whatgoodisaroad

I agree the question of whether Apple was compelled by whatever government (or if they did this voluntarily) has implications on the ethics of these decisions. They may genuinely have no choice.

But I don’t see how it affects the question of whether Apple’s privacy assertions are trustworthy.

It’s my understanding that the keys used in that “end-to-end” encryption are also under the control of the operator [1], so from a privacy perspective it is the same as handing over that data in plaintext.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/17/technology/apple-china-ce...

I don’t understand why this outrage seems so US-centric. This is the same Apple that hands over all your iCloud data (photos and otherwise) to the CCP if you happen to live in China. And they’ve done this openly for the last several years.

What am I missing? Isn’t that a much much much much worse thing for Apple to do? Why are we only suddenly suspicious of Apple’s privacy claims with this matter?

And yet, the way Apple openly operates iCloud in China is infinitely worse than Google's Dragonfly ever could have been. Apple's reputation for privacy is entirely undeserved.

Apple TV is ad free so long as you don’t count the un-dismissable 1p promos for Apple TV+ trials and Apple Arcade trials.

Right, in a way I think this opening tweet just undercuts the entire argument. It's a simplistic description of a problem, which the body of the article returns with a simplistic sort of solution.

The truth is that I want paste to match formatting sometimes, and putting that many emphatic "ever"s in the tweet reads like an act of denial towards how tricky design can be.

In the case of pasting, we've solved he problem with a pair of keyboard shortcuts: Ctrl+v to match formatting, ctrl+shift+v to strip formatting. Effectively, this makes matching format the convention. I actually think matching is probably more common.

Now keyboard shortcuts are not sexy design. They aren't user friendly and are described derisively as "power user" features. But what they are is probably the optional solution to a design problem, and sometimes that's not exciting.

I think to start with, it's a matter of cost for the expense account.

Mubi really is excellent if you like the kind of art-house content they license. I think if I only kept one streaming service it'd be them.

> if there was "evidence" that not punishing murderers was the "best thing for society" (in terms of rehabilitation, crime rate, etc) would you support that policy? For most people, a society that doesn't punish criminals is simply uncivilized. I tend to agree.

This is a pretty interesting and concise way to frame this, because I definitely would support such a policy.

Punishments carried out by justice systems are a means to an end. It's sad that even today it's considered the most effective tool for general safety and protection of society.

It strikes me as really strange to consider punishments for crimes as a sort of state-sponsored revenge.

If a dog gave a positive result 93% of the time, but it was a false positive 40% of the time, does that mean 63% of suspects were carrying? Maybe I'm square, but that seems absurdly high to me unless the dogs are only used when there is already suspicion otherwise.

A little afraid to ask what may be an obvious question, but what exactly does the shortage consist of? Computer chips aren't generally interchangeable and I assume they're mostly purpose-built. Is there a shortage of raw materials? Or is there a drop in fab capacity?

I've always thought of OOP as structuring a program the same way you'd structure a business. There are distinct divisions with responsibilities and internal state, with somewhat well defined ways to communicate with each other.

Part of why OOP got so popular in software businesses is because it removes an impedance mismatch between the functions of business and the software it produces.

In this view, UML is a kind of intermediate bytecode between business planning and software planning.

Where it falls apart, IMO, is that UML is too granular for business functions, and it enforces a probably suboptimal OOP way of approaching technical problems.

Good question. It's less pronounced than Wyoming, but I wonder why Alabama looks so different from its neighbors.

This reminds me of how Roland Barthes would categorize prose as either "readerly" or "writerly", whereas a readerly work is a straightforward and passive experience for the reader, a writerly work is a sort of framework for the reader to participate in the writing, and co-create as you put it.

Recognizing that a work is writerly isn't always obvious. It's often obscured by the fact that reading it can be so stimulating and enjoyable.

I don't know if this helps, but I had a similar problem getting through even one page in a good book. My mind would wander somewhere else mid page and when I realized it, I'd feel silly and have to rewind and rebuild context to continue reading. Usually felt a little ashamed to reread part of the page I had scanned the words of but didn't actually read with my thinking brain.

Eventually what I realized was that these books were actually stimulating my thoughts at a higher frequency than the author intended. This is only really a bad thing if you need to get through the book under a certain deadline. Stimulating new thoughts is precisely why I read books in the first place!

These days, when some sentence sends me on a mental rabbit trail and then consciously pause and follow it as far as I like before returning to the text. Overall this is a much more satisfying reading experience for me.

Paying a fair amount of taxes definitely has a big ethical component to it, AND the laws around it probably ought to be changed, but that doesn't imply that they should be changed strictly because of the ethical reasons.

Specifically, collecting a reasonable amount of taxes is key to the function of governments as they're set up.

It would be unethical to sell somebody a car that secretly has no motor, but ethics isn't the only reason cars need motors.

Weird how finance suddenly becomes "gambling" when a bunch of regular people join the table.

I have to disagree: Apple certainly could block content in a selective way that avoids breaking apps (not that Apple is particularly averse to breaking existing apps).

Beyond that, the browser engine may be an irrelevant implementation detail to the end user, but at the ecosystem-level, iOS's Safari lock-in has many harmful effects that are already well known and widely discussed.

I could imagine a somewhat cynical science fiction story where Earth manages to communicate with an intelligent alien species using fundamental constants and rules of mathematics. But then, the aliens transmit a prime that the humans have happened to have declared illegal and have no choice but descend into interplanetary copyright war.

I think that's right that pwn2own exploits are generally new to the public, but that only means it's not provably out there.

Just to be clear, I think programs like this are great and they do improve safety, but only because they result in patches. This news shouldn't make users feel safe until there is a patch.

Maybe the zero-day isn't disclosed from this pwn2own itself, but importantly, we now know it exists, which means we should consider how many bad actors are already independently aware of it and are exploiting it.

Responsibe disclosure processes are just as much about closing the vectors that we can't prove are under active exploit.

My experience of Goodreads is that it used to be weird and unpolished, but basically on a trajectory towards being a solid niche social network for book readers.

But then, Amazon spent a lot of money to buy it, so they did the sensible thing and turned it into a big clunky funnel for book sales.

I'd wager that the parts of the earth that are chronically in need of food were also not supplied with masks.

I'm slowly reading through a book called the "History of Mathematical Notations" by Florian Cajori and it sounds like just what you're looking for.

It goes into far more detail than probably anybody would wish for on the histories of various symbols and ways of writing addition, roots, ratios etc. Many of these notations were used only by a few medieval scholars for a few decades but they usually try to optimize for efficiency or clarity in some creative way. Really fascinating stuff.

I always thought this would be a killer feature of Spotify. They already have music licenses sorted and they have social connections already baked in. A turntable-like feature could be little different from a collaborative playlist.

Maybe they'd be cautious because a feature like this could become a way to manipulate Spotify's sensitive algorithms.

I think there's a really basic human itch that TT.FM scratches: namely that, for the vast majority of human history, experiencing music has a social/collective experience. It's really remarkably recent that it's even been possible for each individual person to be listening to a different song.

I recently thought of TT.FM again looking at all these music rooms in Clubhouse, which are really a much less-good experience, but I expect they exist for the same reasons.

Exactly. Probably every discovery in math starts out with something that's only close to the truth (like multiplication-is-repeated-addition) but generalizing it to open up whole new areas.

This part of math is so exciting and compelling, I feel like it should be more of a focus in schools.

I like this article, but I feel like it misses the value of teaching analysis to students. It's true that it's not-quite-right to say multiplication is repeated addition, but it's also a really nice demonstration of the analytical/generalization approach anyone could use to "invent" multiplication on their own.

This same pattern can be seen driving discoveries in math. - Integrals are generalizations of Riemann sums. - Fractional exponents generalize taking square roots. - The gamma function sorta generalizes factorials. It's okay to start with something not-quite-right and explore how it generalizes.

No, I'll grant you it's nothing about the content of the article, but rather I don't trust the Bloomberg brand after their handling of the Big Hack story.

I'm torn between whether I should distrust this site because it's pretending to be associated with Bloomberg ... or if I should distrust this website because it may actually be associated with Bloomberg.