DisjointedHunt

iOS is more scary. They don’t give apps the permission, but make no such restrictions on their internal services for analytics/competitor research/private APIs

I’ve dug in much detail through what iOS makes available in the data takeout request on the Apple account level and I find it impossible to believe they include everything they have through iOS at the moment.

I see a lot of comments here reduce the argument to “Ads are bad” . . . Well, Remember that ad-supported business models have underwritten the vast majority of technology R&D and improvements over the past two decades. Yes, including Apple. Hardware devices would never have the utility they do at present without large scale, low margin, high throughput ad models that benefit developers building insanely complex systems around said hardware.

The whole advancement in AI we’re seeing today would never have been accelerated the way it has been this past decade without the monetization models of the present internet.

It is a fine balance to strike where we don’t want to kill off the model that works so well, for fear of parts of it.

The alternative monetization models are things that many people here would despise much more: - More closed-source , paid services , apps, devices that are more expensive without the scale of ad supported models - Smaller (and arguably harder to oversee) spin offs of major ad supported services. - etc

I agree, i apologize. There is no excuse for insults such as those in civil discussion.

This is silly and underscores my point about splitting hairs while completely ignoring the bigger picture.

They were not just focused on the tanks. That was one component of the structure which involved Spacex testing propulsive landings using test articles of varying designs. . And this is the crucial part. . . While designing those test articles and iterating on the manufacturing systems AT THE SAME TIME.

The tanks are silly to make a point about was the response above if that was unclear. It was one component that was going through changes with the rest of the system in a revolutionary way that has never been done before. Not during the falcon development process or any other rocket development process going back to the Apollo era.

Blank sheet -> Starbase today is ridiculously complex. Each element in of itself that I outlined above takes YEARS. Arguing in a silly way about “oh my, they did take two years, well, technically, kinda, with these caveats” is such a stupid way to approach the measurement of progress where , while being completely wrong , is also not constructive to the discussion.

There is inherent value stored in all of Spacexs accomplishments thus far that is very, very hard to place financial value on simply because it is the only asset in the world with the capability.

A reusable rocket? How much would China pay for that capability? Don't worry about ITAR rules, it's a hypothetical question to understand the value of having such an asset available for defense or aerospace contracting purposes.

The centuries prior to the digital age, whole private empires were built on the back of shipping and transport. Spacex is presently sitting on the largest payload capability fleet in the world, by tonnage to orbit. Yes, including China. Yes, including Russia, Yes, we're not even counting one single Starship here yet.

The alloy itself that allows their turbines to run as hot as they have demonstrated to achieve such insane chamber pressures. What is that worth? No one else in the World has been able to do that in the history of mankind (In the unclassified realm atleast)

The thing i love about the company that you allude to as well is they're running a ship that converts these "ideas" into tangible business value quicker than anyone we've seen in classic space industries.

Why oh why can’t the author make a point without resorting to a sweeping conclusion drawn from an anecdote?

Google search is simply an indexed representation of the indexable web. If you’re seeing SEO spam, that’s a reflection of how the web has evolved thanks to the most popular monetization mechanisms available today.

Reddit is simply a great site for user generated (mostly) textual content. It is not comparable to a search engine . . The popularity of “+Reddit” strings appended to the ends of search queries likely pales in comparison to the volume of overall search queries. One can investigate the differences through Google trends where one would see the string “tiktoks” beats Reddit this past year.

Articles like these full of self validating biases such as “My Opinion of Google search is everyone’s opinion and here are some selective quotes to show I’m right” are childish.

Because the assumptions made for one class of payload don't apply to another class of payload with vastly different mission specifications.

A great place to start is this amazing video by The Everyday Astronaut: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbH1ZDImaI8

Notice how the type of fuel used itself is a consideration for the type of rockets we may send to Mars if we're considering In-Situ refueling.

It didn't take them a year to "get fuel tanks right", they were building while iterating on the upper stage design. ie, the manufacturing of an initial design that was evolving was being built at the SAME TIME.

Think about that for a second. For an orbital class upper stage larger than any ever built, it took shorter than ever for it to be designed AND manufactured through multiple iterative designs and manufacturing techniques than either the design stage or the manufacturing stage for ANY OTHER ROCKET.

All this while they continue to churn out and iterate on heatshield material and design at the "Bakery" which is another manufacturing facility they spun up from scratch in record time, manufacturing nearly a new rocket engine every DAY and that which has been flown and tested to demonstrate higher chamber pressures than ANY full flow staged combustion rocket engine in the history of mankind.

They're much further along than any comment in this thread indicates.

HN is great. "For the informed" comments like this with absolutely no substance or information from the past two years of progress at Starbase.

They achieved the highest chamber pressure for a full flow staged combustion engine. . . . EVER.

They've flown and landed upper stage prototypes, achieved an engine production capacity that not even China or any state power in the WORLD has managed in the history of humanity and account for a significant portion of global payload to orbit right now.

They've developed an in house metal alloy that allows for temperatures in the turbine and combustion chamber to reach levels that the United States Government considered "Impossible" during the cold war and one so exotic that only like 4 engines have ever been built in all of human history. The only one of those engines to leave the test stand is . . .the Raptor.

They develop and build their own heat tiles and have achieved significant output capacity in the past two years.

The support system at the launch site which includes the launch tower, grappling arms, fuel stores etc are in very advanced stages at the moment and certainly ready to handle a steady stream of iterative full flight tests.

All this IN PARALLEL !! The weight of the booster through iterative design has been steadily coming down as well, the engine ISP and chamber pressure has been rising in insane steps to the point where it is already amongst the best rocket engines known. Complexity of the engine build has visibly come down in the past few months alone.

Each of these items by themselves take YEARS and were similarly expected to take YEARS even when Spacex started work on them. They're much further along than many people thought they would be two years ago.

There is a lot of juicy detail in the three part video that the Everyday Astronaut did with Elon Musk at Starbase, i'd urge the people interested in this thread to go watch that instead of the armchair idiocy of either the OP or myself and make up your own minds.

I'd say it's the reversal of the trend that excites me more than the single instance of the announcement itself.

For decades, Europe (and admittedly the US) has sat back and moaned against using the single most powerful energy source known to man (measured in energy density). Germany actually proclaimed in 2011 that they would be turning away completely from nuclear energy.

This is a start, executed well . . it lays the foundation for a generational shift.

Construction isn't corrupt, it's the government. In both those cases as well as the subway project in New York which has the highest cost per mile of any rail anywhere, it's all a slush fund for that political party.

Your point is you think you understand anything about spam without working a day in your life in the field.

My statements are backed by experience.

The economic benefits from having a "fuck you" amount of energy ready to go at any point cannot be overstated.

Fresh water shortage due to drought? Desalinate ocean water.

Heat/cold wave? Announce that all electricity bills will be waived for the month. See popularity skyrocket.

Provide near unlimited compute budgets to universities etc on older hardware for their research and other work.

When shackles are taken off, innovation kicks off.

Big Takeaways:

1. The CEOs insistence on "Competition" as the cause for the increased focus on short term impression rates seems pointed at regulators and Congress rather than at investors. This is silly too, Google had no such pressure on impressions and performed rather well just days before.

2. The cat is out of the bag. Facebooks secret sauce was their very HEAVY focus on bottom funnel advertising where they would ascribe suspect numbers that were not Industry standard to "Conversion" objectives (RoAS anyone?). Anyone, anywhere sees an ad at any point in their conversion journey and Facebook would assign a large weighted portion of conversions leading from that individual in their reporting.

3. The big scary underlined headline here should be HOW POWERFUL APPLE IS. They sneeze and change one small thing in the way apps can access their platforms and we see an entire industry shaken.

4. They won't die out quick. These numbers, though not "Growing" as fast as befor or expected to grow as fast (which is the bigger concern), still is much, much , much higher than they need to sustain their business over the next two decades. The big risk though, is the stock price drop which is how the bulk of their pricy talent is paid dropping. Everyone there is currently staring at a 25% pay cut on their stock based comp and that is not a pretty picture for attracting the best kids graduating this year with ambitions of joining a fast growing tech firm or pulling in talent from places like MSFT or GOOG or AAPL who will not want to jump aboard a perceived sinking ship.

So once again, let’s speak about what the issue is not what it is not.

The argument here isn’t that there are no corner cases where legitimate businesses with 401ks tax returns and all that send you too many communications.

On twitter specifically, low quality clickbait is almost always tied to policy violating , if not illegal activity.

If you can’t even admit that, well, you should really engage in conversation with more good faith or more expertise than you have at present.

You don’t understand or you don’t agree?

The sentence and the security environment in the region are well documented and covered in the security posture reviews routinely covered by official press.

What specifically is your argument?

Singapore is an island nation with a tiny population (~7M) and has loads of national security concerns including destabilizing forces spreading misinformation.

So, no, suing for libel in a personal capacity does NOT equate to exercising state power as you assert. Unless you claim the entire Judiciary and state apparatus which has a long track record of issuing rulings both for and against public personalities is somehow flawed.

This is HN, i wouldn't have expected a comment such as this to go unchecked this long.

What do you think it means? As someone who's worked with people in spam fighting, i'd like to understand a different perspective if you have one.

Low quality clickbait is almost always tied to a commercial end, be it ad click fraud, ad view farming or malware/phishing on the extreme end of the spectrum.

Anything policy violating that's considered "Spam" is likely to be tied to illegal activity 9 times out of 10.

Well, i don't think that's fair. Clickbait isn't against even the terms of service for TikTok and it certainly is not illegal activity.

Scams on the other hand are (at least a big subset), commercial, which cause financial damage and most scams are codified to be illegal actions in law.

>“If you feel the need to complain about <insert product or service here>”

This should never ever translate to “you use it too much”. I mean, speak to the quality of the substance in the argument and not throw out the right to voice an opinion about something that seems broken.

Anytime I see the comments on posts about social media moderation, I laugh my ass off.

People calling it a “hard” problem simply parrot the narrative they see other engineers who have tackled it in leadership positions adopt. The reality is it’s a “Dirty” problem. The equivalent of a sewer cleaner in the old days that is a thankless, low pay, low career prospect, riddled-with-politics , nightmare.

Look up the salary bands for roles in spam fighting. The top 5% probably make bank and even that is not wildly large amounts relative to the valley (~$650k TC which is director level)

The LARGE pools of spending go toward maintaining an army of contractors that get passed down a barrage of things that some teams flag through automation. Same at twitter as it is as Facebook and Google. You need only hit up LinkedIn for the right search keywords to find the contractor hotspots.

The point being, Paul is right. If these platforms wanted to solve the problem, the smartest hires would go there motivated by a culture enabling high impact and good compensation.

The hell hole that is moderation operations would make even those guys with the Six-Sigma-black-belt-world-championship-something ops degrees shed tears for how soul destroying the environment is to work in.

Source: Have friends in these roles. Seen it play out a bit more than a decade at this stage.

>In the TV era, they weren't.

Well, what do you think killed the TV era? Competition from a medium that promised less annoying ad experiences. I bet that you can't sit through an entire NFL game today without your phone and the ability to mute/switch channels.

That is not the official line. The whole point of that widget on the lock screen is to perform behavior that is not codified in OS settings or available directly to __ANY__ external developer outside of Apple.

When a "Bug" seems to oddly fit in favor of a native OS's paid feature uptake, call me skeptical when i don't think it is a "Mistake", i mean what are the odds that Apple Music launches, the team is under pressure to deliver subscriber numbers and suddenly this behavior shows up?

The whole approach to Software companies where ridiculous behavior like this are tolerated in recommendation engines in feed or in OS level features that are anti competitive by nature and dismissed as a "Transient bug" by people who should know better is not right.

I have to add a correction there: "Wherever there's money . . .AND SUBJECTIVITY IN THE INTERPRETATION OF PERFORMANCE . . . "

You don't see this in crucial roles in sport, for example, where athletes who once possessed the talent for glory can't hide it when they perform poorly or are past their prime.

Thankfully, there are no deteriorations in performance for physical ability alone in tech, rather, mental abilities improve over time (Except for roles where the grind is important), but in the early tech days, "Winning" meant creating things that were measurable and clearly showed that.(Mostly at least, there will always be exclusions to the norm).

The past decade and a half have been near unbearable with the progressions in tech culture at companies resembling what internet memes on corporate culture are made of. Heavily verbose emails and pointless discussions of low intellect for the most minor of issues or features.

Power is concentrated not in software engineering ability, but in the boardrooms of clueless MBAs and while you say it isn't about that, what i see indicates it is largely because of that.

This is a tale as old as time: The Incumbents in the early 90s were challenged by newer culture, they sneered. Smart people went to work for the newer culture and industries and refused to conform to wearing suits and playing corporate house.

Many of the tech firms that are bleeding out have become everything they fought against. The MBA-isation of big tech is so jarring when you land in the valley coming in from Florida, Colorado or many a foreign country where the rules of engagement and speech are still "normal" ie, casual, ie, ideas win respect not rank, ie there are perspectives outside of what the headlines in techmeme alone speak to.

If you work at a large tech firm today, you will see this play out every 6 months in the promotion discussions that have essentially dissolved into political horse trading and are the single most important events to anyone not directly involved in very very senior roles (Where you speak to investors or are involved in company-level change)

This is so strange to live through as a mid/mid-senior level VP, Manager, Lead what have you. Here you are, apparently at the pinnacle of your achievement, having beaten thousands of intelligent people in competitive exams and studied at the most prestigious institutions only to . . . spend a significant portion of your promotion cycle trying to play the Game of Thrones with a bunch of MBAs ?

Compensation is not a significant differentiator anymore as it has been in the past, infact, one may argue, for the top 10-15% of the company that handles the most crucial products, quitting and starting up would easily get them overnight valuations orders of magnitude returns over their expected 20 year earnings were they to continue climbing the corp ladder (Nuvia, anyone?)

So, in short, the environment externally has changed. The environment internally has absorbed a lot of the lifers and MBAs from "Successful" incumbents to the point where the internal culture reflects everything that was wrong with those guys that these firms "Disrupted" and there's plenty of money to go around.

We certainly need more people who focus on "the work". It is tragic to see young minds be thrown into a culture where they think it is "normal" to abuse anyone based on race, white or black. The fact that this happens routinely in the valley is a pathetic narrative on how the justice system has turned cowardly instead of upholding the law.

That said, as someone who has seen the effects of this virus . . which i do not believe everyone who refuses the shot appreciates, please, please consider getting vaccinated.

The history of war is littered with absolute lines that no one considered would be crossed as a certainty that later became distant laughable and naive thresholds.

Agreed. It is frankly ridiculous how much of our politicians time and effort goes toward picking and fermenting these personal vendettas over international issues that have no bearing or meaning to "US" - The country's interests, but suddenly get clumped into the "Foreign Policy established objectives" . . .

Why?? Because some idiot picked a fight we have no part in. The Bush Dynasty and the endless wars of the middle east, The Clintons and Europe/Russia. Right now in the present, the bi partisan scum skirting the laws of our nation to send Troops and armaments to places like Syria and killing and displacing MILLIONS of people that we as a nation have to carry on our conscience.

This should disgust everyone regardless of nationality, political affiliation or any form of "justification" they may have formed as being the international keeper of peace.

Creating what is essentially a Shell Company in the form of NATO with ridiculous amounts of warmaking powers, whatever cosmetic protections there may be to guard against abuse, and then allowing that entity to run feuds and foreign policy of the United States WELL PAST THE POINT of an administrations tenure should never be allowed.

International treaties should NEVER be allowed to derive in perpetuity, the constitutional powers and duties entrusted to National institutions. And this is precisely what is and has been happening so far.

A "Weird bug or edge case" is rarely the case with these upsells. There's a lot of marketing and research budget that goes into designing these flows and equally tonnes of data behind observing the behavior.

That precisely is my point. The behavior on my end is strange as well where it happens at times i'm commuting and other times, when the phone is still, nothing. Where can i go and switch this off in settings for Apple Music short of killing the app and uninstalling?

Isn't it strange that all app behavior and interaction with the OS for apps that aren't owned by Apple need to be predictable and controlled through standard settings while Apple Music has hidden access to over ride these behaviors?

I can write paragraphs about similar behavior on the News app and other upsell services. When a platform can directly push apps without competition to your device that they don't need to compete with anyone for installs for, that is one thing, having access to undocumented APIs is another, having the ability to plow all revenue from their apps right back in without the 30% cut or other restrictive practices they impose on their direct competitors is yet another.

Either there should be transparency or there should be restrictions on the way internal Apple apps are allowed to compete in the marketplace. A random product manager at Cupertino should not have more power and clout over what apps get pushed to my phone without consent or dialogs and upsells get thrown in the UX compared to what is possible for public apps to do.

Apple Music only has significant usage because of their anti competitive behavior.

All apps on the App Store have to go through rigorous review and are restricted to Apples discretion in being granted access to OS features while Apple themselves use undocumented features to compete as a platform.

Try hooking up AirPods to your iPhone and do nothing else. The Lock Screen changes to have an Apple Music player with a random song you may have never listened to.

This, even if you were listening to another song on YouTube Music or any other music app as your last played audio.

On more than one occasion, I’ve accidentally played some idiotic pop song that Apple Music pushes into this experience while commuting with AirPods and noise cancellation on while holding the phone firmly grasped in my hand.

It’s ridiculous how many of these little UX tricks they adopt that boost the metrics of their internal products while openly denying the competition access to the same.