't buy a YouTube premium subscription, because she said she likes the ads. It's a kind of discovery platform for her. It's not that I share the same perspective, but I respect her about that.
I know people who won't subscribe to a service, but go through great pains to get the thing the service offers (another brand, similar yet inferior service, etc.).
For example, if an application I use has ads (i.e. a game), and it needs a subscription to remove these ads, I'll simply won't install it, or get the paid version of it from the start. For me, playing a game with no end and paying monthly to "hide" advertisements doesn't worth it.
These things are very subtle and are sometimes about ethos, and not about value at all. For instance:
* You propose I buy your ¤4 overhyped toothbrush. If I spend 10 minutes digging around, I could find a sub-¤1 toothbrush. Effectively I'm doing 10 minutes of work at less than minimum wage in order to avoid owning the premium toothbrush. Do I do this? I might! The reason is that I want no part in your hype.
* You offer me a loyalty scheme that will genuinely save me money if I participate. I only have to pay attention to your offers and routinely identify myself and I might get 10% savings, all the time. I decline this because you don't get to use my brain cycles for your profit, even if I profit too.
* You offer me a free thing that happens to track me and funnels data to data brokers. I decline it even though it does me no actual harm at all, because I don't want you to make money from personal facts about me, even when the facts are robotically aggregated and anonymised. Ethics are at stake: ethically speaking, you can just piss off. That is worth more than a free gadget, and it's not even an equation.
>If once she's decided to update the website—surely it's worth more then $20 at that point?
the problem here really, from both sides of the argument, is the assumption that humans are rational economic actors.
One side assumes that it is not worth 20 dollars to update the site quickly thus she does not do it, but really for that to be true (given costs of psychologists sessions etc.) then it would not even be worth updating the site, or paying for the site hosting or the domain at all.
The other side assumes that given that she is updating the site it must be worth paying 20 dollars to do so quickly and asks why she does not, given that it is worth updating the site.
If humans are rational economic actors she should be updating her professional site because it has some professional benefit to her that she is aware of, but this creates the two problems stated above.
This problem, and the examples you give, are resolved by understanding that humans are not really rational economic actors and the reason that she is updating the site and not paying the extra 20 dollars at the same time cannot be resolved to a non-contradictory answer.
We are at best, partially rational economic actors. Rational-like.
I've responded to your other comment too, but regarding anyone's assumption that it's worth paying $20 to have it done quickly, but there was no urgency as it's been a thing she's been wanting to do for years.
She probably put it off because the need to actually contact other people to kick off the process was way more of an impediment than anything, whereas on a Sunday afternoon when I was visiting, we kicked off the process on a whim.
She was able to "work with" ChatGPT during after-hours and in <15-minute sessions, between her doing other things, so it's not like she was likely to have used the time productively anyway.
We aren't even rational like, we are after the fact rationalizers.
Behavior is largely sentiment driven or random and then we invent a story after the fact to frame the behavior as "rational".
"Rationality" is when these two processes happen to line up and that happens very rarely.
We do have the right language in "economic actor" because economics itself is a type of performance. Economics is closer to theater than to chemistry. The non-performative version of economics is a hedge fund.
But as for the "value of her time", despite having to wait due to the rate limits for free users, this was probably still less time consuming for her than paying someone else to make the website.
She basically just did maybe half a dozen (probably less) sessions of less than 15 minutes each. This was a very a low-priority thing for her and did it between other things and after hours, so it didn't really use up time she was likely to use productively anyway.
If she had dealt with a web designer, she would probably have used up more of her time with several back-and-forth interactions with them, which also probably would have had to be done during business hours. Chances are that ChatGPT was better at intuiting what she wanted in a case like this and gave her quicker feedback loops despite the waiting for more "free tokens".
Would $20 have been worth spending on this? Absolutely. But the scope and priority were so minimal that the hassle of doing the once-off sub was more for her than just doing little bits between other stuff. If it wasn't available for free we would have used my Claude sub or she would have just paid.
In this case, because spending it was more hassle than any time she would have saved by doing so. If she had no choice, then spending it would not have been an issue.
If anything, it was a bit of a chore while keeping in mind that chores aren't necessarily a bad thing, e.g. tidying your kitchen after a meal is a chore, but it's satisfying to complete the chore as the alternative is not only a messy looking kitchen, but the hygiene issues which come with it. It's just something which needed to be done.
The once off nature, scope and priority were so minor that it wasn't worth the hassle of actually paying, but if free wasn't an option we would have either used my Claude sub or she would have just paid, no big deal.
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