Wobbles42

This is probably a good thing -- faith in such structures was never justified.

Any relationship with a corporate entity is transactional in nature. A great deal of effort is often expended to manipulate us into feeling otherwise, but that is all it is.

Companies don't have feelings. They aren't conscious entities with a capacity for guilt or morality. They are, in essence, software applications designed to execute on systems composed of human employees. In a sense they are the original AI agents.

I don't think there are any companies that care one way or the other about taking away your freedom.

Companies are revenue maximizers, period. The ones that aren't quickly get displaced by ones that are.

The simpler test is to stay away from any company that has anything to gain by taking away your freedom. THAT unfortunately is most of them.

The depressing reality in consumer tech is that anything with a CPU doesn't belong to you, doesn't work for you, and will never do more than pretend to act in your best interest.

I received training like this over 20 years ago as a brand new engineer at my first job. The training was literally about how to avoid writing emails that could create legal liability due to careless language. Emails that came out during the Ford Pinto lawsuits were used as examples. It was all carefully worded to be about not being misperceived in court.

That job was at an avionics company working on safety critical systems. They paid tons of lip service to always placing safety first -- and from what I personally witnessed, at least at that time, the concern was genuine. There was a culture of taking the responsibility seriously, at least at the engineering level I interacted with.

Even acting in good faith though, things happen. Planes crash (usually due to pilot error), and when they do everyone gets sued, and when that happens careless language represents a risk for a company, even if they did everything right.

Having moved on to consumer tech, I haven't seen similar cultures of doing the "right thing". That could be the modern world, my own cynicism, or just the differences inherent to industries where lives aren't explicitly on the line. Regardless, it's not at all hard to imagine that employees can be taught to self censor in ways that won't themselves create more liability.

Non-lawyer here. This information is surprising to me (to be clear, I believe you, I just would have guessed otherwise).

Is some degree of malicious compliance not extremely common when companies deal with the courts? From the outside it seems like the incentive would be to comply with a court order to the minimum degree required to avoid further legal consequences, but no more. Is compliance more enthusiastic that that in practice? Again, I have zero experience, but the idea of a company losing a lawsuit and then actually acting in good faith is a strange one to me.

An individual might be intimidated to act in actual good faith to avoid serious consequences, but Apple as an entity can't be tossed in jail for contempt of court, right? So it would seem that it is incentivized to push it's employees to take risks like this, with the understand that they can be replaced by employees who will if they refuse.

Would this still be clear bad faith had these chat logs not been created?

In other words, could Apple have done these exact same actions and successfully argued that the language ("external website") was in fact neutral, if not for the direct written record that established their intent to do otherwise?

Everything you just said makes sense, but the details of how the courts manage to enforce orders like this are interesting, and it seems like enforcing notions of good faith must be extremely difficult.

Thanks for writing this though, this is a window into a space I have never played in. The legal system is very mysterious to me.

I think it would be easy to argue that the term "external website" is neutral rather than scary sounding, if not for actual chat logs in evidence saying "let's use this term because it's scary sounding".

It kind of surprises me that people working in that environment haven't been better trained about what not to write. I have zero legal background, but even twenty years ago at my very first corporate job I received a training module about legal discovery and the consequences of poorly worded emails -- and that was at a company that I genuinely believe was trying to follow the law in good faith, and was simply worried about liability due to misperception of careless language.

For a team specifically working on a legal compliance project, I am with the poster above that mentioned legal teams providing oversite. If nothing else, every one of these chats should have had a lawyer logged in to provide a mental reminder to participants that the conversation really isn't private.

There is probably nothing whatsoever the judge could have done about this action by itself. The issue is the conversations around it, which established intent. The chat logs provide hard evidence that it was done in bad faith and with criminal intent.

Now that I think about it, I wonder how much of the current backlash against remote work is to avoid this exact situation. Face to face conversations don't end up in evidence. Written conversations do, and video chats are increasingly being summarized and recorded by AI.

Is it surprising? If the revenue realized by the ongoing defiance of the courts exceeds the cost of replacing the executive (including any risk premium caused by the risk of jail time in that job) then it seems rational for Apple as an entity to continue to defy the law.

Even if these executive positions carried a guarantee of a several year term in minimum or medium security prison, for the salaries involved they should be able to find someone who is reasonably competent and willing to do the job.

It's not like the corporate entity itself can be threatened with state violence, and it's owners (probably half the US!) are insulated from any real consequences. An entity like Apple really has diffused responsibility to the point that it transcends the law at this point, and it becomes perfectly rational for it to defy the courts.

> That hasn't been true for cars, appliances or any modern equipment for ages.

Personally, I don't see that as progress. I don't need touch screens and surveillance everywhere in every major purchase I make. I fail to see what we have gotten in exchange for all the increased complexity.

I've seen the assertion made that we can statistically measure how many people died due to (for example) a heat wave, but we can't say for sure which ones.

I'd imagine something similar applies here. You'd have some number of deaths specifically attributable to lose of power, plus countless other deaths caused or prevented in non-obvious ways. This might be visible at a high level as a statistical outlier in the total number of deaths during the time period of an outage.

The tree had malicious intent. You can't convince me otherwise.

Oh, you're right! I do remember doing this calculation with integers at some point. I might have been using something like a UUID as my bitfield length.

The context was timestamps -- I (playfully) figured out how many bits we'd need to count Planck times before the expected heat death of the universe, thus being truly future proof. I was expecting the answer to be a rediculous number, but in fact it was more in the "not efficient, but definitely feasible" range.

Floating point gets us there too, of course, but it has its own drawbacks and it isn't nearly as funny.

These are not mutually exclusive.

True, but we always have the opportunity to eliminate a similar need for time travel 40 years from now.

Is my experience unique in that "having someone to call" has historically been of very low value?

I'm an embedded firmware dev, so admittedly I am dealing with an entirely different list of vendors and asking for different things than the typical sysadmin or devops type.

With that said, it has certainly not been my experience that "having someone to call" actually solves my problems all that often. It's occasionally a nice to have, but normally I am reluctant to even start the process because my experience has been that it is usually a net drain on my time and energy to do so.

At this point, I am far more concerned with having access to source code so that I have a fighting chance of creating a workaround for myself, and failing that I don't want to contact my vendor so much as I want to replace them.

It certainly won't beat the market in what the market optimizes for -- namely risk adjusted return on capital. It probably won't beat the market on the implicitly coupled metric of "value delivered to customers" either.

The trick here is that "users" and "customers" have become all but totally decoupled when it comes to the modern internet. Not enough people were willing to pay, so the market has turned to other sources of revenue.

I share your skepticism about bureaucratic government agencies creating value, and doubly so when it comes to technology. At the same time, as an individual voter I am beginning to question whether "the market" is optimizing for the same things that I value.

Perhaps there is a natural conflict between maximizing utility for the majority of people vs maximizing utility for the majority of capital.

/k/ has been the U/k/raine board since that invasion started and you risk a ban for deviating from that topic.

This is a genuinely interesting assertion. Is there any evidence of this?

Well, the assumption was based on the fact that they chose base 26, and that the "26" came from the use of a 26 character alphabet. The 10 Arabic numerals are then a convenient character set to expand to 36, which is a much nicer number base than 26.

Japanese could be combined with the Hindi character set to yield base 96, which is fairly convenient. Cyrillic would be harder -- perhaps the best options there would be to drop a character to yield base 32, or perhaps 3 characters to yield base 30.

I'd argue that base 60 is probably the optimal number base for nearly any use (with base 16 or 64 as close second and third for working with binary data). Hindi's 50 characters combined with our 10 Arabic numerals could indeed be a great way to get there.

Or to flip that around, life has existed on Earth for about 25% of the lifetime of the universe.

The fact that we are part of that life introduces some nasty sampling biases, but if we find even one more planet that shows a similar ratio, the implications will be that life is ubiquitous.

There is a really good intuitive analogy hiding here for the scale of the universe:

Our galaxy is to the observable universe as a tenth of a second is to your entire lifetime.

A century is approximately three billion seconds, the second being variously defined across history as a multiple we find convenient of whatever universal natural constant we can most precisely measure -- most recently 10 billion or so of a specific type of vibration of cesium atoms.

All the other stars and planets would have the same experience, though their local orbital periods might result in different units of expression being more convenient.

Of course, as we leave our galaxy they would also be in significantly different reference frames and perhaps experience the rate differently as a result. We are assuming that, statistically, our relative velocity is not special and they see roughly the same relationship between red shift and distance that we do.

Arguably, our ability to observe in any meaningful sense is still limited to light waves occuring inside a volume not much larger than the earth itself. I mean this in more than just a semantic sense surrounding the verb "observe" -- for all practical purposes everything outside of our solar system is indistinguishable from a preprogrammed light show being projected on a sphere centered on our sun with a diameter of less than a light year. There is a decent chance that will never change. The sheer size of the universe traps us in the ultimate version of Plato's cave.

If we have events occuring at some rate in the entire observable universe, and that rate is one a human can easily visualize (e.g. "30"), then the answer to the question "how often do supernovas occur" is probably best summarized as "almost never".

Taken cynically though, is this quote not simply describing the ultimate common enemy?

It's very unlikely that I am capable of remembering every single joke that can be told in a timeframe of 10 minutes. If you were to take every such joke in a random order and put that on a loop, the experience would likely be one of perpetual novelty, even if you repeated it 1000 times.

I have to imagine that very few people would make statements like this if we lived in a universe where there was any real danger of it happening. It would be interesting to talk to humans that have lived even a few hundred subjective years, if any existed. That seems to be enough time to lead to very different perspectives on something like immortality. Given the information storage constraints of our minds, I wonder if there is even some age that makes immortality subjectively different than very long life. We don't seem to be capable of remembering even a full decade of experience. By the time you reach a few hundred years of age, would you have any memories at all of your first century? You might not have experienced a single "death" event, but the "you" that was born may have long since died.

Or to acquire the wisdom to accept it. We certainly are far too young to have a perspective to say which course of action is better -- or indeed to define what "better" means.

Indeed. They didn't say it happened an "int" time ago. They didn't even say a "long" time ago. They said a "long long" time. I'd have to pull up a copy of the C standard to be sure, but even if the units of "time" are plank times, I suspect the implications could easily be that the story occurs before the big bang.

That is unfortunate. With only two prime factors, one of which being 13, base 26 is even worse than base 10, and it doesn't even have anatomical coincidence to recommend it. Much better to use base 36 -- we have a ready made character set for it by simply adding the digits to the 26 alphabetic characters. This gives us many more integer prime factors. Not as good as base 60, but better than base 26 and finger numbers.