baddox

No, I'm not mixing them up. I'm asking questions about them to try to understand people's viewpoints.

Not all of the examples I gave were illegal content.

> It's not hyperbolic at all, or have you not seen the "Silence is Violence" rhetoric everywhere? It could literally come from Orwell's world of "War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength"

I’m aware of the “silence is violence” slogan. It means that inaction in the face of injustice is tacit support for the status quo. It doesn’t literally mean, for example, that all people are being violent while they are sleeping, or that people who are unable to speak are being violent. I’m sure there are some people who use the slogan in preposterous ways, but that’s true of all slogans. You’re looking into this way more than necessary. There’s a pretty clear reasonable interpretation of the slogan if you’re willing to look for that interpretation in good faith.

Do you consider is censorship if a huge Internet/media company removes illegal content like child pornography, explicit calls to "imminent lawless action," phishing/fraud attempts, explicit misinformation (like false claims that an election date has been moved), or content that goes against their own community guidelines (pornography, violence, etc.)? Do you consider those things censorship or opposition to free speech?

There have always been limitations on freedom of speech, including speech that incites violence. So your example, while deliberately hyperbolic (I don't think anyone would say that words literally murder people), has always been a normal thing.

You explain in detail what it would take to compete with Apple, but you’re trying to make the point that this is impossible to do, when in fact many smartphone manufacturers have done precisely that. Apple has a very small global market share on smartphones and only around 50% in the US.

The ads you buy on the Facebook app aren’t ads that you then get to see in your Facebook feed. You’re paying to have your own products/services advertised to other people.

Why do you think this is arbitrary? It makes a lot of sense and is pretty obvious when you look across all apps. This tweet is trying to point out a "gotcha" when there is absolutely nothing inconsistent, unreasonable, or shocking here. Apple doesn't take a cut when you order things on the Amazon app, or when you buy stocks on Robinhood, or when you rent a car on Turo. Apple takes a cut from in-app purchases, but that is a term that Apple defines precisely. It obviously doesn't mean "any purchase in any app."

No one is "buying personalized ads" as an in-app purchase.

> the only reason Epic is doing this is to make more money. They want that last 30%.

It's actually a little sillier even than that. Epic in fact want to have their own app store (the Epic Games Store) on iOS, and thus exercise the precise sort of profitable market power over software developers that they claim to oppose Apple doing. They're pretty explicit about this in their statements.

As far as I can tell, Apple was never going to ban games built on Unreal Engine. Epic made it sound very dramatic, but it seems like that was nothing more than Apple terminating Epic's developer account (for ongoing deliberate violation of rules in the Fortnite app) which happens to also be the account they use to publish the Unreal Engine on MacOS. In other words, Epic wouldn't be able to publish signed updated versions of the engine on MacOS, at least without creating a different developer account. Unless I'm missing something here, there was never a real threat that all games using Unreal Engine would be banned.

> less revenue will necessarily lead to fewer "free" apps and/or fewer "free" features and/or worse quality

I agree with "fewer" and strongly disagree with "worse quality."

Yes, there was one family of jailbreaks that worked like that, but you'd still need to hear about that and have some reason to want to do it to your phone, and I suspect a very small portion of iPhone owners did that. It would be a lot worse if Apple were forced to allow anyone to make what are essentially jailbreak app stores like Cydia, then one of the biggest video games ever told all their players to go install that so that the video game company can sell digital items at higher margins.

Most of them probably did, because it was generally difficult to jailbreak the phone and there wasn't much reason to do so unless you were a hobbyist. App piracy was definitely a thing though, and I bet there were some people who did it because a friend told them they can get free apps, only to end up installing stuff that made the phone very buggy (which was definitely easy to do).

It's easy to say "well that's just their own fault if they installed something bad," but I don't think Apple really cares to argue with their customers over whose fault something technically was. Apple just wants their customers to have phones that are working well.

I suspect a large portion of Apple’s users value the fact that they can’t break their phone by accidentally installing the wrong app or clicking the wrong button. To them it might not be clear what they’re getting from this no-rules App Store.

> Rule of thumb: the more steps you get away from the primary source the more corrupted everything gets. The article is good. The press release is bad. The tweet about the press release is worse. The tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release are terrible. Each one loses more of the critical context we need to actually understand what’s going on. Only the paper itself is a primary source. If you want to know what the paper’s about, you gotta read the paper!

And what about this article, which is about the tweets dunking on the tweet about the press release?

> The first is done largely by the great powers agreeing that it's a bad idea from a military standpoint. That is, biological weapons are not stockpiled not because of all the obvious horrible consequences, but because the common wisdom is that they are ineffective weapons.

Can you point to any evidence that this is the case? It doesn't sound plausible to me.

If you knew exactly where the plane is headed then, yeah, the drones might work.

Just thinking out loud here, but how long would this level of having no “major” wars have to last for it to have been worth it if it ends in nuclear war?

The first example about hospital capacity really just involves tradeoffs around your specific goals, whereas it only makes sense to talk rigorously about efficiency in the context of some specific output goal.

So if you fix some goal, say, "we want to be over capacity 1% of the time," then the most efficient way of doing that is probably to have the minimum number of beds that you need according to your predictions about utilization. But you can't really talk about efficiency when you're deciding what your goal is, e.g. whether you're okay being over capacity 10% of the time versus 1% of the time.

> First the interviewer went off on a tangent claiming that they’re not evil (unsolicited)

They're a big data company that works mostly with governments and militaries, and they're named after evil (and unreliable!) magical spying technology from The Lord of the Rings. It's clear why they feel the need to try to convince you that they're not evil.

> Because it's the part that people should own after they bought it.

Why? Is that just an arbitrary principle? Why should "hardware" be something we have absolute control over, but "software" is not?

> You can play Fortnite without buying anything on the Epic store.

You can use an iPhone without using the App Store. But in both cases, it's probably just not as good of an experience.

> You can't use an iPhone without being forced by Apple to use the device the way they want.

That seems like some rhetorical gymnastics that could be applied to any product or service. You can't use cheating software in Fortnite either (or at least they presumably have measures in place to prevent it).

> Of course it would!

Okay, then you're consistent. I'll give you that. Presumably you think courts should require manufacturers of literally all electronic devices to provide an easy way for owners to run any software they want?

It's common in computer graphics and user interface programming. You want to move your character around a 2D grid, but you don't want either of its x and y coordinates to ever move outside the bounds of the 2D grid. Or you want a web page with an article section that is 50% of the browser width, but never narrower than 300px and never wider than 800px.

I think the reason it's weird is that we might intuitively think of the "enforce a lower bound" function as taking two named arguments (lowerBound and inputValue) and the order of those two arguments mattering.

But of course, it turns out that the order of the arguments doesn't matter: applying a lowerBound of 5 to an inputValue of 100 turns out to be the exact same thing as applying a lowerBound of 100 to an inputValue of 5.

We know that the order of arguments doesn't matter for the Math.max function, so I think that's where the moment of incredulity comes from.

> The axiom is that the Bible is true. The conclusion is that evolution is false. The arguments are about how to reconcile the "fact" that evolution is false with the existence of data that appear at first glance to support its truth.

But there is no intellectually honest way to reconcile that factual claim except to reiterate that it is an axiom (or, if you like, a trivial corollary from the axiom that the Bible is true). The supposed existence of missing links is completely irrelevant, because even if those links weren't missing, his conclusion would be that evolution is false. Ancient flood myths are completely irrelevant, because even if such myths weren't widespread, his conclusion would be that evolution is false.

To clarify, I'm not claiming that creationists conceal their beliefs about the Bible. I'm referring to intellectual dishonesty.

I'm not seeing the distinction. Why is hardware relevant? If Epic sold a "Fortnite tablet" would this somehow change the legality of Epic's monopoly on selling digital items in Fortnite?

> In fact, if you watch Kent Hovind, he opens every single video he makes with, "I believe that the Bible is true and scientifically accurate."

If you're spending lots of effort making what appear to be good-faith arguments toward some conclusion, but that conclusion is in fact an axiom that you hold, then that's intellectually dishonest. If "Bible is true and scientifically accurate" is one of your axioms, then it's intellectually dishonest to provide some supposed piece of evidence that supports this claim (e.g. supposed missing links in the fossil record), because by definition 1) no evidence is necessary to support an axiomatic claim and 2) no evidence or explanation can possibly change your mind.

> Does anyone disagree that Apple and Google have the right to just go "this app store business is just not worth the headaches, we're gonna shut it all down."

There might be legal issues with drastically reducing the functionality of devices after they've been sold, but I would imagine they could do this for new devices going forward. I think this points out a subtlety in the arguments of most people who take Epic's side in this struggle: it appears that Apple could avoid these allegations of anticompetitive behavior by either increasing or decreasing the restrictions placed on third-party software distribution. That's a little bizarre, but it surely must be the case, unless the argument is that all electronics manufacturers must provide an easy way to owners to run third-party software (think game console, GPS devices, stereo receivers, car infotainment systems, the microcontroller in every switching power supply, etc.). Presumably the response to this subtlety is that "iPhones are general-purpose computers, but game consoles, etc. aren't," but I disagree with that both in theory and in practice based on what buyers of these devices expect to be able to do with the devices.

If it poses a threat of major antitrust action, then perhaps their fiduciary duty would be to shut down the app stores.

Or for that matter, can a random person sell digital items to be used in Fortnite?