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It leaves a bad taste in my mouth when an argument in that area starts using fake math to drive a point home. Top-tier engineers spend 6 months to have 20% improvement that could be achieved by spending 20% more on hardware?

Where IS all this coming from? Why is it acceptable to pull out a few random numbers out of our ass and conclude that it's always best to buy more hardware?

I know Google literally invented HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 to shave a few % off their hardware costs. And they had to not only implement this in Chrome and Google.com but to make it a world-wide standard. So surely they must be the idiots putting top-tier engineers for 6 months (or more) on such optimization efforts, instead of spending more on hardware? I don't know.

I wanna see a language where the type system and the actual language are the same language.

I'm not talking about self-hosted compiler, which TS is already. But basically what runs statically and what is compiled for runtime to be the same language in two contexts.

C++ is moving in that direction with constexpr expansion, but it also has to carry the legacy of macros, its existing type system, templates, and so on.

We need something clean.

This meme about Apple products deriving most of their demand from being status symbols is a decade or two out of date.

Both of you are arguing on which side of an ideal abstraction (Veblen goods) Apple is. Seems silly to me.

Apple products ARE status symbols in many countries, that's what most of the Chinese market is for Apple presently.

They're also playing as utilitarian tech products with mass appeal. Apple has always had this hybrid strategy, it's not one OR the other.

A quick look at their profit margins vs. the competition will show that they're marking up their products significantly above the competition. And I mean in profit margin specifically, so that we don't have this argument about whether they have more expensive software and hardware in principle (they do, but most of it is profit margin).

And also sorry but this is a $15 battery sold for $99, even as an Apple user they're losing me here. Some of their accessories are literally for people who want to spend money on Apple shit.

Would anyone else just be fine with a thick phone that had a better internal battery?

Replaceable battery.

Anyway, this argument has been made plenty of times. Apple prefers to sell you a new phone and an external battery.

For the money this 3000 mAh Apple bank costs, you can have 4 of these lasting you literally a whole month.

Kinda hilarious.

The M1 was hailed as an entry level chip

Hailed by whom? I doubt you'll find a single instance of Apple calling M1 an "entry level chip".

It looks like this is the blogosphere getting too high on their own supply, huh?

I don't care much about tracking, but this ad is very effective. It's kinda dishonest about what tracking is (it's not bunch of people making job and purchase decisions for you, come on). But effective.

I wonder if they can't ship the same M1 but with some external RAM and GPU. It won't speed up some apps, but it'll help with Pro apps.

There's a limit to how much we can hypothesize about the nature of other universes, given we don't know if they actually exist. It'd be foolish to claim "QED" either way.

"Eight months without perceptibly faster chip!"

Get a load of this guy. Can't even wait even a full year, he wants his CPU revolutions every 4 to 8 months.

You're not really comparing features to features if you're comparing to a boring 5000mAh brick with wired charging.

So wired charging is boring and magnetically attached is exciting?

You know, this is not like AirPods, which are completely disconnected from the phone. It's a lump attached on your phone that you may also unintentionally disconnect and drop on the floor while taking videos of something.

I'm way more "excited" by the cable, especially given the price (you can find pretty good 5000 mAh bricks for as little as $12).

A Canyon 5000 mAh is of comparable size and costs $12. It's not MagSafe, but frankly the cable is not a problem at all.

I'm an iPhone/Mac user, but this thing costs $99 and they didn't even bother to write out the damn capacity on the page (reportedly less than 4000 mAh).

I like Apple, but their accessories are truly reserved for people with either too much money, or too little intelligence.

A music and artist focused startup or business has no problem catering to artists.

You forgot to name one.

My hope is that the DOJ will break up these companies so that good, healthy competition can take place again.

You think DOJ has to break up Apple Music off so this artist up there will be allowed to post non-face face photos on his account.

Nice. A bit killing a fly with a tank, if you ask me.

A company that cares deeply about music and artists would serve everyone better than Apple. Or Google. Or Amazon.

We have lots of those companies. And I don't see how they're strictly "better" than Apple, Google or Amazon. Each has their fans and users. Your problem is clearly absolutely unrelated to what the artist up there complained about.

Yes, let's have whimsical music, long pauses, tangentially related side chit-chat, and re-enactment filling us on what it means "to walk" complete with walking sound effects.

Gotta love 90s radio. But... it's not the 90s anymore.

I'm talking about the elevator pitch of their blog post, not of their company. Which are actually two distinct things (they're not describing their service in this blog post).

It’s great that we’ve went full circle. But make no mistake that this only means one thing: that servers are cheaper than ever. We can now afford to entertain previously extravagant ideas.

We've not come full circle. This is just one blog saying "how about long-polling". While also ignoring that since then we've gained web sockets, HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, each of which make long-polling pointless in three different ways.

I tried skimming through the article to attempt and derive the missing elevator pitch, but I saw them reimplement precisely the system they maligned at the start (push notifications with polling).

Did anyone here understand what their value proposition even is?

Apple is a 2.5 trillion dollar company. I think they'll do just fine under criticism.

Wait, so you automatically dislike anything that is above {certain capital amount}? The typical pub argument driven by beer and class warfare memes, I see. How insightful.

Apple will be just fine under your vicious criticism even it was bankrupt, because none of this is about Apple per se, it's about us trying to figure out the world around us in a forum. Apple isn't part of this, no one in there will read this noise. But you've figured everything out, apparently: "X rich, so X evil on purpose".

I wasn't "defending" Apple, but describing something that happens in virtually any service of scale, be it private or public. It would be an interesting discussion how we can organize our systems to improve on such problems, but that discussion can't really happen, when met with the banality of your premature conclusions.

EdgeDB: EdgeQL 5 years ago

How do I join tables 1:1 without creating a subfield, i.e.:

table1: id, name

table2: table1_id, level

Desired result:

{id, name, level}

Firefox 90 5 years ago

unethical company

Unless there's a mathematical definition of "ethical" that we can rely on for objective assessment, that's basically everyone and no one based on how you feel any particular day.

I've the feeling you brought your generic Apple rant into a specific issue about profile photos, where it doesn't fit.

It is not about translating intent accurately. What you need is for compilation to be fully specified.

If you know how complicated the transformation pipeline is on a typical compiler, you'll realize that's pretty much impossible.

And that pipeline is specific not only to your code, compiler settings, but also your target machine, and is constantly in flux, update to update.

Even if it could be documented, no one would read the documentation.

Firefox 90 5 years ago

isn't all that great about implementing web standards in a timely manner.

It's not good at implementing standards in timely manner which Chrome implements before they're even standards (and then become standards when Google pushes them to become so). Interesting isn't it. That literally goes back to what I said.

Without Firefox and Safari, Google can declare anything it wants a standard and implement it LITERALLY yesterday.

Among standards Safari is slow to implement in "timely manner" is web pages connecting to USB devices, Bluetooth and a plethora of other nonsense which Google keeps pushing through because they want the web to be the application OS for everyone, and then slap ads on it.

People often get frustrated that the famous and the rich are treated differently, but it's literally logistics at some point.

This happens for everything, for example Tesla for years had the domain TeslaMotors.com, and look at Musk describing him getting Tesla.com:

"That took us 10 years to buy that Tesla.com domain," Musk said on the podcast. "That cost us like, $10 million."

Musk said in 2018 on Twitter that it actually cost $11 million, and took an "amazing amount of effort," to get the domain name off Grossman.

So my overall conclusion from situations like that is, yes, we have to accept that while we're small, or even while we're "medium" we need to play by the rules for everyone else. If you grow up you don't have to.

Daft Punk also had to put up with lots of bullshit in their first years, you gotta presume. They've earned this little victory of having no face on the Apple Music account... :)

Creative artists tend to thrive on limitations. They use limitations to come up with inventive ways of expressing themselves despite and even through the limitations. So think about it like that, IMHO

Famously Prince, became "The artist formerly known as Prince"

Famously he did become, in public media, yes. To his frustration, as he kept telling everyone to stop calling him "artist formerly known..." until he gave up and went back to Prince.

Though in public media's defense, it's very hard to reference someone who literally had no name for a period of time.

Firefox 90 5 years ago

Google already singlehandedly controls the web standards. Firefox and Safari are the last obstacles to them basically privatizing the web.

The independent Chromium distributions do very little to that effect, as they're not incentivized to specifically disable features Google puts in.

If Firefox goes away, kiss the open web goodbye. We'll have it on paper, but just that. It'll be Google's web.