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

Anyone who says we need to do X to solve climate change is wrong, because there is no one "X" that does it.

We need renewables, nuclear, electrification, synthetic fuels, forestation, mangroves, direct air capture, BECCS, biochar, enhanced rock weathering, cloud enhancement to increase albedo, possibly orbital solar shading, ocean alkalinity enhancement, and more that I don't know about including things maybe no one has yet thought of.

We created this problem through a wide variety of mechanisms, burning many different kinds of fossil fuels in many different contexts, and we're going to need an even wider variety to fix it.

And even if they happened faster, it still wouldn't be enough. The focus on emissions reduction to the exclusion of everything else is going to kill a lot of people.

The only way we're going to fix this is to get to net negative, and while emissions reduction can help it will never be enough. That being the case, we should be investing a lot into capture and sequestration research.

Absolutely. We should admit that we're in for some more CO2 rise before we can make it fall, no matter what we do, and invest in geoengineering research focused on techniques to directly reduce insolation and ocean acidification.

None of this is either/or. We need to be doing all of this in parallel: Electrification, renewables, nuclear, and synthetic fuels to reduce burning of fossil fuels, carbon recapture, especially at high-intensity carbon sourced (e.g. cement plants), but also from the atmosphere, and geoengineering to directly cool the planet and increase ocean pH. And we can... but the laser focus on renewables and electrification and renewables is harming the future.

That seems like it would be relatively easy, and safe as long as no one makes a suicide cord and tries to use it to power the house. I don't know if any of this class of equipment provides it.

Need? There are lots of things you don't "need". But this seems like something that could legitimately improve my oral hygiene because -- like most people, I suspect -- I don't floss nearly as often as I should. Having it integrated into the brushing process would mean I do it 2-3 times per day, rather than once every few days. Is that worth $500? I guess it depends on how important $500 is to you. I'm not very price-sensitive and I am very lazy.

I'll wait until these have been available for a while and see what the reviews look like... but if the reviews are positive I'd say there's about a 95% chance I'll buy one.

I have one, and I don't use it enough. It takes time and effort to fill, use and clean up. Did I mention I'm lazy?

The notion that democracy and capitalism are innately incompatible is rather interesting, given that every long-running democracy has a predominantly capitalist economy. There has never been a durable multiparty democracy with a state-owned or centrally-planned economy. Not one! There are several examples of non-democratic nations with capitalist economies, but the complete lack of any successful non-capitalist democracy argues pretty strongly that capitalism is a necessary (though not sufficient) prerequisite for a healthy democracy, which is the opposite of incompatibility.

I did note that you attached the qualifier "unfettered", but has there ever been an example of unfettered capitalism? I'm not aware of one, and it seems fundamentally impossible. Capitalism requires a state to enforce property rights and contract law, and it's hard to think how any state could exist that does those things but doesn't also impose some regulation. If by "unfettered" you mean "lightly regulated" rather than the literal meaning of the word, then it becomes a question of degree but democracies have gone through many cycles of liberalizing and regulating without ceasing to be democracies.

No, in fact most attempts at democratic socialism have been entered peacefully. They tend to begin by election of a socialist leader with enough support to begin nationalizing all or most industry. Examples include the Allende regime in Chile, India's government for much of the latter half of the 20th century, Sweden's Meidner Plan, Venezuela (Chavez' second attempt; his first try was a coup but then he was elected), etc.

Socialist revolutions almost always install non-democratic regimes, though many claimed to be democratic (e.g. the USSR had decades of elections in which every race had only a single candidate, chosen by the nomenklatura).

They did make as good an attempt as anyone... but still had to restrict emigration to prevent their population fleeing the workers' paradise.

Fair, many people do use the term imprecisely.

I doubt it. Which is why the cheaper devices being discussed won't provide backup power during an outage.

The discussion is about equipment that is designed to plug into the house wiring via an outlet, not a standalone battery that provides its own outlets. If you want to discuss an entirely different sort of equipment, then obviously the conclusions change.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

This is too strong. There's a large distance between "Unwilling to tell a pollster they regret" and "Are quite happy".