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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • Paying over a third of all revenue generated from searches on Apple’s platform. That’s incredible. Not a lawyer so I have no idea how this will work out legally, but I have a hard time parsing such an enormous pay-share as anything other than an aggressive attempt to stymie competition. Flat dollar payments are easier to read as less damning, but willingly giving up that much revenue from the source suggests the revenue of the source is no longer the primary target. It’s the competitive advantage of keeping (potential) competitors from accessing that source.


  • Typical corporate greed in that sense. It’s stupid but I’m not at all surprised by that attitude.

    The part that even if they were morally right in that sense… it’s already too late. This is trying to close the barn door not just after the horse left, but after the horse already ran off and made it two states over. There’s definitely value to LLM in having more data and more up to date data, but reddit is far from the only source and I cannot imagine that they possess enough value there to have any serious leverage.

    Reddit would/will survive being taken out of internet search results. Not without costs though: it will arrest their growth rate (or accelerate shrink rate, as appropriate) and make people less interested in using the site.




  • That really depends on what their goal is.

    From a business perspective it’s not worth fighting to eliminate 100% of ad block uses. The investment is too high. But if they can eliminate 50% or 70% or 90% of ad block uses with youtube? That could be worth the effort for them. If they can “win” for Chrome and make it a bit annoying for Firefox that would likely be enough for Google to declare it a huge success.

    People willing to really dig all the way in to get a solution they desire are not the norm. Google can be OK with the 1% of us out there as long as we aren’t also making it possible for another huge chunk of people to piggyback off it effortlessly.


  • Yep.

    On paper she’s about as incompatible with the south as you could get apart from that. A liberal WASP that never practices religion (a WAS?). I used her as an example because I think she represents the relative indifference of much of US society on these matters. Politics starts and ends on election day; thinking about the South as a political entity and how their culture and political identities are tightly linked is anathema to her. It’s just getting too involved. Whereas she always hears how nice the people there are, and her books reinforce that idea, so it must be a wonderful place.

    That’s about the level of thought most people will put into it. “I heard they’re nice; the media I consume broadly comports that. Therefor I don’t hate the place.” Younger, online generations that are in discussions like this are atypical.

    I support making OP’s opinion a popular one, I wholeheartedly agree with it. I just suspect that it actually is unpopular overall (not on Lemmy.)


  • The story of the end of reconstruction is more depressing than that, IMO.

    It was successfully implemented for a decade. Then the North started to grow complacent and socially and politically wanted to move on. It’s easy to pretend a problem is solved if you personally face no direct risks to it not being fixed. Southerners became increasingly violent towards those in favor of Reconstruction and towards blacks in general. With many people being killed. The economic and social costs were staying high and people were inching towards just pretending the problem was solved and being rid of the issue.

    Then the 1876 presidential election happened, and that killed off any hopes of maintaining Reconstruction. After the election, the southern candidate, Tilden, had 184 electoral votes; the northern candidate, Hayes, had 165 electoral votes. There were 20 contested electoral votes from four states. The majority threshold was 185. Hayes needed to win all four states to become president. In the end a compromise was reached: the power brokers of the south would not contest having all four states awarded to Hayes if Reconstruction was ended.

    Reconstruction ended shortly after. Congress did change hands to the south at the time too, but that was in no small part a byproduct of their years-long campaigns of violence to sow discontent with the northern populace.

    The only silver lining is that the US actually did learn from this failure. The post-WW2 denazification of Germany relied heavily on the lessons learned from Reconstruction and its ultimate failure.


  • I think in US society at large it likely is an unpopular opinion. The south has successfully sold itself as: affordable, nice climate, with extremely hospitable people. My mom has a highly romanticized view of the south because it’s the setting of so many of the romance novels she reads. Not going to pretend she’s typical, but there’s going to be a decent chunk of people falling for that or the myth of southern hospitality.

    My experiences are limited, but “southern hospitality” has always come across as performative and insincere to me. It’s a superficial level of ineffectual niceties done for social expectations while actually requiring no true kindness to be displayed. A lot of people fall for the myth of it all the same.

    I’d bet that while a majority of people are not pro-south, the pro-south group (excluding southerners) is larger than the anti-south group — with a large majority of people not giving a fuck.



  • The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn’t truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been “fixed.” Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.

    Vista’s issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista’s reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.





  • People underestimate how much production other countries are capable of. Of course, China does dominate the manufacturing game, especially mass production.

    There’s no shortage of alternatives all the same. Vietnam in particular has been doing quite well taking manufacturing work that companies are moving out of China so as to diversify their production chain. India is rising on that front too. Not to mention that the west truly does far more manufacturing than people give credit for — I’ve found that nearly every category of general goods that I try to buy will have some US made options. That’s not even touching the rest of the west. The big exception being electronics, but those have Vietnam and India as growing alternatives, with Taiwan, Japan, Malaysia, and Singapore all as solid players in that market.

    The overall point being: it’s entirely possible to remove China from the manufacturing chain if there’s enough money behind the push. The US economy is probably large enough to do so with some meaningful struggle. The US and major allies could do so more easily. The difficulty is more political and temporal. Getting everyone on board and committed plus going through with the multi-year long process.




  • I’m planning to upgrade from a 12 mini, which partly influenced my choice of years too (having seen 3 year data was the main part!). If I had a 12 Pro I think I’d have kept it for an extra year, but the battery is just not sufficient for how my phone use has changed.

    I think furthering your extra details here too is I saw someone point out that one of Apple’s slides for the base 15 was comparing its performance to the base 12. Apple knows how often people upgrade. Picking the 12 as a comparison point wouldn’t be an accident — we’re the single largest target audience for the 15. And in a year, they will in all likelihood compare the 16 to the 13 for the same reason.


  • This year’s new phones are for people that last bought a phone in 2020 or earlier. If the average user is on a three year upgrade cycle (what the data shows as I recall) then you’d expect roughly 1/3 of people to upgrade every year.

    This is better for Apple, as it keeps their revenue more spread out instead of heavily concentrated in year one of a three year cycle.
    This is better for consumers, as it means new features and upgrades are constantly being made. If they want to upgrade early they can, and they’ll get new features even if it’s only been two years.
    This is also better for both Apple and consumers because there’s more opportunities to course-correct or respond to feedback over issues. If Apple only released a phone every other or every three years, it’d take that much longer for the switch to USB-C.

    Just because a new product is launched does not mean you need to buy it. Nvidia released a new GPU last year, but I didn’t buy it even though it’s newer than what I currently have. Arguing that new phones shouldn’t come out each year is like arguing that new cars shouldn’t come out each year. It makes no sense.