This isn't a "personal attack" as the complaint isn't personal. My comment isn't even about Pavlo himself: it is about the pattern of how it only seems like Apple employees ever talk up this program, and, "lo and behold", this is such an example. I don't pick at Pavlo for being a bad person, or even attack his comment: I complain about the immorality of the terms and mechanism of the program as well as the ridiculousness of how only Apple people defend it.

If my comment is a problem, then the extremely common comments from people on Hacker News complaining that someone is from Cloudflare or from Google--or from any number of cryptocurrency projects that seemingly the zeitgeist on Hacker News is always angry about--and are shilling some random project are also problematic; and yet, I don't believe I have ever seen you attempt to call people out about any of those: in fact, Hacker News seems to have a pretty clear "it is OK to shit on people who work on cryptocurrency projects" policy.

Meanwhile, Apple really shouldn't get any kind of defense, here: you know part of why Pavlo comes around obliquely commenting with no obvious mention anywhere (in comments, bio, etc.) that he's from Apple? I'll claim it isn't even (directly) his fault! Apple, the company, seems to have a policy against people identifying themselves on social media services so strong that if anyone gets attention--even if they are being helpful--it seems to land them in water hot enough that they have to sit around and wait to find out if they are being fired... such as the story of this poor employee on TikTok I've been following the last couple days:

https://www.tiktok.com/@/video/7131094900778503470

I think this is a shitty policy (whether explicit or implicit: the chilling effect is the same) that Apple has, and it isn't something we should be indirectly helping and supporting by claiming that anyone noting "this person is actually from Apple"--which seems to be the only thing I did, and which I do believe was important context for my comment--is a "personal attack". While I definitely believe that people who work for the large tech companies should be held accountable for the actions of those companies, none of my attacks today are personal: they are all against the explicitly-faceless corporate entity known as Apple.

I think the principles behind Corellium are good (can we build an iOS toolchain without Apple?) but everything I heard about the implementation was unfortunately also negative. I think it would be a lot easier to stand behind them if they separated their product and service offerings, maybe making the iOS bootstrapping code Open Source, but providing ARM instances with commercial support at-cost. In it's current state, though, I can't root for them any more than Oracle or Apple themselves.