kirklennon

@kirklennon@kbin.social
0 Post – 295 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

This headline is ridiculous; I expect better from Ars Technica. You "admit" to things you shouldn't have done. In this case the government compelled Apple to disclose certain data and simultaneously prohibited Apple from disclosing the disclosure. Thanks to a senator's letter, Apple is now free to disclose something that they previously wanted to disclose, about something they were forced to do in the first place.

Compare to the Reuters headline: "Governments spying on Apple, Google users through push notifications - US senator." The emphasis and agency are correctly placed on the bad actors.

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The confusing alphabet soup of Wi-Fi versions got renamed. 802.11n became Wi-Fi 4, 802.11ac became Wi-Fi 5, and 802.11ax became Wi-Fi 6. Wi-Fi 7 is still in development so 6 is the best in-use version.

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  1. This is advertising. It's not the most worst example, but it's still fundamentally an ad.
  2. Revenue is absolutely the wrong metric to use. If you had $100 of revenue and $99 in costs, you have only $1 left to pay your fines. Amazon did not earn enough to pay its fines in 1 hour and 50 minutes because most of that that money was used to buy and deliver the products, plus various other expenses. The blog post is misstating the numbers by over an order of magnitude for some of the companies. If you're going to do it, do it right at least. The profit numbers are just as easy to come by as revenue.
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On the tech side, Android users also get lower-quality photos and videos when they're sent through iMessage.

Android users don’t receive anything at all through iMessage; the whole conversation becomes SMS/MMS. I suppose getting major, relevant tech details is hard for an outlet like Engadget.

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I'm not willing to give Thomas credit for even this. Eastman's appeal was never going anywhere, with or without Thomas. He recused himself on what is fundamentally an uncontroversial case. He gets a little political reprieve for pretending to have suddenly discovered ethics, but nothing was on the line. There's not a chance he'd recuse himself if his vote had any chance of undermining democracy or human rights.

If he were not part of the Seattle police I might be willing to put down my pitchfork and give him the benefit of the doubt, but since he is, in fact, a prominent member of a lawless gang that is notorious for egregious civil rights violations, I say guilty until proven innocent. He’s already actively lost the trust of the public.

"Some carmakers" is a strange way to write General Motors, which is to my knowledge the sole carmaker who has announced they're going to shoot themselves in the foot by dropping a non-negotiable feature required by a majority of new car buyers. I predict they backtrack on this plan pretty rapidly.

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You’re not missing anything. There was a period of time where a lot of patents were granted for “basic idea, but on a computer!” The USPTO stopped doing it and these patents, which should have never been issued, have been systematically invalidated, including most of this guy’s. He’s a classic patent troll suing over patents that were then invalidated.

Do you honestly think Apple cares about Nothing in any capacity? They are irrelevant and apply zero market pressure on Apple.

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If your device locally analyzes your behavior and files, then Apple itself is not actually collecting and analyzing your data. The "locality" is a fundamental difference in who is doing what. If your private information never leaves your phone, your privacy is still fully maintained.

TikTok's daily active users in the U.S. is also just about 5% of ByteDance's DAUs worldwide, said one of the sources.

So much drama in the US over this but it's apparently merely a money-losing afterthought for its owner.

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She's built like a steakhouse, but she handles like a bistro.

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The western Allies and Soviets both actively took Germany, coming in from either side and meeting in the middle. They split the country because they were already there. The Soviet Union never really made it to Japan proper. They took over Manchuria and Japan surrendered ASAP to the US alone once it became obvious that the only alternative was to surrender to both powers later and likely be split like Germany.

It’s worth highlighting that this was the immediate impetus for surrender. The atomic bombs were basically non-factors.

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The app is called Messages. The entire point of the article is to discuss iMessages versus SMS so I absolutely do think it’s important to get the distinction right in this case.

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The very simple version is that the newer versions support faster speeds.

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Uber was unsustainably underpriced in order to gain market share. Pricing is temporary; the core benefit as a consumer was always the ability to request one from anywhere using an app (where you also paid) and have them come directly to you instead of needing to hail one. Taxi companies added that ability and now everything is better. There's no reason why the approximate cost should vary much, outside of limited promotions. An Uber, a Lyft, and a taxi should cost roughly the same. Why wouldn't they? Perpetual VC-funded pricing wasn't what we were promised; the promise was convenient ordering and stress-free payments.

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The proper term is American.

everybody born in the american continent is technically “american” too

The implied context of your question is in English.. In the English-speaking world, there is no American continent. People from North America are North Americans; people from South America are South Americans. People from the United States of America are American. There is no ambiguity. There is also no good term to collectively describe everyone from the Americas but there’s also rarely any need to discuss that.

I consider terms such as “USonian” and whatnot to be highly offensive. Nobody should tell a people what they are allowed to call themselves in their own language just because the same word means something else in another language. It would be like telling French people they’re not allowed to call their arm a bras because it refers to an article of clothing in English. Other languages where America means something else already have their own terms for people from the US. English, however, has no real ambiguity except that caused by those trying to shame Americans for calling themselves Americans.

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It’s the same reason why Twitter had to agree to the sale to Elon Musk and why they had to force it. It was a terrible move overall but since Elon was buying all outstanding shares and taking it private, the board literally had no legal choice but to take it since he was offering well over market value.

It was put to an actual shareholder vote. The individual shareholders voted yes because he was overpaying. The board was fundamentally irrelevant.

I know that you can’t fire someone just for being a sex offender unless it directly interferes with work duties (in the US)

You can definitely fire someone for being a sex offender in the US. Outside of a few exceptions that probably don't apply in your case, you can also fire someone for being merely an accused sex offender.

You can also fire someone for laughing in a weird way, or wearing a color you don't like, or being born on a Monday when you don't like Mondays.

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Variety reports that De Niro’s accusations regarding censorship have been denied by “a source close to the film,” who instead claims the incident was a miscommunication. The insider alleges that multiple versions of the speech had been created, and that both Apple and the filmmakers were unaware that De Niro had not approved the final draft. We have reached out to Apple and the Gotham Film & Media Institute to clarify the situation.

I can't rule out a dumb employee trying to make a unilateral change to a speech almost nobody would have known about otherwise, but a miscommunication over multiple drafts certainly strikes me as highly plausible, and I can also understand why the filmmakers would have been encouraging a draft that was more focused on the film than tangential contemporary political issues.

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This seems like an entirely academic, theoretical technique with literally zero real world risk, and without any path forward to ever turn it into a practical attack.

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As a practical matter all they have to do is not proactively block their iPad apps from being available, which is the default.

Literally zero effort: Their iPad app is available for the Vision Pro and works perfectly fine.
Minor effort: Block the iPad app from being available.
Extra effort: make a specialized visionOS app that takes advantage of additional hardware features.

“The industry is at a pivotal point - new technologies like Gen AI are rapidly shifting how we shop and manage our finances,” said Jack Forestell, Chief Product and Strategy Officer, Visa.

This is so cringey. I get that investors are randomly throwing cash at companies that talk up "generative AI," but it has nothing to do with anything they announced. Is it impossible to just be content with ridiculously sophisticated algorithms? Did someone hold a gun up to these people and demand they spit out some drivel that uses the buzzwords du jour?

Also, the headline feature was solved a decade ago when Apple Pay was released (and no, not by the janky predecessors of Apple Pay but specifically with the launch of Apple Pay, which everything was then changed to replicate). One device that can hold an entire wallet of cards and I can choose what to use right when I pay? Wow! So new.

I thought it sounded interesting when it was new but the more I've learned, the more convinced I am that it's completely useless. I've never seen anything done on a blockchain that couldn't be done faster, cheaper, and more securely in a SQL database. Even the not-a-scam applications are ridiculous and fall apart upon examination. Blockchain as a definitive record of ownership? Absolutely not. There's no way to force a person to update a record. Lose your house in a bankruptcy? The sheriff on his way to evict you isn't going to care that you've got some NFT saying you still own the house. Anything involving contracts at all? If a court can't unilaterally update the blockchain record, then the record is unreliable. But if the government can unilaterally update a record, then you're not relying on community consensus and immutability in the first place.

Blockchain isn't useful for anything important, and it's not a logical choice for anything trivial aside from literally just playing with blockchain stuff for the sake of playing with blockchains. I think it's a dead-end technology.

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What a disgrace. This law is hostile to the basic principles of an open web; Google should have refused like Meta is.

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Chickens evolved from earlier animals. The process is gradual, of course, but we can say that at some point some proto-chicken ancestor laid an egg that was different enough genetically that it counts as a chicken. In other words, a non-chicken laid a chicken egg, which eventually grew up to be the first chicken. Therefore, the egg came first.

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This seems backwards from what a manufacturer would want to do. The concern with variances isn’t really having too much but having too little in the bottle. If you aimed to put exactly 600 in the bottle, you will sometimes end up below 600. It would make more sense to label it 600, aim for 618, and be confident that you’ll always fill it to at least the advertised 600.

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It's not outlandish enough to have his attorneys sanctioned for making a frivolous argument, but only because criminal defendants are allowed to grasp at straws. It's a deeply unserious argument with no textual or historical support and isn't going to pass muster among even the worst judges. It's not even going to meaningfully delay his trial. It's just fodder for his political supporters so he can pretend that he isn't a criminal because apparently l’etat, c’est moi.

Like seriously, what’s the percentage of people that run machine learning algorithms on their phone? 0.0000000001%?

It’s 100%. You use them on your phone all day every day. Your keyboard used machine learning algorithms as you typed your comment to dynamically adjust the size of the tap target of your likely next character and for autocorrect.

Every single photo taken on a phone is run through a huge amount of ML to create it.

All of this is to say, however, that this headline is ridiculous. Aside from Material UI, this is basically a description of every iPhone from the last half decade (with a dedicated “neural engine”). Not really a change in the smartphone world.

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I’m seeing a lot of anonymous quotes and assumptions but not a lot of verifiable facts. Sure, creative differences may have existed, but did any meaningful number of people watch the show? Even in online communities dedicated to Apple TV specifically I can’t recall seeing anything other than perfunctory mentions. Nobody ever actually talked about this show. I feel like the show was probably already on thin ice with a questionable ROI, and some likely not terribly sensational disagreement pushed it over the edge. Makes more sense than Apple caring what he says about AI, since they’ve pointedly avoided the embarrassing hype train, and clearly aren’t going to engage in the sort of exploitative “all of your documents are now our training corpus” nonsense that he’s likely to actually criticize.

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The government has sovereign immunity and can be sued only when it allows itself to be sued, such as under the Federal Tort Claims Act.

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I'm going to go ahead and just call this a nothingburger. The context is that you're already a registered user signed into the Facebook, etc. app. You've already volunteered the valuable profile data and the analytics data from actually using the app. If you're already OK with all of that, there's effectively no additional concern with the relatively minor data that can be collected or inferred from the notifications. The very idea that someone should or would turn notifications off on, for example, Instagram because they're concerned about privacy is ridiculous. It's like telling someone not to crack the windows on their car because it might rain, but they're in a convertible with the top down.

It’s a good line in what is otherwise a very, very bad SCOTUS decision that a for-profit corporation can ignore laws protecting female employees because of the corporation’s religious beliefs.

It’s not like these companies are just refusing to pay their fines, as this article falsely implies. There are ongoing legal disputes. Most of Meta’s “unpaid” fines, for example, are from just six months ago and there are legitimate disagreements on them that are subject to appeal.

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They didn't steal anything. He wrote a non-fiction account of a historical event. The Apple TV+ movie is a somewhat fictionalized account of a historical event with the direct support of the primary people actually involved. They don't owe him a penny. At most his contribution is an inspiration that, hey, this could make a great movie, which isn't worth any money.

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This means absolutely nothing. How much of their advertising revenue comes from the US.

To quote the article again, "The U.S. accounted for about 25% of TikTok overall revenues last year, said a separate source with direct knowledge." Honestly, I think that makes the case for shutting it down even stronger. TikTok isn't in some growth-at-all-costs phase in the US. It's likely near its peak potential userbase. If they haven't been able to make it profitable by now, that doesn't bode well for it ever becoming significantly profitable. Absent the legal issues, they think it's still worth at least trying, but as it stands, it's just a lot of money in and, just as quickly, out, with nothing to show for it at the end of the day.

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It's a retroactive name just to keep the numbering scheme logical. It would be weird to start off giving the next version "1" so they added numbers to all of the old versions. 802.11n was renamed a full 15 years after it was released!

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iPhone 15 Pro tech specs page: “USB 3 (up to 10Gb/s)” with a footnote that says “USB 3 cable with 10Gb/s speed required.”

A regular need for high-speed data transfers is legitimately a “pro” use case. You need the Pro model and you need to buy a thick, stiff high-speed cable.

This is not correct. At no point can the offspring in a single generation be differnet enough to be called a different species.

I'm not saying we should call it a different species but if we're saying species Y is the direct descendant of species X, then, we can imagine a dividing line, and the line must always begin with an egg because eggs are different from their parents but adults are not different from the egg they started off as.

In reality things change very slowley over a large amount of time and there a no clear transition points.

Isn't that obvious?

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If you are a developer, what right does Apple have to seeing your finances for all purchases made in the app that they sold on their store?

It's a commission for sales that came from the app, meaning from Apple's platform, where they have roughly one billion above-average income users with a reputation for buying apps and subscriptions.

It's also worth keeping in mind that there are different ways of monetizing platforms, none of which are necessarily morally better or worse than the other. Microsoft's IDE, Visual Studio, is $45 or $250 per user per month (so $4500 annually for a team of ten). Xcode, Apple's IDE, is free. A business can offer its apps on the App Store, which also serves the files, for a grand total of $99/year.

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