How can you know when it's really "The Year of the Linux Desktop"? Whenever you don't need a "how to make it not suck" blog post to get it to run for normal users.
“Google Pay will never sell your data to third parties or share your transaction history with the rest of Google for targeting ads,” the company said.
From what I can tell, nothing in this statement actually precludes targeting ads based on spending. If it did, they would just say that. They only preclude selling the data or sharing it with the ads team. But that was never the model to start with! This is a sleight of hand by Google to cover up what they actually do: profile users and then offer that profiling to other companies in the form of a service.
To put it more explicitly, you can say “I’ll put your ad in front of 20 year olds with an interest in skateboarding” without selling user data or even sharing profile data with the ads team. You just simply get the ads and the target market and use the data to put the ad in front of them.
And doesn’t the fact that Google says they won’t do those things proof that they know their entire business model is super shady and wouldn’t be appreciated by users if they fully understood it?
A clever move. Apple essentially knee-capped the Epic claim that they’re in the same boat as small developers by putting a high cap on post-commission earnings ($1m sounds like a lot).
There are a few things people make sure they have paid first. Rent is at the top of that list. However, if they're behind, continue to be behind, and can't find employment with an economy contraction... they're not going to catch up. That $2,000 they're behind right now will balloon and become an eviction.
> How can it be a “purely cynical PR piece” when there is an actual reduction in cost for developers?
This is a great question that assumes the responses here are mostly rational (not to minimize how anti-Apple folks feel, which is also legitimate). This is awesome news for small developers.
I find your perspective and interest in your genealogy fascinating, primarily because I don’t share it. Like, not one bit, and I’m not sure why. If I found out tomorrow that my parents weren’t actually my parents and I was actually adopted, I would have no interest in finding my “real” parents. I’m also totally uninterested in having children — it seems like something other people are much better suited for and I’m happy to be on the sidelines paying taxes or pitching in to a nephew’s college fund.
I’m also not interested in having my photos included in family histories, or indeed being remembered at all. Not in a bitter way, just in the same way that I’m not interested in which mushrooms grow in Botswana. It’s a thing that I think is perfectly reasonable to be interested in.
I had no interest in genealogy until I had children of my own, got to be 50 years old.
It occurred to me that my parents would be dead one day and if it were to fall to me to tell the grandchildren the family origins I would be at a complete loss. I had relied on my "elders" to have that knowledge.
Ancestry and the like makes it easy to reconstruct your family tree even if you are starting with almost no knowledge. But there's the oral tradition of "your great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel from the gas lamp fixtures leaking" that would have been a lot harder to have found.
So I did find a sudden interest in genealogy. Or maybe it was a sense of duty or obligation — but that quickly did in fact turn into an interest.
Perhaps if you never do have children you might also never find an interest in genealogy.
I'll say this though, I have not fond any interest in finding genealogical connections to famous people. Nor have I had much interest in going back more than 150 years or so. I think the photos uniquely draw me into the lives of the generations captured in them. And perhaps because they are photos, not wills or marriage licenses, etc., I am come to feel either the futility and brevity of life or, at other times, the wonder and often humble dignity of it.
I felt the same way for most of the same reasons - plus other reasons like my father was about as bad a person as is possible. So I had not only disinterest but some reluctance to make sure I stayed disinterested.
In late 2017, I grudgingly promised a sibling to piece some of our extended family history together. In 2018 I found a lost sister on Ancestry. And then I found a cousin who pointed me to my last surviving aunt (who I visited in 2019 and who passed 6 weeks ago). I also reunited with another lost sister. The sisters and I talk most days.
By the end of this year I will have added about 10k names in Family Search and 15k-20k in Ancestry (w/ much overlapping). It's safe to say my interests changed. I'm not saying I think yours will. Certainly my genealogy numbers don't represent anything likely.
What I can say is that things change, sometimes unexpectedly.
The fucked up thing is that you can’t opt out. Facebook is capturing the world around you and you can’t stop that. There’s no guarantee that the house you rent next year won’t have been mapped by Facebook. Every store you go to, every theater... it won’t be long until they won’t need you to opt in. There will be a tidy alistproducer2 shapes hole in their data, all ready to infer your movements...that is, of the people wearing them don’t capture you as part their distributed data collection.
This is not hyperbole. Facebook already lays claim to the behavioral data of non users, creating shadow profiles ready to materialize should you become a user. This an extension of that.
My husband and I took a road trip of 4,682 miles in a Tesla, with a dog. We stopped every 3 hours and charged for 30 minutes. It was not only possible, but easy, because those stops corresponded to lunch, coffee, dinner, and sleeping. The dog needed to be let out, I needed to stretch my legs, etc.
It's harder with kids. Tesla gets a reasonable range due to squeezing everything to the limit. Getting the same range out of a minivan-sized vehicle without tripling the cost of batteries would be rather tricky.
Also when you travel with kids, you make longer breaks when the kids need them. In that case, picking a random gas station nearby filling the gas while my wife runs everybody through the toilet and distributes snacks, makes things easier. Doing it exactly on schedule with a forced 30-minute wait in a fixed location would be much trickier.
This take is stale. Some people will pay for less freedom on their machines and some developers will gladly take their money. That’s not force, that’s capitalism.
Well, luckily when you ban the sale of new things, it doesn't instantly take off the planet every used version of that thing. The average age of cars on the road is 11 years, meaning we have at least a quarter century from now to get our act together. The world looked a lot different in 1995, a quarter century before today.
