Grustaf

I would say this is at least partly the purpose. It is sometimes very hard to avoid the conclusion that activists came up with some of these terms in order to mark themselves out as more virtuous, not that the group in question were bothered by it and begged people to stop calling them something.

Like LatinX, that definitely seems like a top-down word, that still hasn't caught on among actual Latinos.

Can you find a non-American that doesn't find it cringe to use "BM" for "poo"?

Probably because Denmark is a very old country, it predates most nation states, and the word originally referred to the tribe. Same with "Swede". They correspond to "Angles" I suppose.

This is very typical, you observe that the expressions are slightly different linguistically, and then make a leap from that and posit that this makes it pejorative.

It's a bit similar to how some people just posit that "The Ukraine" or "The Congo" is somehow pejorative just because most countries don't have a definite article.

I was talking about spoken language, not the existence of initialisms per se. Though I'd wager they are a lot more prevalent in written American English than in most other languages as well. Nobody else would think of inventing an initialism-euphemism for body odour (which I guess already is a euphemism for "smell" for example. Or "significant other".

By the way, QED is just a calque from Greek. (Like most things Roman...)

It's a very American thing to pepper your speech with euphemistic initialisms, a lot of people outside the US find it cheesy and annoying.

I remember a few years ago someone posted a link here to a guy that had built a clever off-road wheelchair so that people with disabilities could enjoy hiking, and some people got upset with him because he used the wrong euphemisms.

Putting an email in trash seems like exactly the kind of action that does _not_ need a toast, since it's easy and obvious to undo.

It's a bit unfair, to toasts, to use two examples from Google products, they are terrible at UX.

”Killers, thieves, and lawyers”

Sure, the mac was superior but it was also a lot more expensive, well outside what most people could afford.

Well I would include the blatant self-enrichment in incompetence, but perhaps that is too charitable

Commodores monumental incompetence killed the Amiga. It would have been comical if it wasn’t so sad.

Not at all. I am all for accommodating blind developers, and blind people in general. I even used to work as a narrator of audio textbooks for blind people and worked on side project apps to help the blind, so I am quite passionate about this.

But I also know that no blind developer would want their sighted fellow developers to miss out on something useful on their behalf, especially not in some kind of preemptive gesture of sympathy.

For displaying flat content it is indeed just a kind of monitor simulator, but that is hardly the point of VR. When looking at spatial content it is fundamentally different from a monitor, you can move your head to see the object from different angles, that is a game changer. But the use cases outside gaming and simulation are not obvious. CAD and certain visualisations is all I can think of.

What would this add compared to a phone with headphones? The only thing i can think of is to fake lip sync to the translation, but seems more weird than useful, cool as it is.

To be fair they did get a lot of people very excited for a bit, but not enough to fork out a small fortune for something that is merely cool.

Blind developers are extremely rare, accommodating them is not going to affect the adoption of the vision pro, or really anything.

It is not just a monitor though. The fact that it tracks your movements makes it fundamentally different, it’s an entirely different kind of viewing experience, which might yet found a killer app.

Keep in mind that if you never raise again, YC still owns 7% so they have no reason to complain. If you're successful, 500k for 7% will have been a good deal.

Why wouldn't they charge you? The fee is completely insignificant, and they are providing a valuable service that costs money to maintain.

> What damages would Apple claim?

They don't need to claim any damages, this is not a legal question, they can just close the loopholes.

> the only thing they did "wrong" was sell a solution to an Apple-designed problem.

No, the issue is not that they are "solving an Apple-designed problem" (whatever that problem may be), it's that they did it by leeching off of Apple's infrastructure.

Clearly he means that it's shitty for people who relied on the exploit, but without monetizing it. When Beeper started monetizing it, obviously Apple had to close it, and hobbyists suffered.

I can't read the story, is the number official?

The $150M figure is just hearsay though, isn't it? Or has either party officially mentioned it?

We don't actually know that it is 125 m, that's just hearsay. And we don't know how they were paid, with cash or shares, or something else.

My guess would be that the real number is very different, that this is just a matter of them hiring the Beeper people and getting the brand along with it. Then someone leaks the 125 m figure to the press, to the benefit of both Beeper and Automattic. Makes the latter look rich and the former successful.

Or maybe they actually did give $125 m to a broke startup without revenues or a working product, that was about to go bankrupt. But that does seem gullible.

It would be very surprising if they forced Apple to let competitors use their protocol and servers. Worst case scenario they might force them to let any chat app on the iPhone include SMS, that's the only real advantage that the first-party Messages app has over competitors.

Seems like an insane amount of work for the satisfaction of only having to check one chat app.

Isn't the important part of the tech open source?

What is the market size of people who care about "eliminating the monopoly position of trillion dollar (evil) companies"? And how will you monetize them?

Not that either Apple or Meta are even close to having a monopoly position in messaging.