We can't let China get access to our chip technologies! Sure, we'll upload all of the documents necessary to manufacture these chips to a Taiwanese company, but once that company manufactures those chips we should spend millions of dollars making sure they're not directly shipped to China.

Cringe-y doesn't have a single brain. Where does he purport to have found the other two?

Last one to be eaten wins! What do they win? The chance to starve to death instead of being butchered for Haitian Steaks!

Your understanding of reality is...unique.

Don't blame me - I was thrusting as hard as I could in its direction.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more development to get desktop applications, such as Adobe's, pushed to a client/server model. That would facilitate collaborative work in real-time. They could take all of the functions of each application, put them behind REST endpoints, and broadcast the results to all clients that currently have that "file" open. And since the "file" is just a series of REST calls, you could log them and their parameters and effectively have infinite undo history.

In Adobe's case they've already moved over to a cloud-only, so at least users would get extra functionality for that business model. I'm sure I'm oversimplifying the implementation process, but it would be an interesting concept that seems almost inevitable given where things are going.

As a huge proponent of open source software, I no longer put much value in the "many eyes" argument. For me, the primary security advantage is the superior response time that many open source projects have to major vulnerabilities compared to their proprietary counterparts. Also, documentation and support are usually better for open source projects. Oh, and the feature set of mature open source projects is often better. Finally, if the owner/maintainer goes off the deep-end, there will likely be a fork I can use with relatively little effort rather than an expensive migration to a competitor if I had initially used a proprietary solution.

This is 2026 - telling people the truth is like bringing a dildo to a gun fight. You need to tell them what they want to believe. /s?

But that is a weak causal story compared with the much more direct variables everyone is living through: housing costs, wage stagnation, student debt, childcare costs, healthcare costs

Many civilized countries that don't have these problems anywhere near the extent of the U.S. have also seen birth rates as bad or worse than the U.S.: Italy, Norway the Netherlands, South Korea, Japan, etc. And all of their governments have provided significant financial incentives to have children and they've all failed miserably.

delayed household formation

That's a big one but perhaps not for the reasons many would think. It's not so much the cost of housing that's the issue, it's the delay in women getting serious about starting a family. Continuing education and endless fun on the dating apps means that many women aren't getting serious about starting a family until their biological clock is at the buzzer.

Yes, smartphones may be associated with reduced in-person socializing or changed dating behavior. But that does not make them the root cause

It also doesn't make them not the root cause.

They could just as easily be a proxy for urbanization, class, education, income, broadband access, cultural change, or other regional differences

Emphasis mine. Social media and dating apps (both largely powered by smartphones) have changed our culture more than most people realize. Social media has been the primary tool powering tribalism, especially regarding political ideology. That political divide has been increasing gender division since women have been skewing further left and men skewing further right. At this point, the genders barely like each other, let alone feel motivated to find someone to start a family. The degradation of dating norms thanks to dating apps has further grown that division. This has gotten to the point where studies have demonstrated that fewer people today are having sex. Less sex, fewer babies.

Cause the bugs went unpaid for the mess MS made
And he's not gonna fade just because they close their eyes
And they know it
And every time they patch the fails
and refuse to pay him back, he hopes they feel it
Well, can you feel it?

Cuz he's here to remind you
Of the mess you made for the bugs unpaid
It's not fair to deny him
The cost that's fair for a bounty paid
You, you, you oughta know

It's an extremely common misconception that I'm trying to help clear up in general. People have positive feelings about competitive markets as well as the word "free", so it's natural for them to assume that free markets have healthy competition, but it's actually the opposite. Thank you for tolerating my pedantry so well!

I understand why they don't want to do so, and I'm not convinced that there's enough societal or individual consumer benefit from competition in that area to warrant the technical overhead.

I can't imagine the technical overhead on Apple's side being that overbearing. They're not required to build the products for their competitors - just make some of their internal materials available to competitors.

If the goal is really to provide consumer privacy then consumers should be able to decide which companies/products they trust to process their data. This seems like Apple is dictating to their users that no one else should even have a chance to offer them the opportunity.

The EU really should have granted them an exception for this.

In many ways this appears to be bundling the OS with the AI platform. Slashdotters got mad when MS did the same thing with Windows/IE and Office/Teams but feel differently when Apple does it. Sure, MS had a larger market share, but if the EU granted an exception for Apple to do this with iOS/Siri, they'd probably have to grant a similar exception for Android, and a duopoly abusing their powers in parallel is not effectively much different from a monopoly doing it.

Every confident titan fights tooth and nail to get their opponents disqualified rather than have to actually fight them in the ring. This makes the U.S. look incredibly weak. It's a shame because at the rate Trump is destroying the economy, soon U.S. citizens aren't going to be able to afford anything other than Chinese products.

Apple was simply unable to develop interoperability solutions that meet essential EU privacy and security standards

Shots fired! I'm no Apple fan, but I'm sure they could develop interoperability solutions that "meet essential EU privacy and security standards". They chose not to implement the feature that way due to some restrictions of the DMA. However, it's still not clear to me what the DMA has to do with an on-device AI assistant. The MacRumors article cites representatives from the EU and Apple, yet never gets to the heart of the matter.

More and more companies are using proprietary standards

Agreed.

which destroys the free market

I'm sorry to be pedantic, but I think you're referring to a fair market. The free market is what lets companies create and proliferate proprietary standards - because they're free to do whatever they want without any regulation.

If you do not want to run the servers, open source it.

The problem with that, from Ubisoft's perspective, is that every moment you spend playing an "old" game is a moment not spent playing Ubisoft's latest game. They would probably argue that's stealing since they seem to feel entitled to customers continuously spending money on their new products. I guess I've "stolen" a lot from Ubisoft since I refuse to buy their products.