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It’s due to the third party doctrine, a Supreme Court precedent

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine


which has been warped all out of any comprehensible reality. It hinges on the idea of 'voluntarily' turning over information. Much of what is now considered information voluntarily turned over isn't even information that people know exist much less that they are turning over much less doing so voluntarily.

It's not voluntary if you don't know about it.

Requiring someone pay for information by any common sense interpretation isn't voluntary.

The courts have lost their goddamn minds.


The 3rd party doctrine is why it is allowed when no law restricts it. It does not prevent Congress to pass a law.

And yet, Congress hasn't passed a law to prevent it

Power corrupts the mind. They live in a different world

Ironic the Apple App store allows a "phone antivirus" to exist.

Almost unbelievable that they allow this - except of course they do, because scamware makes a ton of money via in-app purchase, and Apple gets 30%, so of course they do. I'm sure people will come out of the woodwork now to white knight for Apple and spin this somehow. But anything that offends their business model can be removed in minutes, while software that by its title violates the App Store rules is just here indefinitely.

The App Store has done a great job of training users to think that anything downloaded from it is somehow safe. In reality, Apple’s static code analysis and human review processes are flawed and people need to exercise way more caution than they do.

I'm pretty sure that one made it through the review for some reason, you don't typically see these apps in the App Store.

there's a ton of these apps. if you turn off your adblock, use your iPhone for a bit and click a few ads, you'll find a bunch.

Quite an unhinged take.

The claim that malware "makes a ton of money" for Apple definitely needs a citation. I certainly don't believe it.

Obviously, Apple understands that the reputational damage from malware is more costly than any cut they might get from the miniscule sales of it. Apple might be evil (for some definition of "evil"), but they're not dumb.

Occam's Razor and Halon's Razor are aligned here. Apple would prefer this app not exist, but somehow it slipped through the review.


Funnily enough that's given as an example of a prohibited type of app in their review guidelines.

@PlatoIsADisease (because dead comments can't be replied): the term WalledGarden has been a term for this and related concepts since long before marketing-speak had completed the takeover of the internet.

[flagged]


I prefer Walled Rent Seekers Paradise

But it's rated 4.4 stars! I'm guessing it hoovers your contacts and tries to get you to sign up for the IAP subscription.

The meta these days is bundling dodgy SDKs which turn the device into a residential proxy, which then gets sold on to the highest bidder. Mostly AI companies, whose desire to scrape literally everything has driven demand for that type of malware into the stratosphere.

Surely that doesn’t work very well on iOS devices unless you’re actively holding the location api open or something, which would be noisy.

Curated App Store, they said. Might have been true in 2010

The addiction aspect of this is real. I was skeptical at first, but this past week I built three apps and experienced issues with stepping away or getting enough sleep. Eventually my discipline kicked in to make this a more healthy habit, but I was surprised by how compelling it is to turn ideas into working prototypes instantly. Ironically, the rate limits on my Claude and Codex subscriptions helped me to pace myself.

Isn't struggling to get enough sleep or shower enough and so on because you're so involved with the process of, you know, programming, especially interactive, exploratory programming with an immediate feedback loop, kind of a known phenomenon for programmers since essentially the dawn of interactive computing?

Sort of, but the speed at which I can see results and the ability to quickly get unstuck does pull me in more than just coding. While I find both enjoyable, I'm more of a 'end result' person than a 'likes to the type in the code' person. There was a conversation about this a month or so ago referencing what types of people like LLMs and which do not.

I saw a conversation like that but, like here, I didn't always understand what they meant with "end result". Was it only the app GUI and they don't care about the code at all, or do they still care about the code quality, the architecture and planning.

I've written software that solved business problems in everything from Visual Basic to C++. The end result can include the things you list, but typing in the code to me is down the list of importance.

Personally, for me, the "end result" embraces the architecture, planning, algorithms, domain model, code quality, and documentation etc, as well as what the app does in the end. I care a lot about making well architected, reliable stuff

Using agents trigger different dopamine patterns, I'd compare it to a slot machine: did it execute it according to plan or did it make a fatal flaw? Also, multiple agents can run at once, which is a workflow for many developers. The work essentially doesn't come to a pausing point.

> did it execute it according to plan or did it [have] a fatal flaw?

That's most code when you're still working on it, no?

> Also, multiple agents can run at once, which is a workflow for many developers. The work essentially doesn't come to a pausing point.

Yeah the agent swarm approach sounds unsurvivably stressful to me lol


Cool project! I’m a tab hoarder and this seems like it’ll be a good help, excited to try it

How do you feel about Safari tab groups? They're perfectly happy to snap open a thousand tabs at once, from however many such groups you like, all synced across all the (Apple) devices. And on the left of the Safari window in a sliding tray.

Aside from these groups, there's "Save all open tabs to a Bookmarks folder" which lets you just shove a few hundred or thousand tabs into a bookmarks folder every few weeks or months.

Given the old limits on these, it's remarkable how much work they put into tab hoarding enabling!


Nice! Thank you! Let me know what you think

It's quite an early version, but I've been using it for the last few days and it's really nice to have bookmarks so close to the browser


EFF has a good write-up about zero-knowledge: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/07/zero-knowledge-proofs-...

> What ZKPs don’t do is mitigate verifier abuse or limit their requests, such as over-asking for information they don’t need or limiting the number of times they request your age over time. They don’t prevent websites or applications from collecting other kinds of observable personally identifiable information like your IP address or other device information while interacting with them.


The arguments they make is a good example of "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good".

If we allow incumbents to make photo age verification and upload of ID to third-parties to be the solution, we will have a much worse solution.


Exactly. And I do think that a world where zkp ids are taken for granted is one where the issues they point to will be more surmountable than today.


Interesting. While that is true I don't see how it's an argument against. Over-asking + ZKP certainly seems superior to over-asking + without ZKP. Without ZKP in a world where you constantly need to identify yourself you have absolutely no privacy.

And going forward I think that any communication without establishing some kind of trust boundary will just be noise.


Manufacturing consent at work


Me too. I've been using spec-kitty [0], a fork of Spec Kit. Quite amazing how a short interview on an idea can produce full documents of requirements, specs, tasks, etc. After a few AI projects, this is my first time using spec driven development, and it is definitely an improvement.

[0]: https://github.com/Priivacy-ai/spec-kitty


Nice, I'll check yours out after work, looks pretty polished.


Looks cool! I've had a hard time finding personal finance apps that are e2ee, so this is great.

Only downside is manually importing documents, but there isn't any other way, really, without giving up your data to Plaid or another service.


https://github.com/tannn/freethoughts

Inspired by a TED talk I saw [0] where the researcher from Microsoft displayed a program with AI assisting with thinking while someone was reading and annotating a document. They claimed it was a way to sharpen critical thinking instead of killing it. They didn't release the product, but I figured it was cool and useful, so I've spent the weekend creating it. It's been a great way for me to practice using agents, and I've learned a lot from this process.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lPnN8omdPA


They created a fascinating tool -- I'll be following your progress to see what you build!


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