depends, if you don’t clean up the logs and monitor that cleanup will it eventually hit the p&l? eg if you fail compliance audits and lose customers over it? then yes. it still eventually comes back to the p&l.
This example feels more like a bug in the law itself that should be corrected. If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place. I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
> If this behavior is acceptable then it should be legal so we can avoid everyone the hassle in the first place.
Codifying what is morally acceptable into definitive rules has been something humanity has struggled with for likely much longer than written memory. Also while you're out there "fixing bugs" - millions of them and one-by-one - people are affected by them.
> I bet AI would be great at finding and fixing these bugs.
Ae we really going to outsource morality to an unfeeling machine that is trained to behave like an exclusive club of people want it to?
If that was one's goal, that's one way to stealthily nudge and undermine a democracy I suppose.
It's not a bug, it's something politicians don't want to touch because nobody wants to be the person that is soft on anything to do with minors and sex. Of course our laws are completely illogical - the fact that you could be put in prison and a sex offender registry for life for having a single photo of a naked 17 year old (how in the hell were you supposed to know?) on your device is ridiculous.
But, again, who is going to decide to put forward a bill to change that? It's all risk and no reward for the politician.
Fair, but still, the legislative process takes alot of time, and judicial norms and precedent allow for discretion to be exercised with accountability, which also informs the legislative process.
I think "judge AI" would be better if it also had access to a complete legislative record of debate surrounding the establishment of said laws, so that it could perform a "sanity check" whether its determinations are also consistent with the stated intent of lawmakers.
One might imagine a distant future where laws could be dramatically simplified into plain-spoken declarations, to be interpreted by a very advanced (and ideally true open source) future LLM. So instead of 18 U.S.C. §§ 2251–2260 the law could be as straightforward as:
"In order to protect children from sexual exploitation and eliminate all incentive for it, no child may be used, depicted, or represented for sexual arousal or gratification. Responsibility extends to those who create, assist, enable, profit from, or access such material for sexual purposes. Sanctions must be proportionate to culpability and sufficient to deter comparable conduct."
I mean if you’re going to write algos that trade the first thing you should do is check whether they were successful on historical data. This is an interesting data point.
Market impact shouldn’t be considered when you’re talking about trading S&P stocks with $100k.
Historical data is useful for validation, don't develop algos against it, test hypotheses until you've biased your data, then move on to something productive for society
is there evidence it’s for vendor lock in purposes? airpods have a pretty stellar connection for bluetooth, wouldn’t be surprised if there were performance reasons for them going off spec
I doubt it’s for any reason at all. The obvious explanation is that they just developed and tested these extra firmware features against Apple devices because that was the product decision. Since nobody was tasked with targeting Android they might not have even noticed that it wasn’t perfectly spec-compliant if those states were never encountered, nor expected to be encountered.
No there isn’t. I’ve said this a million times before, but usually just downvoted: this is about reducing support costs, not increasing revenue from lock-in. This is not a theory, I’ve sat in meetings at Cupertino and been told first hand.
Support is very expensive. Say what you want about Apple, but they provide absolutely stellar support, especially with the stupidly inexpensive Apple Care insurance. This is only cost effective if they can make reasonable predictions about how their devices will behave in any given scenario. Interfacing Apple hardware with non-certified (MFi, BLE, etc) third party hardware has a non-trivial risk of unpredictability high support costs, either from excessive Apple Care claims, customer support communications, or just overloading the Genius Bar.
Reducing support cost could easily explain the motivation of the entire walled garden if they are sufficiently high.
That's tautological. Everything that is not supported is so because supporting it has a cost. The question is what is the cost? It seems quite obvious that the marginal revenue from airpods would be overshadowed by the revenue of getting a user in the ecosystem.
Having to test the AirPods with more standards compliant devices, having to waste time to tell customers to fuck off if their phone/laptop/toaster is not standards compliant, having to waste engineering time to investigate non compliant aliexpress phones/laptops/toasters, wasting time to implement additional functionality for Apple customers because it has to go into the spec first
Yes, all that is a part of the cost equation, which points to the same thing, namely, that $200-$300 widgets are not worth selling to the general public; they would rather sell them to a customer who will spend a lot more in the ecosystem. Same as razors and blades or consoles and games.
Customer support costs are higher at Apple than its competitors, because they provide a better support experience. This is not a tautology, it’s one of their core value propositions
They couldn't just write (and make people aware at point of sale, ofc) 'no support for using devices with non-Apple Computers products' into Apple Care. They had to purposely break compatibility?
You can still connect AirPods to an android device using Bluetooth, you just don’t get the seamless connection or support for Spatial Audio that use the extended protocols
> Why use Bluetooth at all if they don't actually use it properly?
Because they needed a way to get audio to the AirPods wirelessly and to work with their devices? That’s a pretty good reason to use Bluetooth.
I doubt they got together and tried to scheme a way to break Bluetooth in this one tiny little way for vendor lock in. You can use the basic AirPod features with other Bluetooth devices. It’s just these extended features that were never developed for other platforms.
HN comments lean heavily conspiratorial but I think the obvious explanation is that the devs built and tested it against iPhone and Mac targets and optimized for that. This minor discrepancy wasn’t worked around because it isn’t triggered on Apple platforms and it’s not a target for them.
It reminds me of the USB keyboard extender that came with old Macs. There’s a little notch in the socket so you can only use it with Apple keyboards. At the time I thought it was a petty way of preventing you from using it with any other device, but apparently the reason they didn’t want you to use it with other devices is because the cable didn’t comply with the USB spec.
Yes, USB extenders are not spec-legal (because the device isn't built expecting to be extended).
But you can have an extension cord which accepts USB on one end but doesn't accept USB on the other.
So the keyboard has a superset connector so that it can go in regular USB and notched USB, because it is verified to work right when using the extension cord.
This design also means you can't plug one extension cord into another to get an even longer distance (which the keyboard wouldn't expect). Pretty clever solution.
Truth is, no one has the full facts so any reasons as to why this was made the way it was is pure speculation. Only a fool would move to condemn or endorse what is not yet fully understood.
As someone who's implemented custom Bluetooth protocols, it's actually quite easy to condemn an Apple manufacturer ID check to expose custom services.
And what do you mean by "conspiracy"? I would be shocked to find out this was done by some lone wolf and wasn't built with broad (even if grumbly) consensus in the relevant teams. That's how corporate software is built.
Every time someone opens an argument with the classic appeal to authority “as someone who has…” you can almost certainly expect to have that person miss the point of the discussion entirely.
I've read a lot more about "how dumb it is to use mongo over PG" than the opposite, I think the burden of proof is on the mongo-lovers these days (not that anyone has to prove anything to randos on the internet)
Why mongo is dumb has been written up about ad nauseam - from data modeling and quality issues, out of control costs, etc. It's been a known toxic dumpsterfire for well over a decade...
No one care about this story at large. It's a pretty bad argument to make among the population that does care. Every HN user can leave Firefox and it'd still be running.
Fortunately, history has shown you don't need a majority of users decrying something to get noticed.
