It may be related to the fact that some non-native English speakers (including myself) would sometimes use AI based tools to revise or translate their writings before posting online
Although macOS do provide many little known useful tools (besides this, there’s also dtrace, pf, etc), I still run a Linux VM in my MacBook for daily work. Thing is, the effort I spend on learning these tools is almost wasteful unless I’m doing iOS or macOS development. Skills about Linux tools however, is something people considered valuable because of its wider application. I think apple is missing opportunities by not doing more about macOS Server platform.
I would always refer to Hanlon's razor on things like this: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. I'm not trying to finding excuses for them, just saying that most likely there's no deep conspiracy theory involving government level surveillance here, they are just stupid. On average, Chinese software engineers are less educated and have no sense about privacy or how to implement privacy related features properly.
While logging serial number and some of the basic analytics stats might be attributed to stupidity, I tend to think that using a pretty advanced set of system commands and logging output consistently to log files is very sketchy.
One possible stupid-but-not-malicious explanation is that some anti-cheat company made a sketchy anti-cheat that includes server-side "is CheatEngine.exe running" code, and they're doing that via ps aux... and then this game player app was bullied by some game company into including this anti-cheat library to allow their game to run.
If human is at, say, 80%, it’s still a win to use AI agents to replace human workers, right? Similar to how we agree to use self driving cars as long as it has less incidents rate, instead of absolute safety
I like to point out that the error-rate is not the error-shape. There are many times we can/should prefer a higher error rate with errors we can anticipate, detect, and fix, as opposed to a lower rate with errors that are unpredictable and sneaky and unfixable.
Yes, let's not have cars. Self-driving ones will just increase availability and might even increase instead of reduce resource expenditure, except for the metric of parking lots needed.
A large enough cooperation or institution is essentially automated. Its behavior is what the median employer will do. If you have a system to stop bad behavior, then that's automated and will also safeguard against bad AI behavior (which seems to work in this example too)
> Apple could take just 7% cut and still make 20% profits.
We can say this to any company, "$X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits", but it doesn't really make any sense. Making profits is what makes a company a company instead of a non-profit organization.
It does make sense to highlight, because this kind of statistic is a very strong indicator that the market is not competitive. This is not a normal kind of profit margin and basically everyone except for Apple would benefit from them lowering the margins.
In normal markets there are competitors who force each other to keep reasonable profit margins and to improve their product as opposed to milking other people's hard work at the expense of the consumer.
Might not be competitive but it’s totally voluntary. No one needs app, it’s not food or shelter, so clearly consumers are willing and able to pay this.
The consumer is willing to pay the price based on the perceived value from the App Store
The relevant market here is the creators not the consumers. As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set. Or whatever rates Spotify pays you per stream. The fact you "could" host your own website is irrelevant when the reality is nobody will visit it.
> The relevant market here is the creators not the consumers. As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set. Or whatever rates Spotify pays you per stream. The fact you "could" host your own website is irrelevant when the reality is nobody will visit it.
Collective action by the creators would help.
All they have to do is dual-host (a fairly trivial matter, compared to organised collective action). What would make things even better is if they dual host on a competing platform and specify in their content that the competing platform charges lower fees. If even 10% of the creators did this:
1. Many of the consumers would switch.
2. Many of the creators not on the competing platform would also offer dual-hosting.
The problem is not "As a creator you have no choice but to accept whatever fees Apple, Google, Steam etc set". The problem is the mindset that their content is not their own.
I say it's their mindset, because they certainly don't act as if they own the content - when your content is available only via a single channel, you don't own your content, you are simply a supplier for that channel.
How? I thought it was a Patreon thing - the "competing platform" would be competing with the Patreon app.
I'm not familiar with Patreon, but I thought the way it worked was that you could tip content creators via the Patreon app. I'm pretty certain that Apple cannot tell Patreon (a third party) that they are only allowed to offer exclusive content.
Apple doesn’t allow you to mention that you have alternate payment channels on other platforms. Can’t even allude to it.
To me this is the thing that should be outlawed. Let people pay the Apple tax if they want, but don’t prevent people from making other arrangements. Most people are lazy and will pay the tax, if it isn’t excessive.
What is also totally voluntary is our decision to let Apple exist as an entitiy, to give them a government enforced monopoly over certain things, to make it illegal to break their technical protections of their monopoly etc.
When parts of a market become dominated by one or few companies operating in a limited choice environment, consumers can't just opt to not use both Apple and Play store. You need to choose one in practice.
At this point the regulators should investigate what the barriers are to new entrants and if it's too costly and nobody has managed to cut in the last few years, establishing some rules is probably a good thing. This happens as industries mature and become critical, it happened in transportation (most bus, train companies), energy, water supply, trash, etc, depending on the country and market conditions.
Not so much a failure. Rather, there is no intent for there to be a market here at all. A market relies on offerings being reproducible. Intellectual property laws are designed specifically to prevent reproduction.
Makes me think of the concept of involution in Chinese business and how they understand all of this very differently, and how difficult it is to compete because of that.
Agreed, but this is about to be a special case if it's not already. We're contending with compulsory digital IDs and cashless economies that must be used on authorized devices, and Apple is one of the two makers. While it's certainly not necessary to use Patreon, not having it or something like it is an actual barrier to individual trade. I don't think I can get behind a schema that means Apple can take whatever portion it wants from a transaction initiated on a device that it creates and that is otherwise fairly necessary for day-to-day life in the developed world.
it sounds like it does make sense because if they are making $Z profits then they are still making profits and are not non-profit.
there could also be cases where cutting back to $Z profits might be preferable in case not doing so were to prompt legislation causing someone to be forcibly cut to $Z-1 or even $0 profits from a particular profit source.
Which it has been my observation that when someone is saying "X could reduce price by $Y and still make $Z profits" it often coincides with saying therefore company X should be legislated on this particular profit source.
>there could also be cases where cutting back to $Z profits might be preferable in case not doing so were to prompt legislation causing someone to be forcibly cut to $Z-1 or even $0 profits from a particular profit source.
Not in an environment where regulatory capture costs so much less than any change legislation could bring. The remedy in almost every recent monopoly case has been remarkably nothing. Politicians don’t actually want change, they want the threat of legislation so that industries bring truckloads of money to line their pockets.
Until it turns into cancer because of unrestrained growth.
Like it or not capitalism is a part of an ecosystem. We’ve been “educated” to believe that unrestrained growth in profits is what makes capitalism work, and yet day after day there are fresh examples of how our experience as consumers has gotten worse under capitalism because of the idea that profits should forever be growing.
Fun fact - back in 2009, iPhone 3GS sold in China does not have WiFi feature. If that's possible, I can totally see a new iPhone model with restricted satellite feature selling in Iran and China.
I guess by "Everybody I know who grew up in China" you mean those elites who speaks English and have already bypassed restrictions to talk to you online or travels to other countries. There's some selection bias here.
It's a large step up from "it's used for job postings in (or closely working with) mainland China", to "it's featured in Apple product announcements targeting a global audience of millions".
Has it been used in an Apple product announcement before? My search is imperfect, but I actually can't find an example (on their /newsroom subdomain).
As recently as two months ago, with the Airphone announcement, they weren't doing this:
2020 - "First, I want to recognize Apple’s family in Greater China. Though the rate of infections has dramatically declined, we know COVID-19’s effects are still being strongly felt. I want to express my deep gratitude to our team in China for their determination and spirit. As of today, all of our stores in Greater China have reopened."
2024 - "Today, Apple has 57 stores in Greater China, with thousands of team members delivering exceptional service and creating magical experiences for customers."
It's not a "loose geographical region". It's usually denotes precisely the PRC (People's Republic of China, including mainland China and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao) together with the ROC (Republic of China, usually known as Taiwan).
> especially when you are on Linux AND on macOS. I can’t run FreeBSD jails or ZFS on macOS, can I? Definitely not with one file and one command.
On macOS, docker actually launches a Linux VM to run containers. If this counts, then yes, you can run FreeBSD jails or zfs on macOS, by running a FreeBSD VM.
But it works with one command and one (Docker)file. That’s what I mean by Docker being a kludgy solution: this is way less than ideal. But for developer experience this is very nice. And that same Dockerfile runs on everything from AWS, to GCP, to k8s, to Dokku, etc.
I dislike the implementation but I cannot deny that the UX is good enough to be very popular.
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