ksk

Such as?

Google is well on its way in its mission of installing toll booths on the internet, and shredding any notion of privacy we had on the internet. Apple's busy robbing 30% of sales of small businesses via its App Store, and robbing you via the extended warranty program while choking the repair industry. Microsoft is continuing to further lock you into their eco-system and keeping you running on their subscription treadmill.

Which company ISN'T performing a greedy money grab? Certainly not Google, or Apple or Microsoft.

Apple uses dark patterns and doesn't provide a "stop bothering me" option. I used to get nagged by Apple so I turned on the auto updates just to not have these popups. I guess it worked..

https://imgur.com/7ErVNiw

I posted direct quotes from Greenpeace. You're linking to ZDNet, and a random study that has no published data as far as I can tell. Note that I am not easily swayed by studies - I work in Vaccine R&D and I read tons of research papers, and many of them are junk. A study doesn't mean something is true. I'd trust Greenpeace knowing about the environment more than ZDNet.

>The fact is repairability simply isn’t a significant factor in environmental impact overall.

This is not a fact. Every single environmental group on this planet agrees that repair is significant component in reducing environmental impact. By definition it means fewer devices need to be re-purchased, fewer devices end up in landfills, more local repair jobs, more support-economy jobs, etc. I don't think I will be able to convince you otherwise. I will let you have the last word. Have a nice day :)

>iPhones have the longest useful lifetimes of any smartphones anyway though, so they’re still clearly the best choice overall.

Not exactly, because other phones can be repaired which extends their life.

Apple's doesn't do board repair themselves, and blocks others from doing it as well. This means more components end up in land fills. Apple's own extended warranty program makes billions of dollars. And the repair industry itself is quite large - millions maybe hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Apple products clearly fail and need repair at some point or another.

I hope you'll join everyone else in demanding Apple stop opposing right to repair legislation.

>And if Facebook tracking is so great for the users, then clearly every user will opt in.

IME for most users the default action for any popup falls into two categories - (a) Quickly close it without reading, (b) Accept it blindly without reading. The ratio changes, but I think its about even.

Oh are we playing a link game now?

https://www.fastcompany.com/40561811/greenpeace-to-apple-for...

Well, nerds get mad when you take away controls that existed for.. ever. Is your individuality perfectly expressed through the system preferences that Apple thinks you should have or through exercising your UNIX nerd cred by opening the hatch and messing with the guts? :)

Is your argument that we shouldn't care, or is your argument that it is not user hostile? Just curious.

I'm not personally affected, and my Apple outrage cup is already filled up with their sustained anti-repair pro-landfill stance.

That is completely absurd. I too can "touch" tens of thousands of packages a day. That doesn't mean I can perform compliance on tens of thousands of customer complaints per day. You are simply asserting it is easy without providing actual evidence of how they would achieve this. Sorry, I don't see anything remotely logical in your comment that I can respond to.

>All it has to do is conduct an investigation to confirm the complaint, which is as easy as ordering the item in question and confirming it contains the offer reported by a single customer.

The number of humans available to perform daily investigations versus the total number of products sold makes this most decidedly not "easy".

The easiest thing to do here would be to simply return the item because the seller crossed your personal ethical line, and state that as the reason. A large number of returns on an item will definitely get the sellers and Amazon's attention.

>[..] But this lawsuit seeks to redesign Search in ways that would deprive Americans of helpful information and hurt businesses’ ability to connect directly with customers. [..]

This is a bit funny given that Google's entire MO is to insert themselves between the business and customer so they can tax every transaction. You searched for "Big Bob's BBQ"? Surely that must mean that Google should get a cut out of the order!

Whatever happened to simply organizing the worlds information?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/10/opinion/googl...

>I always wondered what's stopping a rival to Facebook that offers users a share of the money they are generating.

They sort of do. The money is converted into the utility of the product to each user. Technically, they could lower the utility of Facebook and pay you the rest.

I think I understand where you're coming from, but your responses are very specific. I don't think this is the common case. I believe, the common case is that most engineering jobs are dull and boring and are not breaking new ground. Tirelessly testing software, or polishing UI or to take my workplace (vaccine r&d) performing the same set of tests/experiments/assays/etc over and over again. I'd go far as to say that you have to be self-motivated to be successful in most jobs. There is a limit to which management can coddle you.

>I think when you hear 2hrs/3hrs/etc per day, often it is the fault of the organization for:

> - Not having good business cases

> - Thinking Engineers don't care about reasons for doing things

> - Not providing distraction free blocks

> - Not sufficiently sharing rewards with the company

In your list, it seems its the company's that's often at fault. Can you explain that a bit more?

As a manager, I expect my direct reports to do the work I assign them. As a good-faith effort I will do my best to assign work that is relevant/interesting/etc. But I accept that in the real world, there is a lot of work that is often boring, repetitive (some of that is going away thanks to automation). Especially in the scientific domain, performing the same experiment over and over isolating for some factor or the other, and there is sometimes very little intellectual stimulation. I think it would be the same in engineering fields as well.

>Different ARM chips aren't "somewhat compatible" anymore than Intel/AMD x86 chips. It's a standard instruction set.

Can you create a single build for all ARM chips for the same OS? If not, its all the same. At work we're using binaries built for XP that work without modification on W10. No doubt, its a testament to the massive backwards compat. effort by MS, but also from Intel. This is a massive, massive benefit to actual customers who just want to keep running software that they purchased/developed/commissioned on the replacement hardware when their current hardware fails. ARM/M1 brings a lot of benefits too, but as always, each person has to decide what they're willing to give up.

>The M1 has been out for a month and we already have hundreds/thousands of natively compiled binaries—and Windows and Linux are up and running.

Assuming the vendor is still in business, you have to rely on the good faith of the vendor to gift you the new version for free.

The OP raises very valid points, I don't know what is 'utter nonsense' about it. It's only tech, not a tribal war :)

I think there is a larger portion of regular folks who dislike the nutty behavior on both sides (I'm one of them) and just want to move on to more important things than the current fake-outrage news cycles over irrelevant drama/gossip.

We might be screwed in the short-term, and if people out of choice/ignorance no longer care about certain democratic ideals, then it is impossible to force it upon them. Having said that, I trust people more than I trust systems. So it might take time, but I believe we're going to get past this eventually.

Its fine to keep trying, its just that they keep forcing it down your throat by either tying everything to search, or not standing behind a firm commitment of support. As much as I dislike Google, if Google created a non-advertising, non-surveillance paid product that was quality, I'd definitely consider it. Heck I still buy Apple products when they're good, even if I don't like their anti-repair stance.

Anywho, as it stands now, Google seem to be finding new ways to set up toll-booths on the internet via search lock-in. That's their new mantra. Whatever happened to organizing the world's information? Even their "About 2,800,000 results" is total BS. I can't go past page 20 on almost all queries.

I think Facebook and Amazon are far easier to avoid. With Google their tentacles are spread so far across that its impossible to avoid them completely. It is disheartening to see talented engineers excited about working for advertising companies like Google or Facebook. Maybe nerd ethics have shifted over time, I don't know. I've migrated from gmail to a personal domain + host, and to FF for browsing, but that's about it. Out of principle I don't use an ad-blocker, I simply avoid going to sites that feature obnoxious Ads/UX.

So you keep posting the same old tired link claiming its "evidence". I don't think you understand what that document actually says.

I don't rebut evidence, I accept it, if courts accept it when used as evidence in a case. I don't know what rebutting evidence means, or what that would accomplish. After four years of nonsense investigations there were no indictments on this so called "collusion". This fact alone makes anyone involved in making those allegations look completely nutty.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment

No indictment = no charges = no case = no conviction = innocent until proven guilty. Regardless of this report, if Dems had solid evidence to bring criminal charges, I'd bet my life savings that they'd have brought cases by now, and we'd know about it.

>You are completely ignoring the high level of coordination that has been proven, between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

No high level of co-ordination to steal the election was "proven". I don't know what kind of "news" you read.

https://taibbi.substack.com/p/russiagate-is-wmd-times-a-mill...

>It's impossible to know what the effect was, but we know for sure they tried, which is illegal.

If you don't know what the effect was, what is your point again?

>It only "goes both ways" when you are blatantly lying and discounting reality.

Childish name-calling? Nice..

>Many of the states in question are run by Republicans. Are you saying that Republicans conspired to steal the election from Trump?

Actually, I'm claiming both sides are in their own bubble clutching their little (R) and (D) flags and waving them frantically.

>We don't know if Russia made Trump win, we only know that they helped him.

That's a bit like saying we know there is election fraud in 2020 because we found 2 voting irregularities. Minor voting irregularities happen in every election and are also facts.

Sorry, it goes both ways. Both sides need to provide evidence and prove it in court before making such statements. If you don't know, then the right thing to do is to say nothing unless it has been proven.

>Net neutrality has little to do with censorship, and more to do with extortion.

"From the consumers’ point of view, net neutrality is a guarantee that all connections are treated equally and ISPs won’t censor the internet."

https://nordvpn.com/blog/net-neutrality-pros-and-cons/

" Some notable incidents otherwise have included Bell Canada's throttling of certain protocols and Telus's censorship of a specific website critical of the company."

" Deep packet inspection helped make real-time discrimination between different kinds of data possible,[49] and is often used for Internet censorship."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

>While it is true that extortionary tactics can be used to effectively censor particular sentiments, that is not what is being referred to in discussions surrounding net neutrality.

Maybe it wasn't being discussed around you. I certainly remember discussions on HN about comcast blocking torrents or whatnot and 'censoring' the internet. But I guess you have a different definition of censorship, so we never did achieve common ground on that.

I hear net-neutrality is a common position around here. If you agree prima facia that Comcast should not be allowed to block simply or censor YouTube (they're a private company, its their own equipment, etc, etc), then why doesn't the same argument apply to Google?

>Censorship is going around to all the platforms and forcing them to remove content which has already been or is on the way to being displayed to the public.

That is your own personal definition. What happened to meeting people where they are?

>The democrats collected evidence, went to court, and lost. Russiagate, however misfounded, was legal. To imply that there were no other avenues for them to go down so they turned to voter fraud is laughable.

You forgot a few steps. First, they claimed there was fraud (w/o evidence). Then they 'leaked' the Steele dossier and other nonsense documents. Then, there was 24/7 wall to wall coverage for months and months of it (including insane stuff like the pee tape) to manufacture consent. High profile Democrats happily went on TV expressing fake concern and repeated unproven allegations. They happily were the 'inside source' to NYTimes, rollingstone, nymag, etc, etc for more ridiculous stories. Then, they wasted tax payer money knowing full well that it was bogus.

Respectfully, I would invite you to do the same as you ask others. Take a step back, and consider (even if you aren't convinced) whether you've been had by the Dems on the most ridiculous story (if not on all of them) about Trump.

GOP doesn't want Trumps cult to turn on them, Democrats don't want the cult on the left to turn on them either ;)

It's a bit funny both sides proclaim that only the other side is in a bubble.

Are you nice because it is required to be nice? "Requirement" is a loaded term, but I would hope Google employees show some decency and hold up their liberal values and bolster free expression that they claim to value so much.

Well, we teach kids how to use knives safely, we don't ban them.

Is Google also going to ban all the people who pushed the baseless Russia-made-trump-win nonsense? What a giant waste of time and money that was.

Do it equally for everyone, or don't do it at all.