Google likely knew of this issue, but you need to understand that DEI-related missteps are judged a lot more harshly by the society than other types of errors. So, for Google this was likely “choosing the lesser evil” type of scenario. Anticipating edge cases for LLM behavior is very difficult, but it’s hard to imagine that no-one at Google tested vikings and 1940s Germans before the release.
> downvotes, which indicate that a majority of users feel your comment does not add to the discussion.
I've been on HN for far less than you have but I still have more karma than you do, it means your contributions add less to the discussion than mine do, somehow.
Anyway I reposted it because it got flagged. It just had 2 downvotes, that's pretty normal and I'm used to my opinion not being popular here. After all there's lots of privileged americans and westerners in HN userbase.
But maybe you'd prefer to hear only one side?
Perhaps we should have only "discussions" where everyone agrees that the Western liberal point of view is the best and there are no downvotes at all. Oh that would be so enriching and stimulating!
In the case of Navalny, there are mountains of evidence implicating Putin, including audio recording of a Russian agent admitting to a previous poisoning attempt [1].
> After all there's lots of privileged americans and westerners in HN userbase.
Like I don't know what an ad hominem is or I care at all for the approval of a bunch of privileged shielded liberals...get a life. This isn't a high school debate contest and I couldn't care less about your rules when I know I'm right.
No matter who killed him or if he was killed at all, I'm glad Navalny is gone. One less fascist on this planet, and it's definitely helping expose hypocritical liberals like you.
And anyway you still have no hard proof that he was killed by the government. A previous poisoning is not proof of his assassination now, although it makes it likely. In any court, it wouldn't still be enough to warrant an arrest.
But who needs evidence when all you care about is discrediting the enemy and mounting a case to escalate a war?
Few days and we're supposed to know everything about Navalny's death. 5 years after Epstein's death and we still have no idea how did he die.
It's clear you have no interest in rational discussion.
Perhaps you'd be happier engaging with some local political groups that share your views?
Sounds a bit more productive than spamming a Californian VC firm's website with your hourly angry, poorly-informed political rants against "rich woke Western liberals" ;)
Talking about what I did/what I’m planning to do on a regular cadence forces me to reflect on my time spent and makes me more focused. I also love hearing what others are up to because it promotes collaboration between us. The latter point is completely ignored by the author.
However, the blockers question is a waste of time. Blockers should be resolved as fast as possible, not wait until the next scheduled meeting.
They should have a separate term for this, like “over-the-air recall”. This sort of thing will happen more and more often as in-car computers become more relied upon.
When I first started to program professionally, I was fascinated with the blameless postmortem culture that my ex-employer had. I thought (and still do) it is incredibly conducive to systemic improvement. I’m happy it is legally codified in the aviation industry.
I find it hard to believe CORS is the root cause. It’s more likely that the server returns an error response and _that_ response doesn’t include the CORS headers.
You are probably right. However, if I remember correctly (it's been awhile), it was one of them that didn't return a CORS header, but a 200 status, but that led to a number of requests that failed. But regardless, as an SPA, the Teams application is not resilient to it.
I’m curious what the largest bottleneck in robotics AI is - algorithms, training data, hardware, something else?
From a practical point of view, it seems like there would be vastly less training data available because almost all of it needs to be created by hand, as opposed to chatbots that can use already existing troves of internet text.
Looking at the rapid progress over the last few years, I think the bottleneck is still the cost of hardware. Once robots at the level of Boston Dynamics's Spot or Tesla's new Optimus are available to regular hackers, we'll see another massive surge in progress.
I think the bootlneck is largely software. Robots have been there for a while, yet we don't have a good paradigm to program them. Neural net are certainly here to change that. I agree, massive surge in progress is expected!
> But, coming back to my first decade at Google, it was incredible to see employees valued above everything else. Perhaps this is a privilege only possible in a culture of infinite abundance. Or maybe not? Maybe it's possible in a limited-resource culture too, but only if the company is small.
Every team that I’ve been on where I felt this way was when that company was rapidly growing and successful. I can’t say the reverse is necessarily true, but can success be the key ingredient that enables this, not the company size?
I worked for a bootstrapped startup where the opposite was true. While the company was in survival mode, employees were highly valued and the owners had a "we're in it together" type of attitude. When the money started rolling in, their attitude changed to "we are better than you." They moved all their employees to a different office than themselves, and started treating us like we are expendable. They lost all their competent staff in a year, and had to start relying on freelancers to get anything done.
To see why Apple’s mandatory commissions are absurd, compare phones to desktop computers. There is no fundamental difference between the two. So, why is it okay to install whatever you want and pay for it directly on desktops, but on phones it is not?
The “better security” argument just doesn’t make sense in this context.
Apple is hosting, distributing, and directly marketing apps in the app store. They are reviewing submitted apps for compliance with their policies and security requirements.
If you want to compare it to desktop computers, great! Compare it to the macOS App Store which… takes a 30% commission.
Whether or not you personally agree that 30% is a reasonable fee, you can't simply deny that operating the app store costs money and resources. Further, it isn't unreasonable for them to try to recoup those costs or even to make some profit off of providing the service.
It's been a while but I'm pretty sure signing and notarizing is required on macOS now, without disabiling SIP. At least for things downloaded from a browser. My interpretation is that $99/year is required if you want to avoid your users needing to use the terminal.
It's not required. I made a macOS app recently and no way in hell am I paying that $99/year. People are still able to run it. But there is a scary warning.
> Apple is hosting, distributing, and directly marketing apps in the app store. They are reviewing submitted apps for compliance with their policies and security requirements.
They CHOOSE to do this. If there were a free and open market for app stores, competitors would pop up, who would similarly host, distribute, market, and "review" apps. And they would do it for a whole lot less than 30% and 99USD/year.
They charge 30% and restrict other installation methods because they can, but you cannot justify it based on those costs.
I firmly believe this model isn't going to last. If it didn't hurt Apple's bottom line so much, PWAs would be far more prevalent already than they are, and that's right now. In 10-20 years, this thinking will be gone. They just have to milk it as a long as they can for the shareholders.
It's their hardware, for now they can do what they want. Most consumers didn't even know about the 30%, and probably still don't. Guess who it benefits to keep that under wraps? Or convince the world they need an expensive app store to vet their apps before downloading them?
(And don't say "there's nothing like a native app experience". It's completely irrelevant. If there was a will to build it, the UX would be identical)
>They CHOOSE to do this. If there were a free and open market for app stores, competitors would pop up, who would similarly host, distribute, market, and "review" apps. And they would do it for a whole lot less than 30% and 99USD/year.
Would they? There are plenty of storefronts that sell games on Windows, yet Steam is the dominant one and charges, you guessed it, $100 and 30% of gross revenue. Epic charges 12 percent and loses money on every transaction. It might actually cost somewhere between 12 and 30 percent to make it a profitable and sustainable venture.
There is one interesting difference, which is that Steam charges a one-time $100 per game, rather than annually. It's very slightly cheaper in the long run, which is nice if you just want to distribute a completely free game on Steam, or if you're a part-time game dev with low sales.
1. they wouldn't have to fight so hard to keep their not-monopoly
2. the app store would be operating at-cost, with no margin
i think everyone agrees they have a margin, the question is how much. right now i think apple could make a profit with a 10% of revenue, and most likely at 5%. now they've done the hard work of creating an entire market, and invested huge sums to get there, so maybe they deserve a markup on that
but that's the beauty of startups and capitalism. a new product can skip steps, learn from your mistakes, work without your tech debt and bloated organisational dysfunctions, and disrupt your industry. it happens in every industry, and no company is immune. apple will fight to keep things as-is with everything they've got, but capitalism will win.
>So, why is it okay to install whatever you want and pay for it directly on desktops, but on phones it is not?
On desktop you have similar stores like Steam. The store takes a 30% cut from all sales on the platform and they require apps on the platform to use their payment processing so that they can take that cut.
The difference between Windows and iOS here is that third party stores can be installed without being limited to PWAs or requiring hacky workarounds like AltStore.
Why does Apple have the sole app store on the device? Well it's because it ensures they have a closed platform that they fully control. They made this app platform so it's up to them to decide how open it should be from a range of first party only to fully open to any app from the internet. It's up to Apple to decide what kind of openness will allow them to provide the most value to users. Apple designs their app platform from the hardware all the way up to the operating system and libraries for developers to use. Apple has created a great app platform that brings value to a lot of users.
PC platform: Steam doesn't care if (case in point) Eagle Dynamics allows direct downloads from their website of DCS World - in fact they embrace it, by offering account linking APIs.
So on PCs, unlike on iOS, users can buy their content as they choose.
And it's not as if Microsoft forces everyone to use their (exceptionally crappy) store either.
Just to be clear, in the DCS World example you do have to make a choice between using Steam for the game download and purchases, or to use the Eagle Dynamics website/downloader directly. External modules purchases do not import to the Steam account, IIRC.
My point was probably that Steam doesn't force users to only use their platform.
To further illustrate the non lock in culture, you can do a transfer of content from Steam into your Eagle Dynamics account if you want to change the account type.
I'm guessing that seasoned DCS players like the direct account method (more frequent sales, for one), whereas beginners are more likely to discover it through Steam.
(iRacing also has a similar relationship with Steam, although in that case Steam only managed the subscription - not the car/track purchases.)
I believe the rule you're talking about only applies to literal in-game transactions - i.e. the binary you put on steam cannot itself implement a non-steam wallet. But there's no business rule against selling in-game content elsewhere, like apple is doing.
TFA is about Apple's policy on purchases that happen outside the app. It used to ban even linking to them; now it allows that but it wants a cut. Steam doesn't do anything similar - it has no rules about purchases outside the app.
You might have meant something else, but what you wrote is:
> they require apps on the platform to use their payment processing so that they can take that cut.
Which is not true. Both steam apps and in-game content for steam apps can be sold in other stores with steam's blessing, and steam expressly supports developers to bypass their payment processing (by offering steam keys and account integration).
My statement was specifically referring to the app itself. The app is what has to use steam wallet and not something else. Selling a steam key on a website is not selling it in the app. The requirement applies to the app and not the website for the app.
Set app selling aside - I only mentioned that because it's a counterexample to your original post as stated.
What TFA is about is selling in-app content from external stores. Apple used to ban that entirely, and now wants a revenue share for it. Steam has never done either - they explicitly support it (via account integration). The two are not similar.
> There is no fundamental difference between the two.
Are the input devices the same? The screens sizes? The situations you use them? The means of network connectivity? The social conventions around them?
There are tremendous differences between phones and desktop computers. Really the only way that they’re not different is that they’re both Von Neumann machines. But that describes so many things around us these days that it’s a distinction without a difference. By the same virtue a modern television is no different.
If there is no fundamental difference, then did you just define the market as all phones, tablets, and pcs? If so the the iPhone is a small minority and can’t possibly be forced to change anything, right? You can just replace your iPhone with a pc if you want to install things?
Both phone and desktop consumers can install third-party apps on their devices. From this point of view, there is no fundamental difference. Yet, on desktops, people are free to install freely, but on the iPhone, Apple controls all third-party installations.
