> It’s unclear whether Trump can legally pause the TikTok ban.
Irrespective of my political leaning, Trump's legal scenarios have made me learn more about how the U.S. government works and question hypothetical scenarios that I'd never thought of before. Can a non-member be the speaker of the house? How did the Gulf of Mexico get its name? What procedures are official rules vs. just customary? What does it truly mean to be "impeached"? It's given me a new perspective on how laws are written and appreciation for how rules are defined for future generations.
I love the concept and loved the results I got. I tried it out and found a lot of papers both from my lab group and ones related that I had missed. I'd happily pay for it but as a grad student the price is a little steep - would it be possible to make a student tier?
I remain skeptical until I see it in action. On the one hand, Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device. On the other, there was too much ambiguity around this announcement. What is the threshold for running something in the cloud? How is your personal model used across devices - does that mean it briefly moves to the cloud? How does its usage change across guest modes? Even the phrase "OpenAI won’t store requests" feels intentionally opaque.
I was personally holding out for a federated learning approach where multiple Apple devices could be used to process a request but I guess the Occam's razor prevails. I'll wait and see.
> Apple has a good track record with privacy and keeping things on device.
Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong". I don't expect an amazing AI assistant out of them, I expect something that sometimes does what the user meant.
> Apple also has a long track record of "you're holding it wrong".
And yet this was never said.
Closest was this:
> Just don't hold it that way.
Or maybe this:
> If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.
When Apple published a webpage about how other phones also got reduced reception when you held them in a particular way, but then basically immediately pulled it. And then a while later they offered a free bumper case to mitigate the whole issue.
None of that suggests any malice. We don’t know what happened internally, other than the arial designer was eventually let go. That engineer could have been pushing the “every phone has the problem” narrative and brushing it off. At some point the pressure from customer feedback could have meant they were overruled and ordered to retest, or test under the specific conditions.
The fact that Apple changed their stance from “here’s a workaround” to “here’s a free bumper” is a sign they reacted to something, and that could have been anything from the conclusion of internal testing to a PR job to keep customers happy.
If they had said there was no design flaw from the start and stuck with that the whole way then I’d understand people’s reaction, but all I see is a company that said “don’t hold it that way” as a workaround then eventually issued free bumpers, thus confirming the issue. That doesn’t suggest they were blaming the user for doing something wrong. The sentiment just wasn’t there.
Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.
Everyone makes fun of Sammy batteries exploding, but forget antennagate, bendgate, software gimping of battery life, butterfly keyboards, touch disease, yellow screens (which I believe were when Apple had to split supply Samsung/LG), exploding Macbook batteries (not enough to cause a fuss tho). Etc.
Other companies can of course be ne'er-do-wells, but people actively defend Apple for the company's missteps.
I rarely see anyone defending Apple, but I do see people constantly applying logic to them specifically that they don’t seem to apply to other companies. Take this:
> Apple don't react to anything until there's a large enough outcry about it, rather than immediately address the issue they wait to see how many people complain to decide if it's worth the negative press and consumer perception or not.
You can’t immediately address any issue. You need time to investigate issues. You might not even start investigating until you hit some sort of threshold or you’ll be chasing your tail in every bit of customer feedback. It takes time to narrow down anything to a bad component, bad batch, software bug or whatever it is.
As for weighing whether the issue is worth addressing at all - this is literally every company. If you did a recall of every bit of hardware at the slightest whiff of an issue you’d go bankrupt very quickly. There are always thresholds.
I wish we would just criticise apple in the same way we do with other companies. There is no need to invent things like “you’re holding it wrong” or intentionally misunderstanding batterygate into “they slowed down phones to sell you a new one”. They already do other crappy things, inventing fake ones isn’t necessary.
The iPhone will let you install an app only if you tell Apple about it. It will let you get your location only if you also give that location to Apple. The only way to get true privacy is to give users control, which even Google-flavored Android builds provide more of than iOS.
After so many years, so many people still believe in this user control paradigm.
Giving users control works for the slim percentage of power users. Most users will end up obliterated by scammers and other unsavory characters.
Perhaps there is a way to give control to today's users (that includes my non-technical mother) and still secure them against the myriad of online threats. If anyone knows of a paper or publication that addresses this, I'd love to read it.
If you want privacy, that's the only way to get it. As Apple has demonstrated, giving the platform owner control means eroding your privacy with no recourse and still getting obliterated by scammers.
I get the sense there's still a lot of work to be done over the next few months, and we may see some feature slippage. The betas will be where we see their words in action, and I'll be staying far away from the betas, which will be a little painful. I think ambiguity works in their favor right now. It's better to underpromise and overdeliver, instead of vice versa.
Talking about billions is disingenuous, you should be talking about percentages of revenue. Ten billion _sounds_ like a lot but really isn't.
For Google, over 80% of their revenue comes from ads.
Apple's revenue is around 380 billion, 5-10 billion in ads is in the "other" category if you draw a pie chart of it... They make 30 billion just selling iPads - their worst selling product.
Apple can lose the ad category completely and they won't even notice it. If Google's ads go away because of privacy protections, the company will die.
Talking absolutes is not accurate either. Not all revenue is equal.
There is reason why NVDIA, TSLA or stocks with growth[1] potential gets the P/E multiple that their peers do not or an blue chip traditional company can only dream of. The core of Apple revenue the biggest % chunk of iPhone sales is stagnant at best falling at worst. Services is their fastest growing revenue segment and already is ~$100 B of the $380B. Ads is a key component of that, 5 years back Ads was less < $1B, that is the important part.
Also margins matter, even at Apple where there is enormous margin for hardware, gross margins for services is going to be higher, that is simple economics of any software service cost of extra user or item is marginal. The $100B is worth lot more than equivalent $100B in iPhone, iPad sales where significant chunk will go to vendors.
Executives are compensated on stock performance, stock valuation depends on expected future growth a lot. Apple's own attempts and the billions invested to get into Auto, Healthcare, or Virtual Reality are a testament to that need to find new streams of revenue.
It would be naive to assume a fast growing business unit does not get outsized influence, any middle manager in a conglomerate would know how true this is.
A Disney theme park executive doing even 5x revenue as say the Disney+ one will not get the same influence, budgets,resources or respect or career paths.
[1] Expected Growth, doesn't have to be real,when it does not materialize then market will correct as is happening to an extent with TSLA.
> Google is an ad company, they have a full model of what you like and dont like at different states of your life built.
Thats not what I was saying. I was saying that Apple extract more information than google does. I was not saying that Apple process it to make a persona out of you. Thats not the issue here. Apple is saying that they are a "Privacy first" company. To be that, you need to not be extracting data in the first place.
Yes, they make lots of noise about how they do lots of things on device. Thats great and to be encouraged. But Apple are still extracting your friend list, precise location, financial records, various biometrics, browsing and app history. ANd for sure, they need some of that data to provide services.
But whats the data life cycle? are they deleting it on time? who has access to it, what about when a new product wants to use it? how do they stop internal bad actors?
All I want you to do is imagine that Facebook has made iOS, and the iphone, and is now rolling out these features. They are saying the same things as Apple, do you trust them?
Do you believe what they say?
I don't want Apple to fail, I just want people to think critically about a very very large for profit company. Apple is not our friend, and we shouldn't be treating them like they are.
I think what he's getting at is that Apple does collect a lot of very similar data about it's users. Apple Maps still collects data about where you've driven - the difference is that they don't turn around and sell that data like Google loves to do.
o your facial biometrics (apple photos tags people with similar faces, something FAcebook got fined for)
o Who emails you, who you email
With these changes, you'll need to allow apple to process the contents of the messages that you send and receive. If you read their secuirity blog it has a lot of noise about E2E security, then admit that its not practical for things other than backups and messaging.
they then say they will strive to make userdata ephemeral in the apple private cloud.
I'm not saying that they will abuse it, I'm just saying that we should give apple the same level of scrutiny that we give people like Facebook.
Infact, personally I think we should use Facebook as the shitty stick to test data use for everyone.
What do you mean by the “record”? It seems like you think this means Apple somehow has access and stores all that information in their cloud and we just have to hope/trust that they don’t decide they want to poke around in it?
You should look more into their security architecture if you’re curious about stuff like this. The way Secure Enclave, E2EE (including the Advanced Data Protection feature for all iCloud data), etc. The reality is that they use a huge range of privacy enhancing approaches to minimize what data has to leave your device and how it can be used. For example the biometrics you mention are never outside the Secure Enclave in the chip on your phone and nobody except you can access them unless they have your passcode. Things like running facial recognition on your photos library is handled locally on your device with no information going up to the cloud. FindMy is also architected in a fully E2E encrypted way.
You can browse their hundreds of pages of security and privacy documentation via the table of contents here to look up any specific service or functionality you want to know more about: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/welcome/web
by record, I mean precisely that. Apple stores this data. As the Key bearer it has significant control.
Moreover, because apple has great PR, you don't hear about privacy breeches. Everyone seems to forget they made a super cheap and for a long time undetectable stalking service. Despite the warnings. (AirTag)
Had that been Facebook or Google, it would have been the end of the feature. They have improved the unauthorised tracking flow, but its really quite unreliable with ios, and really bad in android still.
> You should look more into their security architecture if you’re curious about stuff like this.
I have, and its a brilliant manifesto. I especially love the documentation on PCC.
> If you choose to enable Advanced Data Protection, the majority of your iCloud data – including iCloud Backup, Photos, Notes and more – is protected using end-to-end encryption.
Ok good, so its not much different to normal right?
> When you turn on Advanced Data Protection, access to your iCloud data on the web at iCloud.com is disabled
Which leads me to this:
> It seems like you think this means Apple somehow has access and stores all that information in their cloud and we just have to hope/trust that they don’t decide they want to poke around in it?
You're damn right I do. Its the same with Google, and Facebook. We have no real way of verifying that trust. People trust Apple, because they are great at PR. But are they actually good at privacy? We have no real way of finding out, because they also have really reactive lawyers.
I'm on Google Domains right now, was disappointed when I heard the change to SS, and have been putting off moving to someone else before the transfer but want to now. What are other registrars other there that I should move my domains to? I've heard good things about porkbun.
Personally, I like Namecheap. They offer really robust DNS configuration, extraordinarily low TTLs, and they have a dashboard that isn’t complete trash. I’ve learned over time that outside of exorbitant exceptions, the prices are irrelevant. Essentially, I don’t chase domain promotions. I’ve also never observed them participating in typical registrar skeez. Their email reminders/notifications and MFA are also nice.
> NetBSD sits in the middle. It is a relatively small, clean, and simple OS.
The "build.sh" system for compilation is so easy to use for compiling your own toyOS that I initially felt like I had done something wrong. Linux is a bigger, better funded, wider documented project but the overall ease of specifying output type for a boot image and what platform I was developing for was the second deciding factor for me. The first was being able to compile it (with no weird extra steps) on my Mac (pre Apple Silicon).
In undergrad it became my hackable OS of choice if I wanted to compile something for my old Mac, a server for my bike, or some incredibly niche computer I found by accident. When I had questions, I asked the IRC group. For me, it was a great introduction by practice of the different parts of an OS.
> some incredibly niche computer I found by accident
I used to think this, but leave it to me to disprove...
Had an Intel Atom board that would only boot Linux and... OpenBSD. NetBSD (and a number of other OSes) would hang when attempting to load the kernel and refuse to boot - likely due to some firmware bug.
Negative, it was an embedded board. GRUB was not the issue; rather the kernel would hang after partially booting. Affected Illumos as well so it's likely a firmware bug.
> What has your experience been in starting a tech blog?
I made one in 2014 (Blogger) then got bored and stopped. I tried again a few years later (Bloger, Medium, Wordpress), then got bored and stopped. I recently got interested in another attempt (BearBlog) which I'm looking into now. The issue for me was not a lack of topics but the opposite - I'd start writing about one thing and get side tracked and start writing about something else. A blog is a great way to explore your interests but it is important to stay focused on what you want to write about. I put too much emphasis on having a consistent output schedule and high standards on what I should write about, which eventually ended up with nothing.
> I am afraid of sharing though and getting negative feedback. Was that something that you pushed through when starting?
I used to be worried about this too and usually consulted my friends or some writing assistants at my undergrad. I think this goes away the more you write.
> Did starting a blog lead to a new job?
No but some people saw my posts and remembered them when they saw me in real life later.
Being in Rochester, I always wonder how this will affect the local community here, where the Xerox was founded and where the majority of its workforce still is [1]. Still, I'm surprised they announced this after the holidays. I'm not sure if that makes it better or worse, or even says anything about the company itself, but it doesn't seem like the norm of other larger technology companies.
If this comes after the close of the company’s fiscal year then the employer is doing their employees a favor, taking a hit for the team. A completed fiscal year means the employer must wait yet additional quarter to claim the savings from trimming head count and allows those employees a bit more time under their employer provided benefits and compensation.
It's better for employees to do layoffs in Q1. Many large companies impose hiring freezes in Q4 in order to meet annual financial targets, plus key people are more likely to be out on PTO so it's harder to make hiring decisions. In Q1 the budgets get reset and job searches tend to progress more quickly.
This, and even if it maybe does not change much it is not nice as the employee to get that as Christmas present and to take home over the holidays in late Q4.
Interesting that the official headquarters is in Connecticut even though employees are in Rochester.
Every business I can think of that has a “headquarters” separate from their largest employee pool seems to be in decline… GE, Boeing being big obvious examples. It seems like moving the executives away from the day to day work is a sign the business doesn’t care about itself anymore. I’m curious if there are any other examples, or any counter examples to this.
Boeing moved their HQ to Chicago in 2001, and experienced wildly successful growth from 2001 until 2019. Seems like it might be recency bias to correlate Boeing decline with its HQ location.
Exxon is another example I can think of. Until recently, their HQ was in a tiny building in Irving, TX while the majority of their workforce was elsewhere.
There's also a whole slew of companies that have a lot of employees "in the field" that are separate from their corporate workforce and would inherently be HQed in locations other than where their large employee bases are, eg manufacturing companies, Intel, car manufacturers, Walmart, UPS, several airlines, banks... Even Boeing would fall into this category. I'm not sure how those factor into things.
Aircraft design and build has a very long lead time. It's plausible that Boeing success in the early 2000's was the result of sound decisions and long-term planning that were made early on. The emphasis on immediate shareholder returns you get from squeezing R&D or QA would take a long time to manifest itself in the actual product.
It's worth noting that the product and sales cycle for commercial aviation is measured in many years. And...2001/2002 was quite a bad time for commercial aviation as well.
That’s the point. Is “being near the CEO” a sign a weakness. That the CEO cares more about their own comfort instead of being close to the people that make the business work.
Tesla? Their HQ is in Texas but their “engineering HQ” is in the Bay Area. Since the Fremont factory has more employees than the Texas gigafactory (according to their wikipedia pages), that probably holds true for Tesla.
Lumen (AKA CenturyLink) has their HQ in Monroe, LA despite all of the execs being in Denver. I always assumed this was some sort of lucrative tax scheme.
I was an intern at CenturyLink the summer they opened their new building in Monroe. Monroe was not fun to live in but the building was gorgeous and great to work in. From my understanding, the building sadly sits more or less empty now as more and more of the workforce moves to Denver (aka home of Level 3 who more or less took over CenturyLink after being acquired).
I don’t see what that scheme could be, it’s not like they can avoid state taxes by doing that.
The only benefit given by the state in exchange for “headquarters” is employing a certain number of people at a certain income. But if all your payroll stays somewhere else, then what could possibly be the incentive for tax breaks?
States will probably bend over backwards when you are 1 of their 2 Fortune 500s
"To secure the latest corporate retention project, the State of Louisiana offered CenturyLink a competitive incentive package that includes an annual performance-based grant, subject to company payroll performance. In addition, the agreement creates funding for information technology faculty, curricula and education at Louisiana Tech University, where the state has supported the Clarke M. Williams Professorship in Telecommunications in honor of the company’s founder."
Xerox has been laying off people in the Rochester area for over 2 decades now. The local economy has adapted to it decently. I doubt this situation will be any different.
The irony which sometimes happens is that those who work for Xerox (or Kodak, who has been doing the same demise, just on a grander and faster schedule) end up working for a contracting firm and then get "rehired" back to do the same job they used to do, just now not as an employee of Xerox. I'm not convinced this saves Xerox any actual money but it must work out to their benefit somehow as TONS of people doing work for Xerox are not Xerox employees but used to be.
The disappointing part of this is the large parts of the population who will look at this and other recent cases (see: Francesca Gino) and think that "academia is broken" or "scientists can't be trusted". That narrative will even be amplified by many YouTubers and periodicals who were quick with those headlines. However, as soon as this work came out, multiple scientists voiced concerns, several even filed complaints with the journal. Those in the field even took steps to reproduce the work found in the paper. The fact that this error was caught and several were skeptical enough to comment is how the system should work. Arguing over results that are too good to be true, taking steps to try to reproduce it independently, and publicly taking it down is why science can be trusted. Research isn't going to be perfect every time but peer review and reproduction should weed out the less than credible.
Academia is broken, and for deeper reasons than the occasional implausible result. Indeed it's the papers that don't make waves that are dangerous. As well as the papers that don't get written.
I am not comfortable with that point of view. Growing up people used to always say "question authority" and that seems like the responsible thing to teach. But on the other hand, does it really make sense for everyone to do their own diligence in every matter?
The thing that has caused me to question this the most is crypto-currency scams. I don't mean generally, just the things we would all agree are clearly scams and kind of obviously so. They so often tell you: "do your own research". I think its a version of the poorly written Nigerian scam letter. The idea is a person with the right skill or knowledge will see its a scam right away and not bother them. People who are careless enough, dumb enough desperate enough will still be suckered and there are plenty of them. So the obvious scammers is completely comfortable saying "do your own research" and know that he filters out everyone but the suckers.
I wonder if sometimes most of us are better off just trusting the people who are experts most of the time? Skepticism is good but you can't really form your own exper opinion on every question you will face.
"But on the other hand, does it really make sense for everyone to do their own diligence in every matter?"
It probably depends on what is at stake. I don't particularly care about superconductors, but I do care about my knees, and when one doctor several years ago wanted to operate me, I sought a second opinion elsewhere. Sure enough, the other clinic told me that this can be treated conservatively.
I canceled the operation and, 6 years later, I have zero problems, zero pain and can walk just fine, even up/downstairs. I am not sure what the operation would do; knees are sensitive joints and don't like to be cut open.
> you can't really form your own exper[t] opinion on every question you will face.
noone can be an expert in all fields, but you can seek multiple opinions from multiple experts, and generally the consensus is likely to be correct. Esp. if those experts are far apart, and unlikely to be colluding or associated.
The trick is how to do it efficiently, and not to fall into confirmation bias (aka, seeking only experts that agree with your preconceived notions).
even just the task of finding multiple experts qualified to hold an opinion on a topic can be overwhelming. for a lot of things (like, for example, superconductivity) i'm not even qualified to determine if somebody should count as an expert or not.
this is the reason why things like scientific journals exist. it's embarrasing that Nature had to retract this paper, but on balance they're still doing a way better job of judging this subject matter than i would.
> The disappointing part of this is the large parts of the population who will look at this and other recent cases (see: Francesca Gino) and think that "academia is broken" or "scientists can't be trusted".
No, sorry. Just no. Stop. "Scientists" were clear, loud, and nearly unanimous in their calls for caution about these results. People on this very site were in these threads saying "we should wait a few weeks, guys" and getting downvoted into gray oblivion for their trouble by a horde of kids hopped up on "proof" they saw via (and I'm not kidding about this) a multimeter screen on TikTok.
You can't fix that with science. Science did everything right here. We had a tantalizing result reported, investigated, and disposed.
Saying "These are huge claims with insufficient evidence, let's wait for clarity" is hardly "being no-fun wet blankets". It's understanding how science works.
"And the only thing you wish went differently is that you squashed more people's enthusiasm??"
It's not about "enthusiasm". It's about scientific illiteracy. You can be excited all you want. "I saw a multimeter on TikTok, therefore it's true" and then shouting down folks with actual understanding for being cautious isn't enthusiasm, though. It's Dunning Kruger in action.
I agree with your assessment, of course, but I don’t think it invalidates the comment you are responding to. Large parts of the population could plausibly think those things, despite how clear and unambiguous “scientists” were about the results.
I'm always caught off guard whenever I see Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) or the City of Rochester in general mentioned anywhere. I just don't expect it. I know Rochester is a former U.S. Boomtown and has a major historical presence in the U.S. but with the great leaps other cities made in Rochester's decline I don't jump to the idea of seeing Rochester mentioned unless it is about lasers.
That being said, Rochester is an up and coming city and I say that more emphatically with each passing year. Pittsburgh is a great case study, but when combined with a Great Lake, quality of life, infrastructure for big business (including the people and schools who are still there), and the talent that closely surrounds the city on all sides (Boston, NYC, Toronto, Chicago, Pittsburgh), future growth is inevitable.
Great timing! I just watched this last night with my friends. We all were surprised that this movie didn't get more traction!
> But Glenn Howerton’s Portrayal of Jim Balsillie’s explosive rage is one of the great performances. Ever. it’s one of those instant legendary meme performances.
Totally agree. Even if you're not into the story of blackberry, the character performances and rarely onscreen story of "engineer becoming corporate" is worth the watch.
Irrespective of my political leaning, Trump's legal scenarios have made me learn more about how the U.S. government works and question hypothetical scenarios that I'd never thought of before. Can a non-member be the speaker of the house? How did the Gulf of Mexico get its name? What procedures are official rules vs. just customary? What does it truly mean to be "impeached"? It's given me a new perspective on how laws are written and appreciation for how rules are defined for future generations.