Valkhyr

I can definitely see that argument, but I feel the issue is that Ive lacked a product-focussed and customer-focussed CEO to reign in his "wilder" impulses (the Edition watches are another example of that).

Jobs may have managed Ive's drive in a way that would not have seemed bean-countery to him but customer-focussed.

In other words, Ive was only a liability in so far as he had no actual peers at the company to reign him in. And it's debatable that that's not really his fault.

[...] struggled with a shift in the company’s focus from making devices to developing services.

Boy can I ever empathize with that.

This shift is the worst thing that ever happened to Apple. Personally, it was maybe the biggest reason I got disillusioned working for them and quit (I should note I was only a Retail employee, nothing big).

Pretty easy to define. Long-term = chronic illness.

Not that easy. If I'm unable to exercise for a year due to COVID complications, that is a major life changing event and has long-term impact. Does it have permanent impact on my health? Maybe, maybe not, but certainly enough that I want people to take this shit seriously.

You also have a simple way to avoid STDs, is to never have sex in your life ever again.

Fortunately I don't have to, because we have condoms. Do you see where I'm going with this?

We can split hairs about what constitutes "long-term" and what doesn't, but if I can't smell anything for a year - not knowing for sure if I ever again will be able to - I'd consider that pretty devastating.

The point is that there are basic steps (vaccination being one, but not the only) that too many people still refuse to follow that can spare many people from having to wonder if they will ever be able to smell again (or worse).

I'm not sure driving is a great analogy to taking/not taking a vaccine or refusing to follow COVID restrictions, but if we do, we also need to consider this:

When driving, you can exercise caution and attempt to minimize the risk of an accident. I'm not from the US, but where I'm from you're also legally obligated to do so - if I drive and hit somebody, and it turns out I did so because I was going too fast or not paying proper attention to my surroundings, I will be held responsible for their injuries and damages.

Further, there are laws stipulating what safety requirements newly sold cars have to meet: again, this may vary by country/state etc, but fairly common requirements are having an air bag and seat belts (which you are legally obligated to wear where I'm from, and you will be fined if you do not).

I would say that the rules governing driving can be considered analogous to those governing social distancing, masking etc. And the safety guidelines for car manufacturers can correspond to vaccine mandates.

Of course you are free to refuse to follow driving rules, but the only legal way to do so is to refuse to drive a car entirely. Just as you can be responsible and stay at home and avoid contact with anybody as much as possible if you refuse to be vaccinated.

And Im in favor of banning video games, social media and pornography.

Those are quite bad analogies you have there.

Playing video games, reading/posting to social media (assuming you're not posting content inciting violence etc) and watching pornography (or producing pornography, assuming consent of all involved) are not actions that have any significant potential to cause harm to others. I don't mind if somebody spends their entire day jerking off with their left hand while playing video games with their right, all the while posting to Twitter via Siri. I wouldn't personally want to be that person(or follow them on Twitter, for that matter), but it's their life and they're not hurting anybody.

Socializing without taking proper COVID precautions however puts other people at immediate risk. Getting vaccinated is one of the precautions we can take to avoid that, and it has been shown to be tremendously effective. It is also very quick, and very low risk for healthy adults. So it is our social responsibility to get vaccinated.

FWIW, I'm OK with people choosing to not get vaccinated for whatever batshit reason they may cite. Their body, their choice, right? But my body is not their choice. So if they choose to commit to endangering myself and other responsible people, and potentially contribute to overloading the health system we rely on, then I also expect them to accept the necessary consequences: minimizing social contact, getting COVID tests whenever they want to enter any establishment, potentially having to look for a new job that can be done 100% from home, and waiving their right to be treated for any COVID infection they may contract while unprotected.

The vaccine does not make you fully immune, and the vaccine does not necessarily prevent you carrying and transmitting the virus. It just makes it less likely to happen (and you're certainly much less likely to become a coughing superspreader).

I don't know about where you live, but many places in the world have not yet reached levels of vaccination that would make make masking and social distancing redundant.

After almost 2 years working from home, I do miss the office.

However, crucially, I do not miss my commute. So unless I could afford to live within easy biking/walking distance of the office, I don't see myself going back.

Did I say he should have objected, or to get the recruiter reinstated? I find it inappropriate to respond with a smilie when you hear somebody was just fired. Something more neutral like "I appreciate the issue has been handled" would have sat better with me (disregarding the larger context of how f*cked up the entire agreement was, of course).

Sure, but at the very best it means he did not object to somebody getting fired over it.

Legality of wage fixing aside for the moment, I don't think this should have been a fireable offense at all (reprimanding the recruiter to ensure it does not happen again would have been all that's needed to satisfy their little gentlemen's agreement).

I don't know if this statement is true or not. But let's assume it is: what does it matter to the Swiss people enjoying a good life?

If you want to work hard and become rich, that's your spot.

Maybe, maybe not. I'd argue there are far more who tried and failed than who succeeded, but I don't know if that ratio of success is better or worse than in other countries today (yes, today - not when the US economy was booming relative to other countries, or when immigration was easy, or in the early days of Silicon Valley, or back during the Gold Rush(es) etc).

In any case, though, I would argue this argument applies to a narrow slice of the population, namely those whose main goal is to get rich. Not everybody wants to "work hard and become rich". Not everybody wants life to be a competition to get ahead. Plenty of people are not deeply invested in a career and simply want to work 40h/week for a decent salary and still be able to afford a decent life.

Others feel a calling to a profession that will generally not make you rich, but is still valuable to society. Case in point: teachers. Extremely valuable to society and extremely badly compensated in the US. If I wanted to be a teacher, I'd much rather be in most European countries than in the US.

Being told a person got fired because of you.

Your response: ":)"

Man, Steve Jobs sure had a lot of admirable qualities, but sometimes he was just a fcking asshole.

Fair enough.

I tried it out under the assumption that it was an attempt at a better mainstream search engine, but I guess I should have paid deeper attention to the name :-)

Congratulations for restating my point in different words.

However, many people who are into Apple tend to ascribe some kind of benevolent or even altruistic motives to the company and its actions.

As a quick test, I searched for the name of one of my favorite game series: "Baldur's Gate" (on its own, no qualifiers, properly spelled - I would usually spell it "baldurs gate" on Google, but I decided to give this one the best chance). I search for info around video games a lot, so that's quite representative of a good chunk of my web searches, and I pretty much know the top sites Google would give me for that query (on its own, without any further qualifiers).

The results were all either barely relevant, outdated (sites that covered the game back in the 90s/2000s before it was re-released), at best tangentially relevant or complete garbage noise. Some of the most highly relevant pages (such as the Steam store listing, the fandom wiki, the publisher/developer's forums for the re-releases, the Baldur's Gate 3 website and the subreddit) were not included at all. Those are all fairly text heavy by any reasonable standard, so I assume they were "punished" because they use JS? Would make sense that nearly all of them are way out of date.

Then I searched specifically for "Baldur's Gate Wiki" but still out of luck - some results, but nothing vaguely Wiki-like.

Finally I searched for "Baldur's Gate Fandom Wiki". This is basically "search engine easy mode", by giving essentially the name of of the site I am looking for. I got ZERO results. At this point I gave up and decided that this thing is useless.

Look, I'm all for unearthing good long-form content (in fact I would say that much of the content around this specific game would qualify), and I do get as annoyed at modern SPAs as the next grumpy neckbeard.

I think considering both of those in a search engine is not a bad idea in and of itself. But I have to wonder what's the point of a search engine that weights some arbitrary aspect of web design higher than the relevancy of the subject matter (to the point of not returning any results at all)? In fact, considering that generally speaking more recent websites tend to include more scripting, you are intentionally skewing the results towards (very) old content, which is probably doing the user a disservice.

Frankly, anybody who thinks that Apple is out for anybody but themselves is living in a dream.

Despicable.

I'm extremely glad I don't work 90h/week, nor have I ever had to (my contract says 40h/week and that's usually how much I work - if I do overtime (rare) I usually get to adjust for that on a different day).

However, I'm not very invested in my work, and I genuinely wish I could work in a team with such esprit de corps and shared sense of purpose as the original Mac team.

I wonder if the two can only ever be had as a package deal.

I.e. if you are so invested in your work (probably a good thing, all else being equal), does it inevitably end up expanding beyond 40h/week (probably a bad thing, all else being equal)?

How did such an empty, ill-researched, ill-backed article even make it onto Hacker News?

"Drivel" is putting it charitably.

I don't use themes or a very heavily themed distro, so maybe I haven't seen egregious (mis)uses of theming.

That said, I absolutely agree when (if) it comes to theming actually breaking functionality (and the original developer having increased support burden because of it).

But asking distros not to style icons feels a step too far, in particular app icons. I appreciate when a distro tries to achieve visual consistency.

How about designing devices and services such that they are open and cross-compatible and the user is ultimately in control?

Yeah, I had heard of that.

Personally, I don't really like the idea of depending on re-signing every 7 days to prevent apps from breaking. In practice it would be fine nearly 100% of the time, it's just not something I like from a point of view of principles. It feels like an immense contortion to make just to install a binary on a device I own :-(

Not true, unless by "having the benefit of hindsight" you mean "having watched Apple's actions for the last few years".

Yes, they do a lot for privacy. But when it comes to their bottom line, they also have a record of compromising on privacy (and consumer rights in general) to preserve business with less than freedom-loving countries such as China, the UAE, Russia.

It is sometimes difficult to criticize them for this because the financial loss to them would be huge if, say, China kicked them out of their market (and utterly devastating if they kicked them out of manufacturing in China), and because people like to make the argument that iOS is (probably) "still the the bets option for privacy in China" - but it doesn't change the fact that in Apple's hierarchy of priorities privacy ranks lower than making money.

To give a concrete example: if Apple allowed sideloading of apps as Android does, Apple would no longer be in the position to remove VPN apps on behest of China - but at the cost of opening up app distribution outside their own store, which means no free rent-seeking income from that anymore. They'd now actually need to compete on providing the best store for developers, which is obviously going to be more work and cost for them. So, instead they choose the "lesser evil" of putting themselves in a position where they are the only thing that stands (or rather: drops dead lie a wet sack) between an authoritarian state and people trying to circumvent that state's surveillance.

It's a good thing Apple shows more Courage(TM) when it truly counts, for instance when it comes to ridding us all of that terrible scourge of human existence, the 3.5mm jack.

Except, you didn't need to roll your own. 1PW used to support Dropbox - it's how I still use it.

And specifically you only need the DB free tier to store a 1PW vault, so the only cost was paying for the 1PW client (which I am more than happy to pay for on major version updates, as long as it is not a subscription).

1PW removed functionality that existed, with goal (or at the very least the effect) of locking users into their own cloud platform with a new monthly bill.

Well, f** 1Password then.

I am currently still using them, but once my current apps are no longer supported, whenever that might happen, I will move to another solution rather than paying a subscription for the privilege of storing my data with them.

I don't mind that personally. They can default to their own stores and advertise them, as long as I can sideload anything I want.

On Android I do use sideloading for niche applications and for FOSS applications available outside the Play Store (F-Droid).

If iOS allowed the same ability to sideload that Android does, that would be a huge step forward for "power"users, irrespective of whether the majority of the population stays with the Apple default.

One’s device ought be one’s property, with all of the expectations of ownership and privacy that entails

Preach.

Though with Apple phones this has never been the case, unfortunately. Having your photos scanned on upload is just the little cherry on top of the sundae of user disenfranchisement that is iOS.

Before watching the video, I was wondering what a "Comma Three" even is (you know, to decide if I should spend time watching the video).

So I went to their website first, to find out - and I think I still don't know. Doesn't describe the product on either the top page, nor the FAQ. Looks like a GPS/Nav device with AR features - but surely that's not worth more than two grand?

I have absolutely no idea if this is a good product or not (hell, I don't even need to drive where I live), but at least their website should tell me what is the selling point.

It has a very nice industrial design language and it's whimsical, a combination which appeals to some people I guess.

I feel like I mainly see people interested in this who I'd consider casual gamers at most but who are into deep design (UI/UX/ID/Typography).

Definitely not my thing though, and I don't get why anybody in the world is interested in a handheld like this when we have the Switch, tons of retro and Windows-handhelds, and above all the Steam Deck being released soon-ish.