It took me 5s to remember who Cursor was. Our team has been using Claude for the past year, and I barely hear about Cursor in the news anymore (it's all Gemini, OpenAI, nVidia, etc...). Hmmm....

This will have a huge impact on the voter ID debate. By further connecting government identification systems with transaction processing systems like credit card companies, both of which Apple has their hands in, it will become just a database join on anyone with a credit card, to figure out who is and who is not a citizen.

If every time we want to do something that might be construed as "destroying cultural heritage" or "upsetting the social order" or "offending a group's sense of identity", etc..., then we lose our freedom to make choices without having to ask others for permission first. It is not crazy to shrug your shoulders and say Amazon, or anyone else, can destroy books to scan them, or do anything else they want. This is America and we believe everyone should be free to make their own choices about what to do with things they freely acquire from others in a peaceful manner. Nobody forced the book seller to sell, nor did anyone force the person who sold the book to the book seller to sell it to them. Everything was done peacefully, freely, the normal way.

It's interesting the technical community is either getting in line, or seems to be split on this issue, while everyone is all on board with condemning Flock. This is exactly the same as Flock, mass surveillance. Just like Flock, there is a demonstrable good reason for it, and just like Flock, its a new system to track everyone's movement everywhere they go, without their knowledge, without a warrant, without any due process, and it will be ripe for abuse, and will be abused. Can't we just skip to the end and not do it in the first place?

Amen. Healthy adults seek cognitive discomfort, not reinforcement.

100% this is about publications, plagiarism, professors, universities, and sociology. If we can post articles about the ReiserFS guy because he axed his wife, we can certainly post articles about professors who axed themselves when their fabrications caught up to them. The overall climate of DEI adds a political context, but it is an accessory to, not fundamental to, the nerdiness of this story.

I agree with you, this cuts too close to freedom of speech and expression. (1) Should we also allow cigarette companies to advertise with cartoon mascots that might happen to appeal to children, but also appeal to adults, and rely on the parents to educate their children about the dangers of smoking? I would argue yes, but we have passed laws long ago saying otherwise, demonstrating a similar trade-off that was made for a different problem... (2) Parents actually can't educate their children not to use social media anymore than they can educate their children not to want to dress like other kids. The most let-it-be parents' kids use it, a clique forms, and now there is an in and an out crowd, and kids who don't want to feel left out are naturally peer pressured into trying to get onto it. That is the actual effect bringing teens onto social media platforms, not direct marketing/advertising from the operators themselves. This is a notorious group-action problem that cannot be solved by a single party, but requires coordination. In any case, despite all that, I agree we should leave it be, but know that some kids are going to have their brains fried...

Depends on what you get for free and what you choose to work on.

The answer is today if you want to write an app that anyone can use, you essentially have to run a business. The reason is no modern app can truly function without running on mobile, and without having a cloud back end. If you don't run the app as a business, you can't pay for the back end, and the mobile vendors force you to obey a bunch of red tape which basically means you have to have a single entity be in charge of the entire app, e.g., to hold signing certificates, sign app store contracts, etc... You can get around some of that with a non-for-profit foundation, etc.., but the economics of needing to host a back end still mean, essentially, no business? no app. A truly P2P network that can provide more than just packet routing, but also provide some kind of authentication, storage, and database infra, would mean you can go back to the old days of hobbyists writing truly world-changing apps, and being able to throw them over the wall for everyone to enjoy, without having to quit their job or whatever else they're doing to be a "CEO". It would be a refreshing blast from the past.

Mark Zuckerberg is furious, on the phone with Alexander Wang, he yells into the receiver "Have we 'accidentally' hacked anything yet?! We don't have all day!".

Well luckily for you, that is something everyone agrees on (eye roll). For anyone else reading this, I just want you to know it is perfectly acceptable and good to vote your conscience, and vote for either the republicans, or democrats, who will best implement your policy choices, and maintain the balance of power, without worrying about random bullies on the internet trying to label you one way or another. You can feel free to ignore them.

Evidence against Trump is just ginned up by his political enemies, because they want to discredit him. I've seen the same process unfold for every single previous president for the last 30 years. If you disagree with his policies, have a policy argument, otherwise you're just talking past your fellow citizens, and not convincing anyone.

Why would you believe something so outlandish as that? If you believe every accusation somebody throws out there, you'll spend all your days clicking through news articles, only to find unproven, heavily interpreted, questionable, highly biased writing. People vote based on their policies, nothing wrong with that.

You typically expose people for fraud or embezzlement or corruption, not for being one of the ~1/2 Americans who voted for one president or another, sheesh.

E2EE is really a dog and pony show, not real math, because the apps we install are all opaque and built by opaque build systems we inherently trust, whose vendors can insert a new backdoor any time they want. Apple and others know that, and know that the real protection is not building in the first place, the infra and plumbing necessary to create a web interface where government agents can log in any time they want and look at someone's encrypted traffic. Their best defense is that they would have to build it, and it would be a gross violation of privacy, but once they do/are forced to build it, every country will come demanding access to it. So the UK is doing a great disservice to citizens of all countries, not just their own, by pushing on this.