I can just imagine a system where you get a "one minute charging speed boost!" when you choose to watch a video ad...

That's not what the person you replied to was talking about.

Apple will not allow an app to be hosted in their store if the service charges a higher price using payments through the app than it does using other methods.

It's funny, I keep hearing people say that, which was the exact opposite of my experience. I had a Discover card for six months last year, and in that time had more problems with their customer service than I have had, in total, in twenty-five years or so with other credit card companies.

Never had any experience with Capital One for a credit card, but all I can say is good riddance if they kill off Discover.

"A human" can't review them all in-depth. However, the most profitable company in the country can afford to hire multiple humans, who could review all of them.

I was responding to the claim that "Not even the biggest sites in the industry could afford an editorial team capable of playing 50 games a day to find and write about those worth highlighting." Exactly what "write about" means isn't defined, but as I've demonstrated it is certainly possible to do better than "one-word games". With their numbers, after you've weeded out the trash, you're left with 2 games per day. It should certainly be possible for a competent team to play that many games for a few hours and write a short review.

If you had to play for a significant time to discover that it's "worthless," then the game isn't "absolute dross," so it doesn't matter for the purposes of their argument.

This:

Is completely in opposition to this:

If 48 of the games are "absolute dross", then a reviewer should be able to identify that fact within, say, ten minutes. Say you've got a staff of five people to review new games; that hardly seems unreasonable for a storefront the size of Steam, so each one would have to review ten games per day. Determining which games of the ten are total crapware should take no more than a couple hours, which leaves you six hours during the working day to give a fair shot to those that have some promise.

It's kind of bizarre how they have convinced anyone to believe that this project will ultimately be successful. Apple is dead set against interoperability, and any time you find a hole in the methods they have to detect a non-official client, they'll be able to plug the hole in short order.

In the end all you're doing is helping them find and close the holes in their walled garden.

Any time someone calls or texts me to try to get me to vote a certain way, I make sure to let them know that it's their fault that I'm voting for the competition. The fit that some of these callers throw is some of the best entertainment of the political season.

They lock messages from non-Apple devices out of that with their point-blank refusal to support secure messages between Apple and non-Apple devices. It's incredibly disingenuous to pretend that Apple's motivations have anything to do with notifying the users about secured messaging.

The only "distinguishing feature" of iMessage is that it doesn't interoperate with other vendor's phones. Which is of course the point, because (despite your claim to the contrary) Apply absolutely loves and encourages petty behavior to drive more sales.

The green/blue bubble thing itself is stupid, but it absolutely is a big thing in some social circles (read: middle/high schoolers and adults that never matured past middle school).

While it's our responsibility as parents to teach our kids to not to let companies manipulate them like that for profit ... Apple's role in encouraging kids ostracizing other kids for not using Apple's products (in order to drive more sales) is more than a little sleazy.

Generally the problems get much more difficult as the month goes on. Later in the month it is not unusual to have problems that are very hard to solve if you don't have a solid understanding of various CS concepts and algorithms.

This year, the first few problems have actually been relatively difficult compared to in years past. A few participants have speculated that they're being intentionally designed to make it harder to solve them by just plugging them into a LLM (which got very popular last year.)

While it's a little interesting to see how they re-interpreted it on the less powerful hardware (as someone who remembers the original demo well), for the most part the results aren't that great. A lot of the cool-looking effects have been replaced with much less impressive interpretations, and some of the sequences are so messy and low-framerate that if you don't know what it's supposed to look like already, you probably wouldn't be able to figure it out.

I don't know what kind of competition this was against to be declared the winner, but it seems like if you were going to remake a demo for the Apple II, maybe picking something a little simpler and actually doing it justice would have been a better choice.

This is a good example of one of the major pitfalls of using ChatGPT to write code -- since it's trained on a bunch of code scraped from the internet, much of it badly-written, it makes the same mistakes that novice programmers make.

The author of the article claimed that writing the code to accept a number with two digits after the decimal would have taken them "two-to-four hours of hair-pulling" (this was to replace three lines of code), so he obviously doesn't have the ability to determine whether the solution that ChatGPT spit out was any good or not.

Part of the point is that since this energy is going to be used for heat anyway, so you don't have to convert it back again. With that in mind, it's certainly possible that this is more efficient and cost-effective than a rack of Li-ion batteries.

Although the author of the article presumably doesn't understand that, since while energy storage in sand makes sense in some circumstances, it certainly can't replace li-ion batteries for most uses.

The competitors never really pulled much of the traffic; what really pressured them to drop the beta was that the comment section became a complete wasteland with huge amounts of anti-beta spam and moderators playing along by modding down on-topic posts and modding up the anti-beta posts. One of the editors took to moderating everything critical of the beta down, but found that they couldn't keep up against the prevailing opinion.

The other time something similar happened was when SourceForge (part of Dice, same parent company as Slashdot) started bundling malware with the GIMP, and the /. editors refused to post anything about it. Again there was a revolt in the comment section until they finally relented and allowed a post about it.

Definitely some parallels to the reddit situation, although I don't know that the reddit userbase can come close to working together like that.