It's an addiction and really hard to stop. Facebook spends billions designing it to be as addictive as possible.
In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
When I was learning to code, programmers had to know about a lot of low level details like memory management, disk I/O, process scheduling, etc. Today, the average JavaScript programmer never thinks about these things.
I could imagine a world in the near future where most programmers don't think about databases.
People are irrationally concerned about low-probability but high severity risks, which is what nuclear is.
The chance of someone in the US dying from a terrorist attack is about 1 out of 3 million. It's a rounding error compared with heart disease (1:6), suicide (1:93), storms (1:35k) or even sunstroke (1:6k). Yet, the US spends $52B / year on the department of homeland security.
There are several companies doing this business specifically: users buy seek boxes from them, and they sell the bandwidth to us video streaming companies. They are just like CDN providers, but instead of buying bandwidth and server from the data center, they “buy” it from home users. I don’t think ISPs would like this, because it affects the business in their data center side.
It's owned by banks but run by government appointees. Most Americans who watch the news and follow finance understand it's a public-private hybrid structure. As Lyn notes, this isn't unusual. Many national banks are not owned by the government, including Swiss National Bank.
Smell is such an odd sense. For example, I found this part amazing:
> It is understood that certain chemicals block certain receptors, occupying their binding sites such that no other volatile molecules can reach them. These antagonists might have smells of their own—they activate other receptors—but, in principle, they will dampen or eliminate the smells that depend on the receptors they block. Such aromachemicals could be used not simply to cover up the stink of a latrine, but, in essence, to prevent it from being smelled at all.
Being able to smell the bad is helpful info in the evolution of the species though. If the water smells foul, don't drink it. That kind of thing. However, it does bring to mind animals sense of smell being so much more keen than humans. Watching where dogs smell, clearly they don't have a "gross" reaction as we do, at least not to the level our candied asses have reached. So the matrix has decided that the hoomans needed that but not the animals. Such on odd decision for a machine to make.
Dogs do find some smells repulsive; and some dogs are fascinated by that repulsion as some humans are fascinated by horror and gore.
Many animals have more nasal sensor than humans do; but even those with much less pay more attention to their sense of smell than almost any human can. The article mentions "realized I could smell a cigarette in the car in front of me" ... many humans have that sensitivity ant the biological level but have spent their lives learning to ignore, rather than interpret, those signals.
Growing up I had a dog that would eat anything. ANYTHING. He was a shop dog and lived with a few other dogs in my fathers shop (they came home on occasion). He would lick the stainless steel chips out of the milling machine trough and his poop would sparkle in the sun. He enjoyed chewing on razor sharp contiguous spiral steel chips from a stainless job we ran on a lathe. Loved eating leather work gloves, and chewing up buffing wheels and the buffing wax. He would find stray cat poops in the yard and merrily chew and play with them. Eat a dead squirrel carcass and stink like it for a day? no problem! Unclog the toilet and lick the poop off the plunger? Delish! My mother bought in the remains of a chicken dinner and he got a hold of the whole chicken skeleton when no one was looking and ate the thing in under 2 minutes, bones and all. He also once got into a bag of little balloons and was pooping out rainbows. He would let himself out (sneak out) and roam the neighborhood once eating the groceries of a neighbor who set them down on the porch to unlock her door. Never had to go to the vet for eating anything. He was a Shepard mix and died at 16 and a half. That dogs stomach was stronger than anything in that shop, truly a shop dog worthy of the title.
What didn't he eat? Anything you'd put Sweet and sour sauce on. Found that out after trying to give him leftover burger king nuggets. The one thing the dog wouldn't eat was actually something delicious. Probably the vinegar.
I think ozone is one of those chemicals. Department stores in the 1950's used to pump it in to subtly mask mustiness or "store smell" so that the distinct smells of departments like perfume were more distinct.
We like hackers and free thinkers. Communities like these are hacking modern society. Even if they don't work or aren't appealing to me, they're all interesting experiments that can teach us something about societies, group dynamics, governments, property rights, etc.
"You're Apple's customer and Facebook's product" is often repeated but completely true in this case. It's all about incentives.
Apple makes money by selling more products which means they innovate by making Watches, Earpods, M1, etc. Facebook makes money by selling your attention and data, which meants they innovate by extracting data from every experience they can (Oculus, Whatsapp, ...), using more complex technologies (Facebook AI), and encouraging whatever behaviors create more ad spend (hint: outrage).
Add in the fact that Apple has made privacy a core part of their brand promise and it means that Apple has strong incentives to protect their customers in a way that most companies, especially Facebook, do not.
Also, you literally are Apple’s product to their iOS developer ecosystem, in the sense that developers fork over 30% of their revenue to Apple for access to you.
On one hand, it's argued that Apple has an incentive to act against their customers because they want to sell apps on the app store.
On the other hand, it's argued that Apple doesn't care about their developers because they enforce draconian regulations on what iOS developers are allowed and not allowed to do, and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
I have mixed feelings about Apple's walled garden, both as a developer and a user, but when it comes to user privacy, I'm firmly in Apple's camp. I can't think of a single other large tech company that has a strong stand in favor of user privacy and acted on that. Basically, if Privacy is a killer feature for a consumer, then Apple is literally the only game in town.
We just need to look at how they handled the San Bernadino shooting and requests for a phone unlock to find a supposed "lying dormant cyber pathogen".
Every other company would have been falling over themselves to unlock a terrorists iPhone.
Apple said no, hired Ted Olsen, and litigated (along with lots of other less well known cases).
This may have even hurt them in some consumers eyes (hard to understand them protecting someone who killed a bunch of people). So the PR risk was very significant.
So they do seem to have a pretty committed consumer focus (and now make money because of that).
It is virtually inevitable though that someone will go after them (anti-trust etc) because this is a game of billions and folks who for example do in-game loot boxes (fortnite) and marketing (facebook) etc are going to be in regulators ears and in ny times ads and op-eds calling for this horrible situation to be broken up.
> and don't hesitate even to shut down billion dollar apps (i.e., Fortnite).
It's fairly obvious that, given Epic was saying "you can pay $2 less to get the same amount of vbucks" that Apple was going to lose a huge portion of revenue from the App if they didn't pull it, and if they actually left it up, they'd have to allow every other app to institute third-party payment processors as well to not appear like they're playing favorites and the PR nightmare that would come from that.
I'm saying that Apple was going to get shafted on payments and making money from Epic anyways if they left it up because Epic was charging $2 less when paying directly via a card and bypassing in-app purchases.
No, that's not right. The app is the product, the customer is the buyer of the app, and the split of revenue is 70/30 (or 85/15 for small devs).
Saying that developers are "buying" users makes no sense. Devs are not a customer of apple. If anything, devs are a supplier to apple. Since the net money flow is from Apple to Dev.
On the other hand, devs wouldn't be able to sell to iPhone users if there was no iPhone, or no App Store, or the appleid.apple.com identity verification system, or iOS 14, or anything else that is paramount to devs even having those users as customers in the first place. In this scenario, the iPhone is the product and the App Store is a feature of the iPhone, and the fact that it moves money around (or doesn't, most of the time) is irrelevant.
Now, the legal view of Apple's ecosystem is being litigated right now. What I posted above might be how the court sees it, or what you posted might be how the court sees it. We won't get a definitive answer until either Epic or Apple go home with the key to processing payments on iOS and all of the other systems that are effectively an iPhone with a different form factor (eg PS5, xbox series).
Whether you consider the developers a customer of Apple paying for distribution, or a supplier to Apple who takes a cut, is ultimately a semantic distinction. But the conflict of interest it creates — that Apple retains a monopoly on how software is distributed to a device that you ostensibly “own” and sets rates to optimize for their own gain - is the case regardless of the semantics we use.
(I’m not entirely opposed to this arrangement; I’m typing this on my iPhone. But I bought it knowing and accepting that I’m partly the product)
If this is true about Apple, it is true in any retail situation.
It’s not what people mean when they say ‘you are the product’.
What they mean is that if you aren’t paying, then the company is only interested in retaining you as a user so that they can satisfy their actual customers.
When you are paying, you are the customer
It’s also true that iOS developers are customers of Apple’s distribution service.
Buy Apple’s users are not a product in the sense that anyone uses this phrase.
This is absolutely true. Both companies play the game of selling customer acquisition. But we seem to be generally more okay with middlemen squeezing a two sided market. Sometimes. If it’s DoorDash or Amazon then public opinion seems to go the other way.
But regardless it’s not Facebook’s value prop to business that people have an issue with but ya know, how they actually deliver it.
No, devs don't buy customers from apple. Customers buy apps, and Apple takes a commission. No money flows from Developer to Apple (apart from to 100$ annual fee if you want to be anal about it).
No they buy access to customers. You can't sell to Apple's customer base unless you give them 30% of gross. The world where Apple charges that 30% commission to the devs after the sale or collects it from the customer during the sale is irrelevant. We fork over a lot of money to Apple for the privilege of selling to their customers.
Well, you can't sell peaches to Walmart customers without Walmart taking a cut either. But we don't say the peach growers are buying customers from Walmart, do we?
I think that nowadays most profitable software is cross-platform and is also available on other platforms, thus their developers see access to the iOS market as added value rather than their primary customer acquisition channel.
Why start with a clean slate and develop a new plane? If the F-16 is still working, why not start with its design and upgrade the avionics and software?
One reason would be the age of the airframes. Technically, why not? But at a certain point you will need to compleely rebuild the airframes, like completely down to the last bolt and rivet. Only to still have an old airframe, in some sense. So new aircraft it is. And developing new enngines, avionics and software to put them into a new, and most likely modernized airframe, is frightingly close to a completly new aircraft design. And will give people the oppertunity to add features as well. And of course, because common sense doens't play a role in military development and procuremt for anything more complex than a Hummvee. Looking at the proposed Humvee replacements so...
In this study, they paid people $25 to not use it for a week. I wonder if your wife would agree to that. It seems like for most people who are addicted, you need to go "sober" and not use it all.
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