Think of it as a 'fuck you' to the thief and whoever might get the brick.
Maybe you get that, otherwise you can be bitter all you want about the inequality and how stealing will resolve that.
More practically, I want to remove the financial incentive from stealing my phone. I want a thief to see it and think "why bother, I can't get anything for it".
From what i can see, it does not seem to work. Here in western Europe in the big cities many people buy locked phones second hand and the vendor explicitly says you have to get it unlocked, which is a service provided by many phone shops (somewhat under the table).
These locked iPhones sold for 50-200€ are acquired by users who will turn to their tech friends/neighbors to get it unlocked. When these tell them they can't help with that (no package in Debian for that yet), they end up spending 20-50€ in a shop to get it unlocked anyway, financing a very shady market.
Quote from the article that sparked the discussion:
> To do this, they phish the phone’s original owners, or scam employees at Apple Stores, which have the ability to override iCloud locks. Thieves, coders, and hackers participate in an underground industry designed to remove a user’s iCloud account from a phone so that they can then be resold.
At the end of the day, if the thief doesn't get the phone unlocked themselves, they will sell the phone for half (or less) the price they would have sold it unlocked, but they're still making a buck.
You make the argument against locking devices (which I agree with) for reasons related to that not deterring theft - which has a point.
Thieves will not profile a person using a premium locked phone against stealing it because it might not be worth it. They don't care about that. They will take whatever they can if only for practicing their skills.
Locking phones does not deter theft but unlocking them will offset the price of unlocking from the phone-shop to the thief increasing the profitability of theft.
I personally don't care about Apple, their phones, their M1's and their ecosystem. But acting out your premise leads to a place I don't like. And others as well. And if you think you can buy a cheaper premium phone if it is unlocked, ask yourself why thieves would continue to sell you cheaper if they know they give you a usable device?
> For Apple, there is a different set of axioms and some people seem to agree with them.
I don't think this is true for all Apple products though, or at least that was not the case in the past. To my knowledge, setting up a free OS on a second-hand Macbook has never been a problem.
However, you are correct Apple is trying to impose new axioms with the iPhones: unique app market (taking controversial posture, such as forbidding alternative browser engines), iCloud lock, non-interoperable hardware (eg. power socket)...
Getting rid of that button (and feature) is the ultimate "we prioritized metrics-based design" over any human input or craft canary. We love old buildings because of an innate human craft and attention to detail. That button, to me, represents a digital form of that same emotion.
Yeah... No! I don't have an axe to grind here but indeed there are more than one way to compare a product.
Air debit is only one dimension. You can pick arbitrary dimensions to compare products depending on which one you want to (if you would) show preference to.
Did they check also the noise level? The dimensions? How long you can run the thing before changing the filters? Do they have some form of regulator or are they always on? Do they fall apart when you bump on them?
It's like comparing processors by their clock speed. Which one 'is outperformed' by the other?
This is probably the only recourse in this new age of AI bots deciding human affairs:
- Seller is banned by an AI agent for arbitrary reasons. There is no reasonable phone recourse
- Seller tries to make a _human_ point in a blog post hoping it goes viral
- The blog post is noticed on different platforms and buzzword of AI wrong doing is amplified to a certain level
- If some arbitrary threshold of _human_ reaction is noticed on the social media, the company in the wrong will probably do something about its AI bot going haywire
Thus, the bot's common sense holes will be covered by collective wisdom of the crowds (which maybe, just maybe, will be integrated in the bot's training loop).
Why not add a government body that, upon submission, starts a fine ticker that forces any company to reply after a set period of time.
If no human reply is given, it starts to exponentially pile up the fine, until the issue is solved.
They shouldn't be able to allow people to make their livelihoods on their platforms and suddenly cut them off without even giving proper support. They should pay for this - innocent people go through an immense amount of stress and get stripped off their money and the product of their work.
If the answer is: "they're too big to have humans manage this", then you know what the reply is - cut them into pieces, half, fourths, who cares. Slap a user account cap on that shit with a number that a human workforce can handle.
I feel no sympathy for growth problems of this massive companies. I really hope European Union starts to crack on this shit, and hard.
I could think of several reasons why regulation would not be a good idea. Cutting into pieces? Maybe, but how would you cut pieces of FB or Amazon that credibly resolve the problem? Remember that lobbying for antitrust splits will be pursued by someone with enough political ambition to offset the pressure in a long run. What would be their benefit?
For now I think that voting with your feet is still a recourse, complemented by vocal messages on social media to maximize hit-back.
I really enjoyed what EU did with GDPR and secure EU citizens data protection, with regulators that everyone can access. It seems to be working well (it could be working better, but it's still a relative new thing).
This has companies make an effort to comply, or other companies refusing to comply and they exit the market not providing products/services to EU citizens, and that's fine!
That's why I believe regulation would do wonders here. Imagine Youtube, or Amazon, have to make up for the loss of revenue of someone they mismanaged and refused customer support? Sprinkle that with fines, and it would start to shift the whole "AI for customer support", which simply doesn't work.
Regarding the cutting into pieces, as long as the user base is cut into manageable size. Amazon has several user bases: AWS users, Amazon Buyers, Amazon Sellers, etc.
In this case, Amazon Sellers are treated like shit, literally. So maybe Amazon Seller platform should be spinned off and have an independent structure dedicated to it. Because currently there's contrafaction, fraud, and a lot of illegal things happening while they give no proper recourse to the damaged parties - unless you're Nike, or Nintendo.
>Remember that lobbying for antitrust splits will be pursued by someone with enough political ambition to offset the pressure in a long run. What would be their benefit?
In this case, for the whole European Union project to start to walk the talk, they have to start to make visible changes. Else the credibility of the union will start to crumble.
What I see is not over-emphasizing the importance of history but de-emphasizing it as a justification for present day sufficiency.
If you don't like the term, use another one. But without history you're bound to cargo cult computer science where what you have to do next is plan your sprint. Why do you need a sprint anyway? You might never know if you need a sprint any more if you don't know what problem was it supposed to fix.
The disdain for history as an expression of you not knowing how to code wordpress is strange considering that, as you allude to, you don't know the latter.
You may want to think whether learning wordpress is the same with learning history of html at decade level.
Since you're publicly exposing your thoughts, let me tell you that what you are doing is expressing your ignorance and being proud of it. You may want to drop the second part.
I've not shown any disdain for history or an inability to code wordpress... in fact, I've said the opposite: I like history and simply don't need it to code.
I don't need to know history to code html, php, javascript, etc. I've a very successful programmer without using the "history' of programming in any shape or form.
"expressing your ignorance" or... I'm simply expressing that I'm a successful programmer who's never used "history" in a decade+ of programming...
You may want to reevaluate "ignorance" as you make claims that you can't support (IE: "disdain" for history and "can't code wordpress" - again, neither statements I've made). Reread my comments.
recap of them: I like history. I don't need history to code wordpress or windows services.
I was not entirely fair to you when trying to make my point. In fact I could see this exact argument of yours coming up and ignored it completely.
What I want to say is that there are entire domains of competence that are irrelevant to a large degree to doing the day's job. Knowing history of computing will not necessary help in making a better program in a way that can be noticed.
But history of computing is closely related to computing. Unlike for example history of knitting. Although neither will make you a better programmer now, the first has much better chance at that than the second (although we don't exactly know that).
Thus, when someone downplays the importance of history of programming to improving a programmer's mastery, I see it as touting ignorance at not seeing the connections between the two: self sufficiency, arrogance of ego being trapped by the light of today's fads, pop culture that doesn't care about the past or the future.
I mean, at a conceptual level, knowing history is important in the "ignorance of history will lead to repeated history" line of thinking - and I don't disagree. ... and knowing why decisions were made can help determine which tools to use (IE: Why use static typing or duck typing and when to use the other... or when to use procedural programming, async, functional, etc...)
Maybe it's a combination of you "projecting" and me not being clear. And trying to discuss what could be deep conversations in a little more than a twitter tag of 140 chars.
I'm personally a .Net Developer and while I do stick with the latest versions (IE: .Net Core), I also have enough experience to know the past (IE: ADO vs Entity Frameworks). I was trained in school on a mainframe (IBM DB2 with RPG and SQL). I'm not trying to stick with the latest "hotness" as most of MY work is actually done via Windows Services, API interactions and moving files around - definitely not the latest fad. With that said, I am working on using good tools to get my job done faster/better - IE: CI/CD pipelines to automate builds, testing, deployment, etc. Tools that didn't exist 5 years ago could be the latest fad but I don't think that's what you are suggesting.
I'm more worried about learning different things (IE: Functional, procedural, async, parallel, etc) than I am worried about "history" of those. When I pick up a programming book, I'm less worried about the "Microsoft created version 1 in 2000 and version 2 in 2005 and..." and more concerned about do's, do not's, best practices, etc.
Maybe it's my personality and the way I "deemphasize" history... it's not that I think it's unimportant... I just think that it's more important to focus on other things. Learning some history along the way is good and fun but it's never been my focus and I've never used what I consider "history" in an interview or a job on a day to day. Maybe that's rubbing people the wrong way lol
So you lowered your bar huh? Who am I to judge, but I would have preferred a story with something more than the game is rigged and that's what I get to play with
I will not judge you. Citation indices are horrible and perpetuate this fraud. I was telling a student of mine yesterday, 10 years ago the game was to get publications in prestigious venues. Now the game is to have a stellar scholar.google.com profile. The two games are perhaps correlated, but the correlation coefficient is not very high.
Last time I checked, which was more than 5 years ago, non-corporation contributions to Linux amounted to less than 20% (with Greg H. pointing out that they needed to make life easier for those not-payed contributors).
This means among others that Linux is a Corporate based project and caters to those corporations with a leverage of at least 4/1 for closed binaries with GPL and contributors' voice compensating for the other side.
In the end this is what we have for better or worse.
