Look at the notifications in the middle of the landing page for iOS 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ It is immediately awful. I hadn't even seen the keynote yet when I went to apple.com to see what had been announced and my very first thought was "Oh no"
The fact that it ever made it to this stage is troubling. It was quite literally the very first thing I thought when I saw their landing page for ios 17. https://www.apple.com/os/ios/ Look at the notifications front and center in the very middle of the screen. It's unbelievable. How are these the decisions being made at one of the biggest tech companies on the planet.
People are very aware that American tech companies want to control and exploit them as much as possible so there's really no difference to them between a Chinese app and an American app. Big tech trying to use its political power to force users into their platforms is an assault on our freedoms. You call it a bratty thing but I call it the only way the people have left to protest the enshittification of their digital lives.
Zizek has a very interesting argument [1] that is perhaps relevant here. (Lightly cleaned up transcript)
> Imagine you are a small girl or boy of, let's say, eight years. It's Sunday afternoon and your father wants you to visit your old grandmother. You, of course, detest it - she's old, senile, whatever. But then, if you have an old authoritarian father, he will tell you something like - and this would be, as Alenka put it, a good thing to do - he will tell you: "Listen, I don't care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to your grandmother and behave there properly." That's perfect, I claim, because you will retain your, let's call it, inner freedom. You will be furious at your father, but that's good for your long-term freedom.
> Now, what would a monster called post-modern permissive father do? He would not give you an order, but he would have told you something like this: "You only go to visit your grandmother if you really want to. Just remember how much your grandmother loves you." Now, a child is not an idiot, and he or she will know perfectly what this order means. Beneath the appearance of a free choice, it gives you a much harsher order. The order is not only "you must go and visit your grandmother," but "you must do it freely." You must really wish to visit your grandmother.
> So you see, this nice example of how - and this is basically what also Alenka described as that situation - "do whatever you want," etc., where the apparent freedom of choice masks a much harsher choice.
> People are very aware that American tech companies want to control and exploit them as much as possible so there's really no difference to them between a Chinese app and an American app
I mean, if that is indeed their rationale, then our civics education really does suck.
Or, perhaps they have made a reasoned determination that their own government does not represent their best interests, and are less concerned about the impact a foreign power thousands of miles away has on their lives.
Giving a totalitarian regime access to the device that more-or-less holds your entire life and acts as a perfect surveillance portal to your every move decidedly falls more on the unconcerned side of the scale.
Unless, of course, they didn't make a particularly "reasoned" determination like you said.
> learn to read yourself before lecturing people about education
Some of us consider the USA to be an authoritarian regime. And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
poof China has all my data - what do they do with it? Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
> Some of us consider the USA to be an authoritarian regime.
Some of us have a definition of "authoritarian" that is different from that of reality. I've lost count of the number of political dissent posts I've seen towards both sides of the political spectrum in the United States on American-based social media platforms.
And if authoritarianism is really a problem, why double down on the governments you give your data to?
> And without a doubt as someone living there they have massively more influence over my life.
Compared to the influence that the Chinese government has over the Chinese people, it's minor. That also goes for the governments of most places China has strong ties with. Strengthening their sphere of influence in the US is not the act of those who have concerns over authoritarian regimes influencing their lives.
> poof China has all my data - what do they do with it?
They're a rather imaginative bunch when it comes to cyber offensives, so let's imagine one ourselves.
They could scour your contacts and content for dissidents abroad, using that information to inform those operating one of their extralegal international "police stations" as to their whereabouts. [0]
Now, let's stop imagining. Let's see what they have been confirmed as actually doing with it.
They could collect geospatial data and combine that information with other personal details to compromise the security of people who work in sensitive places. This has actually led a number of nations, including Norway, Belgium, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK to ban TikTok from being installed on devices with access to government networks [1]
It's worth remembering that the US only banned the TikTok app - they could have continued operating in the US through a mobile webpage, but decided not to and threw a fit until Trump rearranged (perhaps extralegally) the law banning the app. Why? Because apps give far more access to devices than webpages, which have sandboxed processes and other checks on what code can access. If keeping American eyes on TikTok was the one and only goal, that app would have been a sacrifice that they were willing to make. The fact that they had to have the app tells me that they may have wanted the extra access that native apps afford.
> Vs the USA where there is documented proof that the NSA was used against Vietnam War critics etc.
I'm not saying the American intelligence apparatus has clean hands. If that's the concern, then again, cut back on social media and apps that collect unknown quantities and qualities of data, instead of opening up more accounts to totalitarian governments that have a long history of using censorship and surveillance in a very straightforward way to achieve their political aims.
Hey I'm all for not using either, that's what I do. And I get banning it on government phones. They ought to ban almost everyhring on those, but especially foreign controlled apps. And I don't like what China does to their citizens either.
But you'll never convince me that the main reason for the ban wasn't to replace Chinese propaganda with American / Billionaire propaganda and tbh that one's less charming.
And if your imaginative worst case scenario is that they use my data to root out and extrajudiciously kill ex-Chinese dissidents in America then idk why that would be a problem for me since I don't know any of those. I do know some American activists, though.
I can easily invent way more damning fantasies of what the US Govt could do to me, a US citizen, if they had an admin willing to subvert constitutional norms and more visibly use the PRISM surveillance tools.
You think the purpose of civics education is to teach young people to trust American big tech and the American government above foreigners regardless of evidence??
Every single lightning cable I've ever owned developed a black corrosion on a pin that prevented it from working. Every. single. one. You cannot claim that lightning is durable. It's completely farcical.
Never happened to me. In my experience lightning ports a as close to unbreakable as it gets given that size factor. In contrast every USB-C port seems to get loose or outright break after heavy usage (including lenovo and MacBooks). I will not miss having multiple cables but I will miss the snug and reliable fit that various lightning plugs/ports have maintained over years in my service. It's probably time to move to wireless charging anyways
Wireless stuff is neat I guess… but it takes up much more space and is much less efficient. The power loss alone seems like a big deal that we don’t really consider. Not to mention that it’s not really any more convenient than say MagSafe is. I find my phone uncharged in the morning far more often because I didn’t align it properly with the pad, than because my cable is going bad.
I will say, it’s nice letting my phone stand also charge it… so I’m also kinda a fan.
I could show you my collection of broken lightning cables where the plastic just before the "meat" of the connector is split, leading to visible copper/whatever cables. Which in turn leads to broken copper/whatever cables, which are at best broking the functionality, at worse dangerous (is it?).
"The King is happy on his Throne, and the people are pleased" obviously winning in battle is a good outcome, since your enemies are now dead or slaved.
"Rome demands victory from her Generals" .. and those who tried and failed, were publicly killed. As they still do in China actually.
Isn't that how fundraising works? You make people commit to "supporting your cause" with a trivial pledge, so that when you ask for actual money they can't back out without losing face.
"I will maybe log off at some point" sounds like maybe too weak a pledge to me, but I'm sure they've focus grouped the shit out this.
Garry Newman, creator of Garry's Mod, is taking a shot at it https://sbox.facepunch.com/. If anybody is going to succeed in dethroning Roblox, it's Facepunch.
This is really funny. How much have you "innovated" while gaming? You are living under the thumb of entertainment media already. You're trapped in your time waster instead of innovating.
Everything is a time waster until you know, investments pays off. Playing an instrument is a time waster until it turns into something you can market. Its difficult to judge future benefits of current actions.
