You don’t need metaphors. It’s pretty simple.

The Spotify app should have a button that takes you to their website, where you can sign up for a premium subscription.

It doesn’t have one because Apple would kick Spotify out of the App Store.

Also - all other links to the Spotify website (support, terms of service, privacy policy, etc) take you to pages where the main navigation of the website has been removed so that you can’t find the signup page. Because again, Apple bans that. For the longest time apps have not allowed to have any way for users to find a signup form on a website.

That policy is now illegal in the EU (and a growing list of other countries) and Apple’s attempt at compliance is a new API - only available in Europe - that informs the user that they might be a victim of theft, fraud, etc before they get taken to a website that is deliberately sandboxed… supposedly to prevent theft/fraud/etc but more likely because it makes it really difficult for Spotify to link that signup with an existing free account.

Oh and if Spotify opts to expose users to see that horror show… they’d have to pay tens of millions of dollars per year to Apple. They have so far refused to do so, meaning the new regulations have failed (well, they were failing, until the EU declared Apple’s compliance efforts insufficient).

what else do I get with something like CARROT that the default doesn’t offer

More control over what data is highlighted as the primary metrics at the top of the report (or on widgets).

Where I live the actual temperature and “feels like” temperature are often really far apart. Apps like Carrot can be configured to show “feels like” as the main temperature, but Apple only shows it if you scroll down all the way down past a bunch nearly useless stats like the sunset time (spoiler, it will be the same as yesterday) and how the current temperature compares to the historical average.

Also, I live near the beach and want to know the tides. That’s almost more important than the temperature.

does anyone know if there’s any actual data that shows personal disability information being recorded/collected?

That’s basically the crux of the case right? The law is pretty clear, Google can’t collect that data (or at least, if they do, then they’d have to comply with a long list of privacy regulations that I’m pretty sure they don’t comply with).

Um, did they actually do something impressive or is it just a really big gas tank?

I’m struggling to imagine why anyone would even want 1,300 miles of range in a PHEV. Surely it’d be better to have a smaller tank and more space inside the vehicle.

AFAIK the optics have to be regularly cleaned, calibrated and replaced. And by regularly, I mean daily/weekly for some of that.

The process is a carefully guarded trade secret and intentionally difficult. The companies that own the machines are not allowed to have employees who are trained in the process. When you buy those machines it comes with a service contract from the manufacturer. And the manufacturer is ASML - a Dutch company.

Sure, but the vast majority of Mac software at the time, including loads of first applications from Apple, couldn’t run on Tiger. You had to run it in the “Classic” environment - and they never ported that to Intel.

Tiger shipped just 4 years after the MacOS 9.2 and plenty of people hadn’t switched to MacOS X yet.

The reality is Apple only brings things forward when they can do it easily.

Apple has done eight major CPU transitions in the last 40 years (mix of architecture and bit length changes) and a single team worked on every single transition. Also, Apple co-founded the ARM processor before they did the first transition. It’s safe to assume the team that did all those transitions was also well aware of and involved in ARM for as long as the architecture has existed.

Apple has the target disk mode, but doesn’t the laptop need to be shut down for it to work?

Modern Macs can’t do Target Disk Mode. If you had the right cables (thunderbolt or firewire) it was really fast, just as quick as a high end internal PCIe SSD.

And yes, you did need to reboot - because the other computer had full arbitrary read/write access to the raw sectors on the drive with no safety checks or security. If you did that while the computer was running normally, you’d corrupt the data on the disk as soon as they both tried to do a write operation at the same time — and also TDM needed to be used with caution - the other computer could easily install a rootkit or steal all your saved passwords.

It’s been replaced with “Mac Sharing Mode” which operates while the Mac is running normally, does have all the necessary algorithms in place to avoid corrupting the disk, full security to authenticate each read/write operation and block attempts to mess with system files, and therefore is orders of magnitude slower than TDM.

Solar, wind, hydro can do it, but the amount of CO2 produced by manufacturing the generators is still massive

That’s FUD.

Sure - the concrete in a large hydro dam requires a staggering amount of electricity to produce (because the chemical reaction to produce cement needs insane amounts of heat), but there’s no reason any CO2 needs to be emitted. You can absolutely use zero emission power to high temperatures needed to produce cement.

And not all hydro needs a massive concrete wall. There’s a hydro station near my city that doesn’t have a dam at all - it’s just a series of pipes that run from the top of a mountain to the bottom of a mountain. There’s a permanent medium sized river that never stops flowing that comes down off the mountain - with an elevation change of several hundred metres. It provides more power than the entire city’s consumption and does so while only diverting a tiny percentage of the river’s water. As the city grows, the power plant can easily be upgraded to divert more of the water though pipes instead of flowing uselessly down towards the sea.

Covid and Russia’s war created massive fluctuations recently but if you look through that noise global CO2 emissions are pretty much flat and have been for a few years now. They are almost certainly going to trend downwards going forward (a lot of countries already are seeing downward movement).

The simple reality is fossil fuels are now too expensive to be competitive. Why would anyone power an AI (or mine crypto) with coal power that costs $4,074/kW when you could use Solar at $1,300/kW (during the day. At night it’s more like $1,700 to $2,000 with the best storage options, such as batteries or pumped storage). Or wind at around $1,700.

Nuclear is $8,000/kW unless you live in Russia, where safety is largely ignored.

Hydro can be cheap if you happen to be near an ideal river - but for most locations it’s not competitive with Solar/Wind. So hydro is safe as a long term power generation method into the future, but it’s never going to be the dominant form of power unless (like my city) you happen to have ideal geology.

It sounds like it should work to me.

As an example, as a kid I couldn’t play first person video games until game developers worked out they need something in a fixed position taking over a significant portion of the screen (for example, a steering wheel in a car or the gun you’re holding in a shooter).

Turn those fixed overlays off, and after just playing for a few seconds I’ll be sick the rest of the day. If anything I’m even more sensitive now than when I was a kid - but with the right overlays I’m all good.

I’d bet Apple did a lot of research into motion sickness while developing the Vision Pro headset. Good to see some of that coming to other products.

Putting my developer hat on and reading various reports - this smells like Apple had a really bad data loss bug which they quietly fixed by attempting to automatically recover lost photos from some corner of the database that still might have the data. Such as the thumbnail database or a cache.

Backups people. Make sure you have good backups and for your most precious photos not just digital ones - print them. And send a physical copy to your grandparents as a gift - they’ll love it and it will be one more place you can recover that photo of your kid’s birthday if you ever need to

And if you don’t want something in a photo… don’t take the photo.

If any of that is part of the hiring process - I don’t want the job.

If HR is incompetent enough to consider things like relationship status or political opinions then what other bullshit policies does the company have? It’s probably the tip of the iceberg.

By far most important thing is to have good colleagues, because without good colleagues your job will be miserable or the company will not last (or both). Made the mistake of working for a shitty job at high pay once and it was one of the worst decisions of my life.

Don’t waste your life working for incompetent companies.

Also, as someone who has hired devs… if you have a public profile, and it doesn’t make you look hopelessly incompetent, then your application is going onto my shortlist. Too many applications cross my desk to look at all of them properly, so a lot of good candidates won’t even get considered. But if there’s a GitHub or similar profile, I’m going to open it, and if I see green squares… you’ve got my attention.

You’ll get my attention wether the username matches your real name or not, but bonus points if it’s your real name. Openness leads to trust. And trust is criitcal.

If the EU finds apple guilty of “systematic” non-compliance, which will happen if they “continue their shenanigans for every judgement”, then the DMA doesn’t call for a fine. It calls for a TikTok style forced sale. Apple could be ordered to sell the iPhone to another company or face an outright ban in the EU.

Of course that’s assuming the EU has the balls to actually enforce their own laws knowing full well the transatlantic political consequences.

we can be sure a megacorp like apple is pulling every lever at their disposal

Sure. But as far as I can tell the only lever at their disposal is to drag their feet and try to delay compliance as long as possible.

It’s an effective strategy, but it’s stupid. They’re making a lot of people angry and that is never a good long term strategy.

Where will they get their info from with no one to scrape?

It’s not like there’s a shortage of human generated content. And the content that has already been generated isn’t going anywhere. It will be available effectively forever.

just “standing on the shoulders of giants”.

So? If you ask an LLM a question, you often get a very useful response. That’s ultimately all that matters.

I disagree. The real news is the free model will now search the internet for up to date answers, and for calculations it will write and execute a python script, then show you the result.

Paid users of ChatGPT have had those features for months, and they were a massive step forward in terms of how often the AI provides accurate answers.

you can run locally some small models

Emphasis on “small” models. The large ones need over a terabyte of RAM and it has to be high bandwidth (DDR is not fast enough).

And for most tasks, smaller models hallucinate way too often. Even the largest models are only just barely good enough.

It just hasn’t hit that Twitter-level critical mass of users

Twitter used to be bigger than it is now and it also used to have less spam. So clearly size isn’t the problem.

The problem with twitter is Musk fired all the people who spent their day figuring out how to hide (or just delete) shitty content.

it’s all CGI

Crushing the industry I work in, and my dad worked in, is CGI? I’m pretty sure that’s very real.

I love listening to digital music on as much as anyone. More than most people. But it will never replace physical instruments for me and I don’t like to see a company celebrating that transition - even if I admit it’s very much real.

I think the world was a better place when all 50 people on a train carriage listened to the one musician who brought a guitar onto the train and called out asking them to sing a favourite song next.

Spotify pays more to artists than physical stores selling CDs ever did. And they certainly pay better than FM radio.

Sure - if you were one of he top 1000 artists in the world the old system paid more… but it’s not like those artists are starving now — Spotify alone pays millions per year to the top thousand artists, and they also get paid by YouTube, Apple, TikTok, etc etc.

The real way to make money in the music industry is and always has been live performances. A solo artist can make a couple hundred bucks a night doing simple cover songs, and a popular band can make a lot more.

The big difference is exclusive content. Music has a few exceptions but in general sign up for one service and you can listen to anything.

That forces music services to compete on the overall experience (and price), while video services pretty much exclusively compete based on what content is available and literally none of them offer all of the things a person wants to watch. So nobody will ever be happy with any streaming service.