freehunter

Apple requires software to be "notarized"

This is not exactly true and you know it. For example:

if you have enough technical know-how

You right click the app and then click open.

Especially when all the dialogs are calling your software malicious, untrustworthy, etc.

Another lie. The dialog says "this is from an unidentified developer" and does not say anything about being malicious or untrustworthy. What is your beef with Apple that you're so willing to say so many outright lies on a forum filled with people who know better and can call you out on it?

Windows does this with UAC. Many Linux distros require executables to be explicitly set with the +x flag. macOS is not unique in this, and like with the other OSes it's a security feature.

Check out the warning and "bypass" for yourself: https://www.macworld.com/article/3140183/how-to-install-an-a...

I must have forgotten it because I can open the Epic store and play Fortnite on my Mac right now without any warnings. I actually just downloaded the installer right from epicgames.com and it installed just fine. Apple doesn't even try to stop me.

I remember Apple revoking Epic's access to Apple's developer tools because of a disagreement over their developer program TOS, but that only stops Epic from using Apple's tools. It does not prevent me from installing any software.

I have a ton of software on my Mac that's not part of the Apple developer program and the developers have never asked Apple's permission nor given Apple any money for the software and Apple has never once tried to block those developers from creating that software or me from installing and running it.

Something tells me most hobbyists are not doing their car battery welding on-the-fly in -60F weather in the middle of Sibera with the stakes of failure being freezing to death though.

That command makes me really glad Amphetamine exists.

They are also doing everything they can to block people from distributing apps outside of their walled garden.

People keep saying that but nothing on my Mac has ever stopped me from installing whatever software I want. I wish people would stop repeating this lie.

I use it on my work computer and it's not a word I'm comfortable showing to clients. You never know who may have had (or still does have) an addiction, and I also don't want them seeing it and thinking I have an addiction since that could be bad for business.

I download and use the app despite the name. I’m not okay with it, but I need the features it offers and there isn’t a better alternative with a better name. There used to be (called Caffeine) but it disappeared from the store and I’m not sure why.

Just because people use the app doesn’t mean they like the name.

Oh jeez my worst nightmare might just be going to a Meetup without knowing how many people I should expect and ending up being the only one who showed up. If Meetup didn’t tell me how many people RSVP’d I’d never go to any of them.

Pre-covid I went to bars a lot to hang out. Ranging from suburban “family dining” bars to downtown dive bars to hipster breweries, I’ve been a regular at a lot in the last 10-15 years. Most people at my bars come in with friends and really only talk to existing friends or friends of friends. Maybe/rarely the strangers directly next to them if they’re feeling extra social, but not much more than a bit of small talk. From the outside a bar looks like a great place to meet new people and make new friends but in my experience that’s just what it looks like and not how it is.

The only new people I’ve met at bars are friends of friends, not random strangers. And when people are with their group of friends, it’s hard for a stranger to jump into that dynamic.

My dad co-owned a small company in the early 90s and they just got new computers but he convinced the rest of the owners that they needed to invest in serial network equipment “to share files”. In reality they ended up playing multiplayer Doom with it.

Heck I’m in my 30s and I do that sometimes. I just set up a new Mac after using an iPad Pro for a few months and the number of times I touched the screen is embarrassing.

For the most part we don’t learn about them because we don’t know a lot about them. Many of the pre-Colombian civilizations either didn’t build permanent structures or built them from wood that’s long since rotted away. With a few exceptions they also didn’t congregate in large stationary cities where we can dig to find hundreds/thousands of years of artifacts in the same place . Again with a few exceptions, they also didn’t write down their history for us to read it.

As an American we only learn fairly superficial details about the people who were here before us, because we know they existed but there’s just not a lot of historical record. Look up Cahokia, which was a massive city (at Cahokia’s peak it likely had more residents than London did at the same time). And yet all that remains is some piles of dirt.

In which case the people getting Linux running on an M1 likely aren't working for free. Either way it's not a very good criticism.

only because of talented people working on it for free

That’s basically the definition of Linux. That’s not Apple’s fault.

I am obsessed with games or toys that replicate chaos or spreading disasters, like fire spreading in Far Cry 2 or water flooding in Cities: Skylines or collapsing buildings in the newer Battlefield games. I wish there were more games with unscripted chaos.

About 15 years ago at night I crashed my car into a bunch of pallets that had fallen off a trailer driving in front of me with no lights on it. The driver kept going but the police tracked him down to a pallet recycling company just a few miles down the road. Turns out he was an employee at a local warehouse and he was stealing their extra pallets for some extra money. His trailer had a couple dozen pallets before they fell off.

But far more consistently. Most users have no idea how the Internet works, let alone hosting something as complex as email. They'd just stop using email and switch entirely to Facebook.

I use Outlook.com for my primary email and I’ve had a few more outages than with Gmail but nothing I would consider major. The major issue is Outlook.com’s spam filtering is drastically worse than Gmail, I get so much spam that would be just so obvious to any rudimentary spam filter, I mark them as spam in Outlook.com, and the next day I get the exact same email again.

If everyone who uses Gmail hosted their own email servers those people would suffer far more and far worse outages that Google has had.

I imagine in this situation the tribes would eventually develop their own currency as they rebuilt and became more complex. The video game Fallout, for example, uses bottle caps as currency even though they aren't making new bottle caps anymore. But given enough time in the game's universe as more people come out of their shelters and return to the surface world, they'd realize that this increasingly rare currency isn't going to last forever. And then they'd start minting new coins or printing new papers.

Gold and silver works great for newer and less technologically advanced civilizations, because it's easier to smelt metal than print new US Dollars on speciality linen paper. It would be easier to lose the ability to smelt metal and then later regain that ability than it is to lose the ability to print USD and try to regain it. But once you reach a certain level of technological sophistication, minting fake gold coins becomes easier than printing new USD and people start to trust the currency less.

So I guess yes, precious metals would be easier to rebuild civilization with because it could be more easily reproduced as technology advances. But no matter what I think every civilization would abandon precious metals as they progressed, because counterfeiting becomes very easy very quickly.

Why is there such an obsession on this?

Because viewing/storing this material is illegal for everyone except the minor in question. If a minor posts a nude picture on Reddit and I view/save it, I'm guilty of possession of child pornography. Maybe I could get the charges dropped if I can argue/prove I didn't know they were underage, but lives are ruined over mere allegations of child sexual misconduct and that reputation would follow me everywhere.

There's really no way to prevent this but to abandon privacy/force verification.

Which is why official producers of pornography are required by law to verify age and consent of all of their actors (18 U.S.C. § 2257). The problem is when they allow producers to distribute pornographic materials on their platform without verification that the producer is following the law, like PornHub and Reddit and Imgur and Tumblr etc. Forcing verification is already in the law for producing pornographic materials.

It's not a problem exclusive to pornhub

Correct, but the fact that other companies are violating the law does not absolve PornHub of their responsibilities.

It's the "servers are pets, not cattle" but applied to local machines. That's sort of how IT has been run for a while now, but only half-hearted and in the worst way possible.

Almost every organization I've worked with has the policy of "if you get malware, we wipe your whole machine and reinstall the gold image" which is quite disruptive because you then have to reconfigure your settings and reinstall all your software packages and regenerate SSH keys etc. It can be a whole day of downtime and then a week of slowly getting back up and running full speed.

But if your hardware and local software are irrelevant, you can just swap your dumb terminal for another dumb terminal without skipping a beat. And with things like Chromebooks or iPads (actual real dumb terminals) the likelihood of getting to a "wipe it and start over" goes down a lot compared to machines running a full-fledged OS with a privileged user account.

If you drop your Chromebook in a lake, you could run to Best Buy and get a new one for $300 and you've only lost an hour or so, and if all your data is stored in OneDrive and your IDE is Codespaces you haven't lost anything of real value.

That helps for the cases where someone is abusing a child and the police were involved. Does it help when a 15/16/17 year old uploads their own pictures/videos without anyone knowing their actual age? Or when someone's boyfriend/girlfriend records them and uploads it without the victim knowing?

Like Youtube's filter will catch me uploading a video with a Taylor Swift song in it but not someone uploading a video using one of my independently produced/distributed songs, because their filter doesn't have my music in it.

That's pretty much the MO of a lot of SV companies. I remember when Uber came to my city and there were news articles about police officers ordering a ride and ticketing the driver afterwards because unlicensed taxis were against the law. The city claims Uber never petitioned them to change the law, Uber just knowingly broke the law and paid the fines on behalf of their drivers until the city changed the law. Airbnb has done similar things in the past in cities where subleasing and short-term rentals are regulated, but they skipped the regulation and just broke the law until the law changed.

Youtube does the same, Facebook does the same. Laws and regulations are seen as things to disrupt rather than rules to follow or petition for changing. And if you have a billion dollars of VC money in your pocket, who cares about a $100 ticket?

The year is 3000 AD. Civilization has collapsed, governments are non-existent, and the remaining human tribes need some sort of currency to facilitate trade. I need a goat for my farm, so I walk up to the goat breeder and hand him a pile of gold. Does he take that gold and smelt it into something? Probably not, he's a goat breeder. He might be able to take that gold and trade it to someone else for something he needs, but I'd imagine the person making gold jewelry or semiconductors will also sell goat food. So he'd have to give that gold to a hay farmer, who would trade that gold for a new plow and now the plow maker might be able to smelt that gold into something useful. But the gold has no use for the goat breeder or hay farmer.

Now I hand him a stack of papers with numbers printed on them. The goat breeder has no use for these papers, but he also had no use for the gold. He'd need to trade them for something. Let's run it all back up the same line and we see it doesn't end at "and now the smelter has something useful" because paper isn't useful to the smelter either... but running the paper through that chain of merchants has proven that there's value attached to the paper. The smelter then recognizes the value of the paper and trades the paper to the miners who supply the metal, because the traders who supply the metal want to buy some goat milk from me and they know I accept this weird paper in exchange for my goat's milk.

That's how currency has worked since the beginning of civilization. Ancient people weren't melting down coins to make something more valuable, they were trading the coins as-is without a worry about how useful the raw materials are. They just needed something anything that everyone agreed had a certain amount of value to it that's also difficult to fake. Gold has no intrinsic value for 90% of all humans on the planet, it's just a way to exchange goods and services based on an arbitrary-but-universally-recognized token.

None of anything of what you said makes any sense at all. I absolutely develop web applications on my Mac, using a graphical IDE. I've also developed for Arduino boards using a graphical IDE on my Mac. I've written software natively on my Mac that I put into production on Linux and Windows machines. And all of that is supported on the M1 as well. They even built a complete and complex and powerful subsystem to allow you to run Intel code on their new processor.

Apple has never stopped me from installing VSCode or Atom or Sublime or Jetbrains and they've never given me any reason to think they would do so in the future, especially given Rosetta 2. I've never run a VM on my Mac.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make here, so I'm trying my hardest to argue against the best possible interpretation, and that interpretation is still so unbelievably wrong that I still feel like I must be missing the point.

Yes but until XCode runs somewhere else, Apple has to support C compilers and CLI tools and allowing general-purpose code to run on their machines. XCode relies on all of these things. Just because Apple doesn't make a general-purpose IDE for their platform doesn't mean anything as long as you can install VSCode or vim or Jetbrains or whatever your preferred IDE is.

Again, this is repeated here at least once a week for the how many years I've been visiting this site and it's no closer to being true now than it was back then. If it was even remotely true Apple would have left the Macs on Intel and just phased them out in favor of the iPad Pro, but instead they spent billions making their iPad chips run MacOS and desktop applications and code compiled for Intel processors and real talk here, what about that gives anyone any indication that they're planning on throwing all of that away?

They're actively doing the opposite of what you're claiming and spending billions of dollars to do it, and one blog post that says "this isn't even a big deal" is all it takes to convince you otherwise?

Apple doesn't care about using their machines for general purpose development

That's a bold statement that I've heard repeated over many years and never actually seen any real evidence of considering the Mac is the only place you can develop applications for the majority of Apple devices. Not a week goes by on HN without someone saying "Apple doesn't care about developers and/or will stop making general-purpose Macs" and yet there isn't a XCode for iOS or Android or Windows or Linux.

It figuratively kills me that I live in an area where three of the five closest teams to me are blacked out on MLB.tv but they're all far enough that it would take several hours of driving to actually go to a game in-person and the local TV stations don't air those games. It's actually pretty much completely killed my interest in baseball since I can't watch any of the teams I actually care about.

There's a lot to be said about the anxiety of "I'm making a lot of money doing something I don't understand". I've backed out of businesses where I could have been a millionaire but also could have been in prison for violating some law/regulation that I knew nothing about. It starts feeling like you're running a scam.