> it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith or that there may be legit downsides.

Oh, you can definitely disagree. The problem is in good faith which Gruber shows none of. To the point of going from "why the hell would you want to change your Messages default app" to "oh, it absolutely makes sense to chaneg the messages default app but it makes no sense to change Photos, EU is bad" in a blink of an eye.

>The comment is contentious, and also asserts that it is per se impossible for someone to disagree with the EU's stance on interoperability in good faith

Or qiestion moon landing in good faith

Thanks for bringing my attention to the comment guidelines, I'll try to keep to them in the future. I assure you, I do write here in good faith.

I'm open to listening to those who oppose the EU's position on Apple's ecosystem. I draw the line at people comparing Apple's circumstances with those portrayed in Harrison Bergeron. Apple, its developer community and its app ecosystem are unlike anyone in that story, and they certainly aren't oppressed rebels. That comparison was an editorial choice made by John Gruber in his coverage of tech news, including a link to a copy of the story he personally typeset. It rang loudly then of sentimental bias, and it's still ringing.

I don't have evidence of the makeup of the Daring Fireball readership, but many of them are at least adjacent to the tech industry, and so his words have incredible reach, Hacker News notwithstanding. But what are his credentials? When he weighs the merits of a programming language, an API, a platform, or anything technical, I want him to speak from experience. Collaborating with Aaron Swartz twenty-one years ago on Markdown is respectfully not very relevant technical experience in the domains DF traditionally covers. Vesper was one ObjC app written by three people in 2013. I'm glad it was well-received, but again, what significance does Gruber's experience have? Why should the industry listen to him when he (admittedly not so often nowadays) discusses software development? If asked, I think he'd strongly agree that people in power should have considerable relevant experience.

PS— the article that began this discussion is, "The Website Hacker News Is Afraid to Discuss". As you can see, I've been eager, not afraid, to discuss the merits of Daring Fireball, though not so eager as to upvote it on HN.

The parent's point stands. Their comment isn't lacking context, and fundamentally it sounds like we all agree with their argument; the sentiment towards Apple has changed, and the environment these blogposts exist in is not the same. Gruber started blogging in an era when people had hope for Tim Cook, a sentiment that has basically dried up entirely today. The starry-eyed optimism for local-first development is dead in the Apple Intelligence era, and Apple's vision for the future is muddled.

Yes, this is the dynamic that emerges. When trust breaks down over silly things like keyboard reliability and right to repair and third-party app stores and $99/year service fees, people that were once rooting for Apple start to question why we hold out hope at all. It's not Gruber's fault for remaining faithful, but many of his modern articles are out-of-touch with the reality of Apple's situation. It's like performative bewilderment at this point, which this OP article really seems to reflect.

I don't read your blog because your analyses ring true. I read your blog because you are an impactful pundit who I can stomach. Thoughtful people with large followings bore unspoken biases throughout the past and present, and it is my purposeful exercise to engage with the content of one who's alive mainly talks about Apple.

I suspect you have many readers like me. I don't mean that we all disagree with you the exact same way— that would be absurd. I mean that we'll read something sincere but misguided, because that's a valuable element of discourse.

Your Harrison Bergeron allusion wasn't apt, it was memorably cringey, a local extremum. It was ridiculous on its face. We can't know what Vonnegut would think of it, but he might have chosen to write you into Cat's Cradle.

He defined markdown 2 decades ago, and the definition had so many problems (ambiguities, etc) that people felt the need to define better definitions like Commonmark.

Two decades ago. Does that mean his take on smartphone screen size or Blue Sky vs Threads is anything HN in general needs to hear? Probably not.

But I'll bet if he wrote a considered piece on "The Next Generation of Markdown" or something it would do numbers.

I mean, they compared him with Richard M. Stallman, who we know was extraordinarily consequential and influential in technology, but that doesn't mean his takes on oil or judges or whatever matters. I mean, RMS is still plugging away with posts and I've seen zero of them on this site.

Maybe. I landed on "shill" because it's a word he chose, and it seemed to fit when I read it. Let me try and define what it means, and how it's different from an advocate, an apologist or a sycophant.

A shill promotes something to others partly because that thing's success aligns with their prosperity. That causal chain motivates them to look past the thing's flaws, the people it negatively impacts, and the merits of its alternatives. If we're talking about an org with a stance or policy, the shill is incentivized to align with the org's stance over the stance of its competitors, its customers, and even the org's previous stances, because it's the org in its current incarnation that rewards the shill. However, if the org does something to jeopardize its relation to the shill's prosperity, the shill can criticize the org. Pom poms are optional.

Can someone with intelligence and an open mind be a shill? I emphatically believe so. Well-working minds and hearts can compartmentalize, rationalize and internalize. They can strengthen cognitive dissonance. The incentive to shill can live snugly in that habitat.

Sidenote— In my personal opinion, if there were slightly more or louder John Grubers in the world, there'd be far fewer John Calhouns.