bouncing

I would argue that point, at least somewhat. Even among Japanese cars, you can see in reliability reports the difference between cars where the final assembly is in the US or Mexico vs final assembly in Japan. For example the Mazdas truly made in Japan are great, while the ones made in Mexico are, well, good.

The new Lincoln Nautilus, for that matter, is made in China.

The stance of the US is that ByteDance has to sell off what is already a separate product (TikTok).

Google, Facebook etc don't have a "Chinese market" product at all, so there's nothing to sell off. If they did have a Chinese market product, worth many tens of billions of dollars, they would very likely sell it rather than spike it.

> And it's even more implausible to think China would allow this as a result of a US law aimed at limiting China's power.

Well that’s the crux, isn’t it.

If TikTok is just a business, like ByteDance insists, any business would rather get something than nothing. So ByteDance would sell.

If TikTok isn’t merely a business but rather an organ of soft power, and China blocks a sale, then the suspicions of the U.S. intelligence community are confirmed.

"Never discuss politics or religion in polite company."

Sometimes, grandpa's advice was good advice.

See also Bulma; you can totally get by without JS for most projects, though again, you'll miss out on the more interactive things.

Again, iCloud is super-opaque, so it's hard to know exactly what's going on.

As far as I can tell, when you add a file to an iCloud folder, it indexes it locally, uploads it, and the index sticks around even after the file is evicted from local storage.

So for example, right now I searched for an address I haven't used in 10+ years. On my computer, Spotlight immediately found a PDF file that wasn't stored locally. However, I added that file from my computer, so it's in the index (presumably). If I do the same search from my phone, nothing is found, though searching the filename itself still works.

It would be nice if the index data itself were transmitted between devices, but, you take what you can get and it's pretty impressive as it is.

I switched from Google Drive to iCloud in 2021. I haven’t looked back, but also, my use is neither heavy nor demanding. I just keep my documents in iCloud and otherwise use git for my heavy lifting professionally.

iCloud is opaque. It tells you if some file is syncing, or if it’s only in the cloud, but that’s really about it. There’s almost no level of control. If you want a revision history, that’s what Time Machine is for. Collaborate editing, API that apps to integrate into with, previewing without downloading, etc? Those are all not really options with iCloud.

But so far, it hasn’t lost any of my data and it is probably the most approachable option with an end-to-end encryption option (which I enable). Searching works well and even finds text in images and documents.

If you just need the basics and you’re all-in on Apple products, iCloud is great.

That's totally a good point and I don't mean to say you haven't got me on that. The one thing I might point out, though, is that environmentalism wasn't a cultural shift, it was mostly just a response to a practical problem.

You can certainly see other collective action problems that have gotten a government response. The movement to build nuclear weapons was a collective action, but it wasn't really a change in culture.

Well, the civil rights movements is about as individual as it gets. In the past, collectively, groups had responsibilities. Women had a duty to society to raise children and blacks had a duty to not rock the boat. The civil rights movement bucked the collective authority and emphasizes the individual right to autonomy and dignity.

You probably have a point about labor unions. Though, it's worth pointing out, that their triumph was more weak the more west you were. The labor movement in China and Russia produced communism; the labor movement in the United States produced, well, the ability to form in general.

Anti-communist movements in Poland I would also be inclined to chalk up to individualism. They were individuals fighting authority.

Hanson seems to suggest that the cultural drift is aimless or unguided. I'd argue the opposite. There are exceptions to this, especially very recently, but almost all cultural shifts in the west of the past 150 years can be traced to one single thing: individualism.

You can trace individualism to various started places, like the Protestant Reformation's assertion that individuals have a direct connection to the divine. But certainly by the time John Stuart Mill took up the cause, it already had a great deal of momentum and it was adopted as an ethos.

Since Mill, almost every cultural shift has been reconciling the baggage of the past with individualism. The civil rights movement, women's suffrage, the decline of organized religion and promotion of "individual spirituality" all have the through-line of individualism. Name for me a single twentieth century cultural shift, in the "western world," that wasn't about the individual's triumph over the collective.

There are some more recent exceptions from this century though, where the pendulum might be swinging away from the individual and toward the collective. Emphasizing group identity over individual identity comes to mind as an example.

Android has handled this fine since approximately forever. It focuses the element, but doesn't necessarily bring up the keyboard until you tap it.

That's more or less how HTML has always been. Before Chrome, it was IE just adding stuff. Before IE, it was Netscape just adding stuff. JavaScript itself is just a browser adding stuff.

Like it or not, W3C standards have always been reactive to what browsers are already doing.

And what's really remarkable about this list is that quite a few are supported on Safari on Mac, just not on iOS. Like autofocus. It's just a simple attribute you can put on an <input> tag that autofocuses that element when the page loads. It's on Mac Safari. It's on Android browsers. It's just not on any iOS browser because, you have to assume, someone at Apple held it back for not very good reasons.

I find that often, having a tool that enhances something you never did doesn’t make you start doing that thing.

But there are exceptions. I never had an address book or calendar until I had a Palm Pilot. It might have just been that I was becoming an adult at the time, but part of it was probably a barrier to use factor. The Palm was a small thing I could carry to class, keep near my phone, bring to my internship job, etc. It and the need for organizing did conspire to make it my first real organizer and my first time having that information organized at all.

There are debates and groups on other networks.

But there aren’t schisms over alt text or content warnings for food on Threads.

I would rephrase it: mastodon is full of cliques. The cliques form around moderation, politics, whether they federate with Threads.net, what content warnings are used, and even whether alt text is “required” for images.

Then some instances defederate otherwise innocent instances that don’t have sufficient agreement on all those points, regardless of actual content.

It is kind of tiring and honestly hard to recommend.

It’s unlikely you’ll lose it all, but suppose you write a clever app — maybe a cvs editor.

Suppose you find out your cvs editor infringes on a patent and you’re liable. Suppose some business suffers data loss and sues. These things do happen in Europe too.

Also, it’s just a matter of professionalism. A sole proprietor isn’t very professional and many medium-size businesses won’t do business with sole proprietorships.

I went down the deep dive of “falsehoods programmers believe about names” [1] and on my most recent project, made the name field a completely open ended text field; let the users type what they want.

It ended up being a quick mistake, especially marketing a product intended only for western audiences anyway. Any integration you do with third party software expects first and last names. So do email templates and form fields. So do actual users when they upload or download cvs files.

Same story, I’m sure, with addresses. There are benefits with the flexibility of a long open-ended text field, but with that flexibility, a ton of other things will be a pain in the ass.

[1] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

So your liability is limited. That’s like asking why you need a seatbelt.

You can get the simple company type (disregarded entity) and all the advantages of limited liability with an LLC.

There are a lot of reasons not to form a sole proprietorship. You have personal liability, for one.

I had my first LLC in grade school over a summer. I didn’t make a ton of money, but I did earn enough for my first real computer, which launched my interest in programming.

When my wife started her current business as a consultant, she was living off her savings from teaching high school. If you think every entrepreneur has €25k of capital, you need to reevaluate what your country thinks of entrepreneurship.

Your individual identity is tied to the EIN, LLC, and bank account. I doubt it’s that useful for tax evasion.

Each little step of friction discourages some entrepreneurs and adds barriers to entry for incumbents to prevent competition.

And just in general, not doing something very often is not a valid reason for making it needlessly expensive and time consuming.

Not to brag, but there are so few things to actually feel some civic pride for in America, and business registration is one of them, so I guess we have that.

I can get an IRS EIN (tax ID), register an LLC, obtain a sales tax license (only required for selling stuff), and open a business checking account in about 2 hours in Colorado. Someone who knows what they’re doing and doesn’t spend time researching banking options could probably get it all done in 30 minutes.

Alternatively, a legal services company will do it all for you for about $500. If you have partners and want multiple shareholders, the price jumps to about $1000, but you can also do that on your own.

And here I thought it was just a Thievery Corporation album.

Would a lot of those Delta customers be loungers though? I seldom buy food at an airport because I can just drink and eat for free in the lounge.

Maybe it depends on how it’s measured, but I’m not sure about the largest employer claim. I found this list: https://www.careeronestop.org/Toolkit/Jobs/find-largest-empl...

Is your count perhaps including all the businesses in the airport?

I’d wager the C Suite at Apple, at most, approved PWA support but it was an engineer-boosted project. In contrast the DMA compliance stuff is definitely driven exclusively by the legal and strategic teams.

The legal team isn’t concerned with gutting PWA feature and PWAs aren’t strategic for the company.

You’re conflating two separate issues.

One is App Store distribution. The per install license thing is bullshit but it might comply with the law. Keep in mind the DMA was written to privilege companies like Spotify, not to give you a property right to install whatever you want on your own device.

The other issue, which deals with a different DMA rule, is that Apple can’t privilege WebKit over other rendering engines. That means PWAs have to be able to run in any rendering engine installed.

To make that work, they’d have to build out APIs to allow third party rendering engines to do all that WebKit does to render PWAs. Or they could disable PWAs altogether and then nothing is privileged.

Seems like a case study in unintended consequences. If the EU has consulted with anyone who understands technology, this could have been explained beforehand. Or maybe it was. Either way, the WebKit issue might be lazy compliance but it doesn’t strike me as malicious.

Saying that some channels are not censored thus no censorship happens is obviously wrong.

> Cops still work aggressively to break up major drug gangs and arrest people committing drug-related crimes like theft. They also disrupt open-air drug markets like the ones that have emerged in some U.S. cities.

I’m an American living in Portugal. This paragraph does not ring true. You really (I’m being serious here) walk more than a block or two in a touristy area without being accosted by someone selling drugs. They even do it when I have my 3 year old daughter’s hand in mine.