yarcob

I've been an Apple user for more than 20 years, and I really like their products, but every year I am feeling more and more fleezed.

It pisses me off that they overcharge on storage and memory, leading to a situation where everyone who is on a budget struggles with artificially limited machines. I understand that they need to offer multiple price points to cover the market, but I actually preferred it when they just charged more for black.

It annoys me that they arbitrarily block content to enforce their weird standards (eg. no nudity allowed) or just whenever they feel someone is not paying them enough of their revenue.

It annoys me that their overarching goal is no longer to make the best products, but instead the goal is to make you keep buying accessories and services even after you already bought their stuff.

I dunno. For my home computer I already switched to Windows. There's probably lots to complain about with Microsoft as well, but I'm surprised how nice some things are after years of thinking Apple was so far ahead.

> that your proposed AI trailer likely wouldn't be street legal

I see this statement all the time (that legal issues are holding AI back) but I'm pretty sure the legal issues could be fixed pretty quickly if there actually were self driving things.

In this case, if you look at the videos it doesn't look like this trailer is doing anything smart at all, it just accelerates/breaks when you pull/push on the draw bar.

Yeah, this benchmark is way too specific. Would be much more interesting to see how different implementations could take advantage of their frameworks. Eg. some frameworks may make it easy to use animations, or they may have reusable components like date pickers. And of course they should take the target device in account - phone apps should look different from desktop apps, and they would probably also look different from control interfaces on industrial equipment.

Instapaper.

I also can't drink most beer. I sometimes get a hangover and headache from just a single small beer (0.3 liter)

I found that I tolerate beers from some breweries better than others (the type of beer doesn't seem to make a difference).

I suspect that I am allergic to certain yeasts, but to be honest I have no idea.

I can't talk for all countries, but in Austria the cheapest alcohol you can buy is "Spiritus", and they add something to make it taste bitter. You can use it as fuel, for degreasing, cleaning, etc.

You can get pure, food grade ethanol at the pharmacy.

I don't know how people move into appartments where they aren't allowed to drill holes in the wall. This would make an appartement unusable for me.

Unanchored furniture is extremely risky and kills infants every year.

Yeah, there's a risk that you might drill into a pipe. In the last 20 years that happened to me once, and it was annoying, since it cost 200€ to have the pipe fixed, but it's not really a big deal.

I assume they mean to make sure the people who make the laws don't profit from them.

Kinda hard to do in practice.

> A 500% tax on advertising. It’s a zero sum game with no benefit to society.

I don't think a tax is going to fix the underlying problem, which is that ad publishers have no responsibility for the ads they show.

The problem is that the scummiest advertisers can afford to pay the highest prices.

Someone who defrauds you can always afford to pay more for advertising than someone who actually provides a service.

I just tried with 5 songs and I couldn't get lyrics for a single one. It did show some trivia ("Behind the Lyrics") for English songs but not the lyrics themselves. Could it be that they don't actually have the rights to show lyrics?

Spotify doesn't, and even for Apple Music lyrics are a somewhat recent addition afaik.

Poor performance on Mac was also an issue. Web browsers on the Mac were held back by the fact that Adobes plugin was extremely slow on the Mac, and Adobe didn't care. Apple could write the fastest web browser in the world, but it wouldn't matter if Flash on the Mac had only a fraction of the performance of the Windows version.

It was a very smart move to not enable that dependency on the iPhone.

That puts everyones purchases on a single card and is even worse.

Third-pound-burger just doesn't roll off the tongue like quarterpounder.

As far as I understand, you need to change the app store country when you move internationally and have a bank account in another country. To keep purchases made before the move, you need to switch regions.

> I can’t imagine what kind of minor benefit I’d get from using multiple cards and different subscriptions that would make it worth more than easy management.

I have a personal bank account, a business bank account for all business expenses, and a bank account shared with my significant other for household expenses.

I want to pay our shared Netflix and Spotify accounts from the family account, apps that I buy for business use on my business account, and things I buy for myself on my personal account.

I can't be the only person who has multiple bank accounts?

> But a couple points strikes me as not accurate

I'm talking about my personal experience with Apple subscriptions. Maybe I am remembering something inaccurately, but that doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is that I prefer other companies payment systems, and I really don't like that Apple tries to force their service that I don't want on me.

> On macOS it's under System Preferences -> Apple ID -> Media and Purchases -> Subscriptions: [Manage...] button.

I just tried that, and it didn't work. Just showed a spinner for a minute, and then opened the App Store home screen. Everything related to Apple ID is slow and unreliable for me, I don't know why they don't just have a simple web interface like every other company. (On a second attempt it worked.)

> Hm. That's odd. Apps could be pretty deceptive and even outright scummy, but at least on iOS the system payment UI (the one where you have to double-tap the power button) was always very clear about how much and when exactly it would charge me.

The system UI was accurate. The button before was not. For some reason I thought that the system UI showed the price AFTER the trial, so I confirmed the payment, thinking I could still cancel it for two weeks.

1. Because people who unsubscribe might come back again. If it's a hassle to unsubscribe, I'm never going to subscribe again. There are a few of companies that I had poor experience with, and I am never going to buy anything from again. While I currently don't have time for Netflix anymore doesn't mean I'm not going to subscribe again in a year or two.

2. I subscribed to Netflix because they had a reputation of being easy to subscribe / unsubscribe. I'm not going to subscribe to the New York Times because I've heard how hard they are to cancel. I have a subscription to a local newspaper, they even had ads mentioning how easy it is to start / stop their subscription.

There are a lot of Apple apologists who claim Apple's payment system is superior for the customer, but that just doesn't match my experience.

I don't subscribe to a lot of services, but I find that eg. subscribing and unsubscribing from Netflix is a much nicer experience than subscribing from something that uses Apple's service.

With Netflix, I know exactly where to subscribe and where to unsubscribe, and the terms are pretty clear.

Apple on the other hand makes it surprisingly hard to show your active subscriptions. On the Mac, I think you have to open the Music app and click on a bunch of links that I keep forgetting. Kinda weird when Apple is supposedly known for their ease of use.

It's also often unclear how it works. In one app I clicked "start 14 day trial", but ended up being charged for an annual subscription immediately. At first I was surprised, but then I thought maybe it was because I had apparently started the trial already a few years ago already. The buttons I tapped did not make that clear.

And some basic things are impossible with Apple's solution: Eg. charge the Apple Music subscription to a different bank account. Nope, with Apple all your subscriptions go to a single credit card.

Let's say you have some code that takes some JSON as input, and then iterates over the elements of some array in that JSON. Since JSON is schemaless, you need to check whether the array you want to iterate over is actually and array, and for each item you have to check if it has the correct type. Each time you access any data in the JSON you need to validate if it has the correct type, or you will end up with runtime errors.

All that validation takes a lot of effort and makes your code hard to read.

If you verify that the JSON input matches the expected schema at the very beginning, you can skip all the validation and error handling later, since you already know that is valid. This would make it a lot safer to handle external input.

Then the next step would be if language & tooling also supported JSON schema, so that the way you access JSON documents in code also doesn't violate the schema. This would help prevent bugs from programmer errors.

I don't think there are any "middle options" that result in a good product. You want a localized app, but you don't want to put the work in.

If you add some new text somewhere in the UI, you need to start the app and make sure it looks right. If you only do that for one language, and don't check other languages, then there's going to be one language that's broken.

So your app is going to look broken in one language. And you probably will never find out, because the people who run into the bug don't speak your language.

Oh yes, word order is also a major problem in software translated to German. You can tell when an English speaker programmed something...

It annoyed me more than it should that Word for Mac for years had a menu command "Beenden Word" (Quit Word) where the order of the words was obviously hard coded...

Or how Siri says "In 50 Meter Sie haben Ihr Ziel erreicht." (it should be "In 50 Meter haben Sie Ihr Ziel erreicht")

In English you can just take the sentence "You have arrived at your destination" and prefix it with something like "In 50 yards", and it's a perfectly valid sentence: "In 50 yards you have arrived at our destination". It might sound a bit mechanical, but it's not wrong.

If you do the same in German, it just sounds very confusing and wrong.

Oops, you are right, now that I think about it it would be weird to see a button labelled "öffne" instead of "öffnen".

I just thought that it was unlikely that the verb/adjective confusion comes from German->Italian translation, it's more likely from English->Italian.

It's a common mistake that I've already seen in software translated from English to German as well, it's just what happens when you translate English strings without context.

In German adjectives and verbs are easily distinguishable without context. The verb "open" would be "öffne" and the adjective "open" would be "geöffnet". So it's unlikely this mistake would happen if you translate from German to Italian.

It's common to talk about "opening" files to view them, so I assume that's why the developer chose that term, even tough "view" would have been better.

Or maybe the translator should get annotated screenshots of the app. Laid out in a story board.

If you just hand someone a list of strings to translate, there's no way you'll get sensible results.

Also, you should test you translations. Some of the translations that I've seen (even from reputable companies) are so bad that it's pretty obvious no native speaker has ever looked them over.

The problem isn't only with being outright blocked, the problem is also that some topics trigger immediate outrage and can't be discussed openly.

For example, try talking about a need for safe spaces for X, and you will immediately get abuse from random strangers complaining that you aren't thinking about Y.

Or try saying anything about treatment Z side effects. You'll be downvoted and insulted for not sufficiently trusting the science.

Some discussions just work better in a less open, moderated forum, where people will try to engage with you, rather than having an angry internet mob materialize out of thin air whenever their trigger topic is mentioned.

What fraction of customers is affected by the issue?

That's always the first question I ask myself when I get a bug report. I can't fix every bug / annoyance. My software is already way more complex than I can handle, so I have to prioritize which bugs I fix. If the bug only occurs in a special setting and only happens for one customer that isn't important, then I probably won't fix it. I'll just say, sorry that my product doesn't work for you.

Now that customer will be annoyed, because my product was a good fit except for this one issue.

But if the product was open source, then they can fix the blocking issue themselves! I see this as a win/win situation.

But to the consumer it's not clear what is causing the issue. They might just see that they can eat only organic vegetables.

For example, my mom has told me she can't eat bell peppers from Spain because she get diarrhea from them.

Now, I don't think that bell peppers grow different in Spain than they do in Portugal or in Italy, it's probably some pesticide or some fertilizer or something. It's probably not all spanish peppers, but we just don't know enough about the produce at the supermarket. All they tell us is the country of origin, so the only thing she can do is avoid spanish peppers.

The unsurprising result is that naysayers call the change a failure before the first harvest after the change.

They "predict" that they will lose 50% of the harvest. Let's not call it a failure just yet and see how this turns out after a few years.

Sure, sudden change is disruptive, but humans are adaptable and can accomplish amazing things in a crisis. If they don't revert it and stay organic only, maybe they'll have an amazing reputation and a huge competitive edge in a decade.

> Horizontal scaling

I think the importance of horizontal scaling is overhyped. 99% of PostgreSQL applications are at a size where a single machine can easily handle the workload.

To enable horizontal scaling, you need to make so many tradeoffs that I don't think it's worth it for most applications.