I’d agree, though I wonder how much of this is how appealing consumers find the competition? None of them seem to be making major inroads at the moment. The biggest competition is also raising prices, nullifying the competitive penalty Netflix would face from that move.

Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.

Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.

The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.

Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.

It could be that.

My first thought is that it might be the post-lockdown tech demand crash hitting Apple later than it hit the rest of the industry. If I remember right Apple was holding on fairly well when the market first started to crash as society shifted into a “post-Covid” mentality, relative to their competition.

Could be that for whatever reason the drop in demand for Apple was just delayed by about a year.

To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.

I’m not going to hold my breath.

That really depends on what their goal is.

From a business perspective it’s not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can “win” for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren’t also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.

The very start of that article:

October 6 Update: A newly published report has clarified that the discovered code bits are not related to Windows “12.” Also, the next-gen Windows version will not require a subscription.

The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.

Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.

Unit Ready
Unit Ready
Unit Ready

Construction complete

So you’re saying I need to stalk them down and introduce myself? Seems like a lot of work to avoid being incorrect, but since this is the internet I am obliged to do what I must to be correct.

Mine was never stolen, to break your streak. I had one of the little 4GB ones.

People underestimate how much production other countries are capable of. Of course, China does dominate the manufacturing game, especially mass production.

There’s no shortage of alternatives all the same. Vietnam in particular has been doing quite well taking manufacturing work that companies are moving out of China so as to diversify their production chain. India is rising on that front too. Not to mention that the west truly does far more manufacturing than people give credit for — I’ve found that nearly every category of general goods that I try to buy will have some US made options. That’s not even touching the rest of the west. The big exception being electronics, but those have Vietnam and India as growing alternatives, with Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore all as solid players in that market.

The overall point being: it’s entirely possible to remove China from the manufacturing chain if there’s enough money behind the push. The US economy is probably large enough to do so with some meaningful struggle. The US and major allies could do so more easily. The difficulty is more political and temporal. Getting everyone on board and committed plus going through with the multi-year long process.

Unity cares. This whole fuckup is Unity trying to further monetize mobile games and get a stranglehold on mobile game advertising. Console/PC games are just collateral damage.

If this costs Unity enough money it might work. I’m not holding my breath but stuff like this has a better chance of working than PC indie devs abandoning Unity does.

Based on their comment, I don’t think they’re the person deciding what engine is used. They work for someone else that has already selected an engine. They need to keep their skills employable first and foremost here.

Hopefully Godot takes off a bit here, I think there’s good room for it to advance with indie devs and maybe use that growth to be able to be more of an alternative to UE sometime afterwards.

I’m planning to upgrade from a 12 mini, which partly influenced my choice of years too (having seen 3 year data was the main part!). If I had a 12 Pro I think I’d have kept it for an extra year, but the battery is just not sufficient for how my phone use has changed.

I think furthering your extra details here too is I saw someone point out that one of Apple’s slides for the base 15 was comparing its performance to the base 12. Apple knows how often people upgrade. Picking the 12 as a comparison point wouldn’t be an accident — we’re the single largest target audience for the 15. And in a year, they will in all likelihood compare the 16 to the 13 for the same reason.

This year’s new phones are for people that last bought a phone in 2020 or earlier. If the average user is on a three year upgrade cycle (what the data shows as I recall) then you’d expect roughly 1/3 of people to upgrade every year.

This is better for Apple, as it keeps their revenue more spread out instead of heavily concentrated in year one of a three year cycle.
This is better for consumers, as it means new features and upgrades are constantly being made. If they want to upgrade early they can, and they’ll get new features even if it’s only been two years.
This is also better for both Apple and consumers because there’s more opportunities to course-correct or respond to feedback over issues. If Apple only released a phone every other or every three years, it’d take that much longer for the switch to USB-C.

Just because a new product is launched does not mean you need to buy it. Nvidia released a new GPU last year, but I didn’t buy it even though it’s newer than what I currently have. Arguing that new phones shouldn’t come out each year is like arguing that new cars shouldn’t come out each year. It makes no sense.

I wonder what the practical implementation would be here. I assume current water infrastructure is two sets of pipes, one for clean water and one for wastewater. Would the solution here be to add a third parallel set of pipes for greywater?

This doesn’t need to immediately lower housing costs to have a positive impact.

Hypothetical numbers… If housing was going to go up 5% in the next year and this change causes that to go down to a 1% increase, it will have made things better. Of course, we’d all like to just go straight to lowered housing costs. But individual changes can still do good and bring us towards that goal without strictly accomplishing it.

That depends on how long FCC is able to keep it implemented for, IMO.

Something that gets lost a lot in policy discussion is that once you implement a business regulatory policy like this, you create a constituency for that policy. It’s an advantage in preserving hard fought gains but that also means the timelines need to work for it. The problem net neutrality faced the first time is that it was (a) late in Obama’s presidency, (b) held up by court cases, and (c) reversed early on by Trump’s FCC. There wasn’t much time for the internet business community to build a business model around it.

If net neutrality is regulated into existence for 5+ years, at that point businesses will have come to rely on its existence. Taking it away will be harder, especially for a big pro-business party if it’s getting an earful from megacorporations that want things to stay as they are.

Of course, I do agree that legislating it is the most robust option and would be the best course of action. I just don’t see legislation as the only option with any longevity. FCC rules can be that if the timelines work.

The future of renewable energy is very promising. It’s easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.

Beyond solar I’m also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.