Shrug. They can open up the apple ecosystem so you don't need their store and then they can refuse to do business.
Apple put themselves in the position that they have to do business with entities they don't approve of, thankfully the courts are reminding them of this. Soon one or more of the apple execs will wind up in prison.
Yeah, though Epic put themselves in the position of having the gatekeeper of an important part of their business want nothing to do with them, and now they're being whiny babies about it. Both parties suck here.
No, apple is clearly the evil one. They are bullying many, many, many other companies and individiuals in a similar, and often even worse, fashion. Those don't speak up because they're afraid of Apple's wrath. Thankfully Epic did have the balls to stand up, and now various various legal entities are forcing apple to make changes that benefit everyone (except apple).
As a user I love apple products for making payments safe. I can get a refund if the item I bought is not as advertised or I bought it by mistake, I don't need to figure out how to cancel a subscription, it's couple clicks to cancel for any subscription. I don't want apple to allow purchases outside the app as I'm afraid companies will leverage their power to redirect users outside of App Store to bypass those "payment safety" features that do not benefit them and will use fishy tactics to increase their profits.
I trust Sweeney’s intentions far, far more than I do Cook’s. The man is a bona fide hacker from the trenches and does not hide his true feelings behind a corporate firewall.
Not that it's an excuse, but industry darling Gabe Newell has engaged in similar dark patterns since well before Fortnite[1]. Yet, for some reason, there's not a lot of "fuck Newell" people out there.
To be frank, I think this is an issue people only opportunistically care about.
Of course not, but resulting changes to Apple's policy are still a good thing for everyone else. Anything that forces apple to bully other organizations and people less is a good thing.
Epic broke the terms they agreed to, filed the lawsuit, launched an advertising and PR campaign to support it, and continue to make whiny complaints after they got what they asked for, but Apple are the bullies here? I'm not convinced.
Terms that were illegal and thus not binding in many jurisdictions. If I were to write: "By replying to this comment you agree to my Terms of Service which require you to paypal me 10k", you would laugh and disregard it. Same thing.
Anyway, just look at how apple forced their payment service so they can take a 30% cut of every transaction made by any iPhone user. Then they banned price differences between Apple's own payment service and external, cheaper, ones. This forces companies to raise their prices by 30% everywhere. So we're all paying more to fund apple's greed. This is just one example of many, and you have to look beyond the apple vs epic fight since that is just the most public instance. Apple are the bullies.
Apple are involving themselves in business between their customers and companies those users have chosen to use. Apple are the bullies.
> Porn sites suing because Apple won't allow them to put apps in their store and that's costing them their livelihood
Great example, actually. Why do you think it's okay for apple to unilaterally decide what more than a billion people are allowed to use their device for? Is it because you are projecting your own fears and insecurities on everyone else?
From all of them - take it away from Google too. Frankly - Microsoft never actually got much buy in for their store, but take it away from them as well.
Hardware that has only a single approved distribution channel for software, that is owned by someone other than the owner of the hardware, shouldn't be legal.
Further - if you own a piece of hardware, you legally should own EVERY fucking key. If there's a lock in that device, hardware or software based, that has a key - you get a damn copy.
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Some physical comparisons that show how outrageously unethical this setup is:
You buy a home, but your realtor gets the only copy of the keys. "Don't worry" they say, "I'll just pop by and open er up whenever you need to get in and out. Oh, and by the way, I don't like Ikea - so I won't open the door if you're trying to move Ikea furniture in. Great working with you guys, enjoy your new home!".
You've just bought a new car, you tried turning into your neighborhood, but suddenly the car stops. You call the dealer: "Oh, I see your neighborhood road was paved by PavingCo, They don't pay our manufacturers' yearly inspection fee, so we can't certify that our car can safely drive on that road. So we disable it when the GPS detects you're about to drive there."
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This is fundamentally about ownership. Hardware manufacturers are playing with utter fire here, because this is the first time in history there exists enough infrastructure that a device can phone home and ask "Is this ok?" to the maker, rather than operating as the owner desires.
As far as I'm concerned - you don't own a device that does that. You're just renting it, and the manufacturer can and will extort you with rent-seeking behavior at EVERY turn.
Phones are only the first stop - this is going to spread to absolutely everything that uses electricity unless this gets extinguished real fast. We're already starting to see the same games in Cars, IoT devices, TVs, etc...
I'm eagerly awaiting the day my drill stops working because I'm not trying to drill the manufacturers' overpriced screws with it...
So pathetic, especially the red triangle. It's like they thought "well it's a warning, so we use the warning icon but we need to make it scary so it's red!!".
Not OP, but presumably it's because it could cement a permanent divide between classes. We still have quite a bit of upward mobility in the US, but health is a tremendous predictor of future outcomes, so gating that to the rich is dangerous to the stability of society in that way.
This seems like more of an issue with accessibility of the treatment than the treatment itself
If we could make most children smart, productive, ambitious, courteous, civil, conscientious, honorable, strong... the value to society is probably high enough to justify covering it for almost anyone.
The society already can invest a lot (through public education) to “make most children smart, productive, ambitious …”.
Somehow society (or indeed parts of it) decided to use it as a tool of further segregation rather than overall prosperity. I’m afraid same might apply to this.
We "invest" more than almost anyone. 38% higher than the OECD average. I don't find discussions about throwing more money at the problem to be constructive so much as a way to ignore other issues at play.
I don't really see how this affects e.g. what I do for my children. I will absolutely be turning them into the closest to superhuman the current state of treatments lets me, traveling internationally if I need to. If someone else decides to segregate access to treatment, that is a separate, wrong act that will not hold me back from giving my children every advantage possible.
(Yes, I understand this is a positional arms race, but 1. that doesn't change the individually-optimal outcome, and 2. that doesn't change that society net benefits from it.)
I don't mean to invest as to spend more money, rather to spend money better and in a more equal way. While USA spends a lot of money on education I don't think it translates in better education on average. Even if this was beneficial for the society in general.
I am, afraid, that this kind of genome modification will further increase divide in a society and turn social lifts off even more. I.e. it's not gonna be your kid to get "improve" brain genes first, and later your kid wouldn't get a chance to get it ever again for their children.
Just to be clear I'm not against of the progress, this thing is fascinating and really shows how awesome humans are. And I get why you'll get it if possible for your kid. I'm just not sure its benefits for the society mean it's gonna be anyhow affordable for regular people.
You will have a really hard time convincing Americans to keep paying high taxes while funding is pulled from their children’s schools and redistributed to inner cities and ruralia. My observations suggest the problem for the latter isn’t financial.
I'm explaining that gene modification will not be considered illegal or bad because the rich will have a vested interest in it being legal. This is a reply to GP saying:
> use legal mechanisms to discriminate and persecute people who are genetically modified
I believe there is no way this will happen, because legal mechanisms are driven by the whims of the rich, and they will want gene editing to be legal. So there will beno legal mechanisms to discriminate against those who have been edited.
> There are plenty of hotels where you can get multiple rooms and a washing machine
Ok... Can you show me some like that in the EU?
> This is all not to mention being asked to strip beds, take out trash, etc, after you've paid thousands of dollars, including cleaning fees for the place.
I staid at a hotel in Lisbon [1]that had a kitchen and washing machine. (And a kids club that would watch the kids)
There ended up being an issue with the dryer not drying. So the hotel staff took a laundry basket of clothes and delivered them washed and folded the next morning. That level of service would not have happened in an Airbnb.
Yes, trivially. There are filters for it on booking.com. Here's a link for rooms in Paris suitable for 2 adults and 2 kids with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen/kitchenette and a washing machine.
Most 4 start hotels and resorts have either connecting rooms or family rooms in Europe (the latter especially true for resorts). They are far less common on lower categories though.
I suppose to book connecting room you might have to call sometimes rather than going through online platforms though.
Hotel with kitchenette and washing are not that hard to find either. They certainly more common on location were people tend to spend longer stay rather than in touristic cities were people spend on average just a few nights (ie. mountain and seaside places were people sometimes spend weeks or even months), usually they call them aparthotels or suites depending or something like that.
Google will not let you pick the root folder, making it impossible to sync everything.
Note that Google's and other American Big Tech apps do not have this issue, because Google only cares about taking permissions away from "small" players.
Nextcloud isn't really designed to sync the entire device, it's meant to sync your Nextcloud folder to a subfolder somewhere which works fine with the new storage access permissions.
It's designed to sync the files the user wants synced, be it files produced by the camera app or some other app that operates on a directory on your device, such as your Downloads folder, audiobook folder used by your audiobook app, or the notes folder where your notes app writes the notes.txt, or just straight up everything.
It can do that just fine with the new permissions, you just can't sync the root folder or Downloads folder which is OK as documents, audiobooks, etc would be stored in their respective folders and not Downloads.
You mean that that's ok for you. Which is fine. It isn't ok for other people, which is also fine.
Some people may not want to have to reopen Nextcloud any time a new directory appears on their device so they can add it to Nextcloud, while the other American bigtech backup apps can just pick it up automatically no problem.
Google's comparable app (Drive) also cannot pick the root folder. As of Android 11, even apps with MANAGE_EXTERNAL_STORAGE cannot access the root folder.
> is that productivity in the teams using tools like this has greatly increased
On the short term. Have fun debugging that mess in a year while your customers are yelling at you! I'll be available for hire to fix the mess you made which you clearly don't have the capability to understand :-)
Debugging any system is not easy, it is not like technical debt didn't exit before AI, people will be writing shitcode in the future as they were in the past. Probably more, but there are also more tools that help with debugging.
Additionally, what you are failing to realise is that not everyone is just vibe coding and accepting blindly what the LLM is suggesting and deploying it to prod. There are actually people with decade+ of experience who do use these tools and who found it to be an accelerator in many areas, from writing boilerplate code, to assisting with styling changes.
In any case, thanks for the heads up, definitely will not be hiring you with that snarky attitude. Your assumption that I have no capability to understand something without any context tells more about you than me, and unfortunately there is no AI to assist you with that.
Apple put themselves in the position that they have to do business with entities they don't approve of, thankfully the courts are reminding them of this. Soon one or more of the apple execs will wind up in prison.