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Comment Re:Meta: The model for America going forward (Score 1) 45

PLENTY of companies big and small spy on their employees. I've seen it first-hand. However, it is more commonly framed as a corporate security measure – keep customer data private, protect intellectual property, etc. – and doesn't typically take the form of monitoring employee activity down the granularity of each keystroke (although some systems do this) and pointer movement (much more rare, because the data is so decontextualized; how do you know what they're pointing at unless you're also recording the screen?).

That said – this could be the tip of a horrifying iceberg. It's likely that many employment agreements or company handbooks allow this sort of monitoring *without notice to the user*. We may at some point in the dystopian future look back on this public statement by Facebook as refreshingly honest.

Comment Re:You're doing it wrong (Score 4, Insightful) 121

"There will always be a need for true experts, good designers, but the writing is on the wall, AI IS REPLACING all junior functions at this time."

The irony in this statement is so rich: where do you suppose true experts and good designers come from? They're made, not born, and the source material for an expert developer is a junior developer. Using AI to eliminate entry level developer positions is NOT a sustainable course. But it does serve the hypercapitalist masters who have created AI to serve their own selfish goals, so it has that going for it.

Comment Re:Same, always fine for me (Score 1) 79

The issues weren't with usability – Apple Maps has always been decently usable. It's the poor quality of the data and navigation, even today, and the post-apocalyptic nature of their 3D imaging when it was first released: buildings were rendered as melted gooballs or bombed out structures. And their navigation and data quality still lags behind Google; just this past year, Apple Maps tried to take me on a pointless trip around a block on a straight-through path down a street. And I can't count the times throughout the years where Apple Maps has outright taken me to an obviously wrong address.

All that said, I still use it for basic stuff because Apple has a much better privacy track record than Google. If I have doubts, I double-check against Google Maps, but use Apple for everything else.

Comment Re:Good to see Adobe is in the loop for this trans (Score 1) 89

To get a sense of the challenge Adobe faced, consider that Photoshop and other Adobe apps were originally engineered using Apple's MacApp development framework – originally released in 1985, last updated by Apple in the last 90s/early 2000 – and that Adobe was STILL using a heavily modified version of MacApp for their apps as late as 2025, *including their iOS apps*.

https://daringfireball.net/lin...

Comment Re:X86 chips still run rings around arm processors (Score 4, Interesting) 89

Tell me you don't us Adobe products on the Mac without telling me you don't use Adobe products on the Mac.

Adobe might have gotten their start on the Mac with Photoshop, Illustrator, et. al. but you'd never know it by using their apps today. Nothing about their user interfaces follows anything resembling platform standards; they are very poor platform citizens in many ways. And the notion that Apple and Adobe might work closely to produce silicon and code that are optimized for each other is laughable. The relationship between them frosted over when Steve Jobs refused to let Flash onto the iPhone and has never really recovered.

Comment Re: Only 3 times as much? (Score 1) 186

You're just a tad off on your timeline. 25 years ago is 2001 and Apple is roaring back, with the success of the iMac under its belt and the iPod just months away from release. Jobs has been back at Apple for 4 years and was already making significant progress at turning the ship around. OS X has been released and exists alongside System 9 on shipping hardware; System 9 is actually *more* stable and usable than the first few versions of OS X, which lacked significant functionality that pro users were accustomed to.

Comment Re:Backwards into stupidity we go (Score 2, Informative) 307

This comment for the win. It's important to remember that a hell of a lot of amazing advances were made in the 20th century when the population started out at about 1.75 billion in 1900 and ended at about 6 billion in 2000. I really doubt there's an advantage to having 8 billion instead of 6, or even 4 - it doesn't drive markets or innovation any faster, except that perhaps people are suffering *more* due to malnutrition and inability to access medical services; but those calamities don't appear to be driving innovation at all, so perhaps we'd be better off with a lot fewer suffering people and a healthier ecosphere?

Comment Re:And it's been abandoned for over a decade (Score 3, Interesting) 20

Quicktime used to be the standard framework for media playback, transcoding, etc. It had a complex API, but it held up pretty well for at least fifteen years. But Apple just lost interest in it, stopped updating it, and it sort of fell into obscurity. There's no real modern replacement that covers all the same cases.

I'd say the situation is more that the tools and frameworks are available, it's just that they are now platform-specific. One of the reasons the QuickTime file format was adopted for the MP4 container format is that QT was engineered to be cross-platform and endlessly flexible – it didn't include any platform-specific garbage like a lot of the formats coming out of Microsoft at the time. This continued for a long time as QT offered plugins and players for multiple platforms, but eventually Apple realized that maintaining a cross-platform framework as complex as QuickTime wasn't a winning strategy for the long term and didn't really serve their platform (see also OpenGL).

Since then, QuickTime has slowly been sidelined in OS X and replaced with a newer framework that is OS X-only. The new framework is more performant on modern hardware, naturally, but outside of supporting modern codecs, I'm not sure it actually improves or expands upon QuickTime's overall capabilities, and of course it omits support for the more esoteric interactive media types. QuickTime was very mature and largely solved the problem space it occupied.

It is a shame that there isn't today a single pipeline for interactive media where you can just define a view in your app or webpage that can present almost any kind of media, from audio to video to 3D models to interactive flythroughs. However, one could argue that we're better off having multiple options that breed innovation, and specificity is often better than generality.

Comment Re: For those getting pitchforks ready (Score 3, Funny) 153

I've heard the squeals. In my experience, they can happen if the bottom of the pan isn't flat to the cooking surface. Sometimes, merely reorienting the pan or slightly adjusting the power level will make it stop. Once, a metal spoon was the problem and removing it was the trick.

However, also in my experience, the squealing is very, very rare. Perhaps you've just been unlucky in hearing it so often. ðY

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