Corporations are not to be loved
inessential.com
inessential.com
Many people don't agree with those tradeoffs, and that's fine as well.
I'm honestly surprised they never got raked over the coals by some up and coming State Attorney General, would be an easy win and easy political points.
I generally align with those tradeoffs and am happy to pay the premium for good design and to rebuff primarily surveillance- or ad-based business models.
Let's not forget that it's already not commercially viable to distribute consumer-targeted software on their desktop/laptop systems outside of their store. It won't be too much longer, and the ability to install non-AppStore software on will be removed from all of their products. For your protection, of course.
It's so unfortunate that zero other companies have managed to build a laptop computer that isn't complete garbage in comparison.
I left Apple products almost 7 years ago for Ubuntu (+ whatever hardware I can find), and after multiple abject failures, I found a Lenovo X1 Carbon.
This device is thrilling in that it actually works and continues to work through software updates. Unfortunately, it's an ugly bastard compared to the latest Mac Pro lineup.
Don't get me started on Pixel phones. I'm still stuck on the eternal question, "Are these just bad phones? Or are they the worst phones?"
The gravity well that surrounds Apple products is made of an outrageously large collection of extremely high quality user experiences and there are zero other companies who have figured out how to accomplish this absolute feat of human endeavor.
* Fails to detect fingerprints most of the time
* Walks off tables (and dry hands) thanks to the atomically smooth surfaces
* Fails to detect rotation events
* Randomly detects false rotation events
* Turning off auto-rotate requires a rotate-dance to force a rotation to get detected, still completely fails sometimes.
* Which Google app does what, changes constantly for no reason (e.g. Nest vs Home, Hangouts vs Duo vs Gmail vs ???, Google Podcasts is going EOL, many more.)
* Camera adds AI artifacts to photos
* Google apps move their UI controls (my cheese) constantly for no reason
* Device search sucks. Exact matches for apps that are installed show the app result ~50% of the time, and web results the other 50%
* That gigantic camera slab on the back. WTAF?!
* Received SMS images from IOS users are potato quality
* Received SMS videos are useless
* Google deprecated security patches for my last Pixel after only 3 years. WTAF?!
* Bluetooth is still hot garbage when trying to use various headphones and cars
That's what I recall in a quick 5 minutes.
There are many more gripes, complaints and even some actual defects.
I recognize that i-devices have problems too. I recognize that some of these problems are caused by i-devices. I recognize that the utopia has not arrived for anyone.
Unlike i-devices, the entire device (and the software on it) do not feel like they were designed by a group of people who care about how it feels to use it.
It's obvious that caring people were involved in the creation of these devices, but they were always overruled and limited in their ability to accomplish their goals by dipshits with too much power and no values.
I have noticed it hates to detect my fingerprints and fails too fast. It's nowhere near the quality of my old Motorola. I think they sacrificed something to do that "Through the Screen" trick. Also the screen rotation thing is a pain.
I mostly bought mine because my previous Motorola lost security updates less than a year after I bought it. I need them for my work apps so it pretty much made that phone worthless. One thing I hate is that companies provide security updates for the time period after the phone is released, not last purchased.
Apple is definitely blowing away Android phones in almost every aspect. I just can't live with them after my experiences with their iPad and MacBook Pro. Butterfly keyboard, broken touch strip, power cord not working, one drop of water away from disaster. Gah!
Also, I'd suggest ditching SMS and encouraging family and friends to use an encrypted chat app instead.
> * Bluetooth is still hot garbage when trying to use various headphones and cars
This is usually the car's fault, especially if the car was made over a decade ago. Hell, back when I got my first car with Bluetooth built in, almost no contemporary Bluetooth devices would function with it.
Also non-AppStore content works fine, setapp for example is still commercially viable
I was wrong to say that it's already not viable.
There are some examples of small/medium companies making it happen on the OSX platform.
Please. macOS isn't iOS, and the App Store there is a guy shining shoes on a corner compared to the iOS App Store's megamall. Most macOS software sales don't happen there, and you can't even buy many flagship macOS apps (like Adobe's Creative Cloud suite) there.
This is not as easy for small companies with smaller brand footprints.
I am also making a prediction (that obviously could be wrong), that this scary little checkbox will eventually be deprecated in favor of a blanket ban.
Yes, distribution and discoverability is the value of the iOS App Store, and well worth small companies paying 15% for. On Mac, it's just another way to buy software, and developers can easily avoid it if they don't think the ROI is high enough.
It's clearly viable to distribute outside the App Store, but "easily avoid it" is also a little overstated IMO.
Apple has increased the friction for outside distribution and 15-30% off the top of all revenue is a wild thing to demand of anyone.
Keep in mind that the government is coming along for another 30-50%, leaving value creators with a small fraction of the value they create.
Clearly, you've never used the epic piece of shit known as Samsung Galaxy.
I had a Samsung Android phone many years ago (in the early days), and the spamware scared me off, possibly for life.
People, including those you love, can also do things you don't like.
I'm not sure if I have a point here but the line of reasoning there doesn't quite make sense to me.
Not healthy for society, but really good for the economy.
MacOS X Panther with Aqua’s basically artifact-less and butter smooth postscript based rendering capabilities, the beloved (!) BSD shell I could drop into at any point. All of that in 2003 … a true OS from the future and for the masses!
Battery runtime of PPC 7xx also was stellar at the time. AFAIR nothing could compete in relative comparison.
Humanistic and design oriented engineering at an excellent level and consistently so. Of course I aspired to be exactly like that as a professional!
Too bad they have strayed from that in many ways over the years. They IMO mostly still, but only barely hold the functional high ground these days.
That said, it is different from the love I have for people. When my son was young and would treat people poorly over things, I told him there are three kinds of things we can love: people, places, and things. When there's any conflict, the priority should almost always be in that order.
It's rather clearly worded and I see no contradiction.
Corporations use this mercilessly in their PR and explicitly try to build "personal relationships" etc with customers. And it seems to work extremely well to the corporations' favor. Of course at the cost of the consumer via information asymmetries. [Note me resorting to agency here too.]
Corporations don't care. They can't care. They don't have feefees and don't operate like human individuals.
Corporations are literally legal entities that usually just maximize return on capital. Nothing more, nothing less.
Here is another philosophical argument - it neither supports or refutes the title of this post but it’s worth exploring.
People, are multi-cellular organisms. Each cell, is a living thing in its own right. Billions of them working together form this illusion of one cohesive human being. What keeps all the cells working together are some “processes” codified in their shared DNA.
Though every now and then, some of them choose to rebel against the existing rules and detract. These are the cancer cells - which only follow the processes within their mutated DNA.
I think I could go on for quite a bit. It just boggles my mind to think these strategies are so universal.
So forming a corporation to organize a large group of people is a tried and tested strategy.
There are no such "nice companies". They operate on a totally different logic and "DGAF" if they can get away with it. Apple's not gonna bring food to you if you're bedridden no matter how much you've spent on them.
I don't think it's anything philosophical. Just how you model and predict behavior of different kinds of entities. What's a thing of its own right is just a matter of conceptualization.
That means that, at times, I have been incandescent with rage at Apple. Other long-term Apple developers can relate, I'm sure.
May be different for customers; but developing for Apple platforms can be ... challenging.
But I still like doing it, and have no plans to change. My last app submission was in -24 hours or so.
One could certainly love (or like) a corporation if that company provides some meaningful semblance to one's life.
For example, if you are that company's employee and you have been well-provided with means to live a comfortable life while also being aligned with your values, I can't even think how you will have an ounce of contempt for that organization.
If the company provides you with products or services that enhances your way of living, then definitely there would be room for adoring them due to the positive impact that they have.
In the case of the OPs example, the company will be enforcing actions that have different repercussions depending on where you are on the side of the fence.
If you are from the outside where you publish products or services that needs to live within the company's digital ecosystem, then surely that additional tax is an impact that will hurt your finances overall. Anything that hurt your finances will a chain effect that can hurt your business, your decision making, and to some degree, your well being.
Its different when you are within the walls of that company. That additional margin would likely translate to increase compensation (if you are an employee) or better profit (if you are an investor).
The thing here is that, loving or liking or adoring a company hinges on how it impacts your personal bottom line. At the end of the day, the rationality of the decision is based on what each entity perceives as what is best for them. What's best for someone may not be the best for everyone. And that's reality.
The company does not return your feelings, and you'll be shocked when the layoffs come out of nowhere.
The result was that new corporation were objects of civic pride.
It also meant lots of business was done by unincorporated networks of merchants.
It was pretty amazing how massive networks of individual merchants could operate without corporations. Kind of blew my mind.
Corporations have no factual, objective existence as anything other that networks of individuals coordinating their activities according to certain methods.
I have people I admire (that don’t know me). But I hope I don’t love them.
They are often profit (or often loss!) making corporations, and they are something people really love. Yes, the owners sometimes love them too, or are in it for the prestige rather than the profit, but they are still legally corporations and many are, or have been, either listed or owned by listed companies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Publicly_traded_sport... for some of those that are publicly traded.
Under law they are actually qualified as "artificial persons". I think about this from time to time, and what deeper meaning does it carry.
AI isn't intelligence.
It's just a to make a parallel as some attributes are similar or identical, but not all, so they don't quality as the real. Mere similarities only.
An artificial dog represented by a picture of a dog (visually looks quite like a dog), does not move, no life, no smell, no neurons, blood, muscles and bones. Hence not a dog.
But they are people in a sense that they may own property, be sued, etc. What interests me is why they are called an "artificial person" in the first place. Why are they not just called a "business" by law or a similar term. Calling something a person, even if it's artificial carries with itself great implications.
Labelling businesses as (artificial) persons is probably to put the emphasis that (with regards to the law) they will be treated the same as persons. With regards to certain rights given they granted them the same.
Imagine when the concept was introduced, some may have been against it but for sure many did not even comprehend what it meant. "How can a business be the same as a person" asked the layman, "not the same as, an artificial person" said the legislator.
Only speculating, and trying to find reasons for not seeing more than some weirdness that put into historical perspective may not be so suspicious.
As an example of things not changing, we are now calling those prompts spitting back highly probable statistical predictions of correctness in the output "artificial intelligence".
There isn't any intelligence in LLMs. Just adoption of how neurons are connected in our brain. Nodes aren't neurons in those algorthms, they are artificial neurons, connections between nodes are nothing like the actual links between neurons. Not even close. They are like what a rough map is to a territory, to make a parallel with what's on the wikipedia page the cousin post mentions.
Artificial neural network mimicing binary graphs would be a more appropriate naming. People would not have a clue what that means. Here, layman, it's artificial intelligence, see, it writes, talks and even answer questions better than most university teachers.
It looks at what sort of 'people' Corporations are:
The documentary attempts to compare the way corporations are systematically compelled to behave with what it claims are the DSM-IV's symptoms of psychopathy, e.g., the callous disregard for the feelings of other people, the incapacity to maintain human relationships, the reckless disregard for the safety of others, the deceitfulness (continual lying to deceive for profit), the incapacity to experience guilt, and the failure to conform to social norms and respect the law.
Americans have the freedom of speech, and they don't lose that every time they join up with a few mates and e.g. walk down the street (and perhaps protest together), or run a business (and perhaps donate money to political candidates together).
The people who own Apple, who work at Apple, etc. They do have feelings and desires, etc. The thing is, we're talking about a huge number of people. Very few - if any - actually know you personally. Some are nice people. Some are not.
Unlike some other things that don't love you back, corporations are actively abusive relationship partners. Whether an employee of or customer of a corporation, you are being misled and taken advantage of. There are benefits, of course, but you must be a willing participant to being misled. My feeling is that this is an unhealthy consequence of the relationship.
Sidenote, I can say with some authority that you are admired for your love of ham radio and fresh air, even though they don't love you back.
That doesn't preclude the people within the corporation from having malice for you, though.
A corporation is incapable of causing the harm that can come from a close relationship with a person.
To be so caviler about this subject simply to justify your agenda is disgusting.
And are other institutions not be loved either? Can you love the Red Cross, the Catholic Church or the US federal government?
And ham radio and fresh air are more things than institutions. Loving a nation is commonplace too.