It's not just about the engine itself, it's about things like supporting extensions. Safari's content blocker API is less powerful than Firefox's on desktop/Android, for example. I don't know how much of that is a technical engine limitation versus an Apple policy decision.
I generally think any company with a >10 billion (2023 US) dollar valuation should be forced to do things that may not directly benefit them but benefit society. Having to publish open specifications for all their proprietary integrations is a pretty easy, relatively low-cost example.
How to make this work in practice is a really interesting question. Community and employee representatives on the board would be a good start. But I think just having the requirement that open specifications be made available, and writing that into legislation, would be great.
If a company doesn't want at least some element of that, the solution is very simple: drop below a USD $10B valuation by spinning off parts of the company. Note that I said TEN BILLION DOLLARS. A "decacorn". That is an unfathomable amount of money. If you've created a company worth that much you've won at capitalism.
If governments had a good track record I'd advocate for that. No need for strawmen like five year plans, I think competition is a wonderful thing.
My underlying, strong belief is that corporations are legal fictions created primarily to benefit society, Milton Friedman's philosophy notwithstanding.
It’s not hard core capitalism. It’s that geeks hate when people make their own choices without government interference because normal people don’t care that they can’t run Linux on the Apple Pencil.
It’s also naiveté to think that government power isn’t the most dangerous kind of power imaginable even though almost every law proposed by the government with regards to tech is roundly criticized by the same people.
> It’s also naiveté to think that government power isn’t the most dangerous kind of power imaginable
That's only true if the market isn't free. If private businesses are not kept in check, they can (and have) overthrown government power. Ask me how I know!
We have seen plenty of third party companies that have found 0 day vulnerabilities in both iOS and Android and sold the capability to nation states and law enforcement.
Why do you think that the NSA needs Apple and Google’s help?
But isn’t that a reason to be more concerned about government power and not try to give the government power?
Google spies on you and targets ads. The government has the power to arrest you and send you to black sites and cause you all sorts of harm if you go against its interest. This isn’t a conspiracy theory, it’s a publicized fact that the government went after MLK for upsetting the status quo and did wiretaps.
> Why do you think that the NSA needs Apple and Google’s help?
Because leaked NSA documents have implicated them since 2010.
> But isn’t that a reason to be more concerned about government power and not try to give the government power?
I mean, not when private interests are compelled to manufacture them. If anything, it's a reason to demand all software be Open-Source and let the malware-manufacturing cocksuckers suffer the consequences.
The suggestion was simply that companies that make more than 10 billion should be forced to give back to society. That's it. To be against that is indeed hard core capitalism, bordering on religious fervor.
They do give back to society - they provide jobs, pay taxes, and mobile has created millions of jobs and put computers in billions of people’s pockets.
I’m hard core don’t trust giving the government more power. Corporations don’t have guns and the right to drag you to jail and take your stuff without a trial (civil forfeiture).
You want to see what government can do with power - look no further than Desantis or this…
Requiring megacorps to give back to society (which, no, selling their products and providing jobs is NOT what was being talked about when giving back to society was mentioned, what a ridiculous take) doesn't require government overreach, just regulation which other countries manage fine, other countries that are nowhere near the illiterate uneven class disaster the US has become.
Government overreach is a legitimate concern in some cases, but not here. Regulating megacorps is something the US needs, and society would be all the better for it.
It’s a conspiracy theory that the government abuses power? Civil forfeiture, the links I gave you where there is a documented abuse of power, Desantis - a presidential candidate punished a private corporation for speaking out against a policy and running a campaign on fighting the free speech rights of anyone who doesn’t agree with him in Florida (where I live). Those are all figments of my imagination?
Do you like any of the previous laws the government has passed or tried to pass with relationship to tech?
And the EU isn’t exactly a role model for innovation and success in the tech industry.
Design-by-committee doesn't sound half-bad if it can standardize a single serial cable that doesn't have licensing fees. Doesn't resemble an unreasonable use of government power at all.
I don’t think that’s the argument you think it is. Thought experiment, grab a random USB C cable, now tell me:
1. What speed can you transfer data through it?
2. How much power can it deliver?
3. Can it support video over USB C?
4. Say a random device comes with a USB-A cable on one side and a USB-c on the other. Now take a standard usb c/usb c cable, will it always charge the device?
Also when that same government first wanted to “standardize”. They wanted to standardize on micro-USB.
> Thought experiment, grab a random USB C cable, now tell me
Oh, easy. Apple already solved this one; if it has the Thunderbolt logo, it's maxed out. If it's anything else, you're usually getting at least 5w charging and USB 2.0 speeds. In other words, the worst-case scenario is usually slightly better than Lightning.
I travel with a portable monitor that gets power and video from one USB-c cable. It works with both my personal MacBook Air and my work Windows laptop.
> So your solution to making sure that you get the most compatibility is to buy Apple cables for Apple devices…meet the new boss.
I was hoping you'd bite the hook, but not like this...
Intel actually designed the spec, drivers and IC controllers for Thunderbolt. Apple consulted on it with USB-IF, but they don't own the spec like they do with Lightning. They're less of a new boss, and more subsuming their rightful position as a valued consultant on a shared standard. It's a good (albeit old) example of Apple doing the right thing through the right channels.
While one can bring a lot of nuance to the conversation, most imperative languages do not have the &/&mut separation that Rust does and are therefore bad. &/&mut is basically essential to writing correct code in an imperative language.
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. You can start your project in C and release it on an AS IS basis, and we can make fun of you for it, object to its use in professional contexts, and so on.
Don't complain about the downvotes or the well-deserved replies then.
> object to its use in professional contexts
Liability limitation is standard legal boilerplate in literally every free software and open source license. No doubt it's also present in the terms of service documents which nobody reads before accepting. If you're gonna object to using software based on that, you might find you'll have to rewrite all of it or pay top dollar for service level agreements.
While yes, that's theoretically possible, do you have data to establish this? For example, having small sections of the code be marked as unsafe would allow for greater scrutiny of those sections. Also, unsafe access is more annoying to perform in Rust than in C or C++, so maybe that would have acted as a deterrent (or at least the code would have been profiled to make sure that unsafe access was worth it).
It looks like dropbox experimented with disabling bounds checks in their huffman coding impl, and found that using the unsafe pattern increased throughput from 224 MB/s to 249 MB/s (11%-ish faster.) We don’t even need to hypothesize about whether webp would have elminated bounds checking, we can see that other companies arrived at the same conclusion: Disabling it can be worth it if you’re quite sure you’ve gotten the up-front checking right. We can imagine that if Dropbox went to prod with the unchecked huffman implementation (never mind that that article isn’t about webp in particular), we could imagine they could easily have the same bug. And I don’t think a naive code review saying “unsafe is bad” would have stopped them from doing it: they clearly did the work to show why it’s worth it.
The risk probably doesn't matter for their use case because they're doing all this datacenter-scale image conversion on processes separate from the main logic (and likely not even on the same machines). Unlike in a phone's web browser or something, where it's 11% speedup with ??% added risk.
It's already common for PC apps to split potentially unsafe rendering into subprocesses, like in Chrome. If you don't want to pay the full IPC toll, there's shared memory. In theory should be about the same speed as inlined unsafe code, right? What if Rust's "unsafe" blocks could do this for you?
