hey, it's not an ordinary 4%. it's an inflection point 4%!

like almost every other article here. but it pays msmash's salary so we can keep enjoying this formerly venerable news site and crack jokes at the asinine nonsense that msmash gets paid for posting these days. just relax, take it all in and feel the time passing, worlds colliding in the far distance. what's not to like?

noice!!!

now all there's left is ... actually getting them to the moon. piece of cake!

you mean the moneylenders, right?

bullshit, slop, noise ... this indeed is regular online entertainment. people make a living with inane charlatanery, slashdot making a living by regurgitating it, we granting them our precious attention, clicks, comments, business as usual. but in fairness ... it still isn't a doom call. you made me skimread the fricken article, nowhere it spells doom. that's just the magic happening in human brains when exposed to headlines.

the article is your regular slop but "cut into apple's profit margin" is hardly a doom call, specially when apple has been long enjoying a dominant position over suppliers and the ability to dictate prices while still selling at a premium. if their margin isn't huge for sure it isn't because of supply costs.

this could ofc mean that their product will become even more overpriced for customers, and probably will, but i bet most won't care or even be premium happy with it. the price of iphones started to soar for no real reason around 2015 to about 5x today and i don't think anybody batted an eye lid. so no doom in sight until folks simply can't aford their shiny anymore ... which is indeed a possibility at some point but for different reasons, and will be masked by far more serious grudges.

wow, we went into internet psychology! ok, then let's unpack this:

you were first with ad-hominem ("i sank that low"; appealing to goowdwin, really?) to proclaim victory ("i lost the argument"; btw, who wants victory here and what does it even mean?) while you still didn't substantiate your statement that "ethics is inherent to life", which i disagreed with. and i'm fine to disagree and respect your position but find it comical that me merely pointing out that not only didn't you substantiate it but actually abunded in how it actually is a human and ideological construct is presented as "insult and abuse". let's cut the drama, shall we?

but it still seems you still want victory for some reason so to mask the fact that you can't substantiate that claim you lower and blur the bar: now you're talking about how it is "not only" theory and attempt to shroud that in a lot of dialectics that don't hold water either: "scientific disagreement" can empirically be challenged while "moral disagreement" can not, you promote mere biological adaptations for survival to "cross-cultural shared moral truths", you proclaim that justification has to be "public facing" while that's obviously only true inside the group that already shares beliefs and values (actually the founding of any ethical framework) and you dismiss the fact that moral relativism is actually how we function with an appeal to "normativity" as if norm were the result of some natural law and not the favoring of some particular values over others.

now, you seem very eager to convince yourself that your set of values is the right one, which is likely why you want to give it the magical status of "natural moral truth", "inherent to life". fun fact is that i actually share a lot of those values (i think i said so) but see no evidence whatsoever of their trascendent and natural origin. the difference is important in that i recognize them as just nice values to adopt but i'm not in posession of absolute truth so need to be open. you seem to see it the other way around and that's fine but dialectics really bores me, specially if it only serves your crusade to be right. i don't need that.

your effort in illustrating how ethics is a human construct is commendable. so not "inherent to life itself", but "formal, discursive moral theories".

you seem to think that some of them are "can be more justified than others", and thus somehow become "moral law", and i'm fine with that (and i surely could agree with many) as long as that only applies to yourself, but you seem oblivious of the fact that moral relativism is actually how humans work.

i think we do agree except on the definition of what ethics is (semantics again). empathy, collaboration, respect, etc are indeed inherent in nature but that's not an ethical framework. ethics is the search and definition of a rational framework of what good behavior should be. that's definitely a human construct and other animals don't have that, or nowhere near that sophisticated. they have natural hierarchies and rules, they can have theory of mind, but their behavior emerged organically and they don't really argue about ethics, how behavior should be. as an aside, animals can be ruthless and cruel too. just watch a flock of peaceful and lovely hens (specially without a rooster) bullying a particular hen they do not like for whatever reason, possibly to death. it's really brutal behavior, gutwrenching to watch.

furthemore, even if ethics aims to define what good behavior should be the result is not guaranteed at all to be what you and i would consider a good thing. that entirely depends on the particular beliefs and values shared by the group. take the proverbial nazi as an extreme example. they didn't lack ethics, on the contrary, they developed their ethics to the extreme except they based it on values and beliefs you and me would find abhorrent, and wrong. to them however that was perfectly normal and acceptable, thus ethical. there are many such examples, also in our time and day and also very extreme. ethics aren't "good" per-se, they are always based on a subjective perception of the world, on a value and bielief system. from your comments i think you and i could share quite a few of those values (e.g. cicero), but in reality there is no universal "good" ethics. the best we can do is find common ground.

finding common ground, however, requires the hardest thing to understand about ethics (and human co-living in general): that "my ethics" aren't necessarily "your ethics". it requires the recognition of differences and the will to at least understand them and to make them be understood, in what values they are rooted, from what beliefs they spring from, if those values and beliefs actually make sense. ofc there will always be limits but openess, tolerance and engagement are the only way to make that work with time. what you can't do is go out from the premise that your ethics, values and beliefs are the absolute truth. for one they absolutely are not, that's guaranteed, because absolute truth simply doesn't exist. but then, you can't simply impose your values on others, that only works with coercion or violence, that's what the nazi tried.

yes, and that means their own demise to some extent, although they do have a big collection of golden parachutes. will see how that works. but interestingly, the fear of losing their privilege and dominion is possibly what is making them double down (particularly in the west now) on their own ethics, which is in clear contradiction with that of the majority of the population, and it's really bursting at the seems already with cognitive dissonance. i still wouldn't say they aren't ethical, that's just a step away from saying they aren't human.

the aaa segment has also been saturated with minimum value for a while. i can't say what the impact of ai is/will be, it will likely be some, but i think the real underlying trend here is plain old market saturation. gaming has been going mainstream and soaring for more than two decades, covid provided an extra circumstantial boost that isn't there anymore and it seems the market is hitting its limits (combined with consumer confidence taking a hit). i would expect natural selection doing its thing now.

ai disruption acts on top of that, and it can increase saturation across the board. it opens up possiblities for small initiatives, and it is ofc the perceived golden egg goose for established developers. how that actually plays out both in competition and actual value/productivity is i think too soon to say.

this is ofc from a western (and maybe japan) perspective, in asia it might be an entirely different picture. i wouldn't be surprised if e.g. the indian market becomes a global target.

the nobel peace prize has always been a cynical farce. christian brandt made it quite clear in 1935 already when he officially and in all sarcastic seriousness nominated hitler in response to the swedes nominating chamberlain.

so they pretend they do not exist so they can pretend we don't exist? clever bitches!

it's news when someone pulls off a car analogy that actually sort of makes sense.

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w95 was a joke, a nice graphical shell for the time but barely more than that, with no concern for security at all and no way to get around that. that didn't get minimally addressed until w98 second edition. i did forget w7 on the list, though, it was quite solid.

xp was solid too if you upgraded after a few service packs, that's what the 1 year quarantine is for. i never install freshly released comercial software, specially not from ms. let others take the burn if they feel like (and what's the rush, it's just an os, it's basic function is to run other programs, store files and provide connectivity, everything else is just candy or nonsense). that's why i also suggest disabling/delaying all automatic updates on w11 (i think the maximum delay is 4 weeks now, which is way too short; critical security patches will come through anyway).

w8 was meant to be skipped. the sensible upgrade path for windows was:

wfwg3.11 -> w98se -> nt/2000 -> wxp -> w10.

provided you waited about a year after each release. mostly everything inbetween was toxic or didn't work sensibly. w11 is toxic but at least works. most of the time.

i hear you. but this has been brewing for a long time and it's going to get worse before it gets better. quote that comes to mind: "the old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters".