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People were borderline out for blood on such a defiant worldview
Depending on where you’d end up - you’ll feel right at home.
Huh? That is far above the average developer salary. Even in a big city this would only be plausible in a highly demanded specialty and high experience level. Far from average.
Sounds like an outlier to me, unless you can provide some statistics.
The highlighted average range is 5k to 6k gross, which comes out as 4.2k to 5.2k net.
5000€ average would seem about right if it was pre tax & social security -- perhaps OP got these confused and it's actually the pre-tax income.
If jobs are limited, then it feels a bit disingenuous to use this as an example. Please correct me.
But remote work in software development is pretty widely accepted in Germany, too.
That said, especially in the countryside, there are a lot of companies actually building or producing stuff. And they need IT services, too. Any food batch that's not properly accounted for in your warehousing software is effectively unsellable and, thus, a pure loss.
See their cases against Meta, for example.
No one forced site owners to suck out personal information from customers to sell them to the highest bidder. A normal, human respecting website doesn't even need a consent banner.
People are normalizing egregious behavior.
When will the industry reckon?
Unfortunately, normal people do have to be reminded of the basics, because they seem statistically unable to process nuance in any argument they already have an opinion on. The whole idea of winning an argument is a kind of weird normie thing, a sportsball game with words, which is fine as entertainment, but problematic when it gets confused for reasoning about things.
Arguments as soldiers. Win at any cost, doesn't matter if what's said now contradicts what came before.
I didn't know about the idea until someone else explained it to me; talking about it with my much older brother, he had noticed it spontaneously.
Maybe it would be time for you to reflect on how much you implied in that simple sentence. None of what you said I implied or desired to do. It was simply my comment and opinion and contribution to the comment.
There's lots of dumb things "people in general" believe. The infamous list on Wikipedia[0] is just the tip of an iceberg. Everyone is vulnerable to this; if you aren't occasionally discovering and correcting such dumb "broadly known" things in your own beliefs, you aren't paying attention.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions
And if they don't comply it is a ridiculous and unprecedented fine of 10% of global revenue.
They are a trillion dollar company, it’s not like they don’t know what is and isn’t allowed by the law.
Since (a) they are a provider and not a deployer of AI systems and (b) they are no classified as one of the DMA gatekeepers.
"unclear obligations":
- do not use people's data without their consent
- disclose and document your training data
Of course it's "unclear" to companies like Facebook who opted everyone on their platform in to training their AI models by default.
Apple's "AI" is coming to all users everywhere eventually. As many of their products it's rolled out to US, English-speaking, rest of the world, in that order. And it won't even fully ship to the US until sometime next year. Their "boohoo EU" is marketing and PR bullshit aimed at gullible morons.
> And if they don't comply it is a ridiculous and unprecedented fine of 10% of global revenue.
It's a fine up to 10% of global revenue. And that number can only be reached when the company willingly and willfully continues to break the law
The (AI) Act leaves too much to the discretion of the Commission, secondary legislation or voluntary codes of conduct
https://ecnl.org/news/packed-loopholes-why-ai-act-fails-prot...
This is the problem with the DMA and AI acts. The specifics are not written into law. Everything is left up to the EU Commissioner to decide as each case presents itself. Which makes it impossible for companies to predict what their decisions will be. And why would they take the risk with such massive fines on the table.
This kind of regulatory uncertainty is toxic to business.
Also Apple didn't just not release Apple Intelligence in the EU. They've geo-blocked it so you specifically can't use it even in English. They would only do this for legal reasons.
If all specifics were written into the law:
- people would complain about government overreach and that government dictates technological solutions
- no laws would ever be written because there are so many aspects to consider, and it's impossible to predict the future
Facebook, for instance, could easily start with complying with the two bullet points I posted. They don't, and they fight the EU in courts claiming they have god-given right to user data.
And yet you pretend that these companies are somehow victims. They are not.
> Which makes it impossible for companies to predict what their decisions will be.
This is PR and marketing bullshit. EU Commission literally talks to all the involved and interested parties, listens to their positions and invites them to present theirs.
> They would only do this for legal reasons.
Ahahhaha. Of course not.
This approach works just fine in Australia which is renowned for having the best consumer protection regime in the world. It's just harder to do in EU/US when there isn't an appetite for pro-consumer regulations.
And it's hilarious that you think that having to talk to the EU Commission to determine what is the law is somehow good. Businesses need certainty and predictability. Everything the EU regime is not.
No, it's not hilarious. This is literally what industry says it wants: instead of dictates by uncaring government you get a dialog with the industry that shapes the policy and lets the authorities adjust their approach.
People have a misunderstanding of how these EU laws work.
They are designed to be flexible with all of the specifics left up to lawmakers to interpret. Which is understandable when you're dealing with so many technical issues which can't be anticipated ahead of time.
So there is no legal or technical definition of what is the "minimum required". There are high-level outcomes that require continuous negotiations to achieve.
And you can have consumer protections like Australia, UK etc that consists more of specific regulations rather than what the EU has.
After being on the green, not only they got back to their former selfs, they do anything to avoid running out again of the money fountain.
Last instance of this that I noticed was the sudden, unannounced loss of support for self-signed certs for IMAP ("totally reasonable, who still uses those anyway?"), but there were earlier threads, e.g. about the possibility of 3rd-party clients for IMessage ("huge security risk!") etc etc.
I find it noticeable, became there is often such a jarring difference in those threads to the usual prevailing stances of the HN community on those issues. I'm pretty sure, Google, Microsoft or Facebook would be raked over the coals for the same decisions.
In this thread, the anti-Apple replies lean much more toward the childish internet-shitposting style that is atypical of HN. E.g.:
"shilling"
"simping"
"I see your reading comprehension skills seemed to have magically changed yet again in the last five minutes."
And so on.
I pay Apple and I’m their customer.
I’m the product of almost every other company that is even vaguely related to mobile devices — especially the companies pushing to force Apple to stop protecting their users from their depredations.
“It’s unfair we can’t exploit your customers to our own advantage!” seems to be the entirety of the arguments.
PS: I stopped buying Epic games years ago because of their generally sleazy behaviour. I just got an iPhone 16 Pro because Apple is the only company I can trust not to abuse AI mercilessly to my detriment. I’m sure that one or more people at Epic are working on using AI to better addict children to loot boxes or whatever, right now.
My personal favourite example is device encryption. Briefly, I worked in the mobile device management (MDM) space when that was a very new thing, and all the major manufacturers had to start adding device encryption to meet enterprise policy requirements. (At the time, all new Windows laptops used BitLocker.)
So the vendors did that. They added encryption to their devices.
The Android spec sheet added a line:
Encryption: Yes
They had thought of everything. It was as good as encryption could be made without compromising on functionality. I dabble in the Enterprise PKI space also, and the only time I had seen a design this thorough was the internal Ethernet network of the Boeing 787 plane[1].
Afterwards I paid more attention every time there was some fight between a government agency like the FBI and Apple. Each and every time, Apple chose the side of their customers, locking things down further with secure enclaves, anti-hammering protections, in-house security-critical silicon design, and more.
As a reminder, Google's level of encryption is simply "yes". A checkbox tick to meet a requirement, that's all. They really, really don't care about your data security, and it shows in the way they act in practice.
I see similar customer-centric design elements in Apple AirTags. I read the whitepaper on the cryptographic algorithms they used. These very cleverly provide the maximum possible functionality with the minimum possible user data exposure. It's private and useful at the same time.
Google has never published anything of that sort, ever. I'm pretty sure of it.
If you disagree, please link to a whitepaper outlining privacy-guaranteeing technology that they developed and have included in a product that they sell. Or Epic. Or Facebook. or anyone else.
[1] Yeah, yeah, Boeing is a bad company with bad leadership, but their engineers know their stuff.
Android Enterprise Security White Paper
https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.android.com/e...
Chrome browser security
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/chromebrowsersecur...
Google Cloud security Whitepaper
https://services.google.com/fh/files/misc/google_security_wp...
Communicating About Privacy: Towards People- Centered and Accountable Design
https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Privacy-Tran...
By Epic, I'm assuming you don't mean the public interest research center in Washington, DC seeking to protect privacy, freedom of expression, and democratic values in the information age.
their white paper about the harms of genai is at though https://epic.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/EPIC-Generative-...
I.e.: From what I can tell, Google spends approximately $0 on privacy research such as security technology that only benefits end-users.
You linked to a bunch of security technologies that Google just copy-pasted into their products to compete with Apple and Microsoft, or to meet large customer requirements.
Also note that GCP is one of the few offerings Google has where the "users are the customers" instead of products. Despite this, there's nothing in that whitepaper you linked that impresses me as unique or special about GCP in comparison to AWS or Azure. I never hear anything out of Google that's even vaguely privacy-first, even in such divisions.
Linking to a paper with the word "privacy" in it from Facebook is just hilarious.
With Apple, you're allowed to have privacy unless, of course, you're trying to promote democracy in Russia [1], organize anti-government protests in China [2], or otherwise communicate privately without government's approval [3].
Of course, all of that security is a theater as far as government agencies are concerned because Cellebrite, an US-allied firm, can unlock the devices a few months after each iOS release [4]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/17/world/europe/russia-naval...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-65830185
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/04/19/apple-w...
[4] https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24833832-cellebrite-...
Did they also talk about all the vulnerabilities that can constantly root a phone with a message on imessage, without any user interaction?
Yes multiple ones… because they don't bother (or don't want?) to fix them properly.
All vendors have bugs in their products, including security bugs.
Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.
Google does not. The entire company exists to drain your personal data into a giant pond for their ad-tech analysts to splash around in.
Remember when apple had their own JRE implementation (forked from sun's) and they were fixing well known vulnerabilities after months rather than hours like sun was doing?
> Apple is one of the few trying to protect the privacy of their users with technology.
Their privacy protecting effort starts and end inside their marketing department. No engineering employee is involved in that. And judging by your posts, it seems their strategy is working great, and they can also mine your data and for money like everyone else as well, while convincing you otherwise.
Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers.
https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-new-ad-product-pushe...
I may be missing something, but graphs with three-digit precision out to 2025 (next year!) is made-up-bullshit, not research: https://www.emarketer.com/content/apple-looks-boost-app-stor...
Let's look at actual data, such as Apple's annual report, which is an 80-page document that uses the word advertising only 4 times. Clearly a focus of the company.
Sales of "services" in 2023 was $85B of $383B total. This includes the various iCloud subscriptions, Apple TV, Apple Pay, Apple Music, the App Store, etc... and advertising.
Your "eMarketer" source thinks Apple's ad revenue was $5B the same year.
So... just 6% of services sales, and 1.4% of total sales.
Wow, Apple truly has become an ad-tech company at heart!
Not at all like Google or Facebook which makes... checks notes... all of their sales revenue from ad-tech, minus a rounding error for some gadgets designed to spy on you to feed the ad machine.
(I kid, I kid... no wait, I don't. Google's numbers for 2023 are nearly the reverse of Apple, with only 19.5% of their revenue coming from non-ad-tech sources, of which nearly half is Google Cloud Platform. That's almost a separate business, so ignoring that, the core Google company revenue is 90% advertising. But we all knew that.)
You know full well Apple is in the same surveillance capitalism business and instead you want to talk about 3 digit precision numbers or what percentage of their current revenue is makes up as though it was somehow relevant.
How exactly does that help users privacy knowing that the company also happens to have other revenue streams? It’s not even remotely relevant you either engage in the practice or you don’t.
I'm genuinely confused about what point you're trying to make here.
The question that was asked:
> What about Apple's behaviour makes you think you're not the product?
The response was given:
> Apple makes money from selling products. Google and Meta makes money from selling your profile to advertisers
And then I pointed out that despite how Apple would like to publicly portray themselves and how their fans would love to try and convince you otherwise that it is in fact a rapidly growing multi-billion dollar a year business of theirs where they are doing exactly that. The idea that you are not the product is actively wrong.
If a pastry shop also sells sausage rolls, does that make them a butcher shop?
Compare this to Google or Facebook, both of which derive about 80-90% of their revenue from advertising, with all other services and products barely an afterthought.
Money, more than anything, drives corporate priorities, culture, and attitudes.
“Don’t tell me what your priorities are. Show me where you spend your money and I’ll tell you what they are.” — James W Frick
Apple haven't banned exploitation (e.g. loot boxes), they're just demanding a 30% cut of it.
Classic whatbaoutism, which is especially absurd when the comment started off with saying that Apple is certainly not perfect. They made their specific point.
I really want to know… how did Apple hurt you?
I’m being serious. There’s a group of people here on HN (and Reddit) that have a seething hatred for Apple, but always for vague unstated reasons. The few reasons that are stated are always something like “they’re spying!” — said by people that prefer Google Android instead because clearly that is the paragon of user privacy.
So I ask you: please engage in conversation instead of name-calling.
You are completely out of your mind. That is never the argument used against Apple. As mentioned before, you can like your iPhone without simping for them.
I have seething hatred for Apple simps and blind fanatics that think their Cupertino dictator can’t do wrong. They’re just an extremely rich company that produces quality products - nothing more.
My favourite is the small army of ex-Twitter employees frequenting HN who have a visceral hatred for Elon Musk and will rabidly hound anyone that says something even vaguely positive about anything he's ever touched.
There ware some entertaining foaming-at-the-mouth rants about how SpaceX is destroying wildlife with tap water.