iiiggglll

Wow, what city is this?

> I've filed bugs

Was that using Radar? Did you try using the "Report an Issue" UI within the Maps app itself?

One of the perl guys (maybe Larry Wall?) said the same thing at a talk once about companies using perl but not wanting anyone to know it because it was a such a time saver they considered it a competitive advantage.

Welcome to the 21st century, where quality, accuracy, and precision are sacrificed at the altar of "scale".

Not that he's wrong about open-source abandonware, but that's rather an overstatement. No significant amount of his code remains in any modern browser, and when the engine that eventually became WebKit and later Blink (and which now powers the majority of end-user web client browsing today) was first announced as based off KHTML and not Mozilla tech, he wrote a self-congratulatory blog post[0] that started off with "Summary: I was right", even though it had nothing to do with him or his work. Not to mention KHTML was done using C++, something he was always against (no mention of "I was right" on that part, I see). He's done some good work here and there but he really gets carried away with his blowhard opinionating at times, and I think people should turn a more critical eye towards that sort of thing.

[0] https://www.jwz.org/blog/2003/01/more-khtml/

iOS already has the "Trust this computer?" dialog[1], but this sounds like it disables the port to the point where the dialog wouldn't even appear and no connection could get through, trusted or not.

[1] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202778

> China has effectively been waging a trade war with the US for the past 20 years. ... America just hasn’t responded—which I find baffling.

"Hasn't responded"? It was America's idea in the first place!

It started 24 years ago with the Clinton administration granting China "most favored nation" status.[0] A controversial move at the time, and one that broke a one of Clinton's campaign promises.

Lest anyone think I'm being partisan about this, it's worth noting that the previous administration (George H.W. Bush) had also been supportive of the idea of opening up trade with China, so it was not limited to any one political party. The idea of opening trade with China had been brewing for a long time, and accelerated once the end of the Cold War occurred. 1994 was when it finally came to pass, thus setting up the events we've seen play out between China and the US for the next two and a half decades. Who knows where it will go from here?

It's particularly sad to go back and read statements from past US presidents expressing optimism that there would be "long-term sustainable progress on human rights" in China as a result of expanding trade, especially given what's happening today with China's "social credit" system.[1]

[0] http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N27/china.27w.html

[1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-credit/china-to-bar...

I'm not so sure. Developers may be excited at the chance to forgo the App Store / Play Store, but will users get onboard? They've had 10 years of training to download an app from a store. Will the flow for onboarding with a PWA be a complement to that, or just create confusion?

I agree with most of what you wrote, and I do think it was the right call for them to implement this feature for iPhones with batteries having trouble, and I agree most if not all the articles about this have been poorly written and badly misinformed. However...

> for the "Apple should have been transparent" crowd, here's what it said in the release notes

I can't agree that that's sufficient. That little one liner in the release notes just isn't enough.

On macOS, they did more. The battery menu extra will actually display a warning when clicked if it detects that your battery is having trouble. It shows as an extra row at the top of the drop-down menu with a little little caution triangle icon and the string "Service Battery". When you click this, it takes you to a help article advising you to "take your computer in for service". It's not perfect, but it's better than not telling the user anything.

Apple could and should have done something similar on iOS, especially given that there's a whole section in Settings for just the battery. They could have displayed a similar alert icon with similar help text, for starters. A full-screen alert advising the user to get their battery serviced whenever this condition was detected would have been even better. Burying it as a single sentence in the release notes wasn't all that helpful or informative for customers.

> A third line of attack is likely to become important soon, perhaps as soon as next year. Former Facebook executive (yes, another dissident insider) Antonio Garcia-Martinez argued earlier this year that Facebook's ad targeting based on data collected from users is essentially unethical (and also that Facebook oversells its targeting ability).

That last parenthetical about overselling points to a fourth line of attack: fraud. There's been a lot of rumbling for years that FB (and Google for that matter) are not doing enough to combat fake clicks / views / likes and are essentially ripping off advertisers. If everyone smells blood in the water all of a sudden due to these other issues heating up, there could be a lot of pressure on these companies to provide more transparency. That could bring their revenues way down.

There's only one way to respond to this:

http://i.imgur.com/lfcUz.jpg

> I wait for the day this page exists:

> https://www.apple.com/paying_taxes/

Not quite what you mean, but there's this, just posted within the last month:

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2017/11/the-facts-about-apple...

This will only become more common once vehicles are self-driving. People will live in their vehicles and have them either drive around all night or find a place to park many hours away from their jobs (assuming there any jobs left).

The fantasy many folks seem to have about self-driving vehicles causing car ownership to disappear in favor of automated Ubers/Lyfts/whatevers on demand might come to pass for one class of people, but there will be large numbers of people for whom the opposite happens: they give up their homes (by choice or not) and live in a self-driving vehicle that is the only dwelling they own.

I refuse to believe a single number about the online ad business while things like this are going on:

http://fortune.com/2016/12/20/methbot-ad-fraud/

> Besides the big 3, I also froze reporting from Innovis.

Why Innovis? Who typically uses their reports?

> Even though Apple had not ironed out many of the basics, like how the autonomous systems would work, a team had already started working on an operating system software called CarOS. There was fierce debate about whether it should be programmed using Swift, Apple’s own programming language, or the industry standard, C++.

Wow. Few things guarantee success like starting off a project with a good old-fashioned language flamewar!

I recall looking around at the time but didn't see anything. The most recent thread was already done when it happened, and then the convention one was opened with pretty much no mention of it at all. Even now I can't find any substantial discussion of it.[1] It seemed to happen between threads and then the topic was just strangely ignored. I just can't imagine it would be so quiet if the RNC chair had resigned and the R convention was underway. At the time it felt like it came under the same bucket as the mod warning at the top of the convention thread about not "re-litigating the primaries" ... don't talk about it!

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/search.mefi?q=schultz+r...

Count me as part of the strange group that is dismayed at the quality but for some reason I can't fully explain, keeps showing up.

I've had an account since late 2000 (yes, 17 years). I still read Metafilter pretty much every day, but I have gotten to where I will not comment, because I recognize that I do not think the "right" way. I've made perhaps two comments in the last 6 years. I frequently will type up a comment but then erase it without clicking save, because I know my thoughts would not be welcome.

For example, when the thread[1] about the Democratic National Convention was underway last summer, I noticed the thread was up for 48 hours, had over 3000 comments, and barely any mention of the resignation of the DNC chair (Debbie Wasserman Schultz), which had occurred just a few days prior. Go ahead and look through that that thread now (it's long since closed). There are a grand total of four mentions of Schultz's name. That's it, out of more than 3000 total comments. That's really strange, isn't it? The chair of one of the two major US party resigning a few days before their presidential convention is highly unusual and really should garner a bit more conversation, one would think. I'm sure if the chair of the RNC had resigned a few days before the Republican convention, there would have been more than just four comments about it. I was about to point this out, but then I realized that if they wanted to talk about it, they already would have. No one wanted to hear it. The groupthink is just that strong. Shut up and toe the party line (in every sense).

I also see other folks commenting here saying Metafilter's moderation is good and that poor comments are removed, but then I frequently see things like this comment, which is the first response to a post[2] about the recently-leaked climate change report:

> thank god i'll be dead by then. enjoy your eternal life on a cinder, peter thiel

That was allowed to remain (and has multiple "favorites"), because it's apparently okay if the Earth is ruined and everyone dies, as long as some techbro Metafilter doesn't like gets what's coming to him. That's what passes for "quality" on Metafilter these days, along with near-daily posts about how horrible white people are.[3]

And yet I can't look away. I'm still there reading it every day. Don't ask me why.

[1] http://www.metafilter.com/161201/Chase-the-Clouds-Away

[2] http://www.metafilter.com/168710/Very-High-Confidence

[3] http://www.metafilter.com/168715/White-Americans-are-probabl...

Funny. But, here's a real answer:

Too many people do not like Hillary, and they stayed home instead of voting for her. That's the bottom line. Right or wrong, fair or unfair, she is not well liked enough to get elected.

The thing is, that was never a secret. It was obvious even before she got her ass kicked in the 2008 primaries. It was even more obvious afterwards.

So why did she run last year? For her own selfish reasons, that's why. She should have known she would lose. If she actually cared about things as much as she claims to, she would have stepped aside and let someone else, run instead. Then we wouldn't be where we are today. But because she couldn't put aside her own wants and do what was best for the nation, here we are.

(Even her campaign slogan spelled it out: "I'm with her". Clearly, it was all about her, and not about the country.)

That cuts both ways. Signing it would have made a lot of people feel good without actually doing anything.

All the accords and agreements in the world will do nothing to help get us out of this mess. There is only one thing that will save us: technology. Clean energy sources, clean storage, more efficient use, etc. And it has to have a lower price across the board than what we already have, in order to ensure adoption. It also has to work just as well or better than what we already have, or no one will use it.

Nothing else will help, because no matter what pieces of paper are signed, people will not give up their lifestyles and they will not pay more for what they perceive as the same thing. They will continue to drive cars, fly, eat meat, and so on. And those around the world who are not already living that kind of lifestyle are working as hard as they possibly can to get there. The only thing that will be palatable is to give people things that they perceive as being just as good (or better), with the same or lower price tag. Nothing else will work.

Need an example? Just look at CFCs. Did the world stop using them because everyone cared about ozone? That's what everyone said at the time, but in reality the change only happened because there was an alternative that didn't come with a higher price tag and didn't have any significant disadvantages. We got lucky. If the alternative had cost even a tiny fraction of a penny more per unit, or not worked every bit as well as CFCs, industries across the world would have spent untold sums of money lobbying against it, calling ozone depletion a myth, and so on, just like we are seeing today with climate change.

If you truly care about climate change, you'll stop worrying about political agreements and start working on clean technology. Nothing else will work.

> Waymo has around 200, we expect to pass them by the end of the year.

Do you have any idea how ridiculous you sound? Waymo is a serious engineering effort with a lot of talented people working to do it right. There's a lot more to it than just how much data you throw at your NN.[0] Not to mention other companies comply with the law and report all their accidents.[1] Last year, you canceled your product[2] rather than answer a very short and simple safety questionnaire[3]. (Seriously, I've seen SaaS security compliance questionnaires with five times as many questions on them; that letter from the NHTSA was nothing!)

If you're still driving your vehicles around the streets of the SF Bay Area without any permits you are putting a lot of people in danger, including me. Pardon me if I think you're not only full of it, but irresponsible as well.

[0] http://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1838:_Machine_Lear...

[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testi...

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13453344/comma-ai-self-d...

[3] https://www.scribd.com/document/329218929/2016-10-27-Special...

And it was all done in the name of improving "human rights":

http://tech.mit.edu/V114/N27/china.27w.html

Every human has a right ... to be poisoned on the job!

> focussed on what customers and developers want

I would hardly agree with the modern web being focused on what "customers" want. How many web pages today hijack scrolling, fill the screen with ads that lie on top of the content and don't scroll with the page, and so on? How much bloat is there? How many MB of unnecessary JS frameworks must be downloaded, often on a metered data plan, to support all of that? The web is a horrible mess these days. It may be a rip-roarin' good time for (some) developers, but it's absolutely awful for users.

It's like everything in Dan Ligon's satirical video from 10 years ago came true:

http://cargocollective.com/danligon/filter/current-tv/Ha-Ha-...

Note: I like TheDeck and what they were trying to do, not to mention I read and support sites like Metafilter and Daring Fireball, but…

Damn, that is a hilarious parody.

> Uber is that bad? That's terrible. They shouldn't be off the test track yet.

No kidding! Yet somehow I'm not surprised, as it has always been pretty obvious that these jackasses didn't know what they were doing. This just adds to the many reasons why I am fully 100% behind getting them and other amateur-hour efforts (like geohot's comma.ai) off the road right now, and keeping them off until they can prove they are safe enough to be out on the public streets mixed with human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. I live and work in San Francisco and walk pretty much everywhere I go. I don't need to be watching out for some shitty "self driving" car that has to have a person take over every 0.8 miles whenever I'm trying to cross the street. Fuck that. If they keep this up, someone is going to get seriously hurt or killed.

Looks like it's this same survey[1], which was already reported a while ago in the NYTimes[2], and when you actually look at it, contains this phrase, which adds a little more perspective:

> 39% of responding institutions reported a decline in international applications, 35% reported an increase, and 26% reported no change in applicant numbers.

Note that it also says the "final" report will be released March 30, so expect to see this story reported again after that.

[1] http://www.aacrao.org/docs/default-source/TrendTopic/Immigra...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/16/us/international-students...

Wow, people who engage in hashtag activism don't pay attention to facts? Stop the presses!

As the blog post[1] criticizing Paltrow (which was written by a gynecologist and linked from the WaPo article) says, it's not something that should be done continuously, all day long:

> Overenthusiastic Kegel exercises or incorrectly done Kegel exercises are a cause of pelvic pain and pain with sex in my practice. Imagine how your biceps muscle (and then your shoulders and then your back) might feel if you walked around all day flexed holding a barbell? Right, now imagine your pelvic floor muscles doing this.

[1] https://drjengunter.wordpress.com/2017/01/17/dear-gwyneth-pa...

Going by some of the recent antics of companies like comma.ai and Uber, it sounds self-driving cars mostly work via hype & publicity stunts. Any actual technology that is involved is purely coincidental.

Commutes will be solved when everyone is replaced by automation and we no longer have jobs to get to.