It's also at least *mostly* academic. If Apple charges only for actual clicks, rather than impressions, then the cost to the advertiser is arguably the same whether the targeting is good or not. The only difference is the cost to Apple itself.

I would assume the main signal that Apple has is whether the user already has the app installed and/or has previously tried the app and deleted it. And while I understand why app developers would *like* to be able to know every app you have installed so that they can't show ads for it, Apple stopped letting them do that a long time ago for good reason. It's a *huge* privacy impact.

If Apple could come up with a privacy-protecting way to help app developers filter ads that are irrelevant based on installations and other factors without revealing to the app developer what exact apps are installed, I think a lot of users would consider that to be a win, because the ads we endure would at least be slightly less absurd.

But there is no rational universe in which someone can reasonably argue that it is anticompetitive to use the fact that you know that you already sold someone a product to avoid telling them to buy that product, or at least not without arguing that the existence of a single store is itself anticompetitive (which it is, but that's an orthogonal problem).

Well, yeah, but that's ads running in an entirely closed ecosystem. I guess in a silly way, you could argue that in-app ads with tracking disabled are less effective, and App Store ads provide another way to get eyes on apps, so it kind of competes, but that's like saying that Special Rollback Deal signs inside an individual Walmart store compete with Google AdSense. It's technically correct, but not particularly interesting.

Put another way, I can't imagine that any significant number of people who, prior to the do-not-track rules, used to think that in-app ads were targeted well enough are suddenly thinking that targeting is bad because of those do-not-track restrictions. In-app ads are all too horribly targeted across the board for such a thing to be plausible. And the increase in the number of people choosing to use their ad dollars for App Store category promotion over in-app advertising because of those tracking rules is probably even smaller, if it is even nonzero.

I'm not saying that no judge could possibly find that such claims have merit, because there's always somebody who doesn't understand things who will rule in your favor if you venue shop hard enough, but I am saying that IMO, the claims have little to no merit, at least on the surface, and that Apple's DNT rules A. are likely required by law for European compliance anyway and B. have a legitimate public interest that massively overshadows any mostly hypothetical and negligibly sized anticompetitive impact.

Since when does Apple have an advertising ecosystem? I mean, I know there was that brief iAd disaster, but that's been dead for a decade now.

Is competing with the absence of something a problem from an antitrust perspective? If so, explain why, and how intrusive advertising benefits users, rather than app developers.

I'm with Apple on this one. Squarely.

Yes and no. With AI tools, people who know nothing about a code base have a much faster path to making small changes — the kind of changes where someone familiar with the code base could review it in thirty seconds, but could also make the change in thirty seconds if they had time. AI massively increases velocity at the fringes.

But for more complicated changes, in many cases, having AI write the code can cause the author to spend almost as long reviewing the changes as it would have taken to write them, because gaining adequate understanding of the code and paging back in memory of how things work would normally have occurred during the natural course of writing the code, a little as a time, and would have been a decent percentage of the time spent writing the code. When reviewing code written by someone else, you're back-loading that work at review time.

And it also introduces some added risk, because if your code reviewer doesn't know that the change was written by a bot and assumes that you already put the time into making sure it was mostly correct, their review might be more cursory, because they may not take the time to think about all of those details. So if you as the code submitter don't do this, the code quality may suffer severely.

Ad astra per aspera. Strangely fitting. :-D

Half a metre? Half a km? Half a mile? If it's half a mile just to your gate, I can't imagine you live close to very many restaurants.

Besides, you get an ETA and you can track the delivery people, so you know when it's coming.

Kind of getting that impression, yes. Maybe I'm missing something, but there's only one celebrity who I consider to be in any way influential in AI, and that's only because he has a second career as POTUS and could cause all sorts of regulatory roadblocks if he wants to. Otherwise, celebrities might encourage AI adoption, but that doesn't make you an AI leader. It makes you a promoter/marketer.

The next most rational alternative, MuKLinux, could be problematic for Greek reasons as well. :-D (mu = micro)

[*waves at another old friend*]

It's probably worth clarifying that this was done by Tim Cook in his previous job as senior VP of operations, and was long complete by the time he became CEO. But yes.

Yup. I don't think I ever met him in person (not positive about that, given that this was roughly 25 to 35 years ago), but as soon as I saw the name, I immediately recognized it both from MkLinux and from NetBSD-mac68k before that. Good times.

For context, I think the last thing I did for MkLinux was hack up the timezone files for the DST changes in 2007.

Pretty sure if anybody tried to actually run it now, it would be a security nightmare. But on the flip side, nobody would still remember how to compile code for it, so maybe not. :-D

Either way, it was cool seeing a familiar name again after so many years.

Completely serious. Native American groups are pretty pissed about this.

But you're right. Calling it racist is a bit of a stretch, because I doubt our POTUS even knows that it's a Native American word, and probably thinks that it was named after a Canadian province, so by changing its name, he's "sticking it to Canada" or some such nonsense, completely unaware that the lake's name came first.

So in retrospect, I should have said that it displays an absolutely ridiculous level of cultural insensitivity and ignorance.

Either way, the effect is still the same, whether it was deliberate or just through a complete lack of bothering to actually learn anything before making decisions.

That theory relies on a very highly questionable interpretation of the meaning of the English language that is rejected almost universally by all but the most extreme wing-nuts.

Yes, it's being served by a Mac Mini in my TV room closet. :-D

Long time, no see.

We don't need to see the American name, we all know the real name already.

Just curious though: do people outside the UK see the French name for the English Channel?

Trump complains other countries don't respect America enough, but then he does this shit, which just attracts derision and disrespect. He'll be dead in not many years, but we'll still be laughing at the US for electing him.

The constitution is clear. Trump is ineligible to become president after January 20, 2029 unless he becomes Speaker of the House (the highest line-of-succession post in which he can legally take office) and both POTUS and VPOTUS resign or die, or unless he takes some post even lower in the line of succession and an even larger number of people resign or die. And even that path to the presidency isn't clearly constitutional; it just isn't absolutely black-and-white unconstitutional.

So no, Trump cannot win a third term. He cannot even legally appear on the ballot for a third term, short of him somehow managing to get a two-thirds majority of Congress to pass a constitutional amendment and subsequently getting three-fourths of all states to ratify that amendment, or somehow managing to get two-thirds of all states to call for a constitutional convention, neither of which is much more likely than him winning the lottery.

He might, however, be able to win a Senate or House posting, in which case he could continue to be a distracting thorn in the side of proper governance for years to come.